Dweomite

Karma: 889

Dweomite 22 Apr 2024 3:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
In principle, any game where the player has a full specification of how the game works is immune to this specific failure mode, whether it’s multiplayer or not. (I say “in principle” because this depends on the player actually using the info; I predict most people playing Slay the Spire for the first time will not read the full list of cards before they start, even if they can.)
The one-shot nature makes me more concerned about this specific issue, rather than less. In a many-shot context, you get opportunities to empirically learn info that you’d otherwise need to “read the designer’s mind” to guess.
Mixing in “real-world” activities presumably helps.
If it were restricted only to games, then playing a variety of games seems to me like it would help a little but not that much (except to the extent that you add in games that don’t have this problem in the first place). Heuristics for reading the designer’s mind often apply to multiple game genres (partly, but not solely, because approx. all genres now have “RPG” in their metaphorical DNA), and even if different heuristics are required it’s not clear that would help much if each individual heuristic is still oriented around mind-reading.

Dweomite 17 Apr 2024 0:22 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
I have an intuition that you’re partly getting at something fundamental, and also an intuition that you’re partly going down a blind alley, and I’ve been trying to pick apart why I think that.
I think that “did your estimate help you strategically?” has a substantial dependence on the “reading the designer’s mind” stuff I was talking about above. For instance, I’ve made extremely useful strategic guesses in a lot of games using heuristics like:
- Critical hits tend to be over-valued because they’re flashy
- Abilities with large numbers appearing as actual text tend to be over-valued, because big numbers have psychological weight separate from their actual utility
- Support roles, and especially healing, tend to be under-valued, for several different reasons that all ultimately ground out in human psychology
All of these are great shortcuts to finding good strategies in a game, but they all exploit the fact that some human being attempted to balance the game, and that that human had a bunch of human biases.
I think if you had some sort of tournament about one-shotting Luck Be A Landlord, the winner would mostly be determined by mastery of these sorts of heuristics, which mostly doesn’t transfer to other domains.
However, I can also see some applicability for various lower-level, highly-general skills like identifying instrumental and terminal values, gears-based modeling, quantitative reasoning, noticing things you don’t know (then forming hypotheses and performing tests), and so forth. Standard rationality stuff.
Different games emphasize different skills. I know you were looking for specific things like resource management and value-of-information, presumably in an attempt to emphasize skills you were more interested in.
I think “reading the designer’s mind” is a useful category for a group of skills that is valuable in many games but that you’re probably less interested in, and so minimizing it should probably be one of the criteria you use to select which games to include in exercises.
I already gave the example of book games as revolving almost entirely around reading the designer’s mind. One example at the opposite extreme would be a game where the rules and content are fully-known in advance...though that might be problematic for your exercise for other reasons.
It might be helpful to look for abstract themes or non-traditional themes, which will have less associational baggage.
I feel like it ought to be possible to deliberately design a game to reward the player mostly for things other than reading the designer’s mind, even in a one-shot context, but I’m unsure how to systematically do that (without going to the extreme of perfect information).

Dweomite 13 Apr 2024 16:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
Oh, hm. I suppose I was thinking in terms of better-or-worse quantitative estimates—”how close was your estimate to the true value?”—and you’re thinking more in terms of “did you remember to make any quantitative estimate at all?”
And so I was thinking the one-shot context was relevant mostly because the numerical values of the variables were unknown, but you’re thinking it’s more because you don’t yet have a model that tells you which variables to pay attention to or how those variables matter?

Dweomite 13 Apr 2024 4:09 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
I’m kinda arguing that the skills relevant to the one-shot context are less transferable, not more.
It might also be that they happen to be the skills you need, or that everyone already has the skills you’d learn from many-shotting the game, and so focusing on those skills is more valuable even if they’re less transferable.
But “do I think the game designer would have chosen to make this particular combo stronger or weaker than that combo?” does not seem to me like the kind of prompt that leads to a lot of skills that transfer outside games.

