Idishe Melkhim

Sunday, May 7th, 2017

I haven’t played Crusader Kings II, but I found it interesting that a 16-year-old secular Canadian Jew decided to make a Jewish Kings “mod” to improve the accuracy (and depth) of the game’s depiction of his people:

Crusader Kings II does have Jewish characters, but most of them are not playable, and the few who are are — the Khagan of Khazaria and the Duke of Semien, to be specific — easily get destroyed by neighboring empires, and anyway are not very fun to play. I decided to add more options for playing as a Jewish character, such as new and unique decisions and events. In addition to making the Jewish character experience more in-depth, I added events for non-Jewish characters. For example, different kinds of Jewish courtiers can arrive at the court of a non-Jewish character. A non-Jewish ruler might be confronted with a migration of Jews to one of his provinces, and will have to choose either to accept them or not. Historically, sometimes European lords had to face tough decisions like this one. I added this event and others like it to make the experience more extensive and immersive.

[...]

Most of my changes to the game are small, but a few are relatively large, in my opinion. I added two new Israelite cultures: Mizrachi, the culture of the Jews who lived in the Middle East, and Hebrew, which is the predecessor of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. I changed the names of people in each culture and I gave them different bonuses to make them more historical and distinctive. For example, characters of Hebrew culture get +1 piety, and Sephardi get +1 learning. I gave all characters of the Jewish religion +1 learning to reflect how historically Judaism always emphasized the importance of studying religious texts. At first, I thought that it would be wrong to give Jewish cultures and religion so many (arguably over-powered) bonuses, but then I saw that in the base game, Buddhism has +4 learning (which is objectively overpowered)! I lost all shame and decided to proceed with the addition of said bonuses.

I made Ashkenazi and Sephardi culture nonexistent in the early game, but then develop in and diverge from their predecessor the Hebrew culture around the 9th Century, as it did historically. I gave the Karaite sect a head of religion: the Exilarch, and also one for the Samaritans: the Kohen Gadol (High Priest). I added events which only fire when a character restores the Jewish High Priesthood: The Sanhedrin restores the punishment of known murderers and adulterers. I added events where rabbis and other zealous Jews try to encourage other Jews to lose bad traits such as jealousy, pride, greed, and develop good traits instead. I added event chains where a Jew and a non-Jew discuss theology, and one of the two (possibly) develops sympathy for the other religion: A rare friendly interaction between Jews and non-Jews in the Medieval World. I added a decision for Jewish characters to observe the holiday of Yom Kippur with other vassals.

Of course, during all the event chains I mentioned (and the ones I did not), a wide variety of different outcomes might occur depending on the characters’ traits, your decisions and chance.

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

Cloaks, Daggers, and Dice

Thursday, March 16th, 2017

South by Southwest included a talk called Cloaks, Daggers, and Dice, which examined how the CIA uses games:

In “Collection,” Clopper’s first CIA game, teams of analysts work together to solve international crises against a ticking clock. His second title, “Collection Deck,” is a Pokémon-like card game in which where each card represents either an intelligence collection strategy or a hurdle like red tape or bureaucracy.

[...]

Also speaking on the panel was Volko Ruhnke, who is an intelligence educator at the CIA and a freelance game designer. Ruhnke said he is particularly interested in one type of game: a simulation tabletop game to train analysts and help with analytic tasks. It could help forecast complex situations by forcing players to handle multiple scenarios simultaneously.

Ruhnke himself created a commercial board game to simulate the Afghanistan conflict and walk players through military, political, and economic issues in the region. It gives players “a much more dynamic understanding of the issues of modern Afghanistan,” Ruhnke said, adding that a similar game could be of use internally at the CIA as well.

Volko Ruhnke is famous — in the wargaming community — for designing the card-driven wargames Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001–? and Wilderness War. He was also the original designer of GMT Games’ COIN series, which includes Cuba Libre, A Distant Plain, and Liberty or Death: American Insurrection.

