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Problem is that the author starts with a false premise. There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support. Turns out the author either does not know them, or they don't explicitly mention his prior work. Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations.

But maybe some of the developers of complex strategy games mentioned him during GDC or other conferences?

Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.

Yeah that's my take. He gives examples of his "genius" preceded by a cringey analogy to Neo seeing the matrix as code and then gives an example formula that's very trivial and the exposition is extremely shallow which suggests frankly that the author's thinking is also rather shallow. There's no hint of analysis, understanding, or useful insights to the real complexities that arise when trying to glue a bunch of disparate models together into a complex interacting system. Instead he gives us just a trivial application of very basic mathematics to design of a game. Guess what, I'd have done the exact same thing if I had been assigned to design a game and I'd venture to guess that half the people on this site would take a similar approach.

The idea itself is hardly as exceptional as the author wants it to be.

This whole thing to me sounds a bit like a textbook case of the author having spent his life as the smartest person in the room, but only because he's been in the wrong room his whole life. To use an analogy: I suspect he's not Mozart... He's a very decent musician or composer that's spent his life in a community college orchestra and never ventured out into the world to interact with people that can eat him for lunch.

Yeah, the whole article comes off as written for the author's ego first, and everyone else last. He presents these rudimentary equations while lamenting that he's just ahead of his time. I'm sorry, but 3 * A/B is not some mind-blowing model of geopolitical forces at play.

SimCity came out around this time and was inspired by the book Urban Dynamics, which contains complicated models based on systems of differential equations which feed into one-another. Considering that, the work referenced seems elementary, to the point of not even needing to be explained.

As it turns out, those complicated systems are the foundation of fun for an entire class of games. Most strategy games, from SimCity, Civilization, Factorio, or Off World Trading Company consist largely of balancing growth across various interlocking systems.

> Maybe one of the calculations that should be added to the model is that owners of computers in the 80's were a very different bunch from the people having computers today.

This is probably the answer! I was a little kid then, but my uncle played them and I remember that game and some others like it... they were all offshoots of war game board games.

People have moved on since, or maybe better put the market has grown and the number of people interested in nerdy strategy games has not.

Wargames are more popular than ever, and cover a wider variety of topics than before, but (from the perspective of the 80s, surprisingly) the focus has largely moved back to analog games.

The budget to make an analog game is considerably less, especially at "wargame quality". Selling 1k units at $30-70 of a unique system on a marginal topic is sustainable in a way that a digital version is not (and may never be; print-on-demand quality is improving, but the cost of cross-platform development and supporting digital distribution is rising). And the most interesting adversary in asymmetric, multiplayer, non-zero-sum situations often remains another human even given unlimited programmer and compute time.

Also, the field of wargame design is professionalizing, and the major clients with the "big" budgets (governments and NGOs) generally want dynamic, transparent, refereed games. Sometimes those have some digital support for the referee, but only for time or communication efficiency, not to increase the mathematical sophistication of the simulation. Think Excel spreadsheets, not SVMs.

> Games aren't scientific papers though, so they don't need citations.

I just imagined an alternate reality: What if they did? What if all software did? That'd be kind of interesting if development was more explictely collaborative in that way. I guess open source works like that to a degree but still not everything is documented. We've lost a lot of history in our piles of code. Maybe some day obsessive histotians will be digging through chat logs found on hard drives dug out of landfills. Imagine how incomplete that story would be.

The main thing I fear is that it would spark parent or other IP lawsuits. Admitting you based your successful game on someone else's ideas may make the other person's lawyers think they deserve a share of your profit.

I think a lot of IP law is hostile to that sort of free flow of ideas.

It's incredible how many people keep missing the man's point. Almost making it for him. His point is the gaming industry is still completely filled with mindless NPCs and simple boolean interactions. He calls out God of War in another article as an extreme disappointment.

The fact that everyone here is saying his ideas have continued, but keep naming the same two or three games made by only a couple gaming companies, in a niche genre proves how right he is. If you want any form of deep interactivity play a deep strategy game, anything else besides that in game design is still about as interactive as pacman.

