games – Renaissance Guy

The Paradox Model

Editing note: I started this draft several weeks ago. I’m not happy with it, but given the choice between publishing it and delaying again during finals, I went with the former.

In the past few years, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of Paradox grand strategy games. Specifically, I started with Cities: Skylines before making the jump to Hearts of Iron IV. Following that, I was successfully converted to Stellaris. I haven’t touched the Victoria, Europa Universalis, or Crusader Kings franchises, but sometimes I think it might be awesome to try out the fabled mega-campaign, an undertaking to lead a single country from the earliest dates in Paradox Danes through to the conquest of the galaxy in Stellaris.

But I don’t want to talk about the actual games that Paradox makes. I want to talk about how they make them. Specifically, I want to talk about their funding model. Because Paradox makes really big games. More than the campaigns or the stories are the enormous systems with countless moving part, which, when they gel together properly, serve to create an intricate and finely tuned whole, which seems like a self-consistent world. At their best, the systems paradox builds feel like stepping into a real campaign, constrained not by mechanics themselves, but by the limits of what you can dream, build, and execute within them. They don’t always hit their mark, and when they miss they can fall into incomprehensible layers of useless depth. But when they work, they’re a true experience, beyond mere game.

The problem, besides the toll this takes on any device short of a supercomputer, is that building something with that many moving parts is a technical feat. Getting them to keep working is a marvel. And keeping them updated, adding new bits and pieces to deal with exploits as players find them, making sure that every possible decision by the player is acknowledged and reflected in the story of the world they create, adding story to stop the complexity from breeding apathy, is impossible, at least in the frame of a conventional video game. A game so big will only ever have so many people playing it, so the constant patches required to keep it working can’t be sustained merely by sales.

You could charge people for patches. But that’s kind of questionable if you’re charging people to repair something you sold them. Even if you could fend off legal challenges for forcing players to pay for potential security related fixes, that kind of breaks the implicit pact between player and publisher. You could charge a monthly flat fee, but besides making it a lot harder to justify any upfront costs that puts more pressure to keep pushing out new things to give players a reason to stick around, rather than taking time to work on bigger improvements. Additionally, I’m not convinced the same number of people would shell out a monthly fee for a grand strategy game. You could charge a heck of a lot more upfront. But good luck convincing anyone to fork over four hundred dollars for a game, let alone enough people often enough to keep a full time development team employed.

What Paradox does instead of either of these is sell their games at a steep, but not unseen by industry standards, price, and then release a new DLC, or Downloadable Content package, every so often that expends the game for an additional price. The new DLC adds new approaches and mechanics to play around with, while Paradox releases a free update to everyone with bug fixes and some modest improvements. The effect is a steady stream of income for the developers, at a cost that most players can afford. Those that can’t can wait for a sale, or continue to play their existing version of the game without the fleshed out features.

I can’t decide myself whether I’m a fan of this setup. On the one hand, I don’t like the feeling of having to continue to pay to get the full experience of a game I’ve already purchased, especially since in many cases, the particulars of the free updates mostly serve to make changes to enable the paid features. I don’t like having the full experience one day, and then updating my game to find it now incomplete. And the messaging from Paradox on this point is mixed. It seems like paradox wants to have a membership system but doesn’t want to admit it, and this rubs me the wrong way.

On the other hand, with the amount of work they put into these systems, they do need to make their money back. And while the current system may not be good, it is perhaps the best it can be given the inevitable of market forces. Giving players the option to keep playing the game they have without paying for new features they may not want through a paid membership is a good thing. I can accept and even approve of game expansions, even those which alter core mechanics. It helps that I can afford to keep pace with the constant rollout of new items to purchase.

So is Paradox’s model really a series of expansions, or a membership system in disguise? If it’s a membership system, then they really need to do something about all the old DLCs creating a cost barrier for new players. If my friend gets the base game in a bundle, for instance, it’s ridiculous that, for us to play multiplayer, he either has to shell out close to the original price again for DLCs, or I have to disable all the mechanics I’ve grown used to. If Paradox wants to continue charging for fixing bugs and balancing mechanics, they need to integrate old DLCs into base games, or at the very least, give a substantial discount to let new players catch up for multiplayer without having to fork over hundreds of dollars upfront.

On the other hand if Paradox’s model is in fact an endless march of expansions, then, well, they need to make their expansions better. If Paradox’s official line is that every DLC is completely optional to enjoying the game (ha!), then the DLC themselves need to do more to justify their price tag. To pick on the latest Hearts of Iron IV DLC, Man the Guns: being able to customize my destroyers to turn the whole Atlantic into an impassible minefield, or turning capital ships into floating fortresses capable of smashing enemy ships while also providing air and artillery support for my amphibious tanks, or having Edward VIII show the peasants what happens when you try to tell the King whom he can marry, is all very well and good, I don’t know that it justifies paying $20.

The Business Plot

For about a year now I’ve been sitting on a business idea. It’s not, like, the kind of business idea that makes anyone rich. On the sliding scale from lemonade stand to Amazon, this is much closer to the former. I think it will probably turn a profit, but I have no illusions about striking it rich and launching myself onto the pages of Forbes. Looking at the numbers realistically, I will be pleasantly surprised if I can make enough money to keep myself above the poverty line. It’s cliche, but I’m really not in it for the money, I’m in it for the thing.

