I've only played Zendo once. As I understand it, there are are a small number of pieces to make rules about, while rules can be arbitrarily complex. So in this situation you could indeed get better at modeling your fellow players and become more efficient at winning.

In that perspective, playing Understand is a bit like playing Zendo against the game's designer, who has hand-crafted ~130 levels (rulesets) à 5-10 screens (koans), though you're not only trying to guess the rules but also to draw paths on each screen which satisfy them. Anyway, this means that the levels are a finite resource. So to me efficiency doesn't quite seem like the right goal for playing the game.

In a spirit of deliberate practice, I think to get the most practice of rationalist techniques out of Understand, one might:

• early on, try to understand all the subtle ways in which the game gives you feedback or evidence
• in each level, try to discover the rules while doing as little experimentation (drawing paths) as possible, as if doing each experiment was expensive
• try to notice sensations like confusion or surprise, which can give valuable information regarding fruitful hypotheses to pursue
• keep play sessions relatively short, since practice sessions presumably hit diminishing returns at some point

And so on.

Conversely, if you're sure you've correctly identified the rules of a level, and nonetheless find a few screens unsolvably difficult, from the POV of deliberately practicing rationalist techniques I see little reason not to ask for hints or outright look up solutions for these screens. I like puzzle games and mostly enjoyed that part, too; but that's not why I recommended the game here.

I'm interested in the general practice of integrating rationality training into puzzle games.

I've been idly wondering in the past whether the strand of the rationality community which emphasizes rationality as a practice (e.g. CFAR, Duncan, Logan), and which so far mostly focused on workshops and in-person instruction, could have found any teaching success in the form of small video games. In which case that would've been a scalable approach to teaching and knowledge transfer, and furthermore one which everyone in the world could've benefited from, rather than just those in reach of a CFAR workshop.

I'm interested in the general practice of integrating rationality training into puzzle games. 

I should mention I'm doing one of these types of games btw. I've also got a concept brewing where a player proposes a configuration of some components (which is scored by "the aggregate" (rules of the game)), then everyone places bets on whether it can be improved. I'm fairly sure this will beat both cynicism and optimism biases out of people and turn them into very clever pragmatists.

If you'd be interested in collaborating on that I'd be up for it.

Yes, Baba is You is a great puzzle game (and as I mentioned, even the Understand dev cited it as an inspiration). I would personally have been a bit hesitant to recommend it here (see the section "Why Recommend a Game on LW?" in my post), but I did enjoy it myself.

Thanks for the kind comment! I figured the game might work well as a cooperative experience, so I'm glad to hear that that was indeed the case :).

Thanks for taking the time to write this! Yeah, a weird puzzle game like Understand may not be a good experience when tired, and maybe the game does indeed not work for you.

Anyway, I can describe how I approached the game, to maybe give another perspective for how one can play it. In principle, the initial puzzles can be understood and solved without lots of trial & error or brute-force searches. Maybe this inspires you to have another go? (And if not, that's fine, too.)

Let me take level 1-3 as an example. (Note: spoilers follow.)

Since the main challenge early on is to figure out the rules, rather than to draw a valid path on each screen, I often try to learn as much as I can from each screen before proceeding to the next (though all screens are unlocked from the start). But that's my aesthetic preference, and there are other approaches. (For instance, trying to quickly solve the first few introductory screens in a level, then coming up with hypotheses for why the puzzle dev made these specific screens to introduce the rules.)

That said, here's 1-3-1:

6 tiles, 4 symbols, 3 rules (indicated by the circles at the bottom); and an initial suggested path that begins in a circle, ends in a square, and goes through a down-triangle.

If we just follow the suggested path, we see that it fulfills all rules on the screen, but we don't learn anything new. So instead, we want to come up with hypotheses for what each of the three rules correspond to, and then falsify these hypotheses.