His point is that after 35 years and literal orders of magnitude improvement in processing power, the average game is still modeled using incredibly simplistic logic and makes for empty interactions. And take a look at most any top selling game and it's true.

Your average squirrel in the park has more interesting behavior or interaction than most game characters. It's essentially just been "better graphics, bigger explosions" for three decades now. None of that precludes dynamic interactions.

He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software

The second link below gives a pretty good overview of his thoughts on interactivity and how to model human and system behavior. Lesson 7 (how to express ideas mathily) while simple, was mildly interesting. Some of the others are better, but are harder to read standalone, build on prior items.

Essentially it's a summarized course of how to model the essentials of human behavior in a system. Not ground breaking, but at the same time, way more advanced than anything you see in the vast majority of games.

If I were writing a simple game, I'd skim link 2 for ideas I could steal and easily apply to up he interest factor. You definitely could build some interesting mechanics with these ideas.

[1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/game-design/crawfords-laws...

[2] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/in...

[3] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-description-2018/ho...

Boolean interactions are piecewise functions as well. He seems to be arguing to use functions for modeling and considering the whole process or interactions between the functions but has not described an actual approach to doing so in this article. How is picking a set of booleans really all that functionally different from from drawing a surface over the intersection of all of his functions and just treating them as booleans on each surface of that hypercube?

I don't find it particularly groundbreaking to use a set of ad-hoc functions as interactions. He seems so focused on the idea of functions and complexity that he's missing much of the point of why people play games and solely focused on strategy games. In my opinion, a lot of the best games are the simplest games because I play them to take my mind off of other things. It's not about having a lot of complexity, it's about having interesting complexity.

This was written with such self-aggrandizement that it is not super enjoyable to read. It is easy to see why the ideas of someone who projects themselves as a genius is having trouble relating to people who may not believe him to be one. The usefulness of ideas seems to have some respect to how well they fit into the way other people want to use them. He's not focusing on how other people would use them but rather on how he wants them to be used. He seems to have missed the transition from systems-oriented design to human-oriented design.

He doesn't just reject the mainstream AAA titles like God of War though, but everything from heavy-physics-model IF like Hadean Lands to heavy-character-model IF like Blue Lacuna to consims like Europa Universalis to emotionally-driven immersive sims like Gone Home to... well, anything that isn't a verb selector triggering algorithmic character reactions.

I can't remember where I read it, but a critique of his work from... 5? years ago, was essentially "the dragon is already dead, but Crawford can't accept it because his sword didn't slay it." Generously, at some point he lost sight of the goal in favor of the tool. Less generously, he saw the holodeck, wanted specifically that, and came up with the tripartite dragon as the dog to wag.

> He's essentially arguing for Probabilistic Programming without using the term. And saying it should be at the heart of all games, no just deep strategy games. Actually a step further he says it should be at the heart of any interactive software

I haven't grasped this at all from the article but let's assume that's what he said.

In that case I think he's 100% wrong. Many games are fun precisely because they are clear cut and straightforward with no probabilities or randomness. Best competitive games avoid random components altogether.

You'd think after so many decades he'd have made some progress on the problem himself.

> There are as many games having complex geopolitical models underneath as the market can support.

Is this an appeal to the efficient market hypothesis, or do you have some actual evidence to support this statement?

There are many, such as a lot of Paradox games, Aurora 4X, and so on. Few are based on the present state of the world, though. That doesn't make it any less an issue of geopolitics.

It is true that there are several such games. The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear. The efficient market hypothesis is something of a pet peeve of mine, and so I try to call it out when it is erroneously used as support for, well, anything.

> The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear.

There are a lot of these games. And the techniques behind designing a "good" geo-political strategy game are very well understood by now. It's also a market that is cheap to develop for, because these games don't typically rely on expensive, cutting-edge art assets.

It's reasonable to assume that the market for these games is saturated, as mature, well understood, low capital investment markets tend to be.

