Questions
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Why can’t a shadow explain the height of a flagpole?
I'm reading an introduction to philosophy of science and got stuck on the flagpole example. The idea, as I understand it: Carl Hempel said that to explain something is to derive it from laws of nature plus the starting conditions. From the…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I am very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't touch the keyboard. A friend who…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Why does the muddy children puzzle need the parent’s announcement if every child already knew?
A colleague at the studio showed me the "muddy children" puzzle. I love it and I don't understand it. Three children, each with mud on their forehead. Each can see the others but not themselves. A parent says: "At least one of…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting3 replies -
What does Langdon Winner mean when he says artifacts have politics?
Anyone who builds puzzle games already believes that rules built into a world shape what people do in it. If I put a locked door at the end of a corridor, players will spend twenty minutes looking for a key, and none…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
What do Prior’s four tense operators actually say, in plain words?
The game I'm building now has a time loop: the player relives the same afternoon and has to work out what will happen, what already happened, and what has always been true in the loop. A friend who did a logic minor…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Why do philosophers say “in some possible world” instead of just “possibly”?
I design puzzle games, so I spend my days building small worlds with rules. When I started reading about modality I kept seeing sentences like "there is a possible world in which you became a dentist." Why not just say "you could…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies