Minesweeper Automation
October 26th, 2008 Filed Under code, games, portfolio, projects
A few years ago, I was playing a lot of Minesweeper, and I realized that I was spending most of my time implementing two very simple rules repeatedly:
- If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged, clear any uncleared/unflagged neighbors.
- If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged plus the number of uncleared neighbors, then flag all uncleared neighbors as mines.
These rules should be obviously correct to anyone who’s ever played Minesweeper; in fact, I can’t even imagine making any progress in a Minesweeper game without them. So I decided to implement these rules in Gnomine, the open source version of Minesweeper that comes with Gnome on Linux. It only took me a few hours before I had this patch (applicable to gnome-games v2.20.1). Of course, this patch assumes that no mines are ever incorrectly flagged, but I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
And after playing with it, it’s surprising how much of the board can be cleared mechanically before you ever even get to any interesting decisions. When the sweeping does stop, what’s left are a few random decisions, where you can’t do any better than a 50/50 guess, and also the genuinely interesting positions where you have to apply set theory to make deductions.
I sent this patch off to the gnome-games mailing list owner, and have yet to receive a response. I’m sure that adding minor features to gnomine is absolutely no one’s top priority, but maybe if someone else has been similarly inspired, they might find this patch useful.
Stumble it!Sustainability MMORPG
August 17th, 2008 Filed Under games, sustainability
I recently read this blog post entitled Sowing the Seeds of a Future Society (emphasis mine):
Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.
This, along with my current interest in educational science games, inspires me to reimagine Spaceship Earth Beta, my ongoing imaginary platform for exploring issues and strategies of sustainability, as a massively-multiplayer computer game.
First, there must be two competing goals which different players are working towards:
- To develop a society proven to be sustainable over a large time-scale;
- To be selfish or violent or “evil”, taking advantage of loopholes for personal wealth or power or ego, which ultimately leads to making the whole society unsustainable.
The first goal must be concretely measurable. Concrete definitions of a small number of metrics must be defined such that, if they can be maintained or improved over several generations of players, they would indicate that the society as a whole is sustainable. These metrics would at least include:
- energy consumption and reserve
- cultural preservation and distribution
- tolerance for error (human, software, external catastrophe)
Playing the game through multiple generations of players, with different personalities and each generation being more detached from the start of the project, is important; cultural values are not transmitted by default to the next generation.
The second goal, while perhaps irritating to the larger community which devotes itself to the first goal, is nonetheless vital and the players which achieve it must be revered, even as the players who attempt it must be reviled. All systems which are composed of humans with individual volition will have members who desire to destroy the system, even if they must sacrifice themselves. The system must be resilient against any single point of failure, or any small-scale collusion against it. The exile or incarceration of citizens for what amounts to this “treason” must be enforced; their murder must carry the same emotional weight as it would in reality.
I do not believe that we can plan from the outset a completely sustainable system; the “metarules” that are in existence from the outset of the project, and the texts which define its culture and values, are all we can really control, and their ramifications can only be understood from playing them out to a reasonable conclusion. Now, the results of a computer game are obviously not the same as the results of the same experiment conducted in reality. However, we can work to create and refine the starting set of metarules to have the greatest probability of success.
This simulation will have to be run many times with many different people. This makes it different from existing MMORPGs which run continuously, with game designers (”GDs”) modifying the game rules to maximize fun and membership. Many variants will be obviously flawed, others more subtly so, but they should be aborted if and when they are irretrievably broken, and the system analyzed post-mortem to find the flaws that led to its demise, and a new system started with the modified meta-rules.
Can you name the elements?
July 6th, 2008 Filed Under fun, games, science
This can you name the elements game from Sporcle is extremely simple, but well done and actually kinda fun, at least the first two or three times. Accepting the input instantly is a nice touch.
Their geographic tests (like how many countries in Europe can you name) are even harder, at least for me.
I got 71 elements. When you try your hand at it, leave a comment with how many you could name, and which one you were pissed that you missed.
My Free Trial on World of Warcraft
June 1st, 2008 Filed Under games
I finally got around to using my 30-day free trial in World of Warcraft, and I have a few thoughts about my experience. Not everyone enjoys in-depth analysis of online role-playing games, though, so first let me share a brief summary for those people who wonder what the big deal is, but don’t care about the dorky details.
Most Science Games Suck
January 29th, 2008 Filed Under games, science
In my quest to create fun games that actually teach some science, I’ve been researching existing science games, and I’ve definitely learned something: most science games suck. Even the ones that aren’t Trivia or Bingo or Bingo Trivia are pretty bad.
For instance, check out Acideroids, which wants to teach you the structures of the biological amino acids. The concept just doesn’t fit: take an established game, remove all the fun aspects, and slap some science terms on it. In this case, if you don’t know already know what you’re supposed to learn, good luck either learning it or having any fun. It’s more of a test which the teacher won’t accept for a grade.
As a counterexample, It’s Just a Phase (click “Play Online”, then go to the Space Center and choose the game–too bad each individual game can’t be linked to directly) is actually kinda cool: a character has taken outdoor pictures and wants to figure out what day of the month and time of the day they were taken. It’s a little tedious and not very game-y, but I fiddled with it for 10 minutes and actually learned something. The other 5 games in the collection, however, are just some clickety schtick with better graphics.
