Make a Phoenix-like shooter game with different kinds of ammunition that do different amounts of damage, and can be changed into each other at some (changing?) ratio. Give the players a limited amount of ammunition that can be replenished by killing enemy ships, along with occasional packets of additional ammo.
Have the enemy ships have different amounts of health, then contrive their order so that the player does significantly better by successfully getting the maximum amount of damage, given the ammunition they currently have.
The game should be rigged so that you run out of ammo and need to dodge things for a while if you don’t do the arbitrage, and so that you have a little extra left over if you do.
I probably made this a little too complicated somewhere.
Thoughts?
It seems like a challenge of doing this is that a lot of rationality training is about encouraging people to use different mental processes to accomplish their goals than the ones they normally use. In a game, the tasks are often straightforward in a away that seems to cut out a lot of rationality.
Like, whether or not I’m being specific or applying fungibility is difficult to measure, if all you have is my actions in Angry Birds. Whether or not I’m framing problems well (kill the pigs vs. get this tactical implementation of knocking down the blocks) might be noticeable based on the similarity of my moves, but it would be tricky to notice and reward that.
More complicated games like Civilization could probably train some rationality skills, but it’s also totally easy to just get stuck in the game. Also, they tend to be waaay longer than I’d like.
It seems like a basic issue here is how to make it so that you need to directly use a rationality subskill in order to play the game well.
Skill: Fungibility
Make a Phoenix-like shooter game with different kinds of ammunition that do different amounts of damage, and can be changed into each other at some (changing?) ratio. Give the players a limited amount of ammunition that can be replenished by killing enemy ships, along with occasional packets of additional ammo.
Have the enemy ships have different amounts of health, then contrive their order so that the player does significantly better by successfully getting the maximum amount of damage, given the ammunition they currently have.
The game should be rigged so that you run out of ammo and need to dodge things for a while if you don’t do the arbitrage, and so that you have a little extra left over if you do.
I probably made this a little too complicated somewhere.
Thoughts?
It seems like a challenge of doing this is that a lot of rationality training is about encouraging people to use different mental processes to accomplish their goals than the ones they normally use. In a game, the tasks are often straightforward in a away that seems to cut out a lot of rationality.
Like, whether or not I’m being specific or applying fungibility is difficult to measure, if all you have is my actions in Angry Birds. Whether or not I’m framing problems well (kill the pigs vs. get this tactical implementation of knocking down the blocks) might be noticeable based on the similarity of my moves, but it would be tricky to notice and reward that.
More complicated games like Civilization could probably train some rationality skills, but it’s also totally easy to just get stuck in the game. Also, they tend to be waaay longer than I’d like.
It seems like a basic issue here is how to make it so that you need to directly use a rationality subskill in order to play the game well.