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!
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!