https://www.sparkwave.tech/conditions-for-change/
Might help too 🙂
Yiar
Karma: 95
I think it depends a lot on the game and on the quality of the digital version. This game and Through the Ages (by the same devs) do have really good digital implementations that are a joy to play on tablets (that’s what I’ve tried).
Yet there is definitely something awesome about the tactility of real tiles over touch screens. But having to explain and double check rules instead of getting feedback from the digital system is actually not very energizing for me.
This is one of the reasons I hope something like dynamicland.org will make it, then we could potentially get the best of both worlds 🙂
The digital version makes the second half a lot quicker, so maybe that’s enough? 🙂
Somewhat related: https://overcast.fm/+a1rgbK3HQ
The Crew. One of the few good cooperative games. You can’t speak during a round and have only a few ways to communicate to solve the puzzle together. The campaign adds complexity over time to make it stay interesting as the group learns the tricks of the game.
Mindbug. Made in part by the creator of Magic the Gathering, but made much more accessible to play with new people. Still, it is really deep. The core idea of mind bug is that you can take control of the card the other player wants to play (with your mind bug), this creates a lot of mind games as you’re trying to trick the other person to steal a card at the wrong moment (you only have 2 mind bugs per game).
Wavelength. Can play with almost any group and possible to play at high player counts. No need to play in teams, so no uncomfortable competition when trying to have a good time even with new people. Creates interesting conversations and is really fun and replayable! Good for getting to know one another too.
Brass: Birmingham. One of the best Euro games. Industrial revolution theme, understand the market to make your industry win. Other people can use the industries you build so it makes for very interesting strategies.
The Quest for El Dorado. One of the best deck-building games. The hexagon boards can be placed in a lot of combinations to create variation between games, and you can remove some cards from the store to make the strategy change a lot between games. I love it.
Gloomhaven. Another great cooperative game with a good system that creates many fun puzzles to solve. You unlock new ways to play, aka. new characters with new cards and new rules to learn and master in combination with your friends’ characters. Many cooperative games suffer from the problem that one person can decide what others should do. But here you’re not supposed to show your cards to each other at first, so you get both autonomy and cooperation which is nice so everyone feels they have an important role.
Oceans. Strategy-game, compose reliable species that thrive in the ecosystem. Fairly simple rules but hard to master. Lots of unique cards and randomized conditions make it fun and replayable.
Skull. Simple but really fun bluffing game. Easy to bring to a bar or restaurant and play a quick round or two.
Mage Knight has an excellent steam workshop mod for Tabletop Simulator which I highly recommend! 🙂 Automates some things so you can focus on the most fun strategy. Amazing 1-player game, but also fun at 2-players.
Strongly second Great Western Trail. Very fun and replayable 🙂
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Agreed!
I actually didn’t reflect about her having makeup. I recall (but hopefully don’t misrepresent in my paraphrasing) Julia Galef discussing that a society where people wear makeup is perhaps a more fair option since the difference between the most and least naturally beautiful people would be smaller then. I haven’t thought deeply about this, but in that case, wearing makeup might be the rational thing to do. However, regarding the appraisal that the artwork represents the woman’s beauty more than her strength, I can totally see how that reinforces problematic norms.
Rationality is in part about taking control, and you have more control over your strength than your beauty. Still, if I could sculpt myself I would probably rather be sculpting myself pretty than musculus (well, I guess they intersect for some people). Beauty probably has more benefits than muscles these days and physical strength is much less important for rationality than mental strength. An unnecessarily muscular body might also be a sign of prioritizing the wrong things.
It’s hard to get the metaphors perfect and it is easy to rationalize how details make it fit or not. But it’s interesting to see which metaphors resonate with the community, and would be even more interesting if more people wrote why as you did. So thanks for your perspective!
As I reread this short essay on teaching I came to think of this article, e.g. the importance of targeting the metric of really trying to live up to what one teaches, to stay on track as a good teacher. So I thought I’d link it here if anybody is interested in a similar perspective but differently communicated.
Would be interesting to use this framework for articles on LessWrong. Most people don’t spend time arguing why they downvote or upvote posts. It would be useful to know that the community e.g. had downvoted a post mostly based on e.g. enjoyability, robustness, or novelty. There are probably many other ways one could measure, but this one still seems simple yet very useful.
One could of course post one’s ranking using text as a comment, but that doesn’t aggregate the community’s judgment effectively.
Similar to other media, some works are designed better and some worse. For example games like Outer Wilds and The Witness doesn’t try to make you addicted, a lotus-eater.
Instead of having the policy to shut the whole medium out (I’m not saying that you are just because you quit CS:GO), I’m instead trying to make a conscious effort to find the better alternatives that don’t addict me.
I’m not saying that games on average do this well, but I think there is potential for really good experiences from using the dynamic interactive medium for many things, e.g. learning and entertainment.I’m not sure about the exact bounds for how little time one could spend on leisure instead of important work, but I think optimizing well-being in life is rational too, as Julia Galef argued against Straw Vulcan principle #5: Being rational means valuing only quantifiable things, like money, efficiency, or productivity.
