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I read this and the comments, and I can't help but feel... a loss for everyone. I was a graduate student, and I met some fairly miserable professors toiling aw

I read this and the comments, and I can't help but feel... a loss for everyone. I was a graduate student, and I met some fairly miserable professors toiling away. It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth. The social skills help with relevance, but also relating the internal ideas with external ideas and building real momentum. There is a lesson here for anyone young. The mistake here is to assume genius internally. Rather, it is better almost categorically to assume you are an idiot and then talk with others without the ego. "Hey, here is an idea" and many times others will not get it, and that's ok because communication is exceptionally hard. However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. "Have you tried X?" in an applicable way, and people will respond because you bridged the gap between their problems and your deep understanding. As an example, I have a lot of dumb projects that excite me. One of them, which I refer to a large number of times, is my dumb programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/ ). When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? The truth is that it is a mix of both, but it is mostly mine because I have the burden to communicate effectively.

unishark 6y ago
> It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth. This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion, and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an independent researcher. I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking over the world with his vision, there were down days too where he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.
- kungito 6y ago
  I often feel like people formulate the problem wrong. It's not that "your idea was great but only 5% of good ideas work out" but I believe it's more "your idea was almost great but only 5% of ideas are actually great". I feel like it's less about needing luck for a great idea to work out and more about needing more luck to have a better idea. Often times these almost-geniouses are technically talented or creative but lack empathy or social intelligence to see the whole picture. You or your team need to be the whole package to be able to see a problem from all possible angles.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
yoz-y 6y ago
Problem is that the author starts with a false premise. There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Turns out the author either does not know them, or they don't explicitly mention his prior work. Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations. But maybe some of the developers of complex strategy games mentioned him during GDC or other conferences? Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  > Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations. I just imagined an alternate reality: What if they did? What if all software did? That'd be kind of interesting if development was more explictely collaborative in that way. I guess open source works like that to a degree but still not everything is documented. We've lost a lot of history in our piles of code. Maybe some day obsessive histotians will be digging through chat logs found on hard drives dug out of landfills. Imagine how incomplete that story would be.
  - mcv 6y ago
    The main thing I fear is that it would spark parent or other IP lawsuits. Admitting you based your successful game on someone else's ideas may make the other person's lawyers think they deserve a share of your profit. I think a lot of IP law is hostile to that sort of free flow of ideas.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  > Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today. This is probably the answer! I was a little kid then, but my uncle played them and I remember that game and some others like it... they were all offshoots of war game board games. People have moved on since, or maybe better put the market has grown and the number of people interested in nerdy strategy games has not.
mightybyte 6y ago
Well said. The book Extreme Ownership has a slightly different take of what I think is basically the same idea. It opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about people above you in the organizational hierarchy and advocated taking ownership up the chain as well as down. Instead of asking yourself "why isn't my boss listening to me?", you should ask yourself how you are failing to communicate to your boss. Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time, but changing your ownership mentality is a tremendously empowering idea--especially when it goes in the opposite direction of traditionally perceived power vectors.
- matwood 6y ago
  EO is great and has really changed how I interact with people. > Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in your control all the time, but many times they are. How a person responds to situation is always in their control. The classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or team member.
  - mightybyte 6y ago
    > I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Excellent point. I completely agree. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Please be careful about the downsides of EO, which can be seen in the author's complicated legacy within the SEALS. The culture this produced when taken too far can be seen in the Ed Gallagher problem[0]. When things are decentralized, you have to make sure you can trust your people. When you can't, you end up with Gallagher, or LAPD Rampart scandal. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gallagher-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gall...
LightMachine 6y ago
Just replied to let you know that you have an amazing take on the matter.
iamcurious 6y ago
>However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. Sounds about right, genius is about serving. It's a weird status to have.
epicide 6y ago
Well said! Communication is a two-way street. Effective communication is the hardest problem I'm aware of and there is no universal solution. Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your thing. > However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're already damning yourself. From Faust: Take children's, monkeys' gaze admiring, If such your taste, and be content; But ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring, Save your own heart is eloquent!
SunlightEdge 6y ago
I had a quick look around and I liked your website on Adama. I'm just getting my teeth into web programming but your interest fits in with what I'm looking at (its very early days so can't say more). Thanks for sharing
6510 6y ago
Communication takes effort from both sides. Every rule or tip should really be considered in 2 fold. Like so: Of course, if the goal is to explain an idea, you shouldn't present yourself as the genius you so clearly are in your own opinion. At the same time you should never dismiss an idea for its lack of proper presentation. The later is a much more frequent mistake. One should judge an idea for what it is. One should actively suppress ones intention to praise an idea for who presented it or how it was presented. If you do something like: This persons expertise is worth 1000 points therefore his ideas are worth 1000 points it begs to question how the person got to 1000 points as you've eliminated the mechanism that should have rated him. IOW if someone came up with a fantastic idea it means you should examine his other ideas but do so as objectively as you would the village idiots.
breck 6y ago
> When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? I've made dozens of languages and studied thousands more. One easy tip: show ~10 lines of code near the top of the page, above the fold. Without that, you'll probably never get a critical mass of discerning critics to care, because they're too busy. I'm very interested in your lang, both because I like langs and like creating board games, but gave up b/c I couldnt find code.
- dmuth 6y ago
  Yes, I completely agree. I've seen so many cool ideas out there that are largely a failure of "marketing", which is basically the fist few lines of the README.md. I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  Will do, I have a large task on my hand, and I appreciate the feedback. I'll definitely do that both on the github and main site.
- svachalek 6y ago
  For programming languages I can't upvote this enough! History and motivation and features and all that are interesting if I decide to learn about the language, but to decide whether I want to learn about it, it's really all about seeing a code sample that inspires me.
Scaevolus 6y ago
I am also interested in languages to model board games, and I think your biggest mistake might be in relying too heavily on imperative programming models for a domain that doesn't require them. Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/12517 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/1251...). Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly prototype games, with the most approachable version probably being PuzzleScript.
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  I look at the imperative programming model as the escape hatch, and I'm focusing first on data. My next step is to build UIs and look into AI. For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar Galactica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galactica-board-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games, and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of rules. So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer on top of it. The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to have results sometime this year with my silly approach.
hzhou321 6y ago
> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. Ego may be in the way, but this is a rather missed take. Obviously the author was focusing on his idea, rather than getting people calling him genius.
lowbloodsugar 6y ago
The author is evaluating other games and determining that they don't live up to his standards. One possibility is that the author is the best at what he does, as he believes. Another is that the author is not competent to judge the complexity of these other games. A chess grandmaster may view the board and know the inevitability of mate in three, while a normal human might see the same board as favoring the eventual loser, based on some simplistic understanding of piece strength. Whole thing seems a bit Dunning-Kruger-ish. Crawford comes across to me as an eccentric artist, not a game designer, and with the accompanying ego. This has helped the industry, such as when creating (C)GDC. But, like many artists, he has strong opinions on what qualifies. I personally don't enjoy games that are "games as art", but I respect their place. Crawford doesn't seem to view "games as games" with such respect.

