Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games | Hacker News Reader

Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games

if50.substack.com

114 pointsCTOSian32 comments

Our class played a crude kind of game like this for a marketing class once. You had to choose how much to spend each quarter. After one quarter I observed no declining marginal impact of hiring sales people, and a tiny, tiny boost in price from improving the product.

The next quarter my team released the shittiest product we could for the lowest price and spent 30x as much on salespeople as the next highest team.

We won by two orders of magnitude in terms of total net income. The next quarter, everyone tried to do the same thing to an even crazier extent, but there was a predetermined market size which we had already hit in Q2. So we scaled down drastically and everyone else ended up deep in the red paying spending X00 dollars in marketing to get a X0 gross margin on each customer.

In Q4 we were the only team that had enough money to field pretty much any salesmen so we did even better than Q2.

Greatly amusing.

I played a similar game in class, in our case we put a lot on both R&D and marketing, selling expensive high quality and well marketed products. We "won" the game but our teacher was not happy about the outcome and thought he would have to make some changes to the simulation. Mind you, it was only one or two years before seeing everyone buying Apple laptops :D

Played one of those in school (MarkStrat or something like that). The TA was unhappy because we were doing very well based in no small part on a large sales force. But we elected to do a fast follower strategy on a new product--but no one else really had the money to do upfront R&D so we were sort of "expected" to take the hit to make the simulation proceed as planned.

Lol

It was probably the same game. You’re saying the product was laptops right?

Probably Markstrat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markstrat).

My 1999 MBA class played it. I had no idea it was so widespread, since the author was one of the professors at my business school.

From the Wikipedia article, it was originally developed in 1974-77. Which makes it nearly 50 years old.

I'd be interested if anyone was aware of an open source equivalent to Markstrat.

I also played it in college, and eventually want to play against my kids when they reach high school.

The Beer Game

Discussed two weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302898

This article (and the concept of “business war games”) brought me back to one of the first computer games I ever played: Lemonade Stand on the Apple II.[1]

Sounds like Lemonade Stand was a simplified version of some of these games from the 50s.

40 years ago and I still remember the optimum price to charge for a drink ($0.11).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_Stand

Very fond memories of being a 3rd grader and playing a version of this on our classroom TRS-80. I'd get really excited when the weather turned "hot and dry' so I could jack the price and gouge my customers.

And how are you enjoying your current job at Ticketmaster? :-)

I also have fond memories of Lemonade Stand. I think it's one of the games that gave me an abiding love of simulations.

I vaguely remember playing a Flash(?)-based version of this in the early 00s.

>(Love how the upper management men are circling numbers and a competent operator is running the equipment.)

That's just how things were. Until the 1980s and the rise of personal computers, it was considered unnecessary for executives to know how to type, for example. Instead they would either write things out longhand or dictate to a secretary or typist who would do the actual typing.

Maybe, but for mainframes it is considered necessary for an operator to perform the data entry as they have been trained on the program use. People used to get certifications for this. Its hard to imagine putting an executive in from of a teletype and expect instant expertise. Garbage in. Garbage out.

These exercises are always half BS and half valuable insight that you can't even get from years of experience. It gets very hard to tell which is which though.

Simulationist approaches to games basically led us down the path to Holodeck-style VR as an envisioned end state.

And now that we're roughly "there" and hugely elaborated experiences like Star Citizen are being produced, it's become all too clear that these games mostly reflect our beliefs and biases back at us, except where they directly follow from outcomes of nature and mathematics.

Speedrunning is compelling in that it reveals that inner nature behind the set dressing; optimizing towards a goal produces more profound phenomena than designed-in thumb-on-the-scale behavior.

These were probably before most of our times, but I definitely played a lot of other text based games during the 90-00's. For example the classic ship trading game where you are buying/selling cannons, food, men etc. and fighting while traveling to different ports (there were may variations of this game type).

Also during the MUD era, I played a lot of actual MUD, then some Star Trek variations where you have a whole big crew piloting a ship, a Doom type arena shooter game, etc.

For a short time there were a lot of different text games coming out.

In the early 1980s one of the "killer apps" for the Apple ][ in schools was a text game (with occasional 40x40 lowres graphics) called "Lemonade Stand" (itself based on an earlier mainframe game) in which competing lemonade stands would make decisions on how much lemonade to make, what to charge for it, and how much to spend in advertising. We used to play it in class with one computer for the class and the class broken up into groups of 3 or 4 students who each ran a stand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_Stand

Played a internet flash version of this in a class 20 years or so later. Coolmathgames or something.

Found it. It has been updatrd since. https://www.coolmathgames.com/0-lemonade-stand

I'm working on a MUD myself https://github.com/DanteFalzone0/mudnix

Progress has stalled because of the demands of my day job but you can try out the latest (limited, pre-alpha) version of the game here: https://dantefalzone0.github.io/games/mudnix/

http://www.tradewars.com/default.html

Elite on the C64 was famous for its then outstanding vector graphics, but it actually was quite a good (space) ship trading game.

Utopia the online game was big for a while. Is still running but not a lot of people play it. You get a province in a country with random teammates and have to work together to expand, manage diplomacy with other countries, fight wars or decide when to surrender, vote for a ruler etc.

I still play BSD games, Slashem and Trek,

On the ship trading game, it was Taipei.

The fourth picture (with the numbers is enlightening).

So by that time, already, the top execs were looking the world through the lens of numbers.

The operational costs dwarf all other, but they're represented as one line out of 4...

I played one of these simulations in one of my Marketing Operations class, I think it was Markstrat.

It was quite fun and we because competitive about it.

I am interested in the business models behind the games. I did have a look some time ago, but couldn't really find anything.

I played something similar at uni, and have been interested since then.

I once had the idea that something like an erotic text-adventure could be a killer-app for AI powered NLP. Or at least it could produce hilarious results?

"AI Dungeon" is a machine-learning based text-adventure-adjacent thing, and I guess you could use it for erotic content if you really wanted. It's... not great at keeping a consistent world throughout the entire game, though, so it's kind of goofy and dream-like.

They are trash for IF. That's it. You would be better with Inform 7.

Our version was DrugWars on TI calculators.

Reminds me of the early stages of Universal Paperclips.

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