Designing serious games - a request for help

To get the ball rolling, here's an idea based on the "predicting red or blue" card game focusing on calibration, mentioned here: Lawful uncertainty.

The user will be presented with cards one at a time. The cards will be either red or blue. There are X cards in the pack (maybe 50? enough for a good run). At the start of the game, the proportion of red:blue is displayed as percentages.

There will be different types of card-sequences. a) purely random b) an obvious pattern (regularity or increasing numbers of blue etc) c) a combination of the two.

When game begins, the cards will be "turned over" one at a time. before the next card is turned over, the user is prompted to "guess the colour" - they have two buttons - red and blue ad clicking on one of those buttons is their guess... and also causes the card to be turned over.

The user starts with a score of 100%. If the user got the card right, the score does not change. Otherwise it is reduced (can't rem the exact function for this - probably need to re-read the article).

A user plays to beat their previous score. High scores are stored for the top ten.

You could try to teach pessimism in planning as a subgoal, e.g. by someone asking the player to predict their performance on the next task, as measured by a metric that they weren't just measured on.

Beware the Ludic Fallacy!

A few ideas have been kicked around in various threads, that are referenced on the Wiki; that could be a nice background for brainstorming.

One thing that's important to AVOID is the things that come from the world being artificial and made specifically for challenges, things like there always being a way to succeed in the given task even if it seems not to, or the player always turning out to be important without a clear cause, or a multitude of other things, just look through TV tropes for more. In short, most games are stories. If you want the game to train you in thinking like reality you have to make the game more similar to reality (or make it very abstract).

So, some properties a reality like game might have:

• Procedurally generated environments, with no special checks for solvability or indeed any causal arrows coming in from what the player might do in them.

• The player is not placed in a special character. Either the player is the inly intelligence around, ir the player is given control of a random sample from a large population where everyone have interesting enough lives, or the player has to find and chose someone interesting from a randomly generated population. The middle solution is probably the most realistic.

• Lots of things are Hard Work. No gaining advantages quickly as a side effect of accomplishing your other goals, or by killing random things. You have to earn your skills.

• Brutal and unforgiving. A single mistake can make everything you have come crashing down, and there is no reloading from a saved game. Even usually harmless things can permanently cripple you and the only way to avoid this is being observant and trying to understand what makes things tick so you can be out of the blast radius when they finally tock. If there is combat it is short and even if you will can leave you mortally wounded. The game is NOT fair, and things having consequences disproportionate to the crime is the rule rather than the exception.

• You don't really know what the goal is until you win. The game constantly give you "intuition" hints when you LOCALLY approach it. The goal is different each time you play.

• Some NPC characters will try to detect any behaviour that might be smarter than them, and get hostile to anything that seems to be getting an advantage over them. The player can either act dumb and ignore obvious opportunities, avoid interacting with NPCs, or try to grab power to fast for the NPCs to stop them.

Lots of these sound similar to the rougelike genre I think, those also tend to require less development effort than most other games.

Ok, another idea... based on the "sunk cost" bias.

It's a simple investment game. User starts with a set amount of capital.

For the simplest version, you can invest in Stock A or Stock B - whose price fluctuates randomly (we assume we haven't enough money to affect the stock prices ourselves).

At any time, you can see how much your stock is worth now... and how much you have gained/lost so far... but also how much you could have gained if you switched strategy. Thus making it abundantly clear when it's better for you to switch to the other stock -> you eventually get better at noticing when your sunk-cost bias is actually hindering you.

probably needs some more work... eg more detail on how to calculate the various factors...

An interesting exercise you might use to attack privileging the hypothesis:

Start with a privileged hypothesis, ask the player to estimate its probability. Then ask the player to generate a bunch of alternate hypotheses. Then ask them to re-assess the probability of the initial hypothesis. Random line idea: "it could either happen or it could not happen - so there's a 50% chance, right?"

This article analyzing Angry Birds seems like it would be useful to you. (via)

Here's an idea for a game to train awareness of/resistance to confirmation bias:

The game would consist of three phases, that could then be repeated for however many iterations (levels!) were desired.
1) Presenting and habituating the "theory." Basically, give a set of rules for making some kind of decision/prediction, and then have the player apply those rules to a series of scenarios that clearly illustrate the supposed predictive (or score-increasing, if you will) properties of the Theory.
2) "In the wild" - Now present a series of scenarios that each either offer evidence that the Theory from phase 1 is useful (+), evidence that the Theory is incorrect(-), or no clear evidence in either direction (null).
3) "Assessment" - Have the player estimate the relative frequencies of (+), (-), and (null) evidence given in phase 2. Player receives an iteration score based on the accuracy of these estimates, and a cumulative score over all iterations completed.

Later iterations (higher levels) could perhaps re-use multiple Theories for the same round, and then in phase 3 ask for evidence estimates for all the Theories at once, possibly even throwing in Theories for which no evidence was presented in the second phase. Higher levels of complexity bring higher stakes (larger increases for accuracy and larger decreases for inaccuracy), so a player who could continue to improve the cumulative score with increases in difficulty would be doing very well indeed.

I've spoken of the Theories and Evidence in the purely abstract here, but I'm picturing either color/shape patterns and movements, or plausibly realistic word problem-type scenarios. The former would be preferable since it would not involve importing the player's biases about situations that might be found in the real world... or actually, come to think of it, it might be interesting and/or useful to make use of realistic-seeming examples precisely for that reason. Huh.

Anyway. The scoring algorithm would reward players who most aggressively sought out (-) evidence for the active Theory or Theories.

Do existential graphs count?