unishark 6y ago

> It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth. This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion, and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an independent researcher. I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking over the world with his vision, there were down days too where he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.

kungito 6y ago
I often feel like people formulate the problem wrong. It's not that "your idea was great but only 5% of good ideas work out" but I believe it's more "your idea was almost great but only 5% of ideas are actually great". I feel like it's less about needing luck for a great idea to work out and more about needing more luck to have a better idea. Often times these almost-geniouses are technically talented or creative but lack empathy or social intelligence to see the whole picture. You or your team need to be the whole package to be able to see a problem from all possible angles.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

yoz-y 6y ago

Problem is that the author starts with a false premise. There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Turns out the author either does not know them, or they don't explicitly mention his prior work. Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations. But maybe some of the developers of complex strategy games mentioned him during GDC or other conferences? Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.

guerrilla 6y ago
> Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations. I just imagined an alternate reality: What if they did? What if all software did? That'd be kind of interesting if development was more explictely collaborative in that way. I guess open source works like that to a degree but still not everything is documented. We've lost a lot of history in our piles of code. Maybe some day obsessive histotians will be digging through chat logs found on hard drives dug out of landfills. Imagine how incomplete that story would be.
- mcv 6y ago
  The main thing I fear is that it would spark parent or other IP lawsuits. Admitting you based your successful game on someone else's ideas may make the other person's lawyers think they deserve a share of your profit. I think a lot of IP law is hostile to that sort of free flow of ideas.
Spooky23 6y ago
> Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today. This is probably the answer! I was a little kid then, but my uncle played them and I remember that game and some others like it... they were all offshoots of war game board games. People have moved on since, or maybe better put the market has grown and the number of people interested in nerdy strategy games has not.

