Saturday 2024-06-22
Two days ago I was busy existing when the idea for a "game" suddenly came to me. It's really just a way to quantify good decision-making, but my mind keeps calling it a game.
Here's the original text I typed to describe the game:
Here's the game:
In life, you make choices.
If you make a good choice, your daily total increases by 1.
If you make a bad choice, your daily total decreases by 1.
Your score is calculated at the end of the day. It is your daily total divided by the total number of choices you made.
What's your score?
The way it is originally described, your score is a number between -1 and 1. 0 means you have made an equal number of good and bad choices. A negative score means you made more bad choices than good choices and a postive score means you made more good choices than bad choices.
Your score changes if you have made a decision between a good choice and bad choice. You have to determine for yourself what is good and bad.
I considered multiple scenarios for this game to see if the rules needed tweaking.
It wouldn't have any effect on your score. Even though you made a good choice, you didn't have to decide between a good choice and a bad choice since the bad choice never existed in the first place.
Unless you have a specific medical condition, there is no "moral" difference between choosing to eat an apple and choosing to eat an orange. These "neutral" choices don't influence your score under the original rules
After all, something like saving the world from destruction seems to have more weight than being off task for 5 minutes when you are trying to get something done.
While it is natural to think that saving the world is a very good choice [citation needed] and small-time procrastination is a minor bad choice, the point of the game is to train you to choose good over bad more often. When you decided to save the world over not saving it, you only made one decision. Making a very good choice doesn't entitle you to indulge in bad choices. Oftentimes the road to destruction starts from tolerating "minor" bad choices. By making all choices equal in "magnitude," your score will suffer if you make one good choice and many bad choices, as it should
The intuitive answer is 1. But on closer inspection, 1 is the ideal score in the short/medium term, but not long term. Since your score only changes if you decided between a good and bad choice, having a score of 1 means that today, when presented between a good choice and bad choice, you always went for the good choice. But looking back at the first point, we acknowledge that it is possible to reach a state where the bad choice simply doesn't exist.
Therefore the ideal score (in the long term) is actually 0, because you live life automatically choosing the good choice because you don't even conceive of a bad alternative to it.
However, there's an infinite number of ways to get a score of 0. To get the kind of 0 we're talking about, you need to have 0 total choices as well. I suppose that's one area of improvement, is to somehow incorpate the total number of choices you made in a day into the score. Maybe the score should be left in its fractional form.
After deciding that the game mechanics were good enough, I began implementing the game as a web app. It's just 2 buttons to update your score depending on whether you made a good or bad choice and a text field for outputting the score as a fraction.
In an attempt to make the game more potent, I added a score bar as a visual indicator of score, did some CSS styling to make the app look a little nicer, and am working on getting sound to play depending on the button presed, like a reward/punishment system for making good/bad choices. The app still needs some work and there are extra features I want to add. But it is functional as of now.