I disagree with your assertion that it's well understood how to make a good geopolitical strategy game. Most of them struggle with scaling issues; they turn into micromanagement grinds once the scale of simulation gets large enough.

There's a lot left to be discovered in terms of what control schemes and other features result in a fun experience. I have ideas on how to make a better 4x game but I would rather make a PoC than give them away for free. :)

Fair enough, but I think we can agree that the techniques behind building a geopolitical strategy game that sells well is understood. The past three Civilization games have surpassed 5 million units each.

Paradox games has several games in the million+ club, and their games are insanely complicated niche games which take longer to learn than most AAA titles take to complete.

On the other end of the spectrum is Off World Trading Company. That game is the essence of great strategy distilled down into little more than the fundamentals.

I'm no economist, and I didn't want to imply efficient market. More of a guesswork: there are a lot of those games out, some successful, some failed. They usually require quite some involvement to play at good level so I suppose people don't really jump to a new game immediately. They take a ton of time to develop and if they were more popular, I'm quite sure there would be more of them. Contrast this with for example the RTS genre, which is practically extinct.

Ah, I agree with you, I didn't understand your objection, my bad. Did you read the paper that showed that the strong version of the EMH implies P=NP?

Haha, that's brilliant! I didn't see the article, do you have a link? I can visualize the core argument, that at a fundamental level the EMH is saying that optimization problems under constraints are a solved problem, and I'm curious what other details/formalism go into it.

Here is the article : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf

I misremembered, it's not just the strong form that is refuted, but the weak form as well!

Well said. The book Extreme Ownership has a slightly different take of what I think is basically the same idea. It opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about people above you in the organizational hierarchy and advocated taking ownership up the chain as well as down. Instead of asking yourself "why isn't my boss listening to me?", you should ask yourself how you are failing to communicate to your boss. Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time, but changing your ownership mentality is a tremendously empowering idea--especially when it goes in the opposite direction of traditionally perceived power vectors.

EO is great and has really changed how I interact with people.

> Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time

I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in your control all the time, but many times they are. How a person responds to situation is always in their control. The classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or team member.

Please be careful about the downsides of EO, which can be seen in the author's complicated legacy within the SEALS. The culture this produced when taken too far can be seen in the Ed Gallagher problem[0]. When things are decentralized, you have to make sure you can trust your people. When you can't, you end up with Gallagher, or LAPD Rampart scandal.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-edward-gall...

If you can't trust your people, then you have a big problem no matter what management style you use. I would argue EO has nothing to to do with it. In fact, if EO had been followed in this case, the subordinate operators would have put a stop to a crazy officer. What's described in that article is the opposite of subordinates being empowered.

Also, AFAIK, Jocko have never addressed the issue you linked. It might be because he simply doesn't know enough to comment. He left the military in 2010 and this incident happened in 2017. Do you have anything to attach him or EO directly to it?

The author wrote follow-up book called The Dichotomy of Leadership specifically to address the problem of people taking EO too far in one direction. But like my sibling comment mentions, I don't think you should blame the Gallagher problem on EO without clear evidence connecting the two. And even if you do, the follow-up book is there to clarify.

Not to sound like a Jocko fanboy because I think he does have his faults like anyone, but he addresses similar situations in his podcast while reviewing books like The Rape of Nanking, No Ordinary Men, and talking about the My Lai massacre. In all of those situations, EO would would have led the soldiers involved to question leadership and put a stop to what was happening. Giving up control and just 'following orders' was what in part, led to these horrific acts.

> I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault has so many negative connotations.

Excellent point. I completely agree. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.

Never read the book, but this is the well-published psychological factor known as locus of control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

You should probably try to give credit for the idea where credit is due.

By the way, this is an important part of the growth of junior engineers into senior engineers. I've noticed junior engineers tend to identify obstacles as blockers. When asked about progress or estimates, they just talk about the blockers. Completely out of their control. Senior engineers find workarounds, solutions, alternatives.

They are giving credit where credit is due, to the person who made that concept real to them. It is literally impossible to find the original source of every good idea a person has implemented, much less heard. You should probably stop telling people what to do and appreciate alternate routes to arrive at good ideas.

