Perhaps I didn’t explain clearly: In the game, whenever you make any significant action, you must choose whether to do so with the reality-distorting device on or off. You make this decision based on whether you expect that the plan would work in real life or not. This means that if there is a “game developer’s password”, then it’s only one bit long for each decision, and can be guessed by trial and error. Perhaps this is a feature, rather than a bug. If you save your game before making the decision, then you don’t even lose any time. Perhaps the game could have an “easy mode” where the game just shows you the results of your choice, and then continues as if you had made the right choice, rather than forcing you to restart or reload from a saved game.
And I agree that the game shouldn’t require advanced knowledge of chemistry and engineering. The gunpowder/pillar thing was just the first example I thought of.
Anyway, this game was just a random idea I had, and your criticism is welcome.
I suppose that pretty much any game (not just video games) can be better for training rationality than more passive forms of entertainment, like watching TV. Pretty much any game is based on objective criteria that tell you when you made a bad decision. Though it’s not always easy to figure out what the bad decision was, or what you should have done instead, or even if there was anything you could have done better.
Perhaps I didn’t explain clearly: In the game, whenever you make any significant action, you must choose whether to do so with the reality-distorting device on or off. You make this decision based on whether you expect that the plan would work in real life or not. This means that if there is a “game developer’s password”, then it’s only one bit long for each decision, and can be guessed by trial and error. Perhaps this is a feature, rather than a bug. If you save your game before making the decision, then you don’t even lose any time. Perhaps the game could have an “easy mode” where the game just shows you the results of your choice, and then continues as if you had made the right choice, rather than forcing you to restart or reload from a saved game.
And I agree that the game shouldn’t require advanced knowledge of chemistry and engineering. The gunpowder/pillar thing was just the first example I thought of.
Anyway, this game was just a random idea I had, and your criticism is welcome.
And is this the ADOM you’re referring to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Domains_of_Mystery
I suppose that pretty much any game (not just video games) can be better for training rationality than more passive forms of entertainment, like watching TV. Pretty much any game is based on objective criteria that tell you when you made a bad decision. Though it’s not always easy to figure out what the bad decision was, or what you should have done instead, or even if there was anything you could have done better.