LessWrong team member / moderator. I’ve been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I’ve been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Raemon(Raymond Arnold)
It’s a good game, just with a very narrow target audience. (This site is probably a good place to find players who will get something out of it, since you have higher than average percentages of people willing to take a lot of time to think about and explore a cerebral game).
Some specific lessons I’d draw from that game and apply here:
Don’t penalize failure too hard. The Void’s single biggest issue (for me) is that even when you know what you’re doing you’ll need to experiment and every failure ends with death (often hours after the failure). I reached a point where every time I made even a minor failure I immediately loaded a saved game. If the purpose is to experiment, build the experimentation into the game so you can try again without much penalty (or make the penalty something that is merely psychological instead of an actual hampering of your ability to play the game.)
Don’t expect players to figure things out without help. There’s a difference between a game that teaches people to be rational and a game that simply causes non-rational people to quit in frustration. Whenever there’s a rational technique you want people to use, spell it out. Clearly. Over and over (because they’ll miss it the first time).
The Void actually spells out everything as best they can, but the game still drives players away because the mechanics are simply unlike any other game out there. Most games rely on an extensive vocabulary of skills that players have built up over years, and thus each instruction only needs to be repeated once to remind you of what you’re supposed to be doing. The Void repeats instructions maybe once or twice, and it simply isn’t enough to clarify what’s actually going on. (The thing where NPCs lie to you isn’t even relevant till the second half of the game. By the time you get to that part you’ve either accepted how weird the game is or you’ve quit already).
My sense is that the best approach would be to start with a relatively normal (mechanics-wise) game, and then have NPCs that each encourage specific applications of rationality, but each of which has a rather narrow mindset and so may give bad advice for specific situations. But your “main” friend continuously reminds you to notice when you are confused, and consider which of your assumptions may be wrong. (Your main friend will eventually turn out to be wrong/lying/unhelpful about something, but only the once and only towards the end when you’ve built up the skills necessary to figure it out).
Huh, sounds very interesting! So my awesome game concept would give rise to a lame game, eh?
This was my experience with the Void exactly. Basically all the mechanics and flavors were things I had come up with one my own that I wanted to make games out of, and I’m really glad I played the Void first because I might have wasted a huge chunk of time making a really bad game if I didn’t get to learn from their mistakes.
To be fair, in real life, it’s perfectly okay that once you determine the right set of experiments to run to analyze a particular phenomena, you can usually use similar experiments to figure out similar phenomena. I’m less worried about infinite replay value and more worried about the game being fun the first time through.
I’d like to know a) when we say “spilling seeds” what exactly do we mean? Spilling them into the pepper-pieces, or just spilling them over the table in general? With that in mind, what are the differences between the two methods? Your (old) way sounds possibly like my way, which I always thought was pretty good. But that might just be me being biased in favor of my own ingenuity.
I always start by cutting off the top of the pepper (high enough that it leaves a hole in the top-piece, because the little dip in the top goes lower than the place I cut at). This a) let’s you pull out the core, probably in the “surgical” method you were referring to. But it does leave those little rubbery things that you need to deal with on the inside which sometimes have seeds left.
Google is deliberately taking over the internet (and by extension, the world) for the express purpose of making sure the Singularity happens under their control and is friendly. 75%
I confess that I probably exaggerated the certainty. It’s more like 55-60%.
I actually used to have a (mostly joking) theory about how Google would accidentally create a sentient internet that would have control over everything and send a robot army to destroy us. Someone gave me a book called “How to survive a Robot Uprising” which described the series of events that would lead to a Terminator-like Robot apocalypse, and Google was basically following it like a checklist.
Then I came here and learned more about nanotechnology and the singularity and the joke became a lot less funny. (The techniques described in the Robot Uprising are remarkably useless when you have about a day between noticing something is wrong and the whole world turning into paperclips.) It seems to me that with the number of extremely smart people in Google, there’s gotta be at least some who are pondering this issue and thinking about it seriously. The actual evidence of Google being a genuinely idealistic company that just wants information to be free and to provide a good internet experience vs them having SOME kind of secret agenda seems about 50⁄50 to me—there’s no way I can think of to tell the difference until they actually DO something with their massively accumulated power.
Given that I have no control of it, basically I just feel more comfortable believing they are doing something that a) uses their power in a way I can perceive as good or at least good-intentioned, which might actually help, b) lines up with the particular set of capabilities and interests.
I’d also note that the type of Singularity I’m imagining isn’t necessarily AI per se. More of the internet and humanity (or parts of it) merging into a superintelligent consciousness, gradually outsourcing certain brain functions to the increasingly massive processing power of computers.
I’d like to second how awesome that was. I’m almost tempted to do a full color version of the idea.
I’m a little baffled about how Dumbledore and Co. aren’t at least CONSIDERING the possibility that Quirrel is involved, especially since Dumbledore was already suspicious of him.
They don’t need to assume he actually went to Azkaban, just that he was involved somehow.
One of them mentioned “the obvious choice as to who was pulling Harry’s strings.” I’m not sure whether that’s intended to be Quirrel or not.