My idea is for a board game, and it’s a game that I think is interesting to a wide range of people, and also deserves to be made, or at least attempted. I’m not going to share too many details, because if spending high school economics class watching clips of Shark Tank posted to YouTube has taught me anything, it’s that you don’t show your idea off until you have the legal grounds to sue any copycats into oblivion.

The obvious question of why I don’t sign it to a board game publisher has a complicated answer that relies on context that I don’t want to share at this time. But the long and short of it is that, if I’m doing this, it’s a project that I’m pursuing for personal reasons, and based on what I’ve heard from people who have gone through game publishing, they’re reasons I have cause to fear a publisher won’t respect, or might try to renege on. And besides that, there’s a part of me that’s tickled by the idea of being an entrepreneur and not having to answer to anyone (except, you know, manufacturers, contractors, accountants, taxes, regulators, and of course, consumers).

So I have the idea. I have a vague idea of what my end goals and expectations are, and some notion of the path towards them. Whether or not I’m “committed” in the sense that the guides say you need to be to be an entrepreneur, it’s an idea that I’d like to see exist, and I’m willing to throw what money and time I can spare at it. If there was any job that could ever motivate me to wake up early, this project would be one of them. The people I’ve talked to about this privately have told me it’s a good idea, including a business professor who, upon hearing my pitch, immediately endorsed it and tried to convert me to take her class. I think there’s something here.

And that’s about where I got stuck. I managed to make a prototype last summer, shortly after the idea popped into my head, and I’ve been play-testing and reviewing the rules a bit, but this is just circling the problem, and I know it. My next step is that I need to move forward on iterating the prototype towards a sellable product, and on looking into getting some cursory idea of costs. In practice this means getting quotes from manufacturers, which means I need some kind of email account and web presence.

Theoretically, I could throw up a Gmail account and launch that process off today (well, not today; I have homework, but basically any time). But conducting such business under my own name, or even under an arbitrary trade name is both murky for tax purposes, and depending on whom you consult, somewhat legally risky, since it puts all the liability squarely on your head. It’s also less clean than setting up a proper web platform with a fancy custom URL and a logo to handle everything centrally. It’s the same reason I have a patreon already set up for this blog- even if I’m not raking in the big bucks today, I’d rather be prepared for that day with the proper infrastructure than have to scramble if I suddenly go viral.

But setting up a website and branding materials effectively demands that I have, at the very least, an established brand name that can be trademarked. And doing that requires that I have the relevant paperwork filed to incorporate a business. It’s something of a point of no return, or at least a point past which returning becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. To this end I have spent quite a few free hours perusing the available information on starting up a startup and building a business. And let me just say, for as much talk that’s made about making life easy for small businesspeople, and lip service paid encouraging entrepreneurship, I expected it to be a heck of a lot more straightforward. Even the Small Business Administration, whose entire mandate is to make starting new businesses as painless as possible, is a convoluted and self-contradictory mess.

The problem isn’t so much a lack of available information as a lack of concrete information I can act upon. The website can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be written for laypeople or lawyers, and in failing to pick a side is decipherable to both. Most government websites are difficult to navigate, but I would’ve expected an agency whose sole job is to make life easier would be less egregious.

But it’s not that I can’t find a form to fill out. Again, I could always pick a name and a business structure out of a hat and plow forward. The differences between a partnership and an LLC at the size I’m looking at, while not irrelevant, are perhaps less of the deciding factor that they’re made out to be. The problem is figuring out a way to start this project that lets me keep my dependent status and hence my health insurance. Because while I’m willing to throw time and money and endure paperwork for this idea, I’m not willing to go without life support. Or rather, I’m not able to go without life support.

I think there’s a loophole that lets me have my cake, and also not die an agonizing death. But I’m not an expert on this field, and this isn’t a risk I want to take. If it’s a question between starting a business that I earnestly believe will change the world for the better, if only incrementally, and getting my life support, I’m going to pick the latter. This is really frustrating. I mean, I’m still head and shoulders above the people that have to pick between medicine and food, but choosing between medicine and chasing an opportunity is grating.

But what really gets me is the fact that this isn’t a problem in other countries, because other countries have guaranteed healthcare, so that potential entrepreneurs can try their hand without risking their lives. Many of these countries also have free education, transport infrastructure, and in some cases free government advisors for new businesses, all of which lower entry barriers for startups. But in the land of the free markets, we apparently hate entrepreneurs.

I digress. The point is, I’ve hit an entirely political roadblock, and it’s extremely discouraging. I haven’t set this project aside yet, because despite everything I still believe in it. Part of the reason I’m writing this is to remind myself of the excitement I feel to see this through. My hope is that I’ll be able to make some progress on this before summer. But we’ll see what’s possible for an entrepreneur in this allegedly business friendly country.

God Save America

So, something happened this last weekend. I was playing Kaiserreich for Hearts of Iron IV. I’ve talked about Hearts of Iron a bit here already, but to quickly recap: Hearts of Iron IV is a grand strategy WWII game. You lead a country through history starting in 1936, with full control from the largest policy decisions down to the individual fighter. It’s the kind of game you imagine army cadets using to test strategies… if the AI were a bit more competent and the game rules a little harder to exploit based on the number-crunching nature of it.

