Games that let you do real-life science

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

I remember when Foldit was new:

Foldit is the granddaddy of crowd-sourced research games and has proven that games are a viable way to get results. Players were able to discover the structure of a monkey HIV virus, a problem that had stumped scientists for over ten years, in just ten days. The game itself is a 3D folding puzzle. Players are challenged to fold proteins into compact designs and are scored on various criteria like size and whether hydrophobic side chains are buried inside the structure. Players can work alone or with teams, to compete in puzzles and challenges.

Now there are many such games that let you do real-life science.

Posted in Games, Science | No Comments »

Lessons Learned in an Alternate Universe

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

Back in high school, Scott Alexander and some friends decided to make up a fantasy world, Bridge to Teribithia-style, and the game spread. He shares some lessons learned from spending 5,000 virtual years in an alternate universe:

The total lack of rules or advance planning with which we constructed Micras gives it an amazing feature unmatched in any other role-play I know of: the game is exactly identical to the meta-game.

A country is a bunch of people coming together and claiming to be a country and doing country-like things (kind of like in reality). The king — or Shah, or President, or Premier, or Ayatollah — of the country is whoever can convince other people to call them the king and obey their orders (kind of like in reality). The country’s land is pretty much whatever land they can convince other people to accept they have (ibid). The constitution is whatever document you can convince everyone else to sign (…).

If one person wants to found their own single-person country, no one can stop them, but they’re less likely to be taken seriously or considered a Great Power. If lots of people come together to form a country, no one can stop them, but they had better be able to get along and agree on the rules. If you want to unite to ostracize somebody, no one can stop you, but you’d better be able to get more people on your side than they have on theirs.

If you want to claim you have a billion nuclear bombs, no one can stop you, but they’ll just say you’re a terrible simulation partner and ignore you when you say you bomb them. If you want to claim you are pure pacifists, no one can stop you, but then you better either have an alternate plan for protecting yourself (like strong allies) or be prepared to just absent yourself from the military simulation and annoy everyone else. If you want to write a history of your country that conflicts with histories everyone else has written, no one can stop you, but no one is going to take your history seriously either or build upon it or make it part of their canon.

As a result, while other geeks were learning how to calculate damage from Magic Missiles, I was learning how to manipulate consensus reality. I guarantee you one of these skills is more valuable than the other.

The skill of manipulating consensus reality seems more or less identical to the skill commonly called “leadership”. It is easy to underestimate. The whole gag of the comic strip Dilbert is underestimating leadership. These brilliant engineers do the actual hard work, and then some idiot just says “work faster!” or something similarly dumb and gets hailed as a leader and paid a much higher salary and given credit for the group’s success.

[...]

I think the most important thing I learned about leadership is to avoid it. It’s stressful, everyone blames you for everything, and “getting to make decisions” sounds a lot better before you realize how banal and annoying 99% of decisions are. But I also learned that large organizations tend to have a position that pretty much controls everything from behind the scenes but doesn’t have to cope with the appearance of power. In Shireroth it’s called “Steward”. In Westeros it was “King’s Hand”. I don’t know about the USA, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was “White House Chief of Staff”. These positions are a whole lot more fun, and surprisingly there’s a lot less competition for them.

Closely related is learning how many people are optimizing for appearance — which means if you’re optimizing for something else it’s pretty easy to strike compromises that give everyone what they want. If you’re fighting for control of a province, the compromise “your enemy gets an important sounding title like Archduke with almost completely ceremonial powers, and you get a boring sounding title like Undersecretary of Resource Management that controls the place’s economy and military” works a surprising amount of the time. Same with titling a bill “The X Party Wins Bill” and getting leading members of the X Party to support it and having the Y Party protest it angrily and not have any policy proposals of the X Party in it at all.

The third important thing I learned is to have a lot more respect for politicians and people in power. I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense. Once someone has invoked the genre of scandal, it will play out the same either way, proceeding deterministically along political lines until everyone reaches the usual compromise of agreeing you’re scummy and dishonest but not worth the trouble of impeaching.

