[HN Gopher] A most profound video game: a good cognitive aid for...
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A most profound video game: a good cognitive aid for research
Author : myth_drannon
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-06-15 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thoughtforms.life)
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| jader201 wrote:
| The game this article is based on is "Baba Is You" [1]. It's a
| logic puzzle game where you try to get "you" to "flag" -- or more
| precisely, "win" (which, by default most of the time, "flag is
| win") -- but you manipulate a number of objects and join them
| with other words to change the "rules" of the game.
|
| I highly recommend it to the HN crowd.
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/
| timpark wrote:
| If anyone wants to try some levels before buying it, the game
| jam version of the game is on itch.io:
| https://hempuli.itch.io/baba-is-you
|
| That's Windows-only, though. Someone recently released a
| "demake" with fewer levels for Pico-8 that you can play in a
| browser: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=142638
| thimkerbell wrote:
| What is a game jam? What is a demake?
| yCombLinks wrote:
| A game jam is like a weekend hacking event where a bunch of
| people make small games in a short time frame and then get
| feedback or compared. A demake is a remake but usually for
| older systems or in an older style / lower resolution. In
| the indie game scene lots of the big hit games were first
| created at a game jam. No tomfoolery, they're useful words
| to describe things, that don't have other easy ways to
| describe.
| JeffeFawkes wrote:
| Game jam - like a hackathon, for games. Groups are given a
| theme or conditions and a short time (eg a weekend) to make
| a game as a challenge / for fun.
|
| Demake - remaking a game for a more limited set of
| hardware. Remake normally implies increasing quality,
| whereas a demake is focused on cramming as much quality as
| possible in a much more constrained execution environment.
| (In this case, a PC/iOS game to a Pico-8 game.)
| spicyusername wrote:
| Search engines are your friend :)
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| Demake in modern times is often used for example with
| porting DOOM to (insert electronic device like a
| temperature sensor that shouldn't normally play games).
| Since the target platform has less features, it's not a re-
| make, it's a de-make. This could also be for more academic
| purposes, like "what kind of game would we make if we
| deleted all the guns out of DOOM".
|
| But it comes from the old days of gaming. You could play an
| amazing fighting game at the arcade, but the home console
| had considerably less power. So the home version of that
| game might be very limited.
|
| Back then we would just call that a port. Port was used to
| mean taking something from its native platform and putting
| it on something else, which was rarely an upgrade. Putting
| an NES/famicom game onto Genesis/master system would
| involve upgrades (sprite capability) and side or downgrades
| (sound chip differences).
|
| Port today generally means a game has the same quality
| across all platforms, barring the bare facts of hardware
| capability. So de-make now often means a port with some
| intentional limitation. "I know a digital home pregnancy
| test can't run DOOM, but can it run enough to be playable?"
| failrate wrote:
| DOOM on a pregnancy test is still a port and not a
| demake. A demake is not specifically on more primitive
| hardware but is in a morr primitive style that may run on
| more primitive hardware.
| pistachiopro wrote:
| Something that set Baba is You apart for me compared to any
| other puzzle game I can remember playing is the puzzles
| themselves were actually "funny." Not like Portal, where you
| solved puzzles alongside a funny narrative, but in the actually
| language of the puzzles themselves there are setups which get
| subverted in absurd and delightful ways, often in multiple
| layers, as you work your way through to a solution. Playing
| made me feel like the math part of my brain was laughing.
|
| The game doesn't hold your hand, and I think it took about 10
| hours for me to learn enough of the puzzle language for things
| to get really good (and then it started to descend into
| frustrating fiddliness in the deep endgame), but the middle 30
| hours or so we're some of the most gratifying gameplay I've
| experienced.
|
| It kind of felt like the anti-Witness. The Witness was
| fastidiously fair and so carefully constructed I can look back
| at it and marvel, but actually playing it was pretty formal and
| mirthless. Baba is You can be a little sloppy and unfair, but
| it's warm and fun and funny, and the actual craftsmanship of
| the puzzles themselves is still top tier, in it's own way.
