Week 10: Playing finds what simulation never asked

This is the week you finally play the game. Ten minutes with your hands finds things that nine weeks of simulated runs did not.

11 May 2027

Is it me or is it the game? Some of the answer only a person finds. Standing still with the old shard weapon killed nothing, and no simulated run showed it, because the simulated player was always moving.

Open the slides

Here it is. You have measured this game for nine weeks. On Thursday you play it for the first time, for ten minutes, with a notebook open.

The claim#

Simulation answers the questions you thought to ask. Playing asks the ones you did not. Neither is the backup for the other, and a balance process that has only one of them has a blind side it cannot see from inside.

Three things the specimen’s simulation never saw#

Standing still killed nothing. The opening weapon used to be a shard circling the player. In the live game, standing still for six seconds killed no enemies at all: the shard was a point, and it hit about one enemy in five. Every simulated run was full of kills, because a simulated player is always moving, and a moving player drags the shard across things (bfee9c7).

31 kills, level three. A person playing for 45 s killed 31 enemies and was still on level three. The experience was all there, 43 pieces on the field, and the player walked past nearly all of it. The simulated player steers onto a three-pixel dot without effort. A person does not (4c419ca).

Nobody knew what the bar was for. The run timer was a thin pale line along the top. Someone who had played the game asked what it was (8c17b35). No simulated player has ever been confused by an interface.

Why this week is here and not first#

If you had played in week one, you would have spent nine weeks defending your first impression. Now you have predictions on paper, and the game gets to surprise you in a way you can write down.

What you leave with#

A list of what ten minutes of play showed you that your simulation could not have, and one item from it turned into something your instrument now checks.