The last important thing I learned is to be nice. It practically never fails that somebody who thinks they’re really cool joins Micras, makes fun of one of our admittedly disproportionate number of people with no real life or social skills, bullies and harasses them for months or even years… and then that person is the swing vote in an important election, or finds themselves sitting on a deposit of valuable rare earth metals everyone needs. My favorite cases are when neither of those two things happens, and the person just spends five years sorting out their issues and becoming smarter and more competent, and then ends up in charge of everything solely by their own merit. I am pleased to report they rarely forget how the bully behaved when they were young and stupid.

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SimCity’s Evil Twin

Saturday, April 20th, 2013

Dwarf Fortress is SimCity’s evil twin, Gabriel Winslow-Yost says:

Dwarf Fortress puts the player in charge of a fledgling Dwarven colony, initially comprising seven dwarfs — a number that can, with the births and immigration that come with successful play, rise into the hundreds, but just as easily plunge to one or zero. You watch from above, pausing the action at will to give orders using a byzantine array of menus, but never directly controlling any of the dwarfs. The central principle of the game is an attention to detail that is frankly obsessive. Dozens of plants and animals are simulated, and hundreds of types of ore are modeled in the soil. Every dwarf has individual character traits, religious beliefs, affections, moods, and skills, and every limb and tissue layer of their bodies is modeled and tracked. (For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room — baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

Your dwarves can marry and reproduce; suffer from P.T.S.D.; bond with pets; or be taken by “fey moods” and lock themselves away to create artworks. They need constant alcohol intake to remain happy, and if they stay underground for too long will become allergic to sunlight (leading to the classic F.A.Q. entry, “Why is my fortress surrounded by vomit?”). Just starting up a new game requires a few minutes for the computer to randomly generate miles of terrain and thousands of years of local history. And this is it in its embryonic, alpha incarnation. Adams keeps an elaborate public to-do list for the game, whose entries vary in scale from the minute (“Wheelbarrows to haul more objects than can be carried”) to the truly grand (“Have religions in the game correspond to forces or deities and let you play one”), and estimates that version 1.0 won’t be finished for another twenty years.

As in SimCity, there is no real way to win the game. Instead of a series of comfortable equilibria, however, a game of Dwarf Fortress tends harshly, inevitably, toward ruin. The colony is overrun by invaders, or succumbs to disease, starvation, blood-feuds, or madness; a dragon takes up residence in the dining-hall, slaughtering every dwarf but one, who waits out the winter sealed in his room; a vast lava trap, constructed to deal with these threats, malfunctions, killing everybody; and so on. It is played alone, but its brutality, complexity, and unpredictability give its players a need for community — an urge to bear witness, to commiserate, to trade tips for using kittens as poison-detectors. Elaborate written accounts of Dwarf Fortress games, sometimes incorporating art or even animation, have become popular Internet reading material, perhaps more popular than playing the game itself.

One especially successful dwarf fortress demonstrates two important aspects of the game:

The first is that, for all his success in the game — and FlareChannel is about as successful as any Dwarf Fortress creation yet seen — QuantumSawdust does still not feel it is secure. He writes in the Dwarf Fortress forum that the vast families his dwarves have created make him “see the danger of tantrum spirals” — a well-known phenomenon in which an injury to one member of a family causes the rest of that family to run amok with grief and anger, potentially injuring members of other families, and so on — and that “I just have to hope my amenities for the dwarves make up for any disasters that occur.”

