I want to make a good learning environment about numbers

I am watching another brilliant video from Jonas, I am not even halfway through it, and yet I wish to shout about it to the world because it is so god damn right. Writing this blog is a kind of shouting.

He poses many excellent “axioms”, the one I am inspired by is that “fun is a good active learning environment”. Yes! YES! That is precisely the words I was missing when I wrote my previous post about waiting in incrementals. I don’t like waiting in incrementals, because they make it a bad learning environment;

• Having to wait around to see the results of your actions slows down the feedback loop.
• More time spent in the game being a monotonically good thing (combined with the fact that time is “scarce”) means that you cannot go back and repeat challenges without fear of missing out on the future fun.
• Currencies monotonically increasing makes it so that the feedback from taking good actions are obscured by the ability to “just wait a while more”.

I am inspired by Jonas’ video because it clicks with my core desire with game design; I want to make an excellent learning environment for optimizing numericals DAGs folded over a monotonic time dimension, and that means features like rewinding, determinism, benchmarks. At the same time, I enjoy “staring at a screen and having numbers go up – I find that meditative and enjoyable and favorable to my aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, my core design challenge is finding a system and theme of content that balances between both sensibilities.

Anyway.