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Reading the code doesn't mean you can cheat or hack. I don't see why you'd engineer out of the game every social element that makes them fun. The only category

Reading the code doesn't mean you can cheat or hack. I don't see why you'd engineer out of the game every social element that makes them fun. The only category that would work for is if you procedurally generate every run through of the game and randomise all the mixes so 2 people talking to each other on computers next to each other literally don't have the same game to mix the same items together.

drdeca 13y ago
They aren't saying the game would work differently. Rather, things would not be known until at least one person got that far. One couldn't, as soon as the game came out, look at the executable or source file, and determine how it ends, way before anyone else who was playing legitimately. So people wouldn't be able to spoil the twist until someone actually got to it. I think this would actually make people more likely to play it together, because there would be real discovery, and people wouldn't know for sure if they REALLY found everything yet. People could tell each other what they found, but they would only be able to find it by playing, not because one guy looked at the program and just made a complete list. (I have also thought about a similar problem before, but the result ended up being really slow, and I don't know how to make a text adventure actually fun. Mostly it was just really slow though.)
- userbinator 13y ago
  > One couldn't, as soon as the game came out, look at the executable or source file, and determine how it ends, way before anyone else who was playing legitimately. ...or until someone writes a bot to brute-force their way through the game, because computers are really good at trying lots of possibilities really really quickly, many orders of magnitude more quickly than a human player could.
  - drdeca 13y ago
    I suppose that's true. Still an improvement/would take longer. Also the only way I've tried takes a while to compute, so it might be more efficient to do it based on reasoning instead of based on brute forcs? But that might be annoying to users, depending on how long it takes to run each thing. Is there a sweet spot for the computation time is long enough that it is more efficient for a person to reason it out than for a standard home computer to brute force, yet short enough that a human player would not find the delay to be noticeable/annoying?

drdeca 13y ago

They aren't saying the game would work differently. Rather, things would not be known until at least one person got that far. One couldn't, as soon as the game came out, look at the executable or source file, and determine how it ends, way before anyone else who was playing legitimately. So people wouldn't be able to spoil the twist until someone actually got to it. I think this would actually make people more likely to play it together, because there would be real discovery, and people wouldn't know for sure if they REALLY found everything yet. People could tell each other what they found, but they would only be able to find it by playing, not because one guy looked at the program and just made a complete list. (I have also thought about a similar problem before, but the result ended up being really slow, and I don't know how to make a text adventure actually fun. Mostly it was just really slow though.)

userbinator 13y ago
> One couldn't, as soon as the game came out, look at the executable or source file, and determine how it ends, way before anyone else who was playing legitimately. ...or until someone writes a bot to brute-force their way through the game, because computers are really good at trying lots of possibilities really really quickly, many orders of magnitude more quickly than a human player could.
- drdeca 13y ago
  I suppose that's true. Still an improvement/would take longer. Also the only way I've tried takes a while to compute, so it might be more efficient to do it based on reasoning instead of based on brute forcs? But that might be annoying to users, depending on how long it takes to run each thing. Is there a sweet spot for the computation time is long enough that it is more efficient for a person to reason it out than for a standard home computer to brute force, yet short enough that a human player would not find the delay to be noticeable/annoying?