How did I just find out that Neal Stephenson is setting out to make a realistic sword-fighting game, called Clang?
Clang
Saturday, March 2nd, 2013Why do we have to take this class?
Thursday, February 28th, 2013When 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.
How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013In 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.
Behind the Hit iPhone Game “The Walking Dead”
Saturday, January 5th, 2013Telltale 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…
Gary Gygax explains why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Christmas
Monday, December 24th, 2012Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, published this note in the IFW Monthly of February 1969 explaining why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Christmas:
Gygax was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness at the time.
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)
Simulation, Training, and Reality
Thursday, December 13th, 2012I 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.
James Sterrett, Professional Wargamer
Friday, December 7th, 2012James 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.
Future Games
Saturday, November 24th, 2012Nyrath 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.
On using dice with a military audience
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012A 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.
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.
Bill Slavicsek and the Star Wars RPG
Sunday, October 21st, 2012After graduating college and spending a year working on a local newspaper, Bill Slavicsek found a job editing at West End Games, where he went on to develop the Star Wars roleplaying game, which was oddly influential:
I was a self-proclaimed (at the time) expert on the Star Wars universe. I saw the original film when it debuted, and actually went back to the theater thirty-eight times that summer to see the movie again and again. I like to say that 1977 was a formative year for me. That was the year that Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and The Sword of Shannara ignited my imagination. Who knew at the time that those imagination igniters would turn into an amazing career? So, when fact-checking and lore questions began to come up around the office, I usually knew the answer or knew where to look to find it. Remember, this was before the Internet, when research had to be done by scouring back issues of Star Log, flipping pages of novels, and forwarding and rewinding the VCR until the tape snapped. But my knowledge paid off, and soon I was assigned as the co-designer of The Star Wars Sourcebook. That tome full of back story and world material earned me my first Origins Award for game design and set the stage for the expanded Star Wars universe that would begin to emerge a few years later.
There were a lot of firsts in those early Star Wars RPG products. They were the first RPG products to incorporate color printing. They were the first products to add to the Star Wars mythos since the original trilogy had wrapped up three years earlier. And they were the first Star Wars products to give names and back stories to the various aliens that inhabited the background of the films. Suddenly Hammer Head was an Ithorian, Bib Fortuna was a Twi’lek, and Greedo was a Rodian. The universe was more real. Later, novelists and comic book writers and action figure makers and creators of the animated series would use the names I had come up with. But at the time, all I was trying to do was add context and believability to the universe we all loved so much.
American troops love Warhammer 40K
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012What kind of people stage make-believe wars with Space Marines? Real Marines, of course — and members of the other services:
Games Workshop’s U.S.-based outreach manager estimates that 20 to 25 percent of Games Workshop’s American customers are active members of the military. If you include veterans, she says, that number jumps to about 40 percent.
[...]
40K may not be a true simulation of armed conflict, but it’s part of a centuries-long tradition of war games. After World War II, U.S. Navy Adm. Chester W. Nimitz credited gaming for helping the Allies prepare. “The war with Japan had been re-enacted in the game rooms here by so many people and in so many different ways,” he said, “that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war; we had not visualized those.”
Elements of gaming are still present in modern warfare. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Carey served as an operations officer (an S3, to be exact) for an infantry battalion. His responsibilities included developing battle plans from the tactical operations center. “In the movies when you see the room/tent with all the maps, projection screens, and radios with guys moving icons around on a map board — that’s the TOC,” he said in an email. “In a way, running a TOC is as close to hobby war gaming as it gets in the military.”
Who’s hauling all their miniatures overseas?
Playing at the World
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012In Playing at the World, Jon Peterson provides a meticulously researched history of simulating wars, people, and fantastic adventures:
The key thread appears in the work of the younger Reiswitz, in the 1820s. He first introduced to wargaming two separate but intertwined components: referees and dice.
Reiswitz developed a game where verbal orders took the place of movements on a board, where a referee interpreted statements of intention from the players and converted them into results in the game world. This feedback loop, where the referee explains the state of the world and players then describe the actions they would like to attempt, is the fundamental innovation that underlies role-playing games. It bounced across languages and continents until it resurfaced in America in the work of Totten in the 1880s, which Twin Cities gamers later rediscovered and made part of their games in the late 1960s.
This achievement alone would be sufficient to earn a place in the pantheon of gaming gods, but the younger Reiswitz was also the first to grasp how statistics and probability could be combined to let dice resolve fictional events in a game. At his day job at the artillery ranges, he learned the differences in likelihood of striking targets with firearms at different ranges, and from those statistical models, he was able to assign a probability that die throws could resolve as game events. I believe this is where the fundamental principle of simulation was invented, and it was something then unprecedented in intellectual history. He also grasped that dice were a critical enabler for the referee as well, because dice are impartial: an omnipotent referee could always show an unconscious bias towards participants in the game, but dice kept the referee honest.
These two innovations walked hand in hand through the centuries right up to your table top.
Numenera
Sunday, September 16th, 2012Monte Cook made his name as one of the designers of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Now he’s working on his own game, Numenera:
It’s a far future, science fantasy, post-apocalyptic game with streamlined rules that prioritize the story, the action, and the wild ideas. If you’re a fan of outside-of-the-box gameplay such as that found in Planescape, Dark Space, or Chaositech, the far-future stories of Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, or Jack Vance, or mind-blowing visuals like those found in the work of French artist Moebius, you’re going to love Numenera.
Numenera is set a billion years in the future. Civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth. Even though the current inhabitants live at about a Medieval level of technology, the leftover remnants of these advanced societies lie all around them. Some of these are extremely helpful: advanced tools, valuable means of communication and learning, transportation, defenses, and weapons. Others are dangerous: genetically altered monstrosities, flesh-warping radiation, creatures transplanted from distant stars, and clouds of out-of-control nanobots, just to name a few. This setting, called the Ninth World, provides all manner of opportunities and challenges to those that call it home.
The real news is that he’s funding his project through kickstarter — and he’s received almost half a million dollars in pledges.
Libya
Wednesday, September 12th, 2012Sean Smith, a Foreign Service Information Management Officer assigned to the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya played EVE Online, the politically interesting computer game, as a member of the so-called Goonswarm, and on Tuesday he answered the director of his gaming guild with this:
“Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” The consulate was under siege, and within hours, a mob would attack, killing Smith along with three others, including the U.S. ambassador.
In his professional and personal life, Smith was a husband and father of two, and a 10-year veteran of the Foreign Service who had served in Baghdad, Pretoria, Montreal and The Hague. But when gaming with EVE Online guild Goonswarm, he was a popular figure known as “Vile Rat,” and alternately as “Vilerat” while volunteering as a moderator at the internet community Something Awful. Smith’s death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by the State Department and reported widely in the news media.
A Marine FAST team is on its way.