Dweomite 13 Apr 2024 1:08 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
OK. So the thing that jumps out at me here is that most of the variables you’re trying to estimate (how likely are cards to synergize, how large are those synergies, etc.) are going to be determined mostly by human psychology and cultural norms, to the point where your observations of the game itself may play only a minor role until you get close-to-complete information. This is the sort of strategy I call “reading the designer’s mind.”
The frequency of synergies is going to be some compromise between what the designer thought would be fun and what the designer thought was “normal” based on similar games they’ve played. The number of cards is going to be some compromise between how motivated the designer was to do the work of adding more cards and how many cards customers expect to get when buying a game of this type. Etc.
As an extreme example of what I mean, consider book games, where the player simply reads a paragraph of narrative text describing what’s happening, chooses an option off a list, and then reads a paragraph describing the consequences of that choice. Unlike other games, where there are formal systematic rules describing how to combine an action and its circumstances to determine the outcome, in these games your choice just does whatever the designer wrote in the corresponding box, which can be anything they want.
I occasionally see people praise this format for offering consequences that truly make sense within the game-world (instead of relying on a simplified abstract model that doesn’t capture every nuance of the fictional world), but I consider that to be a shallow illusion. You can try to guess the best choice by reasoning out the probable consequences based on what you know of the game’s world, but the answers weren’t actually generated by that world (or any high-fidelity simulation of it). In practice you’ll make better guesses by relying on story tropes and rules of drama, because odds are quite high that the designer also relied on them (consciously or not). Attempting to construct a more-than-superficial model of the story’s world is often counter-productive.
And no matter how good you are, you can always lose just because the designer was in a bad mood when they wrote that particular paragraph.
Strategy games like Luck Be A Landlord operate on simple and knowable rules, rather than the inscrutable whims of a human author (which is what makes them strategy games). But the particular variables you listed aren’t the outputs of those rules, they’re the inputs that the designer fed into them. You’re trying to guess the one part of the game that can’t be modeled without modeling the game’s designer.
I’m not quite sure how much this matters for teaching purposes, but I suspect it matters rather a lot. Humans are unusual systems in several ways, and people who are trying to predict human behavior often deploy models that they don’t use to predict anything else.
What do you think?

Dweomite 12 Apr 2024 22:09 UTC
1 point
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on: “Fractal Strategy” workshop report
I feel confused about how Fermi estimates were meant to apply to Luck Be a Landlord. I think you’d need error bars much smaller than 10x to make good moves at most points in the game.

Dweomite 19 Mar 2024 19:53 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Strawperson’s comment on: Social status part 1/2: negotiations over object-level preferences
I came to a similar conclusion when thinking about the phenomenon of “technically true” deceptions.
Most people seem to have a strong instinct to say only technically-true things, even when they are deliberately deceiving someone (and even when this restriction significantly reduces their chances of success). Yet studies find that the victims of a deception don’t much care whether the deceiver was being technically truthful. So why the strong instinct to do this costly thing, if the interlocutor doesn’t care?
I currently suspect the main evolutionary reason is that a clear and direct lie makes it easier for the victim to trash your reputation with third parties. “They said X; the truth was not-X; they’re a liar.”
If you only deceive by implication, then the deception depends on a lot of context that’s difficult for the victim to convey to third parties. The act of making the accusation becomes more costly, because more stuff needs to be communicated. Third parties may question whether the deception was intentional. It becomes harder to create common knowledge of guilt: Even if one listener is convinced, they may doubt whether other listeners would be convinced.
Thus, though the victim is no less angry, the counter-attack is blunted.