Anyways, one of the few major flaws about the game is that there are only so many variations of WWII that you can really play through before you start to tire of storming beaches in France and encircling spearheads in Russia. Fortunately, the game is easily moddable, and there is a core community of enthusiasts who work tirelessly, dreaming up new abilities, rules, units, technologies, and alternative histories. One of the great products of this community is Kaiserreich: The Legacy of Weltkrieg.

The basic premise of Kaiserreich is simple: what if Germany won the First World War? This simple thought experiment has given birth to a project which is, in some ways more expansive in content and lore than the game in its off the shelf state. Every country is impacted by the changes of a German victory, and no detail is too small for this group. It is evident that this is a labor of love, with untold thousands of hours invested in crafting unique politics and identities for each new country. But the real triumph of Kaiserreich is the variability: Whereas the base game is inherently limited by its mooring to real history, in Kaiserreich, almost anything is possible.

The way the game proceeds is not totally random, but it is variable, and it can hinge on the smallest of things. For instance, rumblings in the Ecuadorian export sector can cause economic ripples in North America which delay the arms shipments which prove decisive to Imperial Germany’s defense of Elsaß-Loringen from the Commune of France. As a result, a good player is always watching the news headlines, of which there are plenty written into the game, to sense potential sea changes before they happen.

Of particular interest is the Second American Civil War, which is not actually inevitable, even in this timeline where the US lacks the post-WWI consensus, and the fall of Britain and France make liberal democracy seem like it is on the way out. The civil war can be avoided, but it is rare to see the AI achieve this if you are playing another country. As a result, the first several months are spent helplessly reading news events, as the United States seizes and spams towards violent collapse.

And there are plenty of events to read about. From the Battle of the Overpass, in which United Auto Workers clash with Ford security, to the infamously racist broadcasts of Charles Coughlin in support of demagogues like Huey Long and William Dudley Pelley, there are no shortage of canaries in the coal mine. The civil war may not be inevitable, but it does not come out of nowhere.

For a moment on Saturday, I thought I was reading the wrong screen. Someone had posted a BBC article about a shooting in a synagogue in New York. My brain took in the information: a politically motivated terror attack, followed by a response from the president that fell somewhere between ineffectual and inflammatory, meaning that within a few hours this terrorist act had become just another geographical feature in the political landscape. Instead of inspiring pause and sober reflection, a blatant act of political violence became just another thing that happened.

It took me a moment to realize that I was reading from the BBC, and not the in-game story. For a split second my brain had categorized this attack as happening in the game, because obviously this was a sign of a country in a deep political crisis bound for violent dissolution. And for that split second, I was content in the knowledge that even if it was a particularly realistic interpretation of alternative history, it could never happen here, in today’s America. I could enjoy the game because I don’t have to deal with it. But no. This is not a game. The people killed in the synagogues of Philadelphia, and the churches of Charleston, and on the streets of Charlottesville are not mere pixels, but people.

It is true that it is easy to make prophecies of doom, to claim that the end is nigh and the fall of the republic is imminent. And it is also true that plenty have made such forecasts before, some under circumstances which seemed far more dire, and have always been wrong so far. The trouble with extrapolating from bad events is that there’s a difference between a cluster of bad results, and symptoms of a doomed system. The former is troubling, but fails to take account of the enormous collective effort required to overcome the inertia of stability.

What concerns me so deeply about reading about this latest shooting is not the event itself, but how easily my mind mistook it for part of the story of how the US fell apart. What concerns me is that we might already be on that path, and it will be impossible to know unless we learn it too late. If we are, then it means that urgent and energetic action is needed to restore norms to our society and political system. It is not yet too late, but it means we may no longer be complacent.

It is no longer enough to complain idly to friends when we see others degrading the democratic norms and principles that this country great. I include myself in this statement. The earlier we commit, the better the chances are that we will be able to overcome the present impasse with a minimum lasting collateral damage. And if this alarm turns out to be the momentary reaction to passing circumstances, then this commitment will not be in vain. For our investment in this great democracy will serve as an investment in the future of our society.

Of note; the single event in Kaiserreich which has the largest impact on whether the United States lives or dies, isn’t Huey Long’s paramilitaries, or Jack Reed’s strikes, nor the machinations of MacArthur and his stratocrats. The thing that decided the fate of America more than anything else is the results of the 1936 election. All the efforts of those larger than life figures are moot if the election swings the other way. The election itself isn’t enough to singlehandedly avert the civil war, but if the American voters don’t do their part and vote, it becomes only a matter of time until thins collapse.

So for the love of god and country, if you’re eligible, go and vote. Get involved. Whether you believe things are headed for trouble or not, whether or not you agree with me, take part in democracy.

Hearts of Iron Review

Since finally caving in and buying Hearts of Iron 4, I have been quite enthralled with it. That is, until our house’s main computer decided to stop responding to inputs from the keyboards or mice. Near as anyone can tell, the computer is fine, but without it can’t do anything. Left without my game, I have felt compelled to contemplate on what I like and don’t about it. Hence, this review.