The second is that the game is so intricate that many of the events it creates were intended by neither the player nor the designer. In one of the online accounts of FlareChannel’s history, the fort’s creator relates his “favorite story,” which he calls “The Fable of Catten and Eagle.” He tells of a single semi-tame giant eagle — one of many that fill the fort — who took an intense, inexplicable liking to Catten, a particularly competent dwarf, but also one entirely indifferent to the eagle. Twelve game-years later, Catten was caught outside during a dragon attack. The eagle rushed to his aid, blinding the dragon and then helping him kill it. They became friends, eventually died of old age, and “during the finishing of the Temple to Armok, Catten’s clothes were mysteriously found on the roof, where no path could possibly have led.” The writer theorizes that “on a rare night when others were asleep, Catten would climb aboard his old friend, strip naked, and fly around the towers.” Though some part of all this was no doubt embellished in the telling, this account is still, crucially, more a report than a story; its origins are behaviors generated by the game, and observed and interpreted by the player.

Posted in Games, Urbanism | No Comments »

Cognitive Training

Sunday, March 31st, 2013

Video games often try to be “realistic” by getting the details right in how everything looks and sounds, but this physical fidelity isn’t as important in a training simulation as cognitive fidelity, Daniel Gopher explains:

My main inter­est has been how to expand the lim­its of human atten­tion, infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing and response capa­bil­i­ties which are crit­i­cal in com­plex, real-time decision-making, high-demand tasks such as fly­ing a mil­i­tary jet or play­ing pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball. Using a ten­nis anal­ogy, my goal has been, and is, how to help develop many “Wimbledon”-like cham­pi­ons. Each with their own styles, but per­form­ing to their max­i­mum capac­ity to suc­ceed in their environments.

What research over the last 15–20 years has shown is that cog­ni­tion, or what we call think­ing and per­for­mance, is really a set of skills that we can train sys­tem­at­i­cally. And that computer-based cog­ni­tive train­ers or “cog­ni­tive sim­u­la­tions” are the most effec­tive and effi­cient way to do so.

This is an impor­tant point, so let me empha­size it. What we have dis­cov­ered is that a key fac­tor for an effec­tive trans­fer from train­ing envi­ron­ment to real­ity is that the train­ing pro­gram ensures “Cog­ni­tive Fidelity”, this is, it should faith­fully rep­re­sent the men­tal demands that hap­pen in the real world. Tra­di­tional approaches focus instead on phys­i­cal fidelity, which may seem more intu­itive, but less effec­tive and harder to achieve. They are also less effi­cient, given costs involved in cre­at­ing expen­sive phys­i­cal sim­u­la­tors that faith­fully repli­cate, let’s say, a whole mil­i­tary heli­copter or just a sig­nif­i­cant part of it.

[...]

The need for phys­i­cal fidelity is not based on research, at least for the type of high-performance train­ing we are talk­ing about. In fact, a sim­ple envi­ron­ment may be bet­ter in that it does not cre­ate the illu­sion of real­ity. Sim­u­la­tions can be very expen­sive and com­plex, some­times even cost­ing as much as the real thing, which lim­its the access to train­ing. Not only that, but the whole effort may be futile, given that some impor­tant fea­tures can not be repli­cated (such as grav­i­ta­tion free tilted or inverted flight), and even result in neg­a­tive trans­fer, because learn­ers pick up on spe­cific train­ing fea­tures or sen­sa­tions that do not exist in the real situation.

[...]

In one [study], which con­sti­tuted the basis for the 1994 paper, we showed that 10 hours of train­ing for flight cadets, in an atten­tion trainer instan­ti­ated as a com­puter game — Space Fortress — resulted in 30% improve­ment in their flight per­for­mance. The results led the trainer to be inte­grated into the reg­u­lar train­ing pro­gram of the flight school. It was used in the train­ing of hun­dreds of flight cadets for sev­eral years. In the other one, spon­sored by NASA, we com­pared the results of the cog­ni­tive trainer vs. a sophis­ti­cated, pic­to­r­ial and high-level-graphic and physical-fidelity-based com­puter sim­u­la­tion of a Black­hawk heli­copter. The result: the Space Fortress cog­ni­tive trainer was very suc­cess­ful in improv­ing per­for­mance, while the alter­na­tive was not. The study was pub­lished in the pro­ceed­ings of the Human Fac­tors and Ergonomic Soci­ety: Hart S. G and Bat­tiste V. (1992), Flight test of a video game trainer. Pro­ceed­ings of the Human Fac­tors Soci­ety 26th Meet­ing (pp. 1291–1295).