Dweomite 19 Mar 2024 4:38 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Some concepts that I use:
Randomness is when the game tree branches according to some probability distribution specified by the rules of the game. Examples: rolling a die; cutting a deck at a random card.
Slay the Spire has randomness; Chess doesn’t.
Hidden Information is when some variable that you can’t directly observe influences the evolution of the game. Examples: a card in an opponent’s hand, which they can see but you can’t; the 3 solution cards set aside at the start of a game of Clue; the winning pattern in a game of Mastermind.
People sometimes consider “hidden information” to include randomness, but I more often find it helpful to separate them.
However, it’s not always obvious which model should be used. For example, I usually find it most helpful to think of a shuffled deck as generating a random event each time you draw from the deck (as if you were taking a randomly-selected card from an unordered pool), but it’s also possible to think of shuffling the deck as having created hidden information (the order that the deck is in), and it may be necessary to switch to this more-complicated model if there are rules that let players modify the deck (e.g. peeking at the top card, or inserting a card at a specific position).
Similar reasoning applies to a PRNG: I usually think of it as a random event each time a number is generated, though it’s also possible to think of it as a hidden seed value that you learn a little bit about each time you observe an output (and a designer may need to think in this second way to ensure their PRNG is not too exploitable).
Rule of thumb: If you learn some information about the same variable more than once, then it’s hidden info. For instance, a card in your opponent’s hand will influence their strategy, so you gain a little info about it whenever they move, which makes it hidden info. If a variable goes from completely hidden to completely revealed in a single step (or if any remaining uncertainty has no impact on the game), then it’s just randomness.
Interesting Side Note: Monte Carlo Tree Search can handle randomness just fine, but really struggles with hidden information.
A Player is a process that selects between different game-actions based on strategic considerations, rather than a simple stochastic process. An important difference between Chess and Slay the Spire is that Chess includes a second player.
We typically treat players as “outside the game” and unconstrained by any rules, though of course in any actual game the player has to be implemented by some actual process. The line between “a player who happens to be an AI” and “a complicated game rule for selecting the next action” can be blurry.
A Mixed Equilibrium is when the rules of the game reward players for deliberately including randomness in their decision process. For instance, in rock-paper-scissors, the game proceeds completely deterministically for a given set of player inputs, but there remains an important sense in which RPS is random but Chess is not, which is that one of these rewards players for acting randomly.
I have what I consider to be important and fundamental differences in my models between any two of these games: Chess, Battleship, Slay the Spire, and Clue.
Yet, you can gain an advantage in any of these games by thinking carefully about your game model and its implications.

Dweomite 19 Mar 2024 2:50 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
If your definition of “hidden information” implies that chess has it then I think you will predictably be misunderstood.
Terms that I associate with (gaining advantage by spending time modeling a situation) include: thinking, planning, analyzing, simulating, computing (“running the numbers”)

Dweomite 19 Mar 2024 2:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: seed’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
I haven’t played it, but someone disrecommended it to me on the basis that there was no way to know which skills you’d need to survive the scripted events except to have seen the script before.

Dweomite 18 Mar 2024 22:37 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Andrew Currall’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Unless I’m mistaken, StS does not have any game actions the player can take to learn information about future encounters or rewards in advance. Future encounters are well-modeled as simple random events, rather than lurking variables (unless we’re talking about reverse-engineering the PRNG, which I’m assuming is out-of-scope).
It therefore does not demonstrate the concept of value-of-information. The player can make bets, but cannot “scout”.
(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I’m unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)

Dweomite 17 Mar 2024 21:48 UTC
4 points
2
on: The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We’ve Tried)
While considering this idea, it occurred to me that you might not want whatever factions exist at the time you create a government to remain permanently empowered, given that factions sometimes rise or fall if you wait long enough.
Then I started wondering if one could create a system that somehow dynamically identifies the current “major factions” and gives de-facto vetoes to them.
And then I said: “Wait, how is that different from just requiring some voting threshold higher than 50% in order to change policy?”

Dweomite 14 Mar 2024 1:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
It’s good to clarify that you’re looking for examples from multiple genres, though I’d caution you not to write off all “roguelikes” too quickly just because you’ve already found one you liked. There are some games with the “roguelike” tag that have little overlap other than procedural content and permadeath.
For instance, Slay the Spire, Rogue Legacy, and Dungeons of Dredmor have little overlap in gameplay, though they are all commonly described as “roguelike”. (In fact, I notice that Steam now seems to have separate tags for “roguelike deckbuilder”, “action roguelike”, and “traditional roguelike”—though it also retains the generic “roguelike” tag.)
And that’s without even getting into cases like Sunless Sea where permadeath and procedural generation were tacked onto a game where they’re arguably getting in the way more than adding to the experience.

Dweomite 12 Mar 2024 0:17 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: kave’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Wow. I’m kind of shocked that the programmer understands PRNGs well enough to come up with this strategy for controlling different parts of the game separately and yet thinks that initializing a bunch of PRNGs to exactly the same seed is a good idea.
Nice find, though. Thanks for the info!
(I note the page you linked is dated ~4 years ago; it seems possible this has changed since then.)

Dweomite 11 Mar 2024 18:19 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Another possible reason to disrecommend it is because it’s hugely popular.
(The more popular a game, the more of your audience has already played it and therefore can’t participate in “blind first run” exercise based on it.)