Posted in Education, Games, Policy, War | No Comments »

How One Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer

Friday, November 4th, 2016

Charles Reep, the father of soccer analytics, made one big, glaring mistake that changed the course of English soccer for the worse:

More than 60 years before player-tracking cameras became all the rage in pro sports, Reep was mapping out primitive spatial data the old-fashioned way, by hand.

Poring over all the scraps of data he’d collected, Reep eventually came to a realization: Most goals in soccer come off of plays that were preceded by three passes or fewer. And in Reep’s mind, this basic truth of the game should dictate how teams play. The key to winning more matches seemed to be as simple as cutting down on your passing and possession time, and getting the ball downfield as quickly as possible instead. The long ball was Reep’s secret weapon.

“Not more than three passes,” Reep admonished during a 1993 interview with the BBC. “If a team tries to play football and keeps it down to not more than three passes, it will have a much higher chance of winning matches. Passing for the sake of passing can be disastrous.”

Did you spot the mistake?

Reep’s mistake was to fixate on the percentage of goals generated by passing sequences of various lengths. Instead, he should have flipped things around, focusing on the probability that a given sequence would produce a goal. Yes, a large proportion of goals are generated on short possessions, but soccer is also fundamentally a game of short possessions and frequent turnovers. If you account for how often each sequence length occurs during the flow of play, of course more goals are going to come off of smaller sequences — after all, they’re easily the most common type of sequence. But that doesn’t mean a small sequence has a higher probability of leading to a goal.

Posted in Games, Science | 2 Comments »

C-WAM

Thursday, October 20th, 2016

The Center for Army Analysis Wargaming Analysis Model, or C-WAM, combines an old-fashioned tabletop map — typically about five-feet long and four-feet wide — and pieces with a simple computer database — the Battle Tracker:

The 76-page C-WAM game manual, a copy of which was provided to GovTechWorks under the Freedom of Information Act, contains 27 dice-driven tables.

To keep the wargame playable but realistic, some aspects are simulated abstractly.

[...]

Dice tables adjudicate everything from weather to special forces strikes. But the aim is less about specific results than to prove whether or not a concept has merit. “We tell everybody: Don’t focus on the various tactical outcomes,” Mahoney says. “We know they are wrong. They are just approximations. But they are good enough to say that at the operational level, ‘This is a good idea. This might work. That is a bad idea. Don’t do that.’”

In other words, like any good military simulation, the goal is cognitive.

[...]

C-WAM was created about eight years [ago] as a solution to a problem: JICM requires a human analyst to create detailed plans for both friendly and enemy forces, which can be fed into the model for adjudication. But sometimes initial plans lacked the detail needed to engage JICM successfully. For example, a combatant command (COCOM) might submit a theater-level plan for evaluation, but leave out specifics, such as whether friendly or enemy forces will attack on the right or left flank, or whether the attacker or defender will emphasize maneuver or rely on artillery. That meant that analysts had to subjectively decide how the battle would be fought.

“Somebody would give an analyst a very high-level document, that says, ‘You’ve got three divisions, they’re attacking in this terrain, here’s the enemy. Go forth and do great things,’” Mahoney says. “But the analyst didn’t know what the campaign looked like, how the terrain might impact operations, how the enemy’s capabilities — or our own — might affect things, the flow of friendly forces into theater and so on.”

Analysts weren’t necessarily equipped to make those decisions.

That’s where CWAM comes in. The game allows military organizations to come up with multiple Courses of Action (COAs) or alternative plans, and then test those out on tabletop to help leaders develop a final battle plan incorporating the best of each COA. Only then is the plan submitted to JICM for a detailed analysis.

Posted in Games, War | 2 Comments »

A trend that has been puzzling economists

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016

Economist Erik Hurst is looking at how technology affects labor supply:

In my third summer project, I’m trying to understand the labor market and patterns in employment over the last 15 years in the US. Specifically, I’m interested in employment rates of young (in their twenties), non-college educated men. In prior work on changes in demand for low-skilled labor, the theory exists that as technology advances, both employment and wages fall due to decreased demand.