| bgoated01 wrote:
| I bought it on recommendation from an earlier HN thread, and my
| 7-year-old, 8-year-old and I play it together. We're only about
| three hours into the game, but it has been very enjoyable. As a
| sibling comment says, the puzzles are often very funny to all
| three of us, and even the youngest of us is able to suggest and
| find solutions. There have been levels where the 7-year-old
| thought of the solution before I did.
| Loveaway wrote:
| The game is truley mind blowing. The rules are simple and clear,
| there are no special hidden tricks, yet almost every puzzle goes
| from "it's impossible" to "oh didn't think of that". Truley
| shatters you assumptions over and over.
| dang wrote:
| Related albeit tiny:
|
| _Baba Is You_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560525 -
| Dec 2020 (1 comment)
|
| More:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Just learn a programming language that allows for
| metaprogramming.
| codesnik wrote:
| not many languages go that far as to allow to redefine what
| "call" is/does, for example. Though, some do.
|
| "Baba is you" is pretty cool, it is not only about changing
| rules, it also at some point plays with what language is, and
| you can even stretch it to explore some platonic ideas.
| schaefer wrote:
| with the c pre processor, you can do anything.
|
| but, please don't.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Or Objective-C method swizzling
| nanomonkey wrote:
| > not many languages go that far as to allow to redefine what
| "call" is/does, for example. Though, some do.
|
| Scheme would be an example that also allows for
| metaprogramming.
| a_tartaruga wrote:
| Baba is you is similarly a good introduction to the mindset
| needed to write exploits.
| Animats wrote:
| It seems similar to the hiring process for Jane Street, as
| described in "Going Infinite", by Michael Lewis. Jane Street
| tests applicants on how well they do with games where the rules
| change during the game.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| Baba Is You would be perfect for teaching people security,
| penetration testing, and so on.
|
| Lateral thinking puzzles are underrated, and orgs mostly
| punish lateral thinkers. Even though the lateral thinker is
| going to catch way more bugs. They will also generate more
| bug reports by doing so, and that's bad for numbers, stop
| that.
|
| Or the old FANG hiring problem. "How would you implement a
| binary search tree for this problem, and do it only on a
| Google doc, no auto complete."
|
| Good programmer: "I would never do that. That sounds
| horrible. Who thought of this?"
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I love a _good_ lateral thinking puzzle, but in my
| experience too many of them wind up being "read the
| author's mind" guessing games and misleadingly-worded
| "gotcha" silliness instead of actual exercises in thinking
| about a problem.
| nomilk wrote:
| While on the topic of games that change your thinking or give you
| skills, any recommendations?
|
| A few I benefited from:
|
| Chess: for general lessons of resourcefulness, creativity,
| calculation, pausing before acting, and practicing being
| comfortable with irresolution (e.g. when two or more pieces could
| be traded but you have to resist the urge to simplify if doing so
| worsens your position). Chess also opened my eyes to how much
| distractions and inadequate sleep affect cognition (my elo can
| drop 100 points when badly lacking sleep, and another 100 if
| playing in a public place with distractions).
|
| Vim Adventures: not exciting enough to recommend for gaming
| alone, but it made it bearable to repeat vim key strokes for 3-4
| hours per day for a few days straight until I had the muscle
| memory to use it for most coding tasks without too much
| clumsiness.
|
| DuoLingo: less of a 'game'; more of an educational tool, but
| still worth the mention as it made learning foreign language much
| easier than doing so via book/audio.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| In general transferring skills through games is quite hard,
| except for the skill you are actually practicing in the game
| (i.e. by playing chess you will mostly improve your chess ELO).
| There is some research going on to broaden this area though
| [0].
|
| Where gaming and more recently the 'educational' apps one sees
| advertised on certain websites and youtube channels definitely
| do help is raising awareness and motivation to the featured
| scientific disciplines.
|
| [0] -
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s41465-022-002...
