MineField
As always, this looks pretty simple:
Steer the car to not drive over mines. The longer you stay driving, the more points you earn.
And as always, it isn’t that simple. Play it for a bit, then pull back the Wizard of Oz’s curtain…
Today’s experiment is in subconsciously encouraging a particular way of playing. The way that life does.
Clues in the form of visual feedback are instant, but dealing with the bad behavior is slightly delayed. The behavior-to-result relationship is subtle and gradated. Just like in life, to even become aware of the problem requires first that you doubt your own mental model, and then respond to that doubt by either (A.) engaging in deliberate experimentation (B.) trying to identify fresh patterns or systematic relationships (or C.) looking into the future instead of focusing only on your present problems.
If you’ve been playing my Game-a-Day projects, you had reason to doubt your own mental model, which was hopefully enough to spark behavior A, B, or C. But what if you went in playing this game without the clue that things may not be as they appear?
There are three points embedded into this game’s mechanics:
- The present is too late to change. The present must be responded to.
- The future cannot be responded to - but based on how you respond to the present, you can change the difficulty of your future.
- You cannot run from the problems ahead of you - and attempting to will only make your future problems worse.
How did I do this?
You are not really driving in a world full of landmines. You are playing a videogame. That means that the world to the right of your screen doesn’t exist, much like the world to the left of your screen. Except unlike the world to the left of your screen, which neither you (the player) nor I (the developer) care much about, I am free to synthesize the world off the right edge (and top edge, and bottom edge) of the screen based on whatever system of rules I deem fit.
Rather than craft rules with the intention of simulating reality, challenging the player, or entertaining the player, I have crafted these synthesis rules in a simple way that I hope communicates an important idea and teaches the player. I am hopeful that learning, in turn, challenges and entertains the player, but the latter two effects are strictly secondary to the concept illustrated. (I have no use for simulating reality.)
In this case, I chose to reward you for taking your problems head on, instead of running from them. Observe the following two diagrams:
Driving Straight
Horizontally lower frequency of mines
Driving at a Steep Angle
Horizontally higher frequency of mines
Combined with the fact that mines moving off the top of the screen wrap to the bottom, and mines moving off the bottom wrap to the top, you don’t accomplish anything by driving at steep angles except to put more mines in your immediate future.
The effect of your current reaction on the future is instantaneous, memoryless, and direct. The harder to struggle to avoid facing the mines, the more densely I synthesize mines from the right side of the screen. The more you just try to go with the flow, the less densely the mines are being created from the right side. A moment of bad behavior is forgotten the moment you straighten out, and a history of good behavior is irrelevant if you panic and start weaving.
Don’t panic. Don’t try to cheat the system and run from the problems ahead. Don’t wait until the last minute. Most importantly, don’t deny responsibility for the quality of your own future, because how you react to the present is the single most important deciding factor in how difficult or successful your future will be.
Rather than waste mental energy being unhappy about how bad things are in the present, look for ways to respond to today’s problems in a way that will make for fewer problems in the future. Once a batch of landmines is visible on your screen, it’s too late to change their density or escape them, so just keep your cool and get them behind you.
Off I go to make another “videogame”… (I really need a better word for these things.)
Keep your head on straight, and your future self will thank you.