Week 10 Tutorial: Play it

Ten minutes with the specimen in your hands, a list of what your simulation never told you, and one item turned into a check.

13 May 2027

Before the tutorial#

Nothing. Do not play it early. The first ten minutes only happen once.

In the tutorial#

Play for ten minutes with a notebook open. Write as you go and do not tidy it up. “I didn’t know what the bar was.” “I keep walking past the orbs.” “I couldn’t tell what hit me.” That register.

If ten minutes of fast play is a barrier, do the observer’s version set out in the policies: sit beside someone who is playing and write the list from what you see. It is marked the same way.

Then go down the list with a neighbour and mark each line: could my simulation have produced this? Most of the interesting ones are a no.

Pick one no. Make your instrument able to see it. A player that stands still, a player that misses pickups by a body width, a metric for time spent not moving.

Where it goes wrong#

• Tidying the list. “Pickup radius too small” is a diagnosis. “I keep walking past the orbs” is what happened. Write what happened; the diagnosis is next week’s work and it is often wrong.
• Writing fixes. “Make the bar thicker” skips the finding, which is that you did not know what the bar was.
• Answering for a simulation you could write. The question is whether yours could have produced the line. The course’s simulated player was checked for this: across one run it gave no input on 0 of its 6202 steps. It has never once stood still, so anything that happens to a player who stops to look was invisible to it, and stopping to look is a new player’s first instinct.

What a finished answer looks like#

14 lines. 9 of them my simulation could not have produced. I picked “I keep walking past the orbs”, and my instrument now has a player that misses any pickup it passes within a body width.

Afterwards#

The raw list is this week’s quiz answer, unedited. The new check joins your instrument for the defence.