Dweomite 11 Mar 2024 18:04 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: ShardPhoenix’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Is Slay the Spire programmed in such a way that giving players the same random seed will ensure a meaningfully-similar experience?
If it were programmed in the simple and obvious way, where it generates random numbers exactly when they’re needed, I wouldn’t particularly expect 2 players to see similar things. For example, suppose at the end of her first battle, Alice’s card rewards are determined by (say) her 21st, 22nd, and 23rd random outputs. But Bob plays a slightly more conservative strategy in the first battle and takes 1 turn longer to beat it, meaning he draws 5 more random cards and the enemy takes 1 more action, so Bob’s card rewards are determined by the 27th, 28th, and 29th random outputs and have no overlap with Alice’s.
Statistically, I’d still expect more overlap than if they used different seeds—if you try this many times, they’ll sometimes be “synchronized” by coincidence—but I’d still expect their results to be more different than the same, unless they also play very similarly.
I could imagine deliberately programming the game in a way where various important things (like battles and rewards) are generated in advance, before the player starts making choices, so that they’re affected only by the seed and not by what the player has done before reaching them. But that sounds like extra work that wouldn’t matter except for exercises like this, so I’d be moderately surprised if they did that. (I haven’t checked.)

Dweomite 11 Mar 2024 5:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: GuySrinivasan’s comment on: One-shot strategy games?
Point of comparison: Slay the Spire consistently takes me ~3 hours. (I have a slow, thoughtful play style.)

Dweomite 11 Mar 2024 5:01 UTC
20 points
10
on: One-shot strategy games?
Searching for games that fit, I am reminded that there’s a frustrating number of games that have a difficult mode, but refuse to let you play it until you’ve beaten the game on an easier setting (sometimes more than once!) It might be possible to work around that by copying someone’s save file.
This list isn’t super filtered, but here’s some games that seem vaguely in line with your request:
Solar Settlers
Short strategy game with somewhat-risky exploration, pointed resource optimization, and exponential growth (if you play well). Advertises a 10-minute playtime, but I think (this was years ago) that my games lasted more like 1-2 hours; I expect this is partly because I’m slow but partly because the better you play the more stuff you need to manage.
I think (66% confidence) the difference between difficulty levels is just how many points you need to count as a “win”, and that you can finish the game even if you reach that threshold, so you could maybe tune the difficulty of the exercise by asking for a different score than what the game says. (Though IIRC there’s a regular play mode, and a skill-calibration mode, and I think only one of those lets you keep playing after you reach the target score, and I don’t remember which.)
Defense of the Oasis
Explore the map and invest your followers into exploiting various terrain features to prepare for a barbarian invasion. Short levels escalate in difficulty, play until you die. Starts easy, but you could probably pick some number of stages (or some score threshold) that would be challenging.
Various Roguelike Deckbuilders
Those I’ve played tend to be a bit longer than you asked for but not hugely so. The default difficulty is often hard for players unfamiliar with these types of games (but easy for veterans), and there’s often harder unlockable difficulties. There’s typically “rules-based” hidden information in the form of not knowing the full set of cards and challenges that exist in the game, but rarely any “gamestate-based” hidden information.
The best-known is Slay the Spire. I think the original and the hardest I’ve played is Dream Quest, but it’s very luck-dependent. Some others that have informed my impressions of this subgenre include Monster Train and Roguebook. There’s a zillion other ones nowadays.
You mentioned Luck be a Landlord, which is sort of on the edge of this category; compared to most I’ve played, it’s faster, simpler and has no hand management. Another game I’ve played that’s on the edge of this category is Crop Rotation, which is more of a tableau-builder than a deckbuilder since all your cards are available at once (there’s still luck, but mostly in what cards are offered in drafts).
Into the Breach
A tactical battle game where the enemies need to charge up their attacks and you can make them miss (or even hit each other) by moving things around, and you gradually upgrade over a series of short missions. I think this one actually lets you play on hard mode from the start, but I don’t remember for sure. Not much in the way of hidden info.
You can vary the game length by choosing to play 2, 3, or 4 islands before doing the finale.
ETA: Tyrant’s Blessing has very similar gameplay and is much less likely to have already been played by your audience (though it’s so similar that I’d expect a lot of skill transfer, and I’m uncertain about the difficulty and playtime).
Renowned Explorers: International Society
This is likely too long, but allegedly there are players who can finish a run in under 2 hours. It’s basically a combination of story events and turn-based tactical battles, with periodic breaks to spend your accumulated resources on upgrades. There’s a mechanic where you can do extra events for more resources at the cost of taking penalties that make the fights more difficult.
It’s not that hard, but if you restrict yourself to only choosing expeditions from the highest-unlocked difficulty rating then most players probably won’t win their first run. Experience at tactical skirmish games may provide a significant advantage.
ETA: Thought of a couple more, although these seem even less promising to me:
Farm Keeper
Turn-based economic strategy where you need to make escalating rent payments. The starting difficulty is almost certainly too low for you, and once again, it only unlocks higher difficulties one at a time as you win. Meeting various conditions while playing also permanently unlocks “secret tiles” that make all future runs easier by giving you more (and typically better) options. Harder modes are also longer and may exceed the playtime you want. So setting up an appropriate challenge might be painful.
It’s also somewhat unfair as a one-shot exercise, because as you play you get access to new tiles that substantially alter the optimal layout, but you can’t move your existing tiles and you can’t see the late-game tiles in advance, so you can end up getting punished for having done a good job of optimizing the variables that you knew about. (Though conceivably this teaches something about flexibility?)
Lueur and the Dim Settlers
This game actually isn’t even out yet, but there’s a free demo. The demo is certainly too easy for your purposes. But it’s a relatively short turn-based survival strategy game where exploration plays an important role. (Note: I have only a vague memory of how long this took to play.)
I think there were some simple action-based mini-games, too, so it’s not pure strategy.
ETA Again: If unknown information is not such a priority, one could also look at some solo-friendly strategy board games—several of which have digital versions, such as Spirit Island, Aeon’s End, or One Deck Dungeon.