If you liked this post you’d probably like this facebook post that Ozzie wrote recently on a similar topic:
https://www.facebook.com/722750362/posts/10165839328500363/?d=n
Thanks for the initiative! I’m interested! 🙂 It’s easy to mostly look at the new posts, but probably more important for me to think deeper and transfer the ideas in classic posts to my current adventures!
This framework reminded me of this quote from Bret Victor’s talk “The Humane Representation of Thought” (timestamp included in link)
I’ve transcribed it approximately here (with some styling and small corrections to make it easier to read).
“There are many things, especially kind of modern things that we need to talk about nowadays which are not well-represented in spoken language.
One of those is systems. We live in an era of systems:
Natural systems:
Environment
Ecosystems
Biological systems
Pathological systems
etc
Systems that we make:
Political
Economic
Infrastructural systems
Things we make out of concrete, metal, electronics.
etc
The wrong way to understand a system is to talk about it, to describe it.
The right way to understand a system is to get in there, model it and explore it. You can’t do that in words.
What we have is that people are using very old tools, explaining and convincing through reasoning and rhetoric instead of these newer tools of evidence and explorable models. We want a medium that supports that.”
A quick sketch of how the RAIN Framework approximately maps to Bret’s model of a good communication medium
Rigor: Quick sketch, not exhaustive. To start a conversation.
Epistemic Status: Moderate. I think Bret Victor has a lot of good insights, but I haven’t done an extensive research to see if the cognitive science research supports his claims.
Explorable Models
Accessibility
Availability
No big difference to text, most texts are accessible these days and explorable models can be too, on the internet. However, making native high-performance explorable models is trickier with software if you want it to work on all platforms. WebAssembly could improve this in the future, hopefully.
Understandability
Well-designed explorable models of systems could give some insights much faster than reading about the systems could. E.g. innovation of mathematical notation was a big step forward in expressing some things more effectively than words previously could, although with a steep learning curve for many people. However, I could imagine badly designed explorable models that wouldn’t effectively guide you toward specific insights either, so it’s important to compare high-quality texts with high-quality explorable models.
Compactness
Explorable models can be dynamic, so they could e.g. be personalized to specific audiences. Instead of writing multiple texts for multiple audiences, one model could be made that could adapt on parameters to fit different audiences. Personalization could tie insights better to your current needs and motivations and make you more likely to pursue learning about challenging but valuable information.
Enjoyability
Explorable models could engage more senses than only the symbolic visual. Personalization probably increases enjoyability too.
Evidence
Robustness
Could include system features to provide verifiability, more openness on bias & noise, and e.g. making models open source for scrutinization.
Explorable models could include being able to explore the data and source, not only the output program.
Importance
If we had explorable models of moral uncertainty which brought together a diversity of intrinsic values representing the cultures of the world, then (to my knowledge) that is the closest approach we have to find “evidence” of what is most important.
Effective Altruism organizations like e.g. Global Priorities Institute could use explorable models to make their information & evidence more accessible, easier to give feedback to, and then improve further in their judgment on what is most important.
I’m curious what you think about Bret Victor’s claims. How big could the effect be if people used explorable models more? The technology to make it cheap to author these kinds of models isn’t here yet, so if we consider tradeoffs then writing might still be a better option. I’m personally more excited about skill-building to make explorable models than I am about perfecting my writing, but maybe I’m overestimating the value. I used to read a lot on Less Wrong but these days I often find it hard to choose which articles are worth my time reading, perhaps a lot based on the enjoyability and compactness factors. But maybe I’m letting my vision of how good information intake could be irrationally demotivates me to read and write texts in the LessWrong norm format.
Thanks for this clear framework, it’s really useful for me right now!
I haven’t read Kahneman’s book ‘Noise’ yet, just listened to a podcast episode where he described how it is important to distinguish between noise and bias. I’m curious if that distinction is important in this framework and if I should read “Bias (Noise)” as “Bias & Noise” or something else instead?
Hi, not sure where to write this but something happened to this post. Curious to read it but it looks like this right now for me:
This talk about puzzles by a puzzle solving master might be interesting to you. Recommendation by Jonathan Blow (who made Braid and the Witness): https://youtu.be/oCHciE9CYfA?si=9ZtETH1_a8pM3l8e
I recommend watching the full thing but I associated the post above to this interesting idea from the beginning of the video:
(1) Eureka moments are the atoms of puzzles. Eureka: A sudden, pleasureful, fluent, confident feeling of understanding. Insights
…
(6) Interesting truths are the root of surprise.
(7) Eureka is not Fiero. Fiero: the emotion of overcoming a tough challenge
…
(9) Eureka is sharable (don’t need fiero to have eureka necessarily)
Not directly comparable to the post above but maybe relevant to the part about if competition is needed.