| mhuffman wrote:
| >(i.e. by playing chess you will mostly improve your chess
| ELO)
|
| I have found it to help with strategy, especially multi-round
| strategy. This is useful in business and other areas of life,
| not just chess ELO.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| Opportunity cost.
|
| What about Go, or Checkers, or Call of Duty, or...?
|
| That's the issue. Yes sitting down and concentrating on
| difficult tasks for long periods of time is good exercise.
| So is jogging, which isn't sitting down. Or rowing. Or
| lifting weights. Or...
|
| Chess probably has much less benefits than learning a
| musical instrument, for example.
| tranceylc wrote:
| I will say that playing counter strike for money has given me
| confidence in stressful situations in a workplace, as well as
| helping me navigate tension between team members/co-workers.
|
| It is mostly soft skill type stuff. For example, something
| goes wrong and veers from an original plan, and you have to
| come up with a solution and adapt in the moment.
| mycocola wrote:
| From experience, I can say that there are many games with
| transferable skills.
|
| At the top of my list is Factorio, and second is actually
| World of Warcraft.
|
| More generally, there is a lot to learn from game design that
| you can learn through playing. The question of how to make
| taxes palatable, for example, is really no different to the
| question of how to challenge a player without frustrating
| them.
|
| I believe the value of games are poorly understood, partially
| because chess, a game that has nothing left to teach us,
| muddies the conversation
| __rito__ wrote:
| I have truly benefited from playing Factorio.
|
| It sets you up with a logistical mindset, you learn to think
| about setting up a _" supply chain"_ before you do something.
| This becomes a very abstract skillset that you start to apply
| in multiple areas of your life.
|
| Secondly, it takes your thinking to a higher, more abstract
| level when you learn to build factories that build factories
| that build...
|
| Thirdly, you learn polymorphic thinking in a high level. Like,
| products that are then taken through different processes
| produce entirely different things, and then some of them are
| fed back to this system.
|
| I have played the game for low two-digit hours, but it
| augmented my thinking in a concrete way.
|
| I will highly recommend Factorio.
|
| Chess has also benefited me in being more far-sighted in
| shorter terms. Especially in situations with real rivals, or
| even without.
|
| Scrabble had helped me learn in an early age that clever tricks
| and pragmatism help me win more than qualities like "elegance",
| etc. It was a lesson 'thrown in my face'.
| fragmede wrote:
| Tony Zhu has a whole video about Factorio and software
| engineering: https://youtu.be/vPdUjLqC15Q
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Portal 2 has some truly unbelievable custom maps that hit the
| sweet spot for brain games mixed with hi-if graphics IMO. If
| you've never played the low-grav lunar levels or used the time
| traveling gun, you're missing out.
|
| Into the Breach is the closest you're ever going to get to a
| chess sequel.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| I'm going to put a plug in for Elden Ring.
|
| Helps with reflexes and hand eye coordination but more
| importantly it fosters a zen mindset. Have to roll with the
| punches and work the problem instead of getting frustrated
| after you envitably die for the 1000th time.
| fragmede wrote:
| http://microcorruption.com if you want to get into reverse
| engineering.
| SilasX wrote:
| What do you do after you beat it?
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Believe it or not Dead Cells got me personally organized by
| highlighting the importance of good tool strategies with
| limited carry slots
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| DuoLingo is deceptive at best. It's made addictive at the
| outset so you feel good. You feel like you're learning. But
| long term the platform has what is now dubbed enshittification.
| It gets exponentially harder to keep up with reviews, there are
| known problems with the lesson structure that will never be
| addressed, etc. And if you pay money, they'll make it easier
| for you. Hm.
|
| Real critique example: Duo relies on 1:1 translation. Native
| language learning isn't even close to 1:1. Every language
| learner hits a point where they can say, "I know exactly what
| this phrase means in the target language, and there is no
| direct translation in English". To finish a language in Duo,
| you will have to memorize dozens/hundreds+ of totally
| misleading and bad translations like this.
