But overall I think it is very genre-dependent, because a necessary tutorial in one genre is a puzzle-spoiling walkthrough in another.

bsky.app/profile/djan...

Playing off Koster's theory of fun, learning how to play is often the fun part of the game, so teaching the player too much too directly can suck all the fun out of the game. It's a balancing act!

Systems suspense games require discoverability. You can have a wiki-heavy game (Dwarf Fortress) or a heavily tutorialized game that uses it (Stanley's Parable) but in general I suspect they tend towards a lighter touch.

polarisgamedesign.com/2023/underst...

My central belief is that if you can induct the player into the core ritual of the game, everything else is a bonus. What's your core loop?

As long as the player has a sense of what they can do next and where to look for information about what to anticipate, they can learn the rest as they go.

Games you expect to continually consult the wiki (e.g., Minecraft) have taken some steps for more discoverability, but Minecraft's in-game tutorialization is achievements.

Some markets you expect to have minutes at most to get the player onboard (f2p mobile games, etc.) so it makes sense to rush.

Like, I think I'm seeing several categories:
- Knowledge games
- Wiki-reference games
- Onboarding games
- System suspense games
- Any others?

bsky.app/profile/brun...

So I think you want Hal Clement, then. Mission of Gravity, etc.

As mentioned, Ander's The City in the Middle of the Night is literally climate fiction on a tidelocked planet, so probably also counts.

Forward's Dragon's Egg is set on a neutron star, but otherwise fits.

For some things it'd be cool to be able to do the tool call completely inline; it's theoretically not a hard technical challenge to wire up a calculator as part of inference, but since it takes both training the model and editing the inference I haven't seen an implementation.

What grad students? We cut the funding and we're replacing them with AI too.

Join us for:
- a peek at the 2025 Roguelike Celebration social space
- a fireside chat with @perryjon.bsky.social about design & proc gen in UFO 50
- @apepers.bsky.social talking about Designing for Systems Suspense
- @ezra-szanton.itch.io talking about Synergy Webs in Roguelike Deckbuilders

But using the AI for necromancy is just a complicated way to use false hope to torment the grieving for your own ends.

Which is why I never trust an AI summary that uses my own phrasing. If it can't paraphrase it, it didn't understand it well enough to generalize it, and therefore cannot be used as a signal for how well it understands the concepts involved.

Humbug puppets are sometimes honest mistakes; the Eliza effect means that it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that were were talking to something intelligent, only to realize that we were merely speaking to a mirror that is repeating back what we said.

This shows up in more subtle ways; when a reporter gets a confession from GPT or someone asks a model how good it is at chess: they don't have access to that information, and you explicitly instructed it to lie to you, so why are you surprised when it lied to you? You told it to.

There are a lot of clever ways to get more information, or better information, or fill in with other information. But there are hard limits. Just like there are a lot of ways to get more energy, but you still can't create a perpetual motion machine.

Lack of information isn't something that can be overcome with better technology; Information Theory describes physical limits that are as immutable as thermodynamics.