For all of the complaints that Hearts of Iron 4 has a steep learning curve, I managed to get a (very basic) handle on the mechanics after only a few hours. Admittedly some of this might be because I have experience in other games, like Age of Empires, or because I’ve seen videos from YouTubers who play the game competently. Also I am what most people would call a history buff, meaning I can tell you not only what the Manhattan Project was, but what the Office of Strategic Services did, what Liberty Ships were, and why the United States was almost unbeatable by 1942, especially combined with other allies; but by the same coin, had to put in extra effort to put their finger on the scales in Europe and Asia.

Needless to say, I played my first game of the United States. Or rather, I started as the United States, but quickly got bored of simply waiting for things to happen while the American people couldn’t be bothered for anything because of the ongoing Great Depression. Democracies, in this game, have all sorts of limitations that limit their early game potential and make them merely reactive. So instead of just sitting and waiting for stuff to happen, in my timeline, by early 1939, revolution was sweeping through the United States. The newly-instated Communist States of America rapidly began rearming the country, preparing to spread the revolution across the continent. Despite lofty promises, the military campaign to liberate the Mexican proletariat proved decidedly more difficult in practice, and the planned encirclement of the Mexican Army failed spectacularly. American forces, who in many places were still equipped with outdated WWI equipment, were forced back into Texas.

The Communist States eventually won the war through sheer numbers, securing Mexican industry and manpower for the Comintern. The CSA continued pushing through Guatemala and Honduras, only stopping at the Panama Canal. Plans to invade Canada in a similar fashion were drawn up, but quickly shelved as Nazi Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazi advance was quickly blunted by American air power, and American lend-lease weapons. Nevertheless the eastern front quickly devolved into a stalemate of back and forth while Soviet troops stalled for time as their American comrades worked their way from their ports in Siberia.

The war quickly became one of attrition, and in this, it was colossally one-sided. Whatever the Nazis threw at the meat grinder, the Comintern would match them for. An abortive attempt was made to open up a second front just northwest of the Dutch border, but though the landing went well, and early progress was made, in the excitement and confusion, the landings were never reinforced, and were quickly driven back. The divisions that died in the landing did not die in vain, however. For the distraction in the west gave the Comintern the opening they had needed to begin the march to Berlin.

For some inexplicable reason, Spain under Franco, and Japan, took this moment to throw their lot in with the beleaguered Axis. Perhaps they feared a Europe dominated by the Comintern, and knew that their chances of victory would only grow more slim with each passing day. Perhaps the AI in Hearts of Iron doesn’t understand self-preservation. This needn’t have mattered, except that it was at this point that I learnt a very important lesson about checking whether countries had joined a faction between the time I started preparing an invasion and when I declared war. Apparently Iceland, which I had been planning to use as a new naval base, was now part of the Allies, and in declaring admittedly frivolous war on them, I brought the Allies into the war against the Comintern.

Of course, Comrade Bowder had never really trusted the British anyways. In fact, about half the army was stationed on the Canadian border. In stark contrast to Mexico, the Canadian campaign was a cakewalk. American motorized forces raced around the northern tundra, encircling the confused home guard divisions, who were expecting a mock German invasion as part of Canada’s “If Day” campaign, not a real American one. These triumphs in the north were tempered by news from Western Europe, where advancing American forces, hot on the heels of the remnants of the Reich, suddenly found themselves cut off by the very countries they had been liberating. The European Front became a massacre.

By late 1943, the war had settled in to something of a stalemate, with the Comintern controlling Europe north of the alps and east of the Rhine. In Asia, Mongolia and Manchuria changed hands almost monthly. The Americans kept up a mixed success rate in attempting to seize nearby British possessions by amphibious landings. American ports churned out endless fleets of screen vessels with the occasional capital ship, attempting to keep the routes to its trade partners open. In an attempt to break the stalemate, many of the Canadian provinces were put to work on producing nuclear materials. The first Atomic Bomb was dropped in early 1944 on a small town in the Netherlands where the fighting had devolved into a bitter stalemate. Comintern forces did achieve their breakthrough, but the destruction of major infrastructure prevented the breakthrough from being exploited. Over the coming weeks, dozens more bombs would be used by the Communist States of America across various fronts.

The main bottleneck to my winning was, at this point, production. I had more than six million men ready to be drafted, but nothing to arm them with. I could barely supply the troops I had (insert communism joke here). The bottleneck to production was resources. I lacked access to adequate Tungsten, Chromium, and above all, Rubber. Declaring war on the allies, while it had given me access to Canada’s factories, had cut off my main sources of all three. This problem only got worse when my main trading partner, the Soviet Union, closed their economy to outside trade to fuel their own war machine.

And then I read online that, actually, I could just make more rubber. I could synthesize it, if I built synthetic refineries. Which I hadn’t, because I had gotten it in my head (somewhere) that refineries were for oil, so I hadn’t even researched the technology. I also didn’t have building slots to spare at this point.