In this strand of my research, I’m almost flipping that theory on its head by asking if it is possible that technology can also affect labor supply. In our culture, where we are constantly connected to technology, activities like playing Xbox, browsing social media, and Snapchatting with friends raise the attractiveness of leisure time. And so it goes that if leisure time is more enjoyable, and as prices for these technologies continue to drop, people may be less willing to work at any given wage. This explanation may help us understand why we see steep declines in employment while wages remain steady — a trend that has been puzzling economists.

Right now, I’m gathering facts about the possible mechanisms at play, beginning with a hard look at time-use by young men with less than a four-year degree. In the 2000s, employment rates for this group dropped sharply — more than in any other group. We have determined that, in general, they are not going back to school or switching careers, so what are they doing with their time? The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week. This change marks a relatively major shift that makes me question its effect on their attachment to the labor market.

To answer that question, I researched what fraction of these unemployed gamers from 2000 were also idle the previous year. A staggering 22% — almost one quarter — of unemployed young men did not work the previous year either. These individuals are living with parents or relatives, and happiness surveys actually indicate that they are quite content compared to their peers, making it hard to argue that some sort of constraint, like they are miserable because they can’t find a job, is causing them to play video games. The obvious problem with this lifestyle occurs as they age and haven’t accumulated any skills or experience. As a 30- or 40-year old man getting married and needing to provide for a family, job options are extremely limited. This older group of lower-educated men seems to be much less happy than their cohorts.

I am currently working to document this phenomenon, but there is a real challenge in determining what the right policy response might be to address the underlying issues.

Posted in Economics, Games | 5 Comments »

How Hobby Games Introduce Coding Concepts

Friday, August 19th, 2016

Game-designer Jay Little explains how hobby games teach basic coding concepts:

For me, no other game influenced this more than Magic: The Gathering. I’m a firm believer that if you can play Magic: The Gathering (or just about any other collectible or living card game), you are well on your way to understanding coding and the logic behind it. Even if you never touched a lick of code — even if you never see the Matrix in all those ones and zeroes — you understand the basics. Enough to really cut down the learning curve for a number of visually-based drag-and-drop game design programs like Game Salad, Game Maker, or Stencyl.

Posted in Education, Games | No Comments »

You Merely Adopted Dungeons & Dragons

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016

Vox Day recently re-shared his Hugo 2016 ballot, where he listed the first draft of Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N book in the best related work category, and that caught my eye, because I’ve mentioned the original Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide‘s Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading before.

In fact, the last time I mentioned it, I cited Jeffro’s own post that he had just completed his survey of all the entries on the list.

It turns out he cited one line from my own post:

Modern fantasy writers have read a lot of modern fantasy. The early fantasy writers read history and legends.

Bane You Merely Adopted Dungeons

Posted in Games, Media | 1 Comment »

Computers — Threat or menace?

Sunday, May 29th, 2016

“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” Stewart Brand wrote in 1972, in Rolling Stone — which explains the context for what comes next:

That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers — Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.

The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That’s the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

[...]

The setting and decor at AI is Modern Mad Scientist – long hallways and cubicles and large windowless rooms, brutal fluoresccnt light, enormous machines humming and clattering, robots on wheels, scurrying arcane technicians. And, also, posters and announcements against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, computer print-out photos of girlfriends, a hallway-long banner SOLVING TODAY’S PROBLEMS TOMORROW and signs on every door in Tolkien’s elvish Fëanorian script – the director’s office is Imladris, the coffee room The Prancing Pony, the computer room Mordor. There’s a lot of hair on those technicians, and nobody seems to be telling them where to scurry.

[...]

I’m guessing that Alan Kay at Xerox Research Center (more on them shortly) has a line on it, defining the standard Computer Bum: “About as straight as you’d expect hotrodders to look. It’s that kind of fanaticism. A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship… They’re kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.”

The hackers are the technicians of this science — “It’s a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment.” They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion. Fanatics with a potent new toy. A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.

