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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 o

by 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.
- morelisp 6y ago
  Wargames are more popular than ever, and cover a wider variety of topics than before, but (from the perspective of the 80s, surprisingly) the focus has largely moved back to analog games. The budget to make an analog game is considerably less, especially at "wargame quality". Selling 1k units at $30-70 of a unique system on a marginal topic is sustainable in a way that a digital version is not (and may never be; print-on-demand quality is improving, but the cost of cross-platform development and supporting digital distribution is rising). And the most interesting adversary in asymmetric, multiplayer, non-zero-sum situations often remains another human even given unlimited programmer and compute time. Also, the field of wargame design is professionalizing, and the major clients with the "big" budgets (governments and NGOs) generally want dynamic, transparent, refereed games. Sometimes those have some digital support for the referee, but only for time or communication efficiency, not to increase the mathematical sophistication of the simulation. Think Excel spreadsheets, not SVMs.
Enginerrrd 6y ago
Yeah that's my take. He gives examples of his "genius" preceded by a cringey analogy to Neo seeing the matrix as code and then gives an example formula that's very trivial and the exposition is extremely shallow which suggests frankly that the author's thinking is also rather shallow. There's no hint of analysis, understanding, or useful insights to the real complexities that arise when trying to glue a bunch of disparate models together into a complex interacting system. Instead he gives us just a trivial application of very basic mathematics to design of a game. Guess what, I'd have done the exact same thing if I had been assigned to design a game and I'd venture to guess that half the people on this site would take a similar approach. The idea itself is hardly as exceptional as the author wants it to be. This whole thing to me sounds a bit like a textbook case of the author having spent his life as the smartest person in the room, but only because he's been in the wrong room his whole life. To use an analogy: I suspect he's not Mozart... He's a very decent musician or composer that's spent his life in a community college orchestra and never ventured out into the world to interact with people that can eat him for lunch.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Yeah, the whole article comes off as written for the author's ego first, and everyone else last. He presents these rudimentary equations while lamenting that he's just ahead of his time. I'm sorry, but 3 * A/B is not some mind-blowing model of geopolitical forces at play. SimCity came out around this time and was inspired by the book Urban Dynamics, which contains complicated models based on systems of differential equations which feed into one-another. Considering that, the work referenced seems elementary, to the point of not even needing to be explained. As it turns out, those complicated systems are the foundation of fun for an entire class of games. Most strategy games, from SimCity, Civilization, Factorio, or Off World Trading Company consist largely of balancing growth across various interlocking systems.
MereInterest 6y ago
> There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Is this an appeal to the efficient market hypothesis, or do you have some actual evidence to support this statement?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There are many, such as a lot of Paradox games, Aurora 4X, and so on. Few are based on the present state of the world, though. That doesn't make it any less an issue of geopolitics.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    It is true that there are several such games. The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear. The efficient market hypothesis is something of a pet peeve of mine, and so I try to call it out when it is erroneously used as support for, well, anything.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Ah, I agree with you, I didn't understand your objection, my bad. Did you read the paper that showed that the strong version of the EMH implies P=NP?
      - MereInterest 6y ago
        Haha, that's brilliant! I didn't see the article, do you have a link? I can visualize the core argument, that at a fundamental level the EMH is saying that optimization problems under constraints are a solved problem, and I'm curious what other details/formalism go into it.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Here is the article : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf I misremembered, it's not just the strong form that is refuted, but the weak form as well!
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment. The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman. His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true. Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions. He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items. Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games. If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas. [1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws-of-software.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws... [2] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/index.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/in... [3] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/how-to-express-ideas-mathil.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/ho...
- morelisp 6y ago
  He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions. I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.

by yoz-y 6y ago

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.

morelisp 6y ago
Wargames are more popular than ever, and cover a wider variety of topics than before, but (from the perspective of the 80s, surprisingly) the focus has largely moved back to analog games. The budget to make an analog game is considerably less, especially at "wargame quality". Selling 1k units at $30-70 of a unique system on a marginal topic is sustainable in a way that a digital version is not (and may never be; print-on-demand quality is improving, but the cost of cross-platform development and supporting digital distribution is rising). And the most interesting adversary in asymmetric, multiplayer, non-zero-sum situations often remains another human even given unlimited programmer and compute time. Also, the field of wargame design is professionalizing, and the major clients with the "big" budgets (governments and NGOs) generally want dynamic, transparent, refereed games. Sometimes those have some digital support for the referee, but only for time or communication efficiency, not to increase the mathematical sophistication of the simulation. Think Excel spreadsheets, not SVMs.

Enginerrrd 6y ago

Yeah that's my take. He gives examples of his "genius" preceded by a cringey analogy to Neo seeing the matrix as code and then gives an example formula that's very trivial and the exposition is extremely shallow which suggests frankly that the author's thinking is also rather shallow. There's no hint of analysis, understanding, or useful insights to the real complexities that arise when trying to glue a bunch of disparate models together into a complex interacting system. Instead he gives us just a trivial application of very basic mathematics to design of a game. Guess what, I'd have done the exact same thing if I had been assigned to design a game and I'd venture to guess that half the people on this site would take a similar approach. The idea itself is hardly as exceptional as the author wants it to be. This whole thing to me sounds a bit like a textbook case of the author having spent his life as the smartest person in the room, but only because he's been in the wrong room his whole life. To use an analogy: I suspect he's not Mozart... He's a very decent musician or composer that's spent his life in a community college orchestra and never ventured out into the world to interact with people that can eat him for lunch.

mywittyname 6y ago
Yeah, the whole article comes off as written for the author's ego first, and everyone else last. He presents these rudimentary equations while lamenting that he's just ahead of his time. I'm sorry, but 3 * A/B is not some mind-blowing model of geopolitical forces at play. SimCity came out around this time and was inspired by the book Urban Dynamics, which contains complicated models based on systems of differential equations which feed into one-another. Considering that, the work referenced seems elementary, to the point of not even needing to be explained. As it turns out, those complicated systems are the foundation of fun for an entire class of games. Most strategy games, from SimCity, Civilization, Factorio, or Off World Trading Company consist largely of balancing growth across various interlocking systems.

MereInterest 6y ago

> There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Is this an appeal to the efficient market hypothesis, or do you have some actual evidence to support this statement?

sudosysgen 6y ago
There are many, such as a lot of Paradox games, Aurora 4X, and so on. Few are based on the present state of the world, though. That doesn't make it any less an issue of geopolitics.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  It is true that there are several such games. The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear. The efficient market hypothesis is something of a pet peeve of mine, and so I try to call it out when it is erroneously used as support for, well, anything.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Ah, I agree with you, I didn't understand your objection, my bad. Did you read the paper that showed that the strong version of the EMH implies P=NP?
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      Haha, that's brilliant! I didn't see the article, do you have a link? I can visualize the core argument, that at a fundamental level the EMH is saying that optimization problems under constraints are a solved problem, and I'm curious what other details/formalism go into it.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Here is the article : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf I misremembered, it's not just the strong form that is refuted, but the weak form as well!

BoiledCabbage 6y ago

It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment. The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman. His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true. Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions. He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items. Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games. If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas. [1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws-of-software.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws... [2] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/index.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/in... [3] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/how-to-express-ideas-mathil.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/ho...

morelisp 6y ago
He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions. I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.