This led to IntelliGym‘s basketball training software:

In order to develop a basketball cognitive training tool, our researchers mapped the brain skills that are required for top performance in the game of basketball. These include (among others) reading plays, positioning, decision making, team work, and execution under pressure. Together, they constitute what is usually referred to as game intelligence. With this map in hand, the researchers designed a system that simulates the exact same skill set.

IntelliGym Basketball

Posted in Education, Games, Science | 2 Comments »

Allan Calhamer, Inventor Diplomacy Board Game, Dies at 81

Sunday, March 10th, 2013

Allan Calhamer, the inventor of Diplomacy, the game, recently passed away at the age of 81. He was an unusual fellow:

Allan Brian Calhamer was born on Dec. 7, 1931, in Hinsdale, Ill., and reared in La Grange Park; his mother was a teacher and his father an engineer.

As a boy, exploring the attic of the family home, Allan encountered a book of old maps and was captivated. On its pages, the past really was a foreign country, with evocative names — Livonia, Courland, the Ottoman Empire — that conjured a distant era. From that book, Mr. Calhamer said long afterward, Diplomacy would spring.

At Harvard, from which he graduated cum laude in 1953, the young Mr. Calhamer studied European history with Sidney Bradshaw Fay. Reading Professor Fay’s seminal 1928 book, “The Origins of the World War,” about back-room intrigue among the Great Powers, he thought, as he later recalled, “What a board game that would make!”

Mr. Calhamer developed his game, originally called Realpolitik, in 1954, while he was enrolled at Harvard Law School. Law students, he found, adored it, as it enfranchised aggression, and it was refined over many late-night sessions in his room.

Disinclined to pursue a cutthroat career, Mr. Calhamer left law school before graduating. He lived for a time at Walden Pond in homage to his idol, Henry David Thoreau; he later worked briefly as a foreign service officer in Africa and a park ranger at the Statue of Liberty.

In 1959, after Diplomacy was rejected by several game publishers, Mr. Calhamer had 500 copies produced at his own expense, selling them by mail for $6.95 apiece. It was acquired shortly afterward by Games Research and has since passed through many corporate hands, including those of Avalon Hill and Hasbro. The game is currently published by Wizards of the Coast, which also makes Dungeons & Dragons.

On the strength of Diplomacy, Mr. Calhamer was hired by Sylvania’s Applied Research Laboratory in Waltham, Mass., to bring his analytical stills to bear on real-world military problems. But he chafed amid corporate culture and left after six years. With his wife, the former Hilda Morales, he settled in his hometown. Besides his wife, whom he married in 1967, Mr. Calhamer’s survivors include two daughters, Tatiana Calhamer and Selenne Calhamer-Boling.

Mr. Calhamer remained deeply, if quietly, proud of Diplomacy, and though the royalties did not make him rich, they did once let him buy a Mercury Monarch. His other board games, never brought to market, include one in which, as Tatiana Calhamer described it on Monday, players move through dimensions of the space-time continuum.

For 21 years, until his retirement in the early 1990s, Mr. Calhamer delivered the mail in La Grange Park. He took pleasure, his family told The Chicago Sun-Times this week, in factoring into primes the license-plate numbers of cars on his route.

He almost certainly took pleasure, too — for this thought was doubtless not lost on him — in the idea that on any given day, slung unobtrusively over his shoulder, there might lurk a letter from one Great Power to another, filled with all the threats, blandishments and cunning hollow promises Diplomacy entails, awaiting delivery by its creator.

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Clang

Saturday, March 2nd, 2013

How did I just find out that Neal Stephenson is setting out to make a realistic sword-fighting game, called Clang?