A young science travels where the young take it. The wiser computer research directors have learned that not trusting their young programmers with major responsibility can lead immediately to no research. AI is one of perhaps several dozen computer research centers that are flourishing with their young, some of them with no more formal education than they got at the local Free School. I’m talking to Les Earnest, the gent who went for beer. He’s tall, swarthy, has a black and white striped beard, looks like a Sufi athlete. He’s telling me about what else people build here besides refinements of Spacewar. There’s a speech recognition project. There’s the hand-eye project, in which the computer is learning to see and visually correct its robot functions. There’s work on symbolic computation and grammatical inference. Work with autistic children, ‘trying to get them to relate to computers first, and then later to people. This seems to be successful in part because many of these children think of themselves as machines. You can encourage them to interact in a game with the machine.”

I’ve written about that piece before, but it came up again because Rolling Stone itself is revisiting it:

Brand had something of a knack for staging epochal cultural happenings. In 1966, he co-produced the infamous Trips Festival with Ken Kesey. Thousands of hippies attended this three day event in San Francisco to listen to psychedelic rock and drink punch dosed with LSD.

[...]

Brand was equally tuned in to the technological revolution that was rocking the Bay Area at the time. “I discovered that drugs were less interesting than computers as a way to expand your consciousness,” he says.

In 1968, Brand helped the inventor Doug Engelbart orchestrate a presentation at a computer conference that has come to be known as The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart demonstrated video conferencing, the computer mouse, email, hypertext, word processing and a windows-based organizational structure. Basically, he predicted most of the elements of the modern personal computer and the modern workplace.

Posted in Games, Technology | No Comments »

Ecco the Dolphin

Saturday, May 21st, 2016

I never played Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin, but I’m not surprised that it would be linked to John C Lilly:

Lilly was once a renowned and respected American scientist, with a particular interest in marine biology and interspecies communication. In the early 1960s he was given funding by NASA to research whether it was possible to teach dolphins to speak. NASA’s logic was that if we could learn to communicate with dolphins, we would have a better understanding of how to converse with extra-terrestrials if they were to ever pop down for a visit.

Lilly flooded a house in the Caribbean so that dolphins could live as closely as possible with him and his team, amongst them Margaret Howe Lovatt, who apparently had sex with one of the animals. The experiment fizzled out as, unsurprisingly, nobody was able to get any of them to talk – although check out YouTube for one of his subjects attempting a pretty close “Hello Margaret”. Useful, if all aliens were called Margaret. Lilly lost funding for the project, moved away from traditional science and threw himself further and further into 1960s pseudo-mysticism and chemical experimentation.

Around 1971 Lilly was looking for a cure for his chronic migraines, and a friend suggested that ketamine could help get rid of them. Back then ketamine wasn’t a widely used drug, probably only used recreationally by a small group of dedicated trippers, quite unlike its status today as a popular party drug. When he was under the influence of a small dose of K, Lilly said that he felt the migraine being pushed out of his body and, miraculously, he never had one again. Encouraged by this, he developed a longstanding affection for the substance he dubbed “Vitamin K”, and started taking it regularly, gradually injecting it in higher doses.

Just shooting up ketamine on its own wasn’t enough for Lilly, though, and soon he was IV-ing it inside a sensory deprivation tank with the help of his friend, Dr Craig Enright. They thought that by using the tank external stimulation would be significantly reduced, giving a psychedelic or, in this case, a dissociative experience at a higher level of intensity. Neither appreciated that what they were doing was incredibly $#@!ing dangerous – tranquilising drugs and floating on water aren’t to be mixed under most circumstances, and sure enough Lilly’s wife, Antonietta, had to resuscitate him on one occasion where he nearly drowned. These experiments would form the foundation for Paddy Chayefsky’s 1978 novel Altered States, later adapted into a movie by director Ken Russell.

During his sessions, Lilly came to believe that he was being contacted by an organic extra-terrestrial entity called the Earth Coincidence Control Office – ECCO. This alien group was benevolent, omniscient and in control of all earthly matters. Except for when they weren’t quite so friendly, as at one point Lilly thought they’d made off with his penis.

