Thanks for writing this up, my meetup group just ran a meetup on this. I’ve told the folks here to give their experiences with the workshop here, because we used pen and paper instead of the google doc.
Some ~5 years ago I played a bit of Baba is You with a friend. I did Tiny Pond on my own before the workshop (I was Raemon for the purposes of our event), but I found it a bit too easy. In particular, I remembered how all the mechanics in the level worked, so my certainty about each step was very high. I collaborated with Jenn in the second round and felt similarly.
Even though the surprise anticipation part of the exercise was moot for me, I still think that the practice of trying to discover and write out the entire solution before solving it was worthwhile, and I plan to do it again on more Baba is You levels.
Many of the others in the workshop felt that this exercise is artificial because ‘you’d never solve research questions like this’, you would always play around with things in advance. I think if I were to run the workshop again, I’d emphasize more how for some problems, playing around in advance is prohibitively expensive, so planning far in advance is important. I think your web version of the game that tracks development time is a nice step towards addressing this part of things.
On a similar note, in my experience doing research, a long-term plan might include cycles of experimentation and plan-making. Maybe you should have a section of the plan-making exercise where you set out 2-3 small experiments you want to run, running them, and then return to long-term plan-making? Or maybe that defeats the purpose of the surprise-anticipation portion?
Personally, I conjecture that as a math PhD student and puzzle game enjoyer, Baba is You is too similar to the exact type of training that I have had for years at this point. I want to try doing a plan-making and surprise anticipation exercise where I have to do something totally foreign to me, like making a chair out of wood!
Thanks Raemon for your effort putting this together.
Yeah I introduced Baba is You more as a counterbalance to empiricism-leaning fields. I think ‘practice forms of thinking that don’t come natural to you’ is generally valuable so you don’t get in ruts.
I played the game a few times when it first came out, I didn’t finish it and hadn’t played in years. This made me pretty familiar with the game in general, but not with some of the specific mechanics/interactions.
I started with the Tiny Pond level and afterwards did The River. For both the first plan that I executed worked, but for both this final plan was chosen only after scrapping many other plans that seemed promising at first, but in the end either my assigned success probability was too low to try them or important parts were missing/uncertain.
Usually for these kind of puzzles my first instinct is to explore around to figure out the rules, and then once I discover whatever interesting interaction the puzzle is based on, use that to solve it. I was surprised to find that even without doing any exploration, I was able to have multiple “aha!” moments during planning, where suddenly things clicked for a new way of approaching the problem. I think assigning probabilities to plans helped with this, as I could see when I think a plan only has a ~10% chance of working because some mechanic might work one way, but likely doesn’t, it helps push you to seek alternatives.
Another thing I noticed is I would often have the start of the plan and the end of the plan settled, but some transition steps in the middle unclear. I would spend a lot of the time trying to sort this middle out, but it turned out it was better to scrap these plans (as they weren’t possible) and go with an entirely different approach in these scenarios.
I played the first third or so of this game when it first came out, and haven’t touched it since then. We did two rounds of the exercise, interspersed with 30 minutes of playing Baba is You levels the regular way to build up more intuition (most attendees were either new to the game or haven’t played it for years). Some people paired up and some people did the exercise individually.
I did Tiny Pond for the first workshop independently, and found it very difficult—despite running through the strategizing and metastrategizing twice, I was still very stuck.
I did The River for the second workshop (after running through the first few levels of Baba is You again). This time I paired up with someone else, and we were able to get to the correct solution after the first round of strategizing.
It felt productive. My day job (running a policy nonprofit) involves a lot of vibes/reacting to Current Thing and not a great deal of rigorously solving hard problems, and the exercise usefully… crystallized? a vague, vibes-based framework that I follow when I do strategy planning—set timers, generate plans, set probabilities, check surprise, go meta, iterate, etc. It’s nice to have that operationalized!
