Octopus, Pianos, and System/Economy Design
Can you pass the System/Economy Designer test of teaching an octopus to play piano? Imagine you've purchased one of the most intelligent animals in the world (comparable to a 3-year-old child) and decided you want to teach it to play piano. How would a System/Economy designer approach this problem? We already have a solution in our toolkit for this.
YouTuber Mattias Krantz tried to achieve this over six months and nearly gave up... until he discovered the holy grail of System/Economy Design! Seriously, stop now and write down a strategy for solving this before reading on.
At first, Mattias designed custom keys since octopuses have no bones and use pulling/grasping motions rather than the "poking" motion humans use for piano keys. Instead of pushing down, the octopus has to wrap a tentacle around the lever and pull it down. Each lever connects to a waterproof switch that sends a signal to a computer outside the tank, which plays a MIDI piano sound. And because octopuses are effectively deaf to airborne sound, he installs underwater speakers so the animal can physically feel the notes it produces.
Next comes the light system. A specific key lights up, and if the octopus pulls the lit key, it gets food and a positive sound. If it pulls the wrong key, it gets nothing but an even buzzer or timeout. The UX is clean, and the rules are understandable. Something System/Economy Designers all too often ignore!
Then we get the "training phase" or three-month grind fest in classic Pavlovian fashion. Mattias starts by simply putting food near the keys. When the octopus accidentally touched a key while grabbing the food, it got a reward. Ironically, Mattis had to stop giving food away for free. The octopus had to learn that pulling the lever = food. Hmmm... sounds a lot like a hard-currency inflation problem...
Midway through the video, the octopus simply stops cooperating. It's bored or frustrated, and the loop offers no structure to pull it back in. This is exactly where UX collapses in game design, too: clarity without consequence has no teeth.
The key pivot comes when Mattias reaches out to an engineer (surprise, surprise) to brainstorm a solution. Naturally, it is a progression system.
They build a progressive Skinner box. A small crab sits inside a clear tube above the tank. When the octopus pulls the correct key, the crab drops slightly. Pull the next correct key in sequence, and it drops again. Play the full "song," and the crab descends step by step until the octopus can finally eat it. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they built a progression bar.
It's a brilliant combination of economics, psychology, and game design. The progressive element is classic Systems/Economy design: it guides the correct sequence, rewards incremental success, and makes progress visible.