🎮 CloverPit〈Panik Arcade〉

How I got there

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In December 2025, I started to look through LessWrong and LW-related archives hoping to get some tips (and maybe gain even more wisdom via comparing different takes at seemingly the same advice).

Somehow I stumbled upon several world-class poker players in a few weeks:

• Cate Hall & her Useful Fictions blog
• Annie Duke’s episode of Clearer Thinking podcast – 213: Two things shape the course of your life: luck and your decisions
• Chris Sparks’s episode of the same podcast – 33: Poker and Productivity
• Liv Boeree’s episode (yeah, there’s a pattern) – 182: Win-Win vs. Moloch, the many-headed monster that may consume us all

And, tangentially, I was affected by this quote from 285: Beyond the assumption that humans are rational (with Barry Schwartz):

BARRY: […] [I]t makes sense for rational choice theorists to say this is the way that you should choose a job, where to go to college, whom to marry, and whether to have children, in the same way you would choose whether to double down or not at the blackjack table in a casino. All that’s different is a matter of degree, a matter of complexity.

SPENCER: So it’s a bit like when physicists are making a toy model in physics. They say, “Yeah, okay, well, real life is so complicated. Let’s imagine this toy model. We’ve got an electron over here and an electron over there. What would happen?” But you need to make sure that whatever you’re studying in the toy model will then apply in the real situation.

BARRY: No, that’s exactly right. But the thing that people maybe sometimes don’t appreciate is that people are not subatomic particles or merely biological systems. So when you increase complexity, there’s a reasonable chance that people will treat complex situations in a way that’s fundamentally different from the way they treat simple ones.

Naturally, I got interested in :games of chance and related decision-making. However, I have no inclination to actually gamble, therefore outright gambling-inspired videogames seemed like a less risky way to get similar experience.

Note that I’m not talking about gambling-inspired mechanics (such as :loot boxes) in non-gambling-centered games. I was going after navigating uncertainty skills, not the opportunity to spend all my money on a fraction of a chance to get my favourite anime girl or whatever. Therefore I restrict myself only to games which provide the full experience without additional built-in costs; otherwise the consequences could have been rather depressing.

The Experience

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A shameful one.

I don’t think that it’s necessary to describe CloverPit’s gameplay here, since there isn’t much that can’t be seen on video. It’s very similar to, yet more elaborate than Luck Be a Landlord, and it shares “artifacts drastically improve your odds” mechanic with Balatro.

The emotional experience of being a gambling addict, however, is something else, especially with phone conversations like these:

“Can I eat something?”
“You don’t even have money for food!”

“If I keep trying, the patterns will align!”
“Stop projecting your ideas onto reality!”

“I need supplements!”
“No wonder! You can’t survive on drinks…”

“Gold and Diamonds are a good investment!”
“Not if you gamble them away!”

All of these are from so-called Normal Calls available when interacting with The Telephone:

The Normal Calls are implied to be reflections of people the player character knew in life. From these calls, it’s also implied the player character had a life-ruining gambling addiction which alienated everyone they knew.

To say it feels terrible would be an understatement. In Balatro, there’s virtually no plot, so the player doesn’t have the opportunity to think about implications of it all. In Luck Be a Landlord the player character is a poor soul whose landlord obliges them to pay rent via playing slots – I got bored too soon to learn whether the protagonist is an addict; it seems like they just didn’t have any other options.

So yeah, no wonder the “psychological horror” aspect of CloverPit took me by surprise.

Takeaways

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It was especially scary to see how my agency made me fixated. I desired to solve the puzzle, I was too eager to learn what the winning strategy was. ¹

But in real life, sometimes there’s no winning strategy or at least no winning strategy that can be applied to one’s exact situation to achieve one’s goals, and that’s intentional. As described in Out to Get You by Zvi:

Some things are fundamentally Out to Get You.

They seek resources at your expense. Fees are hidden. Extra options are foisted upon you. Things are made intentionally worse, forcing you to pay to make it less worse. Least bad deals require careful search. Experiences are not as advertised. What you want is buried underneath stuff you don’t want. Everything is data to sell you something, rather than an opportunity to help you.

Imagine what happens to slot machine players in the real life, when there are way less opportunities to somehow affect the outcomes, but the desire to find that one working strategy is just as strong.

Even before I played CloverPit, it was quite illuminating to read Neel Nanda’s post on agency and to learn that agency requires weighting your strategies and actively choosing what works for you. For example, if you reject traditional ways to do something just for the sake of being a contrarian, you’re not agentic, because you’re still blindly follow some default strategies instead of mindfully choosing the most (cost-)effective ones.

Maybe that’s why the sense of agency is also called the :sense of control. It’s the awareness that one can control their own actions, and sometimes one of the most important goal-achieving skills is to be able to stop.

I ended up uninstalling the game after 1.5 days of playing, since the debt was raising and I got tired of thinking I could have won this time, but… I’ll definitely get the prize if I continue trying.

(Ironically, the main prize in the game is the protagonist’s freedom – the key from the door, i.e. the ability to stop gambling)

It definitely was an important experience of losing control. I hope I’ll be able to better recognize similar situations from now on.

Sources

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• CloverPit Wiki, ‘The Telephone’, accessed 19 December 2025, https://cloverpit.wiki.gg/wiki/The_Telephone.
• Greenberg, Spencer, and Annie Duke. ‘Episode 213: Two Things Shape the Course of Your Life: Luck and Your Decisions (with Annie Duke)’. Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, 6 June 2024. https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/213/annie-duke-two-things-shape-the-course-of-your-life-luck-and-your-decisions/.
• Greenberg, Spencer, and Barry Schwartz. ‘Episode 285: Beyond the Assumption That Humans Are Rational (with Barry Schwartz)’. Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, 23 October 2025. https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/285/barry-schwartz-beyond-the-assumption-that-humans-are-rational/.
• Greenberg, Spencer, and Chris Sparks. ‘Episode 033: Poker and Productivity (with Chris Sparks)’. Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, 25 March 2021. https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/033/chris-sparks-poker-and-productivity/.
• Greenberg, Spencer, and Liv Boeree. ‘Episode 182: Win-Win vs. Moloch, the Many-Headed Monster That May Consume Us All (with Liv Boeree)’. Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, 2 November 2023. https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/182/liv-boeree-win-win-vs-moloch-the-many-headed-monster-that-may-consume-us-all/.
• Mowshowitz, Zvi. ‘Out to Get You’. LessWrong, 23 September 2017. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENBzEkoyvdakz4w5d/out-to-get-you.
• Nanda, Neel. ‘Post 44: What’s Stopping You?’ Neel Nanda, n.d. Accessed 19 December 2025. https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency.
• Wikipedia, ‘Game of chance’, 20 October 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Game_of_chance&oldid=1317866494.
• Wikipedia, ‘Loot box’, 11 December 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Loot_box&oldid=1326822435.
• Wikipedia, ‘Sense of agency’, 10 December 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sense_of_agency&oldid=1326697769.