Posted in Games, Martial Arts, Technology, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Why do we have to take this class?

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

When Bill H. was asked by some Berkeley professors to develop simulations of democracy versus dictatorship in Latin America, he remembered his days teaching government in high school:

Early on, a student had asked the inevitable question: “Why do we have to take this class?” And of course, as seniors they had to pass it to graduate. I didn’t know why it was specifically required, so I looked it up. State legislatures made government and US History required classes for graduation after the Korean War where some American POWs were induced to renounce democracy and the US. The methods used by the North Koreans were diabolical and relevant, so I described this to the Berkeley profs and said I could create a simulation in class around this. This was the simulation following some of the things the North Koreans did, with my own additions.

The professors handed out a survey the first day of class about government, one of the questions being “Do you believe Democracy is the best form of government in the world?” Nearly 100% said yes. The next class, the professors told the students that as this was a class about government that they would be asked to take responsibility for operations in class. Student leaders would be responsible for giving participation points [twenty percent of their grade] as well as points for attendance. The student leaders would also be responsible for operations in the class such as handing out and collecting papers and the behavior of the other students. The professors told students they wanted this system to be efficient.

Then the professors asked for two leaders and sat down. More than 80% of the classes had leaders volunteer with no discussion, no voting. They just presented themselves to the professor as the leaders. The professors told the leaders, in front of the class, that they could chose sub-leaders for groups of students if they wanted. Some did, some didn’t.

Then the class was told that the leaders would be given X amount of participation points and attendance points to give out, enough to give each student 5 points per class for participation and 1 point for attendance. Here we did what the North Koreans did: We gave the leaders 30% more participation and attendance points than needed. The professors told the leaders they could use or not use the points as they saw fit. He expected things to run efficiently and if he had to intervene to get things done, they would lose points.

In 90 percent of the classes, the following happened: The leaders gave themselves and sub-leaders more points from the extras. Students found the leaders `repressive’ but said nothing, even when the often very unequal points were posted. Students that challenged the leaders either lost points or were bribed with points to remain quiet.

Students complained to the professor, who referred them back to the leaders. In about a third of the classes, students asked the professors how they could `get rid of the leaders’. [The students' phrase in most cases.] This possibility was anticipated from reading about the POW camps. The instructions were that if five students stood and declared the leader `dead’, they were removed. However, if they did this, the leader would not receive any participation points. The students came up with the word `assassination.’ And of course, nothing happened in class until new leaders came forward. At times, that didn’t happen very quickly…

This was the situation in all but one class out of ten after just two weeks or six class sessions. The professors were `astonished and disturbed’ by the results. So were the students. A number came to the department head to complain. And of course, the students from different classes were talking, so things like assassinations `caught’ on and leaders from different classes were trading `techniques’ to hold power and avoid being assassinated. Half the classes had assassinations. In the POW camps, in all but two cases, it was simply intimidation or a physical assault that led to the leader `stepping down.’

The simulation was ended after two weeks, and this process was scripted too, by the professors announcing the end of the `system’, even though unstated, students thought it would go on for the entire class.

The basic point of the simulation was that if a group accepts `efficiency’ as the prime value in a government, instead of `fairness’, some form of dictatorship will usually follow. While the professors `knew’ this intellectually, it was quite another thing to see it in action among democratic-loving students. They were not only disturbed by the effectiveness of the simulation, but now they had to `turn it around’ so students wouldn’t be `psychically damaged’ as one professor put it.

We scripted that too. The professors pointed out that the democratic process wasn’t used to chose the leaders or run the class, though no stipulation was made about the form of governance. They all either acquiesced to the uneven distribution of points or turned to assassination to change leaders. It was also pointed out that this was done even when they felt that democracy was the best form of government.