I wanted to argue a bit against the notion popular in reviews that Hearts of Iron has a steep learning curve, because that’s not quite accurate. I actually found most of the controls themselves intuitive enough. The game even does a decent enough job of notifying you when things are going wrong, at least as far as proximal causes go. Where the game has trouble is in tracing these proximal causes back to bottlenecks that can be fixed. For example:

Your invasion… err, liberation… of the United Kingdom has stalled. You know this because your troops are still in marshaling areas at Norfolk instead of London. Okay. You go to find the commander of that task force to give a talking to, and he says he called it off. Why? Because he’s concerned the mid-Atlantic isn’t fully under our control. Why isn’t the Atlantic an American Lake? Because the fleet you assigned there decided to head back to port. Because its ships got dented by those pesky British subs. It’ll be done repairing… soon…ish. So you look to deploy more ships, only to find your shipyards have also been taking a break. Because you lack Chromium. And good luck finding more. Because the only country that has Chromium that’s not at war is Sweden. And Sweden hasn’t delivered. Why? Because there’s an ocean in the way. An ocean filled with British subs. The ones that you need your navy to beat. Your navy that needs Chromium.

Even though the story here is relatively straightforward, every sentence here is buried on a different tab. Once you’ve figured out that it’s a shipping problem in Sweden, and everything trickles down from there, it’s relatively straightforward to come up with a solution (most of them involve invading Norway). But figuring out the issues is, sometimes literally, half the battle.

This problem is somewhat exacerbated by the pace of the game. Hearts of Iron measures in-game time in hours. This is fair enough when tearing through undefended countryside in a motorized division, but gets a little slow during the moments in between, or even along a static front. Of course, part of this may be due to my computer, which, while it meets the minimum specifications (or used to when it still worked), isn’t new by any stretch. The time on my computer doesn’t seem to pass as quickly as it does on videos of other people playing.

Computer issues aside, the game still involves a lot of waiting. You have to wait for factories to be built, for materiel to be produced, for troops to be trained and marshaled, for fleets to be assembled, etcetera. Even on a fast computer, this takes hours, if not days (real time). Hearts of Iron alternates between short, staccato bursts of activity, in which you scramble to give orders to all of your divisions at once, and long periods of buildup and regrouping. You can speed up and slow down time, but in my experience this still isn’t fast enough to power through the slow bits. Indeed, I have played almost the whole game at maximum speed, and in many places it still felt too slow.

In 1944, the Comintern navies finally got the upper hand in the battle for the Atlantic, paving the way for the American invasion of the United Kingdom. Supported by liberal use of nuclear weapons across the European continent, American forces moved from Plymouth towards London. As American motorized forces raced north to secure Scotland and jump into Northern Ireland, the remaining British forces desperately shifted their forces across the Channel, abandoning continental Europe to defend the holdouts in Dover. British forces held firm, but were overrun, as were the remaining western enclaves in France and the Low Countries. By 1946, the Americans had used their nuclear arsenal to force an encirclement, trapping most of the Spanish frontline and what remained of Vichy France, and causing the last major power in Europe to capitulate. The bitter mountain campaign continued, but this was a mere distraction for the Comintern.

The remaining exiled British forces fought on in India, but as American forces arrived in greater number, the front slowly inched closer to the last major allied capital. In the Far East, Atomic bombs rained down on Japan, shattering any pretense of industry. Still, having yet to lose ground in battle, the sole Axis power would not surrender. At this point, a victory on either front would mean an effective end to the war, particularly as killing either the allies or the Axis would allow the Comintern to consolidate their resources. The rubber shortage had by 1946 been mostly alleviated by synthesis, but Chromium remained in short supply.

In 1947, India surrendered, triggering a conference of the major warring powers to divide up the world. For some reason, the Soviet Union decided to take Canada, which I had worked quite hard to build up after liberating it. Despite this, they didn’t seem too concerned about how Europe looked. So I took most of Great Britain, except for London, where the USSR installed a puppet government that controlled the city as well as… Italy, apparently. I took most of costal France, and a few bits and pieces in the balkans, India, and Africa that would give me the Chromium I needed to continue prosecuting the war against Japan.

The Home islands were taken that same year in an amphibious invasion that took the Japanese completely by surprise. That should have been the end of it, but the game decided that the real powerhouse behind the Axis was Reorganized Nationalist China, that is, the puppet government installed by the Japanese. And this is where things bogged down again, because while WWII-era China may not have much in the way of infrastructure, or technology, or planes, or a navy, or logistics, they do have a seemingly endless reserve of men to absorb all the munitions the Comintern can produce, be they conventional or atomic.

Worth noting- the way the game handles atomic bombs is interesting. Rather than act as world-ending weapons, they inflict a decent, if somewhat disappointing amount of damage, and, rather than bring your opponent closer to surrendering, instead they lower the threshold, which is calculated by what percentage of major cities a nation holds. This means that A-bombs are helpful to give your opponent a nudge, but you can’t win a war just by throwing nukes at the enemy while you sit back in your bunker. From a game mechanics standpoint, this is a solid approach. Unfortunately, it means that you can fling scores of bombs at an enemy until you run out of targets, and your enemy is no closer to surrender than when you started. It also means that using nuclear weapons to support a ground advance is only effective in marginal cases.

At the beginning of the game, there were seven countries the game recognized as great powers. By 1949 there were two remaining that weren’t puppet states. Who would’ve won in a showdown is an open question. The USSR had far more troops in the field (in all of the fields, because apparently Zhukov didn’t feel like moving his divisions to the front), but my Communist States of America had more factories, and had lost far fewer men in the fighting so far. I had also already been preparing for a 1984-style betrayal, building fortifications, stationing troops to man them, and keeping enough planes and rockets on standby to begin bombing Moscow if need be. On the other hand, nearly every country was already in the Comintern, and so chances were good that it would be pretty much the whole world versus me. And while I could out-produce the Soviets, I wasn’t sure I could take on the rest of the world combined. I could try and make a bunch of them switch, but that would take time, and the game clock was running out. Also, my computer was already sputtering with the number of divisions it had to render, and I didn’t think it would be terribly happy with opening up even more fronts.