I think a pretty straightforward answer is that for it to be information, an intelligent being has to perceive it as such. I don’t think there’s a loophole—if you would successfully send information farther back in time using any means, Time Gets Mad, and things somehow work out so that you don’t. And even if you get around that, unspeakably bad things probably happen.
However, I suspect that the six hours is an artificial safeguard built into the spell. You could PROBABLY create a new time travel spell that can go seven or eight hours without breaking things. I doubt the 6 hour limit is actually the snapping point. It’s just the limit to what you can do before you start to deal damage to reality. Going farther once might work, but if everyone did it then Very Bad Things happen. If the payoff matrix for “everyone defects” is that the universe stops existing, you should probably cooperate.
Edit: NVM, reread the end of the chapter, and it seems like if there’s any way to go more than six hours, period, it’s such a well kept secret that no one thinks its possible. Then again, this would not be the first time Eliezer has employed the “powerful weapon being an amazingly well kept secret” thing, and it was somewhat foreshadowed when Harry mused that maybe scientists had come up with things worse than nuclear weapons.
I would not be surprised if the destruction of Atlantis involved Time Travel. Especially if we consider that this fic might be influenced by “Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time.”
Chapter 61: Proofreading (I think)
Albus looked at her, his face as expressionless as Severus’s, now; and she remembered, with a shock, that Albus’s **own** - “It is the best reason I can possibly imagine for removing Bellatrix from Azkaban,”
Albus’s own what, exactly?
Hmm. That makes sense, and I can understand why you might leave the sentence truncated like that… but honestly it doesn’t come across to me as clever writing, it just looks like a mistake. If there’s a way to write it so that it’s clearly a truncated thought instead of a writing error, that’d be better.
Possibly wording it ‘Albus’ own fa- “It is the best...”
Cutting it off in mid-word makes it a little more clear what is happening, and “fa” has the benefit of looking a bit like “face” so that it still takes some effort to process what the actual thought is.
Honestly I don’t think this is a case where making the audience work for it is really useful. The actual answer is revealed in the next chapter, so it’s not like you’re keeping it a secret for any length of time, but most people probably won’t connect Albus’ “my own father was in Azkaban statement” with Minerva’s truncated though. The people wanting to solve the mystery don’t have much payoff, the people who assume it’s writer-error will just be confused.
Honestly I think “Albus’ own father—” would works better. There are places for clever, mysterious writing but this isn’t it.
Warning, big swath of text coming through.
I’ve recently been rereading the story from the beginning. By now the whole thing has a bit of a halo effect and judging things without bias is getting tricky. So kudos on accomplishing that… but there are a few issues that I think harm the piece overall. They didn’t hurt my enjoyment of it, but they end up limiting it to a smaller audience. There’s a lot of smart people who would love this fic if there weren’t certain things that turned them off to it.
The main problem is that Harry too absurdly intelligent to believable at first glance. In the first few chapters people tend to assume that the “primary change” is simply that Petunia married someone different, which isn’t enough to justify him not only being saner but being genuinely smarter than the original Harry was. My sister was particularly annoyed by this. I’m not sure how much of that had do with her reading it before you updated the intro-text to say “multiple points of departure.” But by now she’s internalized Harry as a creepily overintelligent jerk and I can’t get her to give it a second chance, despite the clues you’ve dropped more recently about why he is the way he is. And while you’ve put a lot of effort into showing that Harry is not always right (and is in fact, often grossly wrong), the bleed between your own opinions and writing style and Harry’s opinions is often difficult to distinguish.
Something about the early chapters makes it particularly hard to tell, and if I had to pick the single biggest issue, it would be your portrayal of Dumbledore. I know that you’re writing from Harry’s perspective, and Harry’s perspective is flawed. I suspect you also want us to keep guessing about what precise changes you’ve made to Dumbledore’s character. Is he insane? Why/did he kill Narcissa? Etc. I’m sure there’s other plot elements that you’re foreshadowing that we haven’t picked up on yet. But even when I try to compensate for that… the character simply reads… off. Too weird, too dim, too much of a different character than the one we remember. My suspicion is that Dumbledore’s personality IS pretty different from your own, so writing him convincingly is simply difficult. If that’s true, well, fair enough.
I understand what you were trying to do in chapter 39, but he really comes across as a strawman. Not because his reasons for deathism are poorly thought out (it’s fine for him to either have undisclosed information or just lack that kind of rationality) but because he seems to fail to understand how angry/disappointed Harry is in him. Dumbledore should NOT be bad at that kind of empathizing, and that’s what makes him look genuinely stupid instead of simply having a different viewpoint. If he’s only pretending to be bad at understanding Harry.… eh, I’ll withhold judgment in case you have an awesome resolution to that scene planned out for later, but right now it doesn’t read as clever foreshadowing to me, it just reads as a character who’s written oddly.