The similarities between Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin and Lilly’s ketamine fantasies are undeniable. It’s almost like the game’s story is an amalgamation of his interest in dolphins and the wacky philosophy he spouted when returning to reality from his phenomenal K-hole trips.

Alongside ECCO, Lilly encountered another alien life force, which he called the Solid State Intelligence. Unlike the entities from ECCO, the SSI were spawned by a mechanical solar system, and their main aim was to ravage the earth and destroy mankind. It’s not unlike the much-documented cinematic battles between us fleshy creatures and advanced AI turned malevolent, and it’s no stretch to compare the SSI with Ecco’s Vortex enemies, those evil, dolphin-kidnapping, interstellar villains.

(Hat tip to Scott Alexander.)

Posted in Games, Media, Science | 1 Comment »

Can Boys Beat Girls in Reading?

Saturday, May 7th, 2016

Boys outscored girls on reading tests — when they were told the tests were a game:

The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls age 9 years old on average, from four third-grade classes at three schools. All classes received a silent reading test that required students to underline as many animal names as possible in three minutes from a list of 486 words (animal names comprised half the list). Two classes were told the test was an evaluation of their reading abilities, and two were told it was a new animal fishing game designed for a fun magazine.

In classes given reading evaluations, boys made an average of 33.3 correct answers compared with 43.3 by the girls. But when the tests were framed as animal games, boys’ average scores were significantly higher: 44.7 compared with 38.3 for the girls.

It looks like the boys’ performance improved and the girls’ performance declined when they said it was a game?

Posted in Education, Games | 1 Comment »

Wargaming in the Classroom: An Odyssey

Monday, April 25th, 2016

James Lacey designed the perfect course on the Peloponnesian War for his students at the Marine Corps War College — only to realize that no one learned or remembered much of anything. Then he completely redesigned the course to use wargaming in the classroom, and the results were amazing:

I selected Fran Diaz’s Polis: Fight for the Hegemony, because, unlike many games, it has a heavy economic and diplomatic element. After dividing the seminars into teams, I was able to run five simultaneous games.

The results were amazing.

As every team plotted their strategic “ends,” students soon realized that neither side had the resources — “means” — to do everything they wanted. Strategic decisions quickly became a matter of tradeoffs, as the competitors struggled to find the “ways” to secure sufficient “means” to achieve their objectives (“ends”). For the first time, students were able to examine the strategic options of the Peloponnesian War within the strictures that limited the actual participants in that struggle.

Remarkably, four of the five Athenian teams actually attacked Syracuse on Sicily’s east coast! As they were all aware that such a course had led to an Athenian disaster 2,500 years before, I queried them about their decision. Their replies were the same: Each had noted that the Persians were stirring, which meant there was a growing threat to Athens’ supply of wheat from the Black Sea. As there was an abundance of wheat near Syracuse, each Athenian team decided to secure it as a second food source (and simultaneously deny it to Sparta and its allies) in the event the wheat from the Black Sea was lost to them. Along the way, two of the teams secured Pylos so as to raise helot revolts that would damage the Spartan breadbasket. Two of the teams also ended revolts in Corcyra, which secured that island’s fleet for Athenian purposes, and had the practical effect of blockading Corinth. So, it turns out there were a number of good strategic reasons for Athens to attack Syracuse. Who knew? Certainly not any War College graduate over the past few decades.

All of these courses of action were thoroughly discussed by each team, as were Spartan counter moves. For the first time in my six years at the Marine Corps War College, I was convinced that the students actually understood the range of strategies and options Thucydides wrote about. In the following days, I was stopped dozens of times by students who wanted discuss other options they might have employed, and, even better, to compare their decisions to what actually happened. A number of students told me they were still thinking about various options and decisions weeks later. I assure you that no one even spent even a car ride home thinking about my Thucydides lectures.

[...]