mightybyte 6y ago

Well said. The book Extreme Ownership has a slightly different take of what I think is basically the same idea. It opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about people above you in the organizational hierarchy and advocated taking ownership up the chain as well as down. Instead of asking yourself "why isn't my boss listening to me?", you should ask yourself how you are failing to communicate to your boss. Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time, but changing your ownership mentality is a tremendously empowering idea--especially when it goes in the opposite direction of traditionally perceived power vectors.

matwood 6y ago
EO is great and has really changed how I interact with people. > Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in your control all the time, but many times they are. How a person responds to situation is always in their control. The classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or team member.
- mightybyte 6y ago
  > I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Excellent point. I completely agree. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Please be careful about the downsides of EO, which can be seen in the author's complicated legacy within the SEALS. The culture this produced when taken too far can be seen in the Ed Gallagher problem[0]. When things are decentralized, you have to make sure you can trust your people. When you can't, you end up with Gallagher, or LAPD Rampart scandal. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gallagher-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gall...

LightMachine 6y ago

Just replied to let you know that you have an amazing take on the matter.

iamcurious 6y ago

>However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. Sounds about right, genius is about serving. It's a weird status to have.

epicide 6y ago

Well said! Communication is a two-way street. Effective communication is the hardest problem I'm aware of and there is no universal solution. Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your thing. > However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're already damning yourself. From Faust: Take children's, monkeys' gaze admiring, If such your taste, and be content; But ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring, Save your own heart is eloquent!

SunlightEdge 6y ago

I had a quick look around and I liked your website on Adama. I'm just getting my teeth into web programming but your interest fits in with what I'm looking at (its very early days so can't say more). Thanks for sharing

6510 6y ago

Communication takes effort from both sides. Every rule or tip should really be considered in 2 fold. Like so: Of course, if the goal is to explain an idea, you shouldn't present yourself as the genius you so clearly are in your own opinion. At the same time you should never dismiss an idea for its lack of proper presentation. The later is a much more frequent mistake. One should judge an idea for what it is. One should actively suppress ones intention to praise an idea for who presented it or how it was presented. If you do something like: This persons expertise is worth 1000 points therefore his ideas are worth 1000 points it begs to question how the person got to 1000 points as you've eliminated the mechanism that should have rated him. IOW if someone came up with a fantastic idea it means you should examine his other ideas but do so as objectively as you would the village idiots.

breck 6y ago

> When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? I've made dozens of languages and studied thousands more. One easy tip: show ~10 lines of code near the top of the page, above the fold. Without that, you'll probably never get a critical mass of discerning critics to care, because they're too busy. I'm very interested in your lang, both because I like langs and like creating board games, but gave up b/c I couldnt find code.

dmuth 6y ago
Yes, I completely agree. I've seen so many cool ideas out there that are largely a failure of "marketing", which is basically the fist few lines of the README.md. I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.
mathgladiator 6y ago
Will do, I have a large task on my hand, and I appreciate the feedback. I'll definitely do that both on the github and main site.
svachalek 6y ago
For programming languages I can't upvote this enough! History and motivation and features and all that are interesting if I decide to learn about the language, but to decide whether I want to learn about it, it's really all about seeing a code sample that inspires me.

Scaevolus 6y ago

I am also interested in languages to model board games, and I think your biggest mistake might be in relying too heavily on imperative programming models for a domain that doesn't require them. Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/12517 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/1251...). Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly prototype games, with the most approachable version probably being PuzzleScript.

mathgladiator 6y ago
I look at the imperative programming model as the escape hatch, and I'm focusing first on data. My next step is to build UIs and look into AI. For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar Galactica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galactica-board-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games, and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of rules. So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer on top of it. The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to have results sometime this year with my silly approach.

hzhou321 6y ago

> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas. Ego may be in the way, but this is a rather missed take. Obviously the author was focusing on his idea, rather than getting people calling him genius.

lowbloodsugar 6y ago

The author is evaluating other games and determining that they don't live up to his standards. One possibility is that the author is the best at what he does, as he believes. Another is that the author is not competent to judge the complexity of these other games. A chess grandmaster may view the board and know the inevitability of mate in three, while a normal human might see the same board as favoring the eventual loser, based on some simplistic understanding of piece strength. Whole thing seems a bit Dunning-Kruger-ish. Crawford comes across to me as an eccentric artist, not a game designer, and with the accompanying ego. This has helped the industry, such as when creating (C)GDC. But, like many artists, he has strong opinions on what qualifies. I personally don't enjoy games that are "games as art", but I respect their place. Crawford doesn't seem to view "games as games" with such respect.