[HN Gopher] Deduction Mechanics in Games
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Deduction Mechanics in Games
Author : sebg
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-12-20 05:18 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| Akronymus wrote:
| This reads more like a wish list rather than analyzing how
| different games do it in different ways, which the title made me
| expect.
| gampleman wrote:
| My far most pleasurable experience is with the Ace Attorney
| series of games, which I think achieves it by the courtroom
| simulation.
| frodorf wrote:
| Probably the best (and only one) I've encountered is the
| Painscreek Killings - a little known gem that I've been pestering
| my friends to try out. The only system it uses is the old Unity
| style first-person "interact with item in environment to read
| note or pick up key" mechanic. However, the design is intricately
| laid out so that only by making a conclusion in your head, you
| know where next to go in the small, but sufficient open world
| town the game takes place in. I think more detective games would
| benefit by taking inspiration from that game.
| mikotodomo wrote:
| Wow this is like how in Genshin Impact, a character tells you to
| go find an item that you already have and when you talk to him
| again 5 seconds later, he says "woooow you found it after so
| long! you must have travelled far!".
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> I've been thinking recently about detective games, and in
| particular, the "deduction mechanic" -- the gameplay system of
| linking "facts" together to produce a new and interesting
| conclusions that forward the story.
|
| Pedant's corner: deriving new facts from known facts is logical
| _abduction_ , not decudtion.
|
| The way that Sherlock reasons is abductive reasoning, although he
| calls it deduction:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning#A_Theory_o...
|
| I guess the term never really caught on in the popular language.
| scollet wrote:
| I believe this is why Doyle was so compelling.
|
| Write the story backwards and read it forwards. You get the
| illusory effect with no effort.
| ajuc wrote:
| I've been writing a simple 2d arcade rpg a few years ago. I
| created a simple graph language for creating quests and started
| to design the system for specifying arbitrary quest conditions.
|
| It started from simple things like "has player killed a monster
| of type X", "does player have item Y in inventory", "was the
| actor X in place Y already", "have player talked to actor Z about
| Q".
|
| But then I thought it would be cool to add metainformation. "Have
| actor X seen player killing the monster Y". "Have any actor seen
| player talking about Q". "is there a chain of actors meeting each
| other from the actor that seen player killing actor X to the
| quest giver".
|
| I tried to implement this naively and it turns out the amount of
| information is astounding. To the point that I'm still amazed our
| brains can do this.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It sounds like you accidentally started writing a logic
| programming language.
| mst wrote:
| This really sounds like the sort of thing that'd be fun to
| implement in https://logtalk.org/ specifically.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I was working on something just like this myself as a prototype
| for a kind of "immersive sim" detective game, and experienced
| the exact same thing. I still really like the idea and hope to
| return to it someday, but yeah, it's harder to model stuff like
| that than one would intuit.
| scollet wrote:
| That's funny you both had the same natural ideation.
|
| I had the same but for the morality/social system of an
| apocalyptic im-sim.
|
| I did some notebook sketching and quickly progressed into
| capsnet territory so I shelved it :(
| trun wrote:
| Something similar was described in this GDC talk which you may
| find interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZft_U4Fc-U
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| RPG games are terrible, invalid engineering. Insufferable
| garbage. They are about as fun as watching ads on 90s television,
| which is admittedly possibly better than staring at a brick wall.
| You will never have an RPG where it feels like you're playing the
| "Role", because what you are really doing is trying to walk in
| the right spot to trigger a switch. You will always see one way
| to "solve" a "problem" in any given situation that was just
| story-told to you, but the author preconceived a finite set of
| solutions (i.e., one) for you that can only be expressed by
| stepping in a certain coordinate bound. And this is just the tip
| of the iceberg concerning a real RPG. Most add all kinds of
| useless crap on top of this: like leveling systems, grinding, and
| purchasing things to make your weapon better (not even talking
| about microtransactions. I mean getting 100 gold to get item x to
| get item y to get a weapon you need to get to the next area). If
| a game needs to be so cluttered with emulating an open world with
| all kinds of details (in practice, these will all be thinly-
| veield consumeristic nonsense like getting a flower to use to
| craft or trade), it better be an Epic, and took multiple decades
| to create, not every single game a studio churns out every year.
| If it is not worth your time to build an actual interesting open
| world with an actual meaning (aside from consume product) behind
| the entities in said world, it's not worth my time to explore it;
| i will skip through everything, installing hack to skip forced
| dialog, etc, like every other game.
| jandrese wrote:
| I see you have never played Nethack.
|
| Granted, in Nethack you "Role Play" as a murderhobo, so it's
| not quite the narrative focus you are looking for, but if you
| want multiple ways to solve problems it has an incredible
| amount of player fuckery built in from decades of development.