For six or more hours at a sitting, classes remain focused on the strategic choices before them, as they try to best an enemy as quick-thinking and adaptive as they are. Every turn presents strategic options and dilemmas that have to be rapidly discussed and decided on. As there are never enough resources, time and again hard choices have to be made. Every war college administrator can wax eloquently about their school’s mission to enhance their students’ critical thinking skills. But they then subject those same students to a year of mind-numbing classroom seminars that rarely, if ever, allow them to practice those skills that each college claims as its raison d’etre. Well, wargaming, in addition to helping students comprehend the subject material, also allows them an unparalleled opportunity to repeatedly practice decisive critical thinking. Moreover, it does so in a way where the effects of both good and bad decisions are almost immediately apparent.

At the end of each wargame, students walked away with a new appreciation of the historical circumstances of the period and the events they had read about and discussed in class. And even though all wargames are an abstract of actual events, I am sure that no student exposed to historical gaming will ever again read about the Peloponnesian War without thinking about Sicily’s wheat, the crucial importance of holding the Isthmus of Corinth, or what could have been done with a bit more Persian silver in the coffers of one side or the other’s treasury.

Posted in Education, Games, War | 7 Comments »

Revitalizing Wargaming

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

We must revitalize wargaming to prepare for future wars, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Gen. Paul Selva argue:

Few historical periods match the dynamic technological disruption of the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, militaries the world over struggled to adapt to new inventions such as radar and sonar, as well as rapid improvements in wireless communications, mechanization, aviation, aircraft carriers, submarines, and a host of other militarily relevant technologies. Military planners and theorists intuitively understood that all these new technologies, systems, and advances would drive new ways of fighting, but they were forced to envision what future battlefields would look like with few clues to go by.

To help navigate through this period of disruptive change, the United States military made extensive use of analytical wargaming. Wargames were an inexpensive tool during a period of suppressed defense spending to help planners cope with the high degree of contemporary technological and operational uncertainty. They were used to explore a range of possible warfighting futures, generate innovative ideas, and consider how to integrate new technologies into doctrine, operations, and force structure. For example, faculty and students at the Naval War College integrated wargaming into their entire course of study, analyzing the then-novel concept of carrier task force operations, the role of submarines in scouting and raiding, and how to provide logistics support to fleet operations spread over the vast Pacific Ocean. Wargames in classrooms at Quantico helped the Marine Corps develop new concepts for amphibious warfare and conceive of new techniques for capturing advanced naval bases. Wargamers at the Army War College explored how to employ tanks and artillery on infantry-dominated battlefields and examined the logistical challenges of fighting a war far from American shores.

As valuable as they were, wargames were not in and of themselves sufficient to prompt organizational and operational change. As such, all of the services worked hard to test wargame results in fleet and field exercises. Exercises were used to verify game insights using systems at hand or with surrogates that represented desired advanced capabilities identified during game play. The observations and lessons learned in exercises were in turn fed back into new wargames, thus creating a cycle of creative ideas and innovation that generated requirements for new systems, suggested new operation concepts, and influenced force design.

Once the Second World War began, those warfighting communities that had pursued wargaming and exercises with vigor proved far better prepared for modern combat than those that did not. For example, of the three major warfighting communities in the Navy — naval aviation, surface warfare, and submarine — the naval aviation community carried out the most innovative pre-war experimentation and exercises. Although aircraft carriers were originally envisioned as operating in support of the fleet battle line, carrier aviators explored a wide range of futures, including independent carrier operations. As a result, the U.S. carrier force was ready on day one of the Pacific war, and within six months had inflicted a major, lasting defeat on the superior Japanese carrier force at the Battle of Midway. By contrast, pre-war wargames and exercises in the submarine community had emphasized rote doctrine using the submarine fleet as a scouting force for the main battle line, and policy strictures dampened any exploration of independent submarine operations. Unsurprisingly, then, the submarine community proved unprepared for the tactics, techniques, and procedures needed to execute unrestricted warfare on Japanese merchant shipping. Similarly, surface warfare wargames failed to anticipate long-range torpedoes or account for the Japanese emphasis on night surface action. As a consequence, they suffered badly in early clashes against a highly trained Japanese cruiser and destroyer force that excelled at night fighting and was armed with the deadly, long-range Long Lance torpedo.