Thanks for writing this up, my meetup group just ran a meetup on this. I’ve told the folks here to give their experiences with the workshop here, because we used pen and paper instead of the google doc.
Some ~5 years ago I played a bit of Baba is You with a friend. I did Tiny Pond on my own before the workshop (I was Raemon for the purposes of our event), but I found it a bit too easy. In particular, I remembered how all the mechanics in the level worked, so my certainty about each step was very high. I collaborated with Jenn in the second round and felt similarly.
Even though the surprise anticipation part of the exercise was moot for me, I still think that the practice of trying to discover and write out the entire solution before solving it was worthwhile, and I plan to do it again on more Baba is You levels.
Many of the others in the workshop felt that this exercise is artificial because ‘you’d never solve research questions like this’, you would always play around with things in advance. I think if I were to run the workshop again, I’d emphasize more how for some problems, playing around in advance is prohibitively expensive, so planning far in advance is important. I think your web version of the game that tracks development time is a nice step towards addressing this part of things.
On a similar note, in my experience doing research, a long-term plan might include cycles of experimentation and plan-making. Maybe you should have a section of the plan-making exercise where you set out 2-3 small experiments you want to run, running them, and then return to long-term plan-making? Or maybe that defeats the purpose of the surprise-anticipation portion?
Personally, I conjecture that as a math PhD student and puzzle game enjoyer, Baba is You is too similar to the exact type of training that I have had for years at this point. I want to try doing a plan-making and surprise anticipation exercise where I have to do something totally foreign to me, like making a chair out of wood!
Thanks Raemon for your effort putting this together.
Yeah I introduced Baba is You more as a counterbalance to empiricism-leaning fields. I think ‘practice forms of thinking that don’t come natural to you’ is generally valuable so you don’t get in ruts.
I played the game a few times when it first came out, I didn’t finish it and hadn’t played in years. This made me pretty familiar with the game in general, but not with some of the specific mechanics/interactions.
I started with the Tiny Pond level and afterwards did The River. For both the first plan that I executed worked, but for both this final plan was chosen only after scrapping many other plans that seemed promising at first, but in the end either my assigned success probability was too low to try them or important parts were missing/uncertain.
Usually for these kind of puzzles my first instinct is to explore around to figure out the rules, and then once I discover whatever interesting interaction the puzzle is based on, use that to solve it. I was surprised to find that even without doing any exploration, I was able to have multiple “aha!” moments during planning, where suddenly things clicked for a new way of approaching the problem. I think assigning probabilities to plans helped with this, as I could see when I think a plan only has a ~10% chance of working because some mechanic might work one way, but likely doesn’t, it helps push you to seek alternatives.
Another thing I noticed is I would often have the start of the plan and the end of the plan settled, but some transition steps in the middle unclear. I would spend a lot of the time trying to sort this middle out, but it turned out it was better to scrap these plans (as they weren’t possible) and go with an entirely different approach in these scenarios.
I played the first third or so of this game when it first came out, and haven’t touched it since then. We did two rounds of the exercise, interspersed with 30 minutes of playing Baba is You levels the regular way to build up more intuition (most attendees were either new to the game or haven’t played it for years). Some people paired up and some people did the exercise individually.
I did Tiny Pond for the first workshop independently, and found it very difficult—despite running through the strategizing and metastrategizing twice, I was still very stuck.
I did The River for the second workshop (after running through the first few levels of Baba is You again). This time I paired up with someone else, and we were able to get to the correct solution after the first round of strategizing.
I’m curious how it went in terms of ‘do you think you learned anything useful?’
It felt productive. My day job (running a policy nonprofit) involves a lot of vibes/reacting to Current Thing and not a great deal of rigorously solving hard problems, and the exercise usefully… crystallized? a vague, vibes-based framework that I follow when I do strategy planning—set timers, generate plans, set probabilities, check surprise, go meta, iterate, etc. It’s nice to have that operationalized!