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| I prefer FPS and side scrollers. I don't play RPGs for the
| role playing, but I do notice that the role playing is
| implemented incredibly poorly.
| crooked-v wrote:
| That really depends on what specific game you're looking
| at.
| scollet wrote:
| Minecraft is pretty good.
| ajuc wrote:
| Try tabletop RPGs. They solve your main issue.
| vbphprubyjsgo wrote:
| Those are not video games.
| tantalor wrote:
| Who said anything about video games?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| You said RPGs, not CRPGs
| ehnto wrote:
| I think you need the "Aha" moments to let you complete some task,
| or lead you to some place, or interact with some thing, whilst
| still hiding enough information to keep you curious. That way the
| moments of deduction are exciting because it lets you progress
| the story, and gets you closer to the final deduction.
|
| For games with a grander theme like a whodunit, I think it's
| totally reasonable to have that just be revealed at the end, and
| if you got it right you can pat yourself on the back. Books and
| movies are no different, sometimes you figure it out before the
| book tells you what it was and you get to have a cheeky grin on
| your face when it turns out you were right, but that's all. If
| you really must gamify it, you could have your character accuse
| people, and if they get it wrong the cutscene shows who did it
| getting away or what have you.
|
| I feel The Occupation meets the authors requirements. You play
| the role of a journalist trying to figure out what happened in a
| bureaucratic scandal, wandering through beautifully atmospheric
| old institutional buildings collecting documents and clues. There
| is a lot of freeform deduction and you will definitely not get
| everything on the first playthrough as some things you won't even
| realize you were looking for, unless you made those freeform
| deductions and knew to look for those clues or documents.
|
| They do a great job of gamifying knowledge through meetings and
| interviews you have with different characters, and if you don't
| have the right bits of information then you simply don't have
| those questions to ask, and can't pick the right answers, and you
| get less information back out of the person.
| jawns wrote:
| A few years ago, I became curious about whether it's possible to
| write code that generates logical-deduction puzzles.
|
| It turns out, you can -- and you can also write code that solves
| them.
|
| I wrote about the experience here, using the "Cheryl's Birthday"
| brain teaser as inspiration to create a murder mystery:
|
| https://github.com/shaungallagher/cheryls-murder/blob/master...
|
| The code is a bit convoluted -- it was hastily written during a
| Hack Days event -- but it's fun to see the end result!
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The Search for Planet X[1] is a board game where players solve
| what amounts to a logic puzzle. The puzzle is generated
| procedurally and shared via seed amongst the players. The
| players then interact with an app to extract facts or
| constraints, keeping track of their own information as well as
| other players' queries in order to derive the game
| terminating[2] fact (the location of planet X). The game is, of
| course, deciding which new facts or constraints to learn.
|
| 1. (2020) https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/279537/search-
| planet-x
|
| 2. Among other ways to win points within the game
| DylanSp wrote:
| I got that on Kickstarter, still haven't played it yet,
| though.
|
| I _have_ played and enjoyed Alchemists, another board game
| that involves deduction, though with other complex mechanics
| involved, and pure deduction won't necessarily win you the
| game.
| seanwilson wrote:
| Are there any good detective games based around interrogating a
| suspect where you're given a decent amount of freedom in what you
| can say/ask over fixed dialogue trees?
|
| Her Story can be viewed as something like this in a limited form,
| where there's a satisfying enough reason for the limitations.
|
| Return of the Obra Dinn was awesome. Like Her Story, the
| deduction goes on in your own head or on paper in contrast to
| e.g. an unnatural UI that shows a nodes/lines diagram of facts
| where you're joining facts together to prove you know what's
| going on.
| rcfox wrote:
| Disco Elysium - lots of dialogue trees and people to
| interrogate. Saying every possible thing is usually a bad idea.
|
| Orwell - not so much about direct interrogation, but you
| essentially play Big Brother and feed investigators information
| you find from their Internet activity. What information you
| pass along or withhold can drastically sway the outcomes.
|
| Consortium - first-person game where you're investigating a
| murder on a plane. (kinda feels more like a spaceship from Star
| Trek.) There's some actiony shooting as well, but it can mostly
| be avoided and isn't the focus.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I think the critique of Return of the Obra Dinn is flawed. The
| game only seeks two pieces of information for every crew member,
| but in actuality, you need to crack out a paper and pencil and
| start "investigating" to get this information without brute
| forcing the game's mechanics. By asking less of the player it
| actually provides very rich deductive experience, unlike any
| other detective game I've experienced.
| SolarNet wrote:
| I feel like that was the point the author was making:
|
| > Obra Dinn achieves this by the simplest mechanism
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(page generated 2021-12-20 23:01 UTC)