What Game Are We Playing?
Designing Games to Learn
As I've been writing this series of newsletters on learning and video games, there's been a spectre lurking in the background. Video games and education. Edutainment.
Building games that can be understood at a glance
Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018
Building Games That Can Be Understood at a Glance
the Enshittification of Cozy Games
Discovering and transmitting abstract knowledge over generations
The complexity of human culture depends on people's ability to discover and transmit abstract knowledge. Studying this ability is crucial to understanding humans' distinctive place among species, but current experimental paradigms focus on the cultural transmission of specific, concrete facts rather than generalizable abstract knowledge. In this paper, we develop a crafting game paradigm to study how people discover abstract knowledge and transmit it via language. We compared individuals playing this game for 40 rounds to chains of four participants playing for 10 rounds each and passing messages to each other sequentially. The individuals performed significantly better over rounds, but the chains did not. Through simulations with language model agents and a follow-up experiment, we find substantial variation in the helpfulness of participants' messages, which may explain the lack of consistent improvement in chains. The ability to learn selectively from the good messages may be essential for improvement over generations.
Learning to solve complex tasks by growing knowledge culturally across generations
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what previous generations believed, valued, and practiced, and how these evolved over time. The power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning, however, are not well understood, and as a result, current AI systems do not leverage language as a means for cultural knowledge transmission. Here, we take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language. We developed a suite of complex tasks in the form of minimalist-style video games, which we deployed in an iterated learning paradigm. Human participants were limited to only two attempts (two lives) to beat each game and were allowed to write a message to a future participant who read the message before playing. Knowledge accumulated gradually across generations, allowing later generations to advance further in the games and perform more efficient actions. Multigenerational learning followed a strikingly similar trajectory to individuals learning alone with an unlimited number of lives. Successive generations of learners were able to succeed by expressing distinct types of knowledge in natural language: the dynamics of the environment, valuable goals, dangerous risks, and strategies for success. The video game paradigm we pioneer here is thus a rich test bed for developing AI systems capable of acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge.
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?
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
A philosophy of games to help us win back control over …
You’ve Been Played
How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across...
Building the Future of Games on ATProto | Birbhouse Games
Game platforms hold too much power over developers. We want to change that by decentralizing games with ATProto — devs own their data, players own their progress, and no payment processor can take it away.
RNGdle
A daily random number game. Roll your number, collect badges, and compete with friends.
17. A Value for n-Person Games
17. A Value for n-Person Games was published in Contributions to the Theory of Games, Volume II on page 307.
A Season of Learning
Credit: Unsplash / Patty Spahr There’s a concept in computer science called explore vs. exploit. Exploitation means using what you know to get reliable returns; exploration means trying new t…
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