I made a lot of stupid mistakes during my first game. The whole rubber debacle comes to mind, as does accidentally declaring war on the allies before I was ready. I also managed to have multiple amphibious invasions fail spectacularly because I forgot to order them to take a port from which they could be supplied, and as a result by the time I went back to check on them, they were starving to death and couldn’t be bothered to move. My troops had a knack for advancing into places where they could be supplied, and subsequently developed a knack for losing whatever equipment they were issued. Perhaps there’s a way to fix this, so that the largest economy on the planet isn’t struggling to supply its soldiers.

The game does take some patience and willingness to learn, but it is eminently learnable. Much of the minutiae which makes the difference between a smashing victory and a pyrrhic one aren’t fully detailed in the tutorial, and so have to be looked up online or intuited, but despite criticism, the game is intuitive coming from the proper stratego-historical (according to the original Greek declensions, this is the correct way to say that) headspace. This game is not easy, and it is certainly not simple, but it is great fun for the right person. I enjoy it, and as soon as our computer can be brought back into line, or I decide to finally set up my laptop, I shall continue to enjoy playing it.

The Story of Revival

Okay, I’ll admit it. Rather than writing as I normally do, the last week has been mostly dominated by me playing Cities: Skylines. It is a game which I find distinctly easy to sink many hours into. But I do want to post this week, and so I thought I would tell the story thus far of one of the cities I’ve been working on.

Twenty-odd years ago, a group of plucky, enterprising pioneers ventured forth to settle the pristine stretch of land just beside the highway into a shining city on the hill. The totalitarian government which was backing the project to build a number of planned cities had agreed to open up the land to development, and, apparently eager to prove something, granted the project effectively unlimited funds, and offered to resettle workers immediately as soon as buildings could be constructed. Concerned that they would be punished for the failure of this city personally, settlers came to calling the city “New Roanoke”. The name stuck.

A cloverleaf interchange was built to guide supplies and new settlers towards settlement, with a roundabout in the center of town. The roundabout in turn fed traffic down the main streets; Karl Marx Avenue, Guy Debord Boulevard, and Internationale Drive. Within a year of its establishment, New Roanoke began making strides towards its mandate to build a utopia by mandating strict sustainability guidelines on all new construction. With an infinite budget, the city government established large scale projects to entice new settlers.

With its zeppelins for transport, its high tech sustainable housing initiatives, and its massive investment in education and science, the city gained a reputation as a research haven, and began to attract eccentric futurist types that had been shunned elsewhere. New Roanoke became known as a city that was open to new ideas. A diverse populace flocked to New Roanoke, leading it through a massive boom.

Then, disaster struck, first in the form of a tornado that ripped through the industrial district, trashing the rail network that connected the city to the outside world, and connected the city’s districts. The citizens responded by building a glittering new monorail system to replace it, and with renewed investment in emergency warning and shelters. This system was put to the test when an asteroid impacted just outside the rapidly expanding suburbs of the city.

Although none were hurt, the impact was taken by the population as an ill omen. Soon enough the government had walled off the impact site, and redirected the expansion of the city to new areas. Observant citizens noticed several government agents and scientists loitering around the exclusion zone, and photographs quickly circulated on conspiracy websites detailing the construction of new secret research facilities just beyond the wall.

This story was quickly buried, however, by a wave of mysterious illness. At first it was a small thing; local hospitals reported an uptick in the number of deaths among traditionally vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and the disabled. Soon, however, reports began to appear of otherwise healthy individuals collapsing in the middle of their routines. The city’s healthcare network became overloaded within days.

The government clung to the notion that this massive wave of deaths was because of an infection, despite few, if any, symptoms in those who had dies, and so acted to try and stop the spread of infection, closing public spaces and discouraging the use of public transport. Ports of entry, including the city’s air, sea, and rail terminals, were closed to contain the spread. Places of employment also closed, though whether from a desire to assist the government, or to flee the city, none can say. These measures may or may not have helped, but the one thing they did do was create traffic so horrendous that emergency vehicles, and increasingly commonly hearses, could not navigate the city.

With a mounting body count, the government tore up what open space it could find in the city to build graveyards. When these were filled, the city built crematoria to process the tens of thousands of dead. When these were overloaded, people turned to piling bodies in abandoned skyscrapers, which the government dutifully demolished when they were full.

By the time the mortality rate fell back to normal levels, between a third and a half of the population had died, and tensions New Roanoke sat on a knife’s edge. The city government build a monument to honor those who had died in what was being called “the Great Mortality”. The opening ceremony brought visiting dignitaries from the national government, and naturally, inspired protests. These protests were initially small, but a heavy-handed police response caused them to escalate, until soon full-scale riots erupted. The city was once again paralyzed by fear and panic, as all of the tension that had bubbled under the surface during the Great Mortality boiled over.