Today, we are living in a time of rapid technological change and constrained defense spending, not unlike that of the inter-war years.

The story of how the Navy learned to learn to fight is fascinating, by the way.

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Blood, Dice, and Darkness

Monday, April 4th, 2016

Games Workshop started humbly, as three game-loving friends selling Go boards and backgammon sets from their London flat. Then their gaming fanzine Owl and Weasel founds its way across the Atlantic to Gary Gygax, who sent them a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. They became the European distributor — still from their London flat:

“We were desperate not to let Gygax know that we were running the company from our flat,” Livingstone said.

“But what we didn’t know at the time was that he was publishing Dungeons & Dragons from his flat as well. Both parties were assuming that the other was some big-time operation, but it was very much a fledgling industry at the time.”

Eventually their side-project, a miniature-making company called Citadel, became the main project, as the games they devised to sell those miniatures took off:

“Bryan told us: ‘We need a game to sell more toy soldiers, get on with it.’ He’s like that,” Priestley said.

“His role was very top-down. He only laid down a couple of paramaters. He told us the game had to have rules for every model the company made at the time, and that it could only use standard six-sided dice, because every kid had them in their Monopoly sets.

“Richard wrote the initial manuscript, and then I did a lot of the production and development work, so a lot of the game mechanics were down to Richard and I did a lot of the refinement and detail.”

Warhammer First Edition

The result of their efforts was Warhammer’s first edition. Published in 1983 as a set of nondescript black and white booklets, it included rules for manoeuvring and fighting with a variety of fantastical creatures and soldiers. But it came with none of the fictional background that’s now synonymous with the Warhammer brand. Instead it was marketed as a “dual system” allowing roleplay gaming groups to fight large battles as part of their ongoing campaigns.

After Warhammer, they created its science-fiction cousin, Warhammer 40,000 — which has a deeper origin story than I realized:

“We just plundered everything. Obviously Tolkien was a big influence, and in terms of 40K there’s a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dune in there. If you’ve read Dune, every chapter starts with a bit of an excerpt, and I rather enjoyed that, so I just copied the idea by putting little bits of pseudo fiction in.”

Other influences included the works of Robert Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft, but it was a much older source – the 17th century poet John Milton – who would provide the inspiration for the game’s greatest conflict.

In a reimagining of the epic poem Paradise Lost, which deals with an attempt to overthrow God by a faction of rebel angels, Warhammer 40,000 featured a cataclysmic schism within the forces of the Empire of Mankind. In an event known as the Horus Heresy, chapters of Space Marines – genetically engineered, fanatically religious super-soldiers – turned against their Emperor after falling prey to the influence of the Chaos Gods, the supreme antagonists of this dark future setting.

“The original idea for Chaos was Bryan Ansell’s,” Priestley said.

“He wrote a Warhammer supplement called Realms of Chaos where he came up with the gods and the demons. He produced this huge hand-written manuscript where he defined all of that, and I took what he’d written and developed it as a book.”

But Priestley’s idea of Chaos differed from Ansell’s, and in 40K he sought to expand on the concept.

“Bryan’s idea of Chaos was very much derived from [science fiction and fantasy author] Michael Moorcock,” he said. “I always thought it was a little too close for comfort, it looked like we were just copying.

“But I’d always had this sense of Chaos existing as described in Paradise Lost. I’d tried to bring elements of that into the background and gradually change it from a description of demons into a kind of force out of which came realities, a kind of literal primal chaos.

“Unless you’ve read Paradise Lost you don’t get it. The whole Horus Heresy is just a parody of the fall of Lucifer as described by Milton.”

Posted in Games | 2 Comments »

Is Shooting a Martial Art?

Wednesday, March 16th, 2016

“Do you consider shooting a martial art?” I asked Jocko (@jockowillink). “How has your firearms training been like or unlike martial arts training?” He answered, and it went something like this:

Shooting is absolutely a martial art, maybe not the way people picture martial arts nowadays, because we picture a guy in a gi doing karate, that’s the generic picture. But for me that’s not martial arts actually. For me martial art is the art of war, the individual warrior skills which it takes, and firearms are absolutely a martial art. Because it’s something that you train, something that you get good at, something you need to maintain your skill at. To me it’s another piece of the puzzle, another thing that you need to know how to do, just like tactics that go along with shooting are an important part of being a warrior, you need to know how to shoot.