Posted in Education, Games, Policy | 1 Comment »

How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

In 1999 Charles Huang and his brother Kai founded Red Octane, which went on to becomes a billion dollar business without any VC funding:

Launching six months before Netflix, the goal was to be the Netflix of videogames. But six months after they launched the dot com bubble burst and so did their business. As funding completely dried up, the capital intensive rental business became unfundable. Of that time Charles said, “It looked like the whole valley was just going to die and go away. So that’s when we scrambled and looked at video game hardware, and eventually videogame software. That was the beginning of what was many lives of Red Octane.”

They were gamers and were playing a lot of Playstation 1 games, especially the pirated stuff out of Japan. Dance Dance Revolution was just making it’s way to the States so they stated selling dance pads. “We realized the dance pads that we were buying and reselling were garbage, because they were breaking down and we thought we could make better dance pads than this,” Charles said. “I literally packed my bags, went to China, visited a few of these factories that made dance pads, figured out how they made them and took a bunch of suggestions that users had given us and incorporated them into new designs and so we started coming out with our own dance pads and believe it or not, that kept the company afloat (from 2001 to 2003).”

Everything was sold online due to lack of cash. “We had to start that way because we couldn’t afford to sell to stores due to cash flow. The way it works is you sell to Gamestop and they don’t pay you for 60 to 90 days. We didn’t have the money to do that, so we had to sell everything online because when somebody orders with a credit card, you get paid in two days.”

The company’s number one rule to survive was simple. Don’t die. “As long as your company doesn’t die, smart people will find a way to make things happen, but if you let your company die, that’s it, you’ll never have another shot.”

For two years the company ran with less than 2-weeks of cash in the bank. Seriously. Every week they hoped to make enough money to make the next payroll. One time Charles had drafted the email to lay the employees off because they didn’t have enough money to pay. They decided to wait until after Thanksgiving and when Black Friday hit, orders poured in. “It was like a gift, like money falling from the heavens,” Charles said. “Like ‘where are all of these orders coming from?’ Then that actually gave us enough money to make payroll and we made enough money over the next month to continue.”

Once they realized that Konami could ruin their dance pad business if they decided to stop selling it in the US, they needed to be more in charge of their own destiny. They took a popular arcade game called “The Groove” and partnered with the developer to bring it to the console. This took their company from $1MM in revenue to $9MM and the profits allowed them to work on their second game, Guitar Hero.

They knew the music genre was working in Asia, but it hadn’t translated to the US or Europe. They took a look at music games and found Guitar Freaks. “We said, man this thing is fun, but if we could just make a few changes, we think that would be a `partnership was perfect. Red Octane made the hardware and Harmonix made the software.

“Guitar Hero was an incredible experience in that in the first day that we talked about it in February, to the day we released it in November, everything about it just seemed like this magical experience. You know, you hear musicians say how sometimes the right songs just flow from your head? It was like that, every idea just came so smoothly.” They demoed the game at E3 in true underdog fashion they weren’t even on the main show floor. They were down in the basement with the other indie games. They won Best of Show awards going up against Madden, Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, and others. The budget for the original game was $1.7MM.

But they were still fighting. Retailers didn’t want to carry the game because the large box didn’t fit on the shelves and there was no precedence for that type of game selling well despite the positive consumer buzz. GameStop was the only retailer to carry the game. “They were almost obligated to take every videogame product because GameStop was where hardcore gamers shopped, so you have to have everything.”

To pay for the inventory, Red Octane tried to raise money again. And while they had done $9MM in revenue the year before, they were unable to raise $3MM. “It wasn’t like we were a startup that was burning cash, we were already profitable. At the time, videogames were just considered an uninvestable category by VCs. So, in order to get the game out, my brother and I took out second mortgages and took on credit card debt and to buy inventory for the launch of Guitar Hero.”

The game launched in November 2005. Best Buy forecast the game would sell 30K units between November and the end of January. The day it launched they sold 3,000 units in the first two hours. Best Buy called that day and wanted 80K more units the next week. Because of the hardware the games were built and shipped from China. That shipping delay turned Guitar Hero into the hardest game to find that Christmas season. They sold $45MM worth of Guitar Hero in the first 11-months and then they were acquired by Activision for north of $100MM.