Just from looking at this setup, I have the following hypotheses:

• Like in the earlier levels, the suggested path begins in a circle and ends in a square. This seems like a common theme (maybe in the entire game, or maybe just in world 1, who knows at this point). But does the direction here matter? That is, if I begin the path in the square and end in the circle, does it fulfill all rules? -> Do the experiment. -> It only fulfills rule 3, so direction matters!
• Continuing from there, a natural assumption is "we have to start in a circle and end in a square". How can we test that? Well, what if we draw only parts of the suggested path? -> Do a few experiments like that. -> If we start in the circle and don't end in the square, rules 1 and 3 are fulfilled, but rule 2 never is. If we don't start in the circle but end in the square, rules 2 and 3 are fulfilled, but rule 1 never is.

So at this point my current best guess for the rules (which I can still refine on future screens) is:

3: ?

Continuing from there:

• The suggested path goes through a down-triangle but not through an up-triangle. Can we go through an up-triangle? -> Do the experiment, e.g. draw the path circle-upper_triangle-square. -> This path does not fulfill rule 3.
• What does that suggest for rule 3? Maybe "go through one (or all) down-triangles"? Or maybe "go through no up-triangles"? How can we distinguish those hypotheses?
• Here's a meta technique that can often help answer questions like this: Ask yourself, which rules are fulfilled if I just draw 1-tile-long paths? -> Do the experiment in each of the 6 tiles. -> All 1-tile paths fulfill rule 3, except the one through the up-triangle. This is inconsistent with rule 3 being "go through one (or all) down-triangles".

So my current best guess for rule 3 is:

So here we basically managed to discern all rules of the level just based on the first screen, and using little trial & error. But if that hadn't been enough, we could've proceeded to the next screen, tried drawing a path based on our current understanding of the rules, and if that path hadn't been valid or we couldn't find any valid path at all, we could've repeated the above-mentioned process.

That's just one approach to this game, but I found it a fruitful one. In particular, many levels have 3+ rules, one or two of which are very simple stuff like "start in a circle", with the remaining rules being the actual challenge of the level; and once you've identified those easy rules, your trial & error experiments become far more purposeful and less wasteful.

Maybe with an emulator e.g. Wine. See e.g. here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/462030/can-i-play-windows-games-using-wine-and-or-through-steam 

https://www.protondb.com/app/1299400

I don't bother with linux steam, I just boot steam within lutris. Lutris just automates config / wraps wine plus a gui, so lutris will make steam think it's within windows and then everything that steam launches will also think it's within windows. Tho admittedly I don't use steam a lot (lutris takes excellent care of me for non-steam things)

The Witness is a fantastic puzzle game, but see my section on recommending games on LW: the very fact that The Witness is more engaging and addicting makes it a better experience but (according to me) a worse recommendation to a community of non-gamers who have other high-value uses of their time.

Re: completing Understand puzzles without understanding why: Yeah, I also did that at the start, and that also hampered my experience a bit. Personally I eventually returned to those levels and solved them in a way such that I understood and could write down each rule.

Anyway, for me the core experience of Understand is not so much solving any individual levels, but constantly practicing the loop of: make new hypothesis -> experiment -> falsify hypothesis -> make new hypothesis.

For example, it's one thing to learn about confirmation bias by reading about it on LW, and another to constantly run afoul of it during gameplay; the latter experience is a great illustration and motivation for the claim that one should try to falsify, rather than prove, one's hypotheses.

As mentioned at the top, this video game is inspired by the board game Zendo, which is a bit like what you propose, and which I've seen played at rationalist meetups.

Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which one player, the Moderator, creates a secret rule that the rest of the players, try to figure out by building and studying configurations of the game pieces. The first player to correctly guess the rule wins.

For games with similar themes, Wikipedia also suggests the games Eleusis (with standard playing cards) and Penultima (with standard chess pieces).

I didn't notice that, that's pretty neat! And unexpected; my impression of such rankings is similar to trying to get the top comment on a Reddit thread, i.e. the advantages of an early comment or review ordinarily cannot be overcome by anyone who comes along later. Though in the case of this review, maybe linking from this LW essay made the difference?