The training is very similar in my mind to martial arts training, in that it takes repetition, you have to know what the basics are, you have to repeat those basics, then you get more advanced.

It’s about movement and getting efficient with your movement, you want to train very similar to the way you train mixed martial arts. And once you get all those mechanical skills down, then you want to train your mind around this skill, so that your mind knows how to utilize it when things are unexpected and when there’s chaos and mayhem going on.

(Thanks to our Slovenian guest for transcribing that.)

From there, Jocko tells a fun story about Nerf “lazer” tag and the importance of good tactical training.

Posted in Games, Martial Arts, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

League of Legends Prodigy

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016

ESPN looks at League of Legends prodigy Faker — a young pseudonymous Korean eSports “athlete” who has mastered the popular PC game:

When I ask the group why Faker is regarded as the best player in the world, MonteCristo, who goes by Monte, jumps in: “How would you grade a professional athlete? Like, what makes LeBron great?”

I rattle off a few words: athleticism, skill, decision-making.

“It’s the same. It’s exactly the same,” Susie says.

The League equivalent of athleticism is called mechanics, which refers to a player’s ability to use his mouse and keyboard to make swift movements, like dodging shots. In this respect, Monte says, Faker is peerless. He points me to a video of what is widely seen as the greatest play in League history, clipped from a 2013 game between SK Telecom and the KT Bullets. Faker is dueling another player, Ryu, and they’re both playing the same champion, a ninja named Zed. After a brief skirmish, Faker’s Zed appears about to die, so he darts away. Then, just when Ryu thinks he has the fight sewn up, Faker unleashes a startling set of moves, cutting down his opponent in a blinding flash. The audience goes nuts. “He used six different abilities in the span of two seconds,” Monte says.

Even more impressive, DoA adds, is the breadth of Faker’s champion pool, which makes it easier for him to adapt to new patches to the game — the “meta,” in eSports parlance. Because Riot upgrades League every few weeks, players live in perpetual fear of having their favorite champions’ skills diminished. Imagine if the NFL suddenly announced next year that rushing touchdowns were worth only five points, or if MLB expanded the strike zone for left-handed pitchers. Although the constantly changing meta keeps the game fresh, it can be agonizing for professionals. Some players never recover from an ill-timed patch.

That’s one of the reasons the average eSports career is so short. Professional players typically retire before their mid-20s; like figure skaters, they peak long before then. Older gamers must battle slowing reflexes and fatigue, as well as injuries to their necks and wrists. “As a male teenager, it’s easy to play video games for 16 hours,” Monte says.

Because many Korean players skip college, their career options after retiring are limited. “A lot of pro gamers don’t come from wealthy backgrounds,” Susie says. “A good number of them are doing this because they’re supporting their families.” Increasingly, she says, players realize they have limited time to capitalize on their skills, which is driving some of them to leave the country. Although most professional gamers in Korea earn five-digit salaries and a few elite players make over $100,000 (Monte says Faker probably makes more than twice that; SK Telecom declined to comment on his salary), Chinese teams boast massive war chests. One squad, Invictus Gaming, is owned by the son of Wang Jianlin, the richest man in mainland China. This winter, Invictus added four Korean players to its roster.

Pro players also make money by streaming, allowing fans to watch them practice while advertisements pop up. One retired player in China, Wei “Caomei” Han-Dong, has said he makes more than $800,000 a year streaming. Korean teams have begun to stream a little, but in general, “they think it’s inefficient,” says Lee “CloudTemplar” Hyun-woo, a retired-gamer-turned-caster. “In Korea, to make money you have to put up results.” Demand is out there, though. This February, a minor scandal flared up when a Twitch user started streaming Faker’s practice games without permission.

Posted in Business, Games | No Comments »

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