Ban the ban: essential game design advice (with examples)

Anthropic bans ‘abusive or cruel behavior’ toward Claude

The usage policy update also adds new rules addressing propaganda campaigns, surveillance, and weapon development.

Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents

Significance The fact that humans enforce and comply with norms is an important reason why humans enjoy higher levels of cooperation and welfare than other animals. Some norms are relatively easy to explain: They may prohibit obviously harmful or uncooperative actions. But many norms are not easy to explain. For example, most cultures prohibit eating certain kinds of foods, and almost all societies have rules about what constitutes appropriate clothing, language, and gestures. Using a computational model focused on learning shows that apparently pointless rules can have an indirect effect on welfare. They can help agents learn how to enforce and comply with norms in general, improving the group’s ability to enforce norms that have a direct effect on welfare. , How do societies learn and maintain social norms? Here we use multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate the learning dynamics of enforcement and compliance behaviors. Artificial agents populate a foraging environment and need to learn to avoid a poisonous berry. Agents learn to avoid eating poisonous berries better when doing so is taboo, meaning the behavior is punished by other agents. The taboo helps overcome a credit assignment problem in discovering delayed health effects. Critically, introducing an additional taboo, which results in punishment for eating a harmless berry, further improves overall returns. This “silly rule” counterintuitively has a positive effect because it gives agents more practice in learning rule enforcement. By probing what individual agents have learned, we demonstrate that normative behavior relies on a sequence of learned skills. Learning rule compliance builds upon prior learning of rule enforcement by other agents. Our results highlight the benefit of employing a multiagent reinforcement learning computational model focused on learning to implement complex actions.

Exploitative Game Design: Beyond the F2P Debate

The past few months have seen a torrent of articles about Free-to-Play business models, often discussed alongside issues of ethics in games (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). These pieces have addressed the effect on addiction-prone players or children, the possibility of corrupting artistic intent, the sheer amount of money being spent, and other advantages and dangers of F2P. While all of this is relevant, I fear that we’re focusing too much on F2P and glossing over the wider ethical issues in game design.

Taiwanese Fans Defy Asian Games Flag Ban with Slogans

Taiwanese Fans Defy Asian Games Flag Ban with Slogans Spectators waved Taiwan towels; some changed into flag-bearing clothes post-entry despite ban

NYC school system to ban AI for elementary, middle school students

The Department of Education is unveiling new guidelines following backlash.

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time

You do not have to follow these rules every time. If you have a good reason to break any of them, do. But they are safe to follow every time.

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?

Asian Games bans ROC flag from baseball game - Taipei Times

The Asian Games banned the Republic of China and Imperial Japan’s Rising Sun flag at yesterday’s baseball super round, following an incident on Friday, when a staffer demanded that a spectator put away a cloth that read “Taiwan,” saying that the competition bans political messages.The incident occur

Why Everything is Becoming a Game

All the better to control you

The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom

A wealth of studies on students’ use of computers in the classroom supports the notion of banning them.

The Psychology of Normative Cognition

From an early age, humans exhibit a tendency to identify, adopt, andenforce the norms of their local communities. Norms are the socialrules that mark out what is appropriate, allowed, required, orforbidden in different situations for various community members. Theserules are informal in the sense that although they are sometimesrepresented in formal laws, like the rule governing which side of theroad to drive on, they need not be explicitly codified to effectivelyinfluence behavior. There are rules that forbid theft or the breakingof promises, but also rules that govern how close it is appropriate tostand to someone while talking to them, or how loud one should talkduring the conversation. Thus understood, norms regulate a wide rangeof activity. They exhibit cultural variability in their prescriptionsand proscriptions, but the presence of norms in general appears to beculturally universal. Some norms exhibit characteristics that areoften associated with morality, such as a rule that applies toeveryone and prohibits causing unnecessary harm. Other norms applyonly to certain people, such as those that delimit appropriateclothing for members of different genders, or those concerning theexpectations and responsibilities ascribed to individuals who occupypositions of leadership. The norms that prevail in a community can bemore or less fair, reasonable, or impartial, and can be subject tocritique and change.

It's open season for refusing AI

There's been a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject and shut down AI.