Dweomite 11 Mar 2024 2:02 UTC
3 points
1
on: One-shot strategy games?
Several thoughts occur, in relation to this list of criteria.
- Is 30-120 minutes supposed to be how long the game would take if you were playing normally, or if “you were taking a long time to think each turn or pausing a lot”? I’m a pretty thoughtful and methodical player in strategy games, and some genres of game seem to take me as much as 2-5x as long to play as they take for a typical player, so this can make quite a difference. (Though the upper end of that range may only apply if I’m actually pausing to take notes.)
- Are you looking for games where a typical player on their first play will lose, or where they will take longer to win than the given timeframe, or is either fine?
- With respect to “value of information”, I usually make a distinction between learning gamestate and learning rules—for instance, in Poker, the first would be learning what cards someone has, while the second would be learning whether or not a straight beats a flush.
  - Hidden gamestate generally has precise bounds for what it could be (if you already know the rules), but are generally made deliberately unguessable within those bounds. The rules of the game have no strict boundaries on what they could be, but usually aren’t designed to be mysterious, and your ability to guess them may be extremely dependent on how much experience you have with similar games.
  - It would be extremely unusual for a game to take into account how much a move reveals about the rules of the game when balancing them.
  - Most modern video games are designed to teach you the rules during your first game (which may actually be an obstacle if you want an exercise where the rules are taken as known)
- My impression is that most games with exploration as a mechanic are optimized to deliver feelings of discovery, rather than interesting strategy around explore/exploit trade-offs.
- Any game where information is valuable, and where gathering less than the maximum amount of helpful information is a viable strategy, is a game with a significant amount of luck. (Since this implies you can gamble on unknown information at reasonable odds.) This means players who only play once will not have a reliable measurement of how well they actually played.

Dweomite 26 Feb 2024 23:19 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Exercise: Planmaking, Surprise Anticipation, and “Baba is You”
On a literal level, I can’t play “a level I haven’t played before”, which is what the instructions call for.
On a practical level, I’ve already spent multiple hours beating my head against this wall, and when I stopped I had no remotely promising ideas for how to make further progress. (And most of that time was spent staring at the puzzle and thinking hard without interacting with it, so it was already kind of similar to this exercise.)
Admittedly, this was years ago, so maybe it’s time to revisit the puzzle anyway.
I will note that a level editor for this game seems to exist, so in theory you could craft custom levels for this exercise. Though insofar as the point is being potentially-surprised by the rules, maybe that doesn’t help if you aren’t inventing new rules as well.