Love your comment on junior vs. senior engineers. Very insightful!

> When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine?

I've made dozens of languages and studied thousands more.

One easy tip: show ~10 lines of code near the top of the page, above the fold.

Without that, you'll probably never get a critical mass of discerning critics to care, because they're too busy.

I'm very interested in your lang, both because I like langs and like creating board games, but gave up b/c I couldnt find code.

Yes, I completely agree. I've seen so many cool ideas out there that are largely a failure of "marketing", which is basically the fist few lines of the README.md.

I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.

Will do, I have a large task on my hand, and I appreciate the feedback. I'll definitely do that both on the github and main site.

For programming languages I can't upvote this enough! History and motivation and features and all that are interesting if I decide to learn about the language, but to decide whether I want to learn about it, it's really all about seeing a code sample that inspires me.

> It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to bring them forth.

This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion, and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an independent researcher.

I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking over the world with his vision, there were down days too where he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.

I often feel like people formulate the problem wrong. It's not that "your idea was great but only 5% of good ideas work out" but I believe it's more "your idea was almost great but only 5% of ideas are actually great". I feel like it's less about needing luck for a great idea to work out and more about needing more luck to have a better idea. Often times these almost-geniouses are technically talented or creative but lack empathy or social intelligence to see the whole picture. You or your team need to be the whole package to be able to see a problem from all possible angles.

Well said! Communication is a two-way street. Effective communication is the hardest problem I'm aware of and there is no universal solution.

Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your thing.

> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.

I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're already damning yourself.

From Faust:

  Take children's, monkeys' gaze admiring,
  If such your taste, and be content;
  But ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring,
  Save your own heart is eloquent!

I am also interested in languages to model board games, and I think your biggest mistake might be in relying too heavily on imperative programming models for a domain that doesn't require them.

Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/12669/1251...).

Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly prototype games, with the most approachable version probably being PuzzleScript.

I look at the imperative programming model as the escape hatch, and I'm focusing first on data. My next step is to build UIs and look into AI.

For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar Galactica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games, and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of rules.

So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer on top of it.

The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to have results sometime this year with my silly approach.

Communication takes effort from both sides. Every rule or tip should really be considered in 2 fold. Like so: Of course, if the goal is to explain an idea, you shouldn't present yourself as the genius you so clearly are in your own opinion. At the same time you should never dismiss an idea for its lack of proper presentation. The later is a much more frequent mistake. One should judge an idea for what it is. One should actively suppress ones intention to praise an idea for who presented it or how it was presented. If you do something like: This persons expertise is worth 1000 points therefore his ideas are worth 1000 points it begs to question how the person got to 1000 points as you've eliminated the mechanism that should have rated him. IOW if someone came up with a fantastic idea it means you should examine his other ideas but do so as objectively as you would the village idiots.

> However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.

Ego may be in the way, but this is a rather missed take. Obviously the author was focusing on his idea, rather than getting people calling him genius.

>However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.

Sounds about right, genius is about serving. It's a weird status to have.

Just replied to let you know that you have an amazing take on the matter.

The author is evaluating other games and determining that they don't live up to his standards. One possibility is that the author is the best at what he does, as he believes. Another is that the author is not competent to judge the complexity of these other games. A chess grandmaster may view the board and know the inevitability of mate in three, while a normal human might see the same board as favoring the eventual loser, based on some simplistic understanding of piece strength. Whole thing seems a bit Dunning-Kruger-ish.

Crawford comes across to me as an eccentric artist, not a game designer, and with the accompanying ego. This has helped the industry, such as when creating (C)GDC. But, like many artists, he has strong opinions on what qualifies. I personally don't enjoy games that are "games as art", but I respect their place. Crawford doesn't seem to view "games as games" with such respect.

I had a quick look around and I liked your website on Adama.

I'm just getting my teeth into web programming but your interest fits in with what I'm looking at (its very early days so can't say more).

Thanks for sharing