Local police called in outside reinforcements, including the feared and hated secret police, who had so far been content to allow the city to function mostly autonomously to encourage research. Rioters were forced to surrender by declaring martial law, and shutting down water and power to rebellious parts of the city. With public services suspended, looters and rioters burned themselves out. When the violence began to subside, security forces marched in to restore order by force. Ad-hoc drumhead courts-martial sentenced the guilty to cruel and unusual punishments.

The secret police established a permanent office adjacent to the new courthouse, which was built in the newly-reconstructed historic district. The city was divided into districts for the purposes of administration. Several districts, mainly those in the older, richer sections of the city, and those by the river, cruise terminals, and airports, were given special status as tourist and leisure districts. The bulk of rebuilding aid was directed to these areas.

New suburbs were established outside of the main metropolis, as the national government sought to rekindle the utopian vision and spirit that had once propelled the city to great heights. The government backed the establishment of a spaceport to bring in tourists, and new research initiatives such as a medical research center, a compact particle accelerator, and an experimental fusion power plant. Life remained tightly controlled by the new government, but after a time, settled into a familiar rhythm. Although tensions remained, an influx of new citizens helped bury the memory of the troubled past.

With the completion of its last great monument, the Eden Project, the city government took the opportunity to finally settle on a name more befitting the city that had grown. The metropolis was officially re-christened as “Revival” on the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. Life in Revival is not, despite its billing, a utopia, but it is a far cry from its dystopic past. Revival is not exceptionally rich, despite being reasonably well developed and having high land values, though solvency has never been a priority for the city government.

I cannot say whether or not I would prefer to live in Revival myself. The idea of living in such a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete, with monorails and zeppelins providing transport between particle colliders, science parks, and state of the art medical centers, where energy is clean and all waste is recycled, or treated in such a way to have no discernible environmental impact, sounds attractive, though it would also make me skeptical.

Thoughts on Steam

After much back and forth, I finally have a steam account. I caved eventually because I wanted to be able to actually play my brother’s birthday present to me; the game Cities: Skylines and all of its additional downloadable content packs. I had resisted, what has for some time felt inevitably, downloading steam, for a couple of reasons. The first was practical. Our family’s main computer is now reaching close to a decade old, and in its age does not handle all new things gracefully, or at least, does not do so consistently. Some days it will have no problem running multiple CPU-intensive games at once. Other days it promptly keels over when I so much as try to open a document.

Moreover, our internet is terrible. So terrible in fact that its latest speed test results mean that it does not qualify as broadband under any statutory or technical definition, despite paying not only for broadband, but for the highest available tier of it. Allegedly this problem has to do with the geography of our neighborhood and the construction of our house. Apparently, according to our ISP, the same walls which cannot help but share our heating and air conditioning with the outside, and which allow me to hear a whisper on the far side of the house, are totally impermeable to WiFi signals.

This fear was initially confirmed when my download told me that it would only be complete in an estimated two hundred and sixty one days. That is to say, it would take several times longer to download than it would for me to fly to the game developer’s headquarters in Sweden and get a copy on a flash drive. Or even to take a leisurely sea voyage.

This prediction turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. The download took a mere five hours; the vast majority of the progress was made during the last half hour when I was alone in the house. This is still far longer than the fifteen minutes or less that I’m accustomed to when installing from a CD. I suppose I ought to give some slack here, given that I didn’t have to physically go somewhere to purchase the CD.

My other point of contention with steam is philosophical. Steam makes it abundantly clear in their terms and conditions (which, yes, I do read, or at least, glaze over, as a general habit), that when you are paying them money to play games, you aren’t actually buying anything. At no point do you actually own the game that you are nominally purchasing. The legal setup here is terribly complicated, and given its novelty, not crystal clear in its definition and precedence, especially with the variations in jurisdictions that come with operating on the Internet. But while it isn’t clear what Steam is, Steam has made it quite clear what it isn’t. It isn’t selling games.

The idea of not owning the things that one buys isn’t strictly new. Software has never really been for sale in the old sense. You don’t buy Microsoft Word; you buy a license to use a copy of it, even if you were receiving it on a disk that was yours to own. Going back further, while you might own the physical token of a book, you don’t own the words on it inasmuch as it is not yours to copy and sell. This is a consequence of copyright and related concepts of intellectual property, which are intended to assist creators by granting them a temporary monopoly on their creations’ manufacture and sale, so as to incentivize more good creative work.

Yet this last example pulls at a loose thread: I may not own the story, but I do own the book. I may not be allowed to manufacture and sell new copies, but I can dispose of my current copy as I see fit. I can mark it, alter it, even destroy it if I so choose. I can take notes and excerpts from it so long as I am not copying the book wholesale, and I can sell my single copy of the book to another person for whatever price the two of us may agree upon, the same as any other piece of property. Software is not like this, though a strong argument can be made that it is only very recently that this new status quo has become practically enforceable.

Indeed, for as long as software has been sold in stores by means of disks and flash drives, it has been closer to the example of the classic book. For, as long as I have my CD, and whatever authentication key might come with it, I can install the contents wherever I might see fit. Without Internet connectivity to report back on my usage, there is no way of the publisher even knowing whether or not I am using their product, let alone whether I am using it in their intended manner. Microsoft can issue updates and changes, but with my CD and non-connected computer, I can keep my version of their software running how I like it forever.