Posted in Business, Games, Technology | No Comments »

Behind the Hit iPhone Game “The Walking Dead”

Saturday, January 5th, 2013

Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead has been declared “game of the year” by a number of sites and has sold many “episodes“:

Telltale sells the game in “episodes” — five in all — for three gaming platforms: the Xbox 360, PC and the iPhone/iPad, where it’s especially resonating with swipe- and touch-based mechanics.

Since launching the first episode in April, players have purchased more than 8.5 million episodes, said Telltale CEO Dan Connors. At about $5 per episode, that’s roughly more than $40 million in sales, not including any promotions. Each episode ends on cliffhangers, enticing the player to buy the next one, Connors said.

About a quarter of those sales are happening on the iPhone and iPad, Connors said. That’s the fastest growth for “The Walking Dead” among platforms, underscoring how important mobile devices are becoming in the eyes of game publishers.

First one’s free…

Posted in Business, Games, Technology | No Comments »

Gary Gygax explains why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Christmas

Monday, December 24th, 2012

Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, published this note in the IFW Monthly of February 1969 explaining why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Christmas:

Gary Gygax explains why Christians should not celebrate Christmas

Gygax was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness at the time.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

Simulation, Training, and Reality

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

I recently cited professional war-gamer James Sterret, who noted that gamers are usually planning by themselves, but true military staffs must come up with a plan that everyone understands.

This reminded David Foster of an anecdote from Don Sheppard’s book Bluewater Sailor, which I’ve cited before.

Read the story and remember the lesson: while considering the political dynamics, don’t forget to listen to the ship.

Posted in Business, Games, War | No Comments »

James Sterrett, Professional Wargamer

Friday, December 7th, 2012

James Sterrett is a professional wargamer — his title is Deputy Chief, Simulations Division, Digital Leader Development Center, at the Command & General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth — and he discusses three things gamers usually do not have to deal with:

First, we usually have far better knowledge of the situation than is possible for real armies; consider that one of the key pieces of information from ULTRA decrypts was the Axis order of battle in various theaters – simply knowing what units the Axis had was a major intelligence coup, but such information is routinely handed to players. Moreover, the scenario usually tells us what the friendly and enemy win conditions are, while those are often less clear in real life.

Second, in nearly every game, our forces do exactly what we tell them to do, exactly when we tell them to do it. In the real world, subordinate forces need time to conduct their own planning so they can carry out our orders, and they may not go about the task exactly as we envisioned. (The best game I’ve played for experiencing these challenges is Panther’s Command Ops series with the Command Delay set to the maximum value. I’ve also heard good things about Scourge of War in this regard but have not personally played it.)

Third, gamers are usually planning by themselves, which means they have to explain everything only to themselves and to the game. Military staffs deal with more information than one person can process; even a battalion staff is likely to be several dozen people. Getting this many people to pass information among themselves efficiently, and let alone coming up with a coherent plan that everybody understands, requires practice.

Posted in Education, Games, War | No Comments »

Future Games

Saturday, November 24th, 2012

Nyrath has compiled a list of futuristic games from science fiction, and Eleusis caught my interest:

Eleusis is a card game that simulates the scientific method and teaches inductive logic. One player (“God” or “Nature”) secretly formulates a rule (a “law of nature”) that specifies what card can be played next. The rest of the players (“Scientists”) take turns playing a card (“performing an experiment”), and trying to deduce the rule (“create a hypothesis”) before the other scientists.

The game can be played with a standard deck of cards, or a special deck can be created.

Eleusis was invented in 1956 by Robert Abbott and appeared in Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations column in the June 1959 issue of Scientific American.

In 2006, John Golden created a streamlined version.