I think chapter 39 would work a lot better, though, if it wasn’t set up by chapter 17. This is our main introduction to Dumbledore, and it’s just… too weird. Too insane in ways that Dumbledore was not traditionally insane, too dim sounding when Harry starts talking about locating Hypothesis. (I confess I’m biased a bit simply because the “detector box” thought experiment has never been compelling for me. Yes, it makes sense, but it doesn’t register at all on an emotional level, so taking a few paragraphs to describe it just feels weird and offputting).
I’m not a skilled enough writer to do it better, especially without knowing all of your longterm goals for the story. But I think chapter 17 is something you should revisit at some point. If there’s a way to accomplish the same goals without feeling so different from Canon!Dumbledore, and without making Harry look genuinely smarter, then the character would feel more real and you’d probably hold on to a wider audience.
By chapter 62, it’s become clear that this IS the Dumbledore we know and love, just a little more realistic when it comes to fighting a war and perhaps a tad more whimsical. But the audience has to wait a long time to find that out, and I can’t see any reason that we had to wait for that. I appreciate the way you force us to think “hmm… DO we really trust this guy in this alternate universe?” but the overall way you go about it just feels… off.
I didn’t say there weren’t good clues. Just that those clues come too late to help with the sort of person likely to give up around chapter 20.
If he did want to preserve that, yeah, I think your take on it’s the best bet.
It wasn’t a matter of I forgot about his father (although no, I wasn’t thinking about it at that particular time). It was that I didn’t even perceive it as a sentence that needed completing.
Chapter 63: The last chapter was very satisfying. I was afraid it might be something along the lines of “and then Harry went to Ravenclaw dorm and glanced at Hermione sadly and then when to bed, the end.” Instead I got not one but TWO good Hermione scenes,as well as a nice resolution for literally every character. While I look forward to the next act, I think I can spend the next month in relative peace. So thank you.
One thing that’s been concerning me is Harry’s view of Hermione. I’m assuming/hoping that you intend to delve into this further, because idolizing someone to the degree that Harry does Hermione is not healthy. I had a friend/romantic-interest (who did not return my affections in that way) that I put on a pedestal. And unlike Hermione, she really HAD been dedicating her life to helping people. I looked at her as a beacon of hope for what humanity could be like. And she knew that’s how I looked at her, and it was hella awkward and it (along with other factors) caused us to drift apart for a while.
By now I’ve successfully split my “beacon of human salvation” mental construct and the “replica of my friend” mental construct into two separate thing, allowing me to have hope for humanity that is not contingent on a friend being flawlessly perfect and a person I can treat like a real friend even when they make mistakes.
This was touched upon a little when Hermione realized “I haven’t helped anyone.” Not exactly the same circumstances that I was in, but seems to indicate that Hermione has room for growth and isn’t quite as good (yet) as Harry thinks she is.
First, I know Eliezer’s deliberately keeping Dumbledore mysterious and forcing us to question what we think we know about him and how we think we know it. But I think, in the end, he is the same character with the same core virtues that we originally loved. The difference is that he is now in a world where he could not be content “merely” being Gandalf, because in this new universe, Gandalf would have lost. Dumbledore in the original universe didn’t make the hard, cold decisions this Dumbledore does, not because he was incapable of it, because that universe didn’t require it of him.
This universe does, and because he DOES share the same core virtues it breaks his heart, which is what finally sold me on his character in chapter 62 (and even in chapter 39, when I went back and reread it).
I may turn out to be wrong, but I would be disappointed if that is the case.
The problem is that, simply put, such games generally fail on the “fun” meter.
There is a game called “The Void,” which begins with the player dying and going to a limbo like place (“The Void”). The game basically consists of you learning the rules of the Void and figuring out how to survive. At first it looks like a first person shooter, but if you play it as a first person shooter you will lose. Then it sort of looks like an RPG. If you play it as an RPG you will also lose. Then you realize it’s a horror game. Which is true. But knowing that doesn’t actually help you to win. What you eventually have to realize is that it’s a First Person Resource Management game. Like, you’re playing StarCraft from first person as a worker unit. Sort of.
The world has a very limited resource (Colour) and you must harvest, invest and utilitize Colour to solve all your problems. If you waste any, you will probably die, but you won’t realize that for hours after you made the initial mistake.
Every NPC in the game will tell you things about how the world works, and every one of those NPCs (including your initial tutorial) is lying to you about at least one thing.
The game is filled with awesome flavor, and a lot of awesome mechanics. (Specifically mechanics I had imagined independently and wanted to make my own game regarding). It looked to me like one of the coolest sounding games ever. And it was amazingly NOT FUN AT ALL for the first four hours of play. I stuck with it anyway, if for no other reason than to figure out how a game with such awesome ideas could turn out so badly. Eventually I learned how to play, and while it never became fun it did become beautiful and poignant and it’s now one of my favorite games ever. But most people do not stick with something they don’t like for four hours.
Toying with player’s expectations sounds cool to the people who understand how the toying works, but is rarely fun for the player themselves. I don’t think that’s an insurmountable obstacle, but if you’re going to attempt to do this, you need to really fathom how hard it is to work around. Most games telegraph everything for a reason.