|
| Tldr. Selling kids DuoLingo for language learning is like
| selling kids cigarettes to help them learn to build a fire.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| I love the Talos Principle 1 and 2, if you liked Portal you
| will probably like them, they rely less on platforming and more
| on puzzles that require you to use the puzzle elements in
| creative ways. The puzzle elements are easy to understand, like
| a jammer beam gun which jams a force field door when placed.
| One of the early and obvious tricks is if you have two jammers,
| how you can bring them both with you through a door.
|
| They also have quite a bit of humanist philosophy, in my
| opinion they do a good job of being relentlessly optimistic in
| a way that feels genuine without being overbearingly techno-
| optimist.
| azeirah wrote:
| An idle game like cookie clicker can teach you much about what
| addiction could look like for you. It depends a lot on the
| person what kind of game will "click" and if they will "click"
| at all, but if they do you will be utterly addicted for a
| while.
|
| This sounds like an awful idea!
|
| I have an addictive personality, and cookie clicker and similar
| idle games have taught me a lot about how I feel when I'm
| addicted to something, how it affects my decision making
| capabilities, how I can detect it early, what I can do to get
| out of the loop.
|
| This is not something you'll pick up automatically by playing
| these kinds of games, you'll have to deliberately and mindfully
| interact with them, but if you do you can learn a lot about how
| you respond to addictive stimuli and hopefully prevent a lot of
| way, way worse addiction in the future through these lessons.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I recommend the vim adventures demo for the gaming alone.
| Haven't tried the rest of it, having balked at the price tag
| (knowing vim well enough that I think I'd be paying for the
| gaming alone).
| butz wrote:
| Few moments (or hours, or days, depending when you are reading
| this post) ago a custom level set, titled "The Legend of Zelbaba:
| Linkeke between words" was presented @party 2024 -
| https://scenesat.com/video/atparty . Actual presentation starts
| at around 17-ish minute of live stream. Level pack is here (base
| game required): https://gamebanana.com/mods/150971
| toisanji wrote:
| I've written about the cognitive aspect the author talks about
| before:
|
| https://blog.jtoy.net/examining-concepts-through-different-f...
|
| https://blog.jtoy.net/on-the-wondrous-human-simulation-engin...
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12068
|
| The human brain has at least over 12 different coordinate
| systems. I like to reference this image:
| https://cln.sh/gpqhwrw2Hg92MQz62TY6
|
| Humans have the ability to inspect anything from any point of
| view that we want, like a real time video game simulation system
| in our minds. I suspect that artificial neural networks are
| missing this core ability to encode and translate its point of
| view when processing data. Just look at basic LLMs failing at the
| reversal curse: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288 No amount of
| more GPUs and more training data will fix it.
|
| The entorhinal cortex in humans has a special kind of neuron
| called grid cells that works with hippocampus cells to do
| generalized coordinate translations. The discovery of grid cells
| won a nobel peace prize (
| https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/advanced-inf...
| ). It is a prime suspect to incorporate for a coordinate
| transformation layer in my opinion.
|
| I want to build an ANN that incorporates this "coordinate
| transformation system", but I'm not sure how to translate it into
| code, this is my dream project.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Among other things, it dissolves barriers between data and
| algorithm, between a cognitive system and its contents, and gets
| you to think differently.
|
| Ah, I remember my epiphany, 13 ish years ago when Prolog first
| clicked for me. I put it into a little rhyming couplet:
| There is no separation 'tween data and operation
|
| Funny how you have to go all the way to the highest level just to
| find the same simple truths that define the lowest level; of
| computation.
|
| Games are cool too.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| > And the new factor comes into being, when one sees, when the
| mind realises totally that the observer is the observed, when
| that realisation takes place there is a release of energy which
| is new, which will go beyond 'what is'.
|
| --Jiddu Krishanmurti, Public talk in Rome, 1973 October 28.
|
| https://www.krishnamurti.org/transcript/when-the-mind-realis...
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