Posted in Games, Science | 2 Comments »

On using dice with a military audience

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

A war-gaming consultant speaks on using dice with a military audience — an audience that doesn’t generally like games:

I recently gave an ‘Introduction to Operational Analysis‘ presentation to the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College’s Advanced Command and Staff Course students and Directing Staff. At one point I left the security of the lectern, walked to front centre stage and, laying my professional credibility on the line, produced a large rubber 6-sided die and told a story.

Some years ago I was a Course of Action (COA) Wargaming Subject Matter Expert floorwalker at a corps level CPX. HQ 1 (UK) Div was a player HQ and were conducting a COA Wargame. The success of the plan being wargamed was predicated on breaking through an enemy blocking position, and the HQ staff had applied sufficient combat power so that the supporting operational analyst assured them that the force equivalency ratio was 3:1 in their favour. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and assumed the attack would, when the time came, succeed. We all ‘know’ that a 3:1 ratio ensures a brief fight then home for tea and medals. Or does it…?

I asked the analyst what 3:1 actually meant. He told me that it gave an approximately 70% chance of success, based on historical analysis of planned attacks versus a hasty defence. I translated ‘approximately 70%’ to 66% for obvious reasons explained below.

At this point (and knowing him quite well) I approached the General Officer Commanding (GOC). Armed with the analyst’s figures I gave the GOC the self same large rubber die and asked him if he would be happy rolling it in front of his peers and commanders when his plan was executed. If he rolled 1-4 his plan worked, but a 5-6 meant his plan failed; the enemy would remain firm and the entire corps plan stall. With almost no hesitation he called his COS and the plan was revised; more combat power was applied to increase the chances of success.

The folks at the Simulating War discussion group add their thoughts, including Sun Tzu’s admonition, used metaphorically: don’t besiege walled cities.

Posted in Games, War | No Comments »

How Would a Georgist Single Tax Work in Monopoly?

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

The history of Monopoly, the board game, is surprisingly political, as it was originally meant to illustrate Henry George’s half-socialist, half-capitalist idea that we should have a single tax on land — on the unimproved value of the land.

Bryan Caplan recently taught his sons how to play Monopoly, so he naturally asked, how would a Georgist single tax actually work in Monopoly?

Without improvements, even Boardwalk only yields a rent of $50. So a full-blown Georgist Single Tax would collect just $50 per landing. If the owner maximally improves the property by erecting a hotel, he’d get to keep $1950 ($2000–$50) a pop — 97.5% of the value. Despite the game’s Georgist origins, almost all of the value comes from improvements.

Is something fishy going on? In Georgist terms, no. Houses and hotels should definitely count as “improvements.” After all, the more you tax houses and hotels, the lower players’ incentive to build them. A non-gamer might imagine that players will always build as many houses and hotels as they can afford. After all, each house only costs $200 — a sum players can usually more than recoup as soon as the next player lands on Boardwalk. If you’re a gamer, though, you’ll quickly realize that things aren’t so simple. Buildings lose 50% of their value if you ever have to sell them, so you have a strong incentive to keep a decent amount of cash in hand.

Does Monopoly reveal a fatal flaw in Georgism? Not at all. (For the real fatal flaw, see my paper with Zac Gochenour). The reason why a Single Tax on the unimproved value of Boardwalk generates so little income is that the game artificially fixes a bizarre package of relative prices. A real estate market where (a) Boardwalk with nothing brings in $50 in revenue, (b) Boardwalk with a hotel brings in $2000 in revenue, and (c) a hotel only costs $1000 to build, simply wouldn’t be stable in a free market. Competing developers would bid up the rent of Boardwalk with nothing, bid down the rent of Boardwalk with a hotel, and/or bid up the price of houses.

The right lesson to draw is simply that despite its creator’s didactic motive, Monopoly is a bad way to grasp the essentials of Georgism. In a truly Georgist game, unimproved rents would be enormous, and improvements would be priced at marginal cost.

Posted in Economics, Games, Henry George, Policy | 4 Comments »

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