As a kid I played a lot of computer games, I particularly liked empire-building strategy games. My dad got me “Balance of the Planet”, by Chris Crawford, in which the goal – running the whole planet – was similar enough to my usual preferences that I really got into it. I also bought in fully to the greenie dogma around that time. More recently, I dug up a copy of it on one of the abandonware sites and went through it again … and immediately started noticing things. For example, the game’s formula for “extent of grassland” is “last year’s grassland, minus whatever has been removed by erosion”. That’s it. Grassland never expands on its own, it just shrinks at varying rates. There’s a multitude of other inherent assumptions in that game that turn its model of reality into the purest lying propaganda. Crawford appears to be completely unaware of what he’s doing; I remember flipping open his book on game design to a random page and seeing a sentence about how he modeled nuclear power that was so spectacularly wrong it was flabbergasting, especially given that the context was of Crawford congratulating himself on finding such a good way of doing it.

Crawford himself has been out of professional game development for 20 years. If you read his blog, you’ll find a man lost in his own delusions, constantly patting himself on his back for his correct intuition and ground-breaking work on things that other developers have worked into published products 5 or 10 years ago; and convinced that the only reason he isn’t receiving adulation from everyone is that there’s conspiracies against him. He does book reviews from time to time; they’re notable for how the review depends entirely on if it confirms Crawford’s preconceptions or not.

It wouldn’t surprise me to find the same sort of mentality operating among dieticians.