TreeMind
What TreeMind Is
Minimalist in every sense of the word, TreeMind initially seems to be a game involving a little skill and a lot of luck.
Once understood, it becomes a game requiring zero skill and a little (or zero) luck.
A Horse Led to Water Won’t Lead Itself to Drink
Note that unlike most Game-a-Day projects, TreeMind does not provide instructions of any kind. Nothing is said about the game, because if I said anything at all, the player might be inclined to trust me to provide all relevant information - and in this case, I distinctly did not want to do that. Tossing the player into the contextless play space leaves an instructional vacuum to be filled by experimentation, and experimentation is what’s needed to untangle this knot.
Required Keys Become Found Keys
What’s intended to happen is that the player first moves the mouse back and forth to see what’s happening - hopefully noticing that touching the green loop at either edge earns a point, and that touching a red loop in the middle takes away that score.
This is a hint. It doesn’t take much videogame literacy for a player to recognize that a locked door blocking progress almost certainly has a corresponding key or switch in the world. The player realizes something must be missing, and hopefully through minimal experimentation, tries clicking the mouse. The red loops shuffle, and the player now has a (rough) way to make it across.
Very rough.
Ineffective and… Possible
The method of crossing using mouse clicks is a difficult one, and the probabilities (at least two independent 1/9 risks must be survived in each crossing, often more) don’t work out very favorably for the player over many cumulative turns. The statistics get messy (and readers either won’t get it or don’t need to be shown), but let it suffice to say that the chances of reaching a score of 6 is rather slim when playing the game using mouse clicks to cross.
Optional Keys Become Ignored Keys
My score in the screenshot is 104. If the player picked up on this little detail, it should be flagrantly apparent that something is still misunderstood. There is still yet another lock, another hint to the player, another suggestion in pure videogame-language that a key or switch must be hidden someplace that would make this task easier.
And yet, for most players, I suspect that this second layer of complication does not scream “experiment!” nearly so loudly as the first “locked door” did.
When facing a 0% chance to progress, a player understands that something must be done differently. As soon as there is some way to reach the objective using what is already known, regardless of how poor or inefficient the tactic, the motivation for a participant to dig for a smarter way to do things is virtually eliminated.
Generalizing the Concept
This is no longer about videogames. This is now about interface design, lesson plans, personal goals, management, government, and religion. Most people, given a way to make measurable progress toward a goal, however ineffective that method is, will sooner employ that strategy until the goal is reached than invest any amount of time into potentially zero-progress investigation of better methods.
That doesn’t apply to everyone. If you figured out the trick, pat yourself on the back. If you didn’t, there’s no reason to feel bad - I strongly suspect that you’re in good company.
The Fast & Lucky Trick
Whip the mouse back and forth very quickly. As long as it doesn’t happen to be lined up with a red loop while this happens, the player dot can cross sides clean through the red loops. Like most videogames, TreeMind only updates positions at finite intervals and doesn’t check for intersection between frames, meaning that objects moving fast enough can pass through one another.
The Slower & Luck-Free Trick
Move the mouse cursor from just left of one edge to just right of the other edge - outside/above/below the browser window. The dot will jump to the next position that it’s able to pick up from the browser, which for most OS/browser combinations is when the mouse is back within the browser window.
The Effect of Frustration on Self-Guided Discovery
Although I don’t expect most players to pick up on the Trick strategies, some certainly will. If the primary strategy was a little more effective, then I would expect virtually no one to pick up on the Trick strategies, even though they would still work and be more effective than anything that involves clicking and monitored traversal.
The better solution is only found if the existing solution is unworkably ineffective.
Conclusion
Solutions that seem good enough, but are not, are more dangerous than solutions that are blatantly inadequate. We can live with the former, whereas the latter will push certain inquisitive and inventive types people to discover better solutions.
Absurd Afterthought: About the Title
When I was younger, I used to ponder over what it would be like to be a tree. I briefly went through a phase when I believed such questions were ludicrous, although I have since outgrown such presumptuous folly. Any more, I’m willing to admit that there’s a great deal not understood about plants, life, and consciousness, and I’m not able to rule the question out as a potentially legitimate one.
What does that have to do with this game? Nothing, really, unless we’re willing to stretch it so badly as to leave readers with a metaphor wedgie. Perhaps something like “The player realizations branch, like a tree” or “Trees are free from assumptions about physical interaction, so a tree is better prepared to solve this puzzle than an educated person”. I was having trouble coming up with a name that was descriptive of the game without giving away what the game is about - since what it’s about is basically all there is to it.
So I simply asked myself, WWTD - What Would a Tree Do - and the answer that I needed was of course buried in my question: TreeMind.
On second thought, maybe a metaphor wedgie would have been better than WWTD…
January 24th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
It’s interesting; I progressed almost exactly as you’ve laid out in your description:
1) “What am I supposed to do?”
2) “Oh, I get it. Green is good, red is bad.”
3) “But those red ones are always in the way…”
4) “Ah, clicking moves them…”
6) “I guess I’ll try working my way across…”
7) “What the? They teleport on top of you?”
At which point I gave up, guessing that I missed some important instruction in the journal.
After reading that you could do significantly better, I tried to figure it out…
8) “I wonder if there’s a pattern?”
9) “If I keep my dot at the far left or right when I click, I’m safe.”
10) “Nope, no obvious pattern.”
11) _randomly swinging mouse around_
12) “Hmm… that got me a lot of points.”
13) “Ah, whipping back and forth works pretty well!”
At which point I noticed that typically if it lost a frame in between whipping from one side of the screen to the other, it was in the center. So I could improve my chances by clicking until the red balls were off the center.
Interesting meta-puzzle.
By the way, whatever happened to the forums? Have those been removed, or am I just having trouble finding the link?
January 26th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’m glad to know that the game’s intention came across - I don’t get a lot of direct feedback on these things, so sometimes it’s unclear how much I’m imagining things, versus how much they’re actually affecting the user. Thanks for the comments!
The /bb forums were not explicitly deleted, since there are sparse links into posts there from elsewhere on the web, but no one is posting on it at this point. I removed the link from the main site, except to the section for budding developer help. I figured staying on top of game-a-days, journal entries, and the comments here would be enough to keep me busy after work in the evenings.
(So far I’ve been right about that. ;)