Saturday, January 13, 2007

There's nothing more fun than a good book with lots of psychological experiments and graphs and people being misled by the way their brains are constructed. The Logic of Failure is a great book. I like how the writers use games for their experiments as I have long been fascinated by games that are somewhat complex. I first thought of civilization, which involves a complex balancing act between science, military and culture. Then I thought of Ogre Battle, which has a reputation system that is quite hard for me to grasp. You have to increase your alignment by defeating characters that are higher in level, but at a certain point, your alignment starts to drop because you level up, and you also have to be careful about how underleveled you allow yourself to be, because if you allow yourself to be too underleveled, you'll be defeated and the cities you already have will be taken over by the empire, and thus you'll lose reputation. Of course, the games here are more like "how you can fuck up colonizing Africa and cause people to die"(based on real events) and Simcity for psych majors who aren't commies(because worker's collectives lead to ideas about shooting nonworking workers)

Also they used one of my favorite stories from childhood! The good ol' inventor of chess asks for 1 grain of rice for the first square, 2 grains of rice for the second, and double the amount of rice for each square story. Super yay!

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