Design a simple game that masquerades as an ESP test that takes advantage of these facts to convince the user that he or she has psychic powers.
This week's challenge is for programmers as well as designers. It comes from Mick West, a co-founder and former technical director of Neversoft Entertainment.
The Challenge
Design a simple game that might make a player believe he or she has psychic powers.
Assignment Details
People often perceive patterns in random data, a phenomenon called pareidolia. People also often a have a poor understanding of probability.
Design a simple game that masquerades as an ESP test that takes advantage of these facts to convince the user that he or she has psychic powers.
The game must rely on unskewed random numbers and not "cheat." You can focus either on the patterns that naturally arise in random numbers, or on positive reinforcement and misdirection to try to skew the player's perception.
To Submit
Use the forum to psychically coerce others into giving you their answers, or just to brainstorm with fellow programmers, designers, and other aspiring game developers.
Psychonumeral Prediction
The player must guess within 1 point a number within a 10 point range. However, the number is randomly chosen by adding together two randomly generated numbers between 1 and 5. Imagining a pair of hypothetical 5-sided dice, the distribution of rolls will follow something akin to a bell curve. This means that a player who chooses towards the middle will be often correct - even a guess of 1 or 10 will occassionally be right due to the soft range.
To sustain the illusion, the 10 point range would randomly have a number between 0 and 90 added to it. The player would be shown the number after their guess, and the game would track "hits" and "misses". However, no bonus would be given for guessing the number exactly - the range must "hide" the fact that the randomness is an illusion, so an answer off by 1 would still be a "psychic hit".
At the end of a predetermined number of rounds, the player would be shown their total and a description. A miss rate of under 10% would be considered "Strong ESP", between 10% and 30% would be "Weak ESP", and anything below that (however improbable) would be considered "No ESP".