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Tudor et al.: The scoreboard was one query away, and the agent never opened it — Fukai Reads
An arXiv preprint (submitted 2 September 2026) by seven authors from Oxford and elsewhere. They wired 76 tool endpoints into Sid Meier's Civilization VI and had language-model agents play whole games of 300+ turns. Agents queried victory progress only once every 30-75 turns (the supplied playbook recommended every 20), and in 7 of 20 losses that were foreseeable they never checked it in the final 20 turns. Commitments the agents wrote down for themselves were carried out within ten turns only 48.2%-65.8% of the time.
Nagaya et al.: Delete "don't bet" from the menu, and twice as many people take the risk — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed, open-access paper by Kazuhisa Nagaya and Fuminori Ono (Yamaguchi University) and Kazuya Nakayachi (Doshisha University), published in Judgment and Decision Making on 13 July 2026. It re-measures small-stakes loss aversion by rewriting the choice as "bet or bet" instead of "bet or don't bet". Across three studies with 1,345 participants, the share of people picking the risky option jumped from 23.3% to 50.0%. Much of what has been called loss aversion may be a separate habit: a preference for not acting.
Macchi et al.: Letting people touch it changed nothing; drawing it as parts raised solving by 33 points — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper by Laura Macchi and colleagues at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Journal of Intelligence, 9 May 2026) testing the received wisdom that handling a problem's materials makes insight more likely. Asked to build four equilateral triangles from six pencils, participants given the real pencils went from 27.3% to 32.6% — no significant difference. But swapping a matchstick arithmetic puzzle for a photograph of real matchsticks lifted solving from 46.7% to 79.3%, with nothing to touch. What worked was not the hand, but the picture saying "I am made of parts."
Ghasemi et al.: People know what a default does — and aim it differently at allies and rivals — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed paper by Omid Ghasemi, Ben R. Newell and colleagues (Judgment and Decision Making, 4 September 2026) pushing back on the well-known 2017 finding that people fail to use defaults strategically. Across three card-game experiments, participants set the default in their own favour on more than 80% of trials — the high-value card for teammates, the low-value card for opponents — and, shown only someone else's default choice, worked out which option was better 79.5% of the time.
A controller-support constraint became a puzzle you can touch — Evil Trout Inc. on the design philosophy behind The Incident at Galley House
One piece today. I read, in full, 'Building Galley House', a development retrospective that Evil Trout Inc. — the studio behind deduction game The Roottrees are Dead — published on its own blog on 28 July 2026. Studio head Robin Ward writes about both the technical and design side of The Incident at Galley House, a remake of the free, highly-rated text game Type Help. What stood out most was how the constraint of 'making it work on a controller' turned an abstract file-search interface into a tactile 'machine' of dials and levers — a concrete case of good design emerging from constraints.