Steam, however, takes this mindset that has existed in theory to its practical conclusion. You do not own the games that you pay for. This is roughly equivalent to the difference between buying a car, and chartering a limo service. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it is a major shift. There is of course the shift in power from consumers to providers: rather than you getting to dispose of your games as you see fit, you can have them revoked by Steam if you misbehave or cheat. This is unnerving, especially to one such as myself who is accustomed to having more freedom with things I buy (that’s why I buy them- to do as I please with), but not as interesting as the larger implications on the notion of property as a whole.

I don’t think the average layman knows or even cares about the particulars of license transfers. Ask such a layman what Steam does, and they’ll probably answer that they sell video games, in the same way that iTunes sells music. The actual minutiae of ownership are a distant second to the point of use. I call my games, and digital music, and the information on my Facebook feed mine, even though I don’t own them by any stretch of the imagination.

This use need not be exclusive either, so long as it never infringes on my own plans. After all, if there were a hypothetical person listening to my music and playing my games only precisely when I’m not, I might never notice.

So far I have referred to mostly digital goods, and sharing as it pertains to intellectual property. But this need not be the case. Ridesharing, for example, is already transforming the idea of owning and chartering a vehicle. On a more technical level, this is how mortgages, banknotes, and savings accounts have worked for centuries, in order to increase the money supply and expand the economy. Modern fiat currency, it will be seen, is not so much a commodity that is discretely owned as one that is shared an assigned value between its holder, society, and the government backing it. This quantum state is what allows credit and debt, which permit modern economies to function and flourish.

This shift in thinking around ownership certainly has the capability to be revolutionary, shifting prices and thinking around these new goods. Whether or not it will remains to be seen. Certainly it remains to be seen whether this change will be a net positive for consumers as well as the economy as a whole.

Cities: Skylines seems to be a fun game that our family computer can just barely manage to play. At the moment, this is all that is important to me. Yet I will be keeping an eye on how, if at all, getting games through steam influencers my enjoyment, for good or for ill.

Halloween Video Games

With Halloween imminent, I thought I’d review some video games that I think are apropos for the season, and that I might recommend if one is looking for something to kill some time on for a solo Halloween. None of these are horror games, but I consider all of them to be in some form or another, dark. Not in aesthetics either. Not from aesthetics either, but in theming and story.

DEFCON

The tagline is “everybody dies”, and they’re not too far off the mark. If you’ve ever seen the movie WarGames, then this is basically that game. This game simulates global thermonuclear war. You have a complete arsenal of strategic weapons, including nuclear-armed aircraft, fleets, and ICBMs. In the base game, you gain two points for every million enemies killed, and lose one point for every million casualties taken. The game isn’t detailed, and it prioritizes gameplay over realism wherever there is a tradeoff, but it is still haunting. You are in complete control of a superpower, and yet are nigh powerless to prevent massive and irreversible devastation, because even if you’re merciful to your enemy, your enemy won’t be to you.

The level of detail is minimalist in such a way that it gives your imagination just enough fodder to work with. You can see the renditions of individual, nameless pilots, and real life cities, and can’t help but fill in the details. Each point measures a million people dead, and you can see how many survivors are still around to kill. All rounded of course. At this scale, you can only ballpark to the nearest million or so. You have as much data and detail as a real nuclear commander would have, and nothing more.

One of the things I found most chilling: the default speed for the game is in real time. Let that sink in. If you’re playing in a basement away from windows, it is entirely possible to imagine that a WarGames style scenario has happened, and you’re watching the end of the world in real time. And just like in real life, you can’t pause or quit once you’ve started, until there is a victor (yes, this is annoying when you’re actually playing, but the statement gets through). The online manual takes this a step further, including in its instructions on setup and play strategies, pages copied directly from actual Cold War civil defence pamphlets, describing in terrifying detail, how to build a fallout shelter for you and your computer.

Plague Inc.

Back when I was in primary school, there was this game called Pandemic II (it still exists, it’s just really old and outdated), and the basic idea was that you were a disease trying to wipe out humanity. Plague Inc took this idea and ran with it, adding all kinds of new features, new interactivity, and new scenarios. The game calls itself “hyper-realistic”, which seems to be their way of saying it parodies the real world and takes everything to extreme, video-game/cartoon logic ends (One guy in China is coughing. Clearly the world needs to go to full scale pandemic alert).

Perhaps others disagree, but I always felt this rather undercut the game. Sure, it’s amusing to see that “Apple$oft is working on the iCure app”, but this doesn’t really make it emotionally engaging. It’s just too easy to wipe out the puny humans without really pausing to reflect on what you’re doing. I can see the juxtaposition they were going for, using cutesy bubbles and highly stylized graphics to display information about millions of casualties. The artist in me can even appreciate, and applaud the effort. I just don’t think they managed to pull it off.

This doesn’t make the game bad, by a long shot. It’s a great app game to kill some spare time, say, in the hospital waiting room (no, I’m not joking). For a game with such a heavy subject matter, it just doesn’t carry the weight well. In many respects, this makes it a better app game than a video game. You can wipe out all the humans in a short play session between IV changes, and without actually having to commit emotionally. But on this list, that’s a bad thing.

Prison Architect

As proof that you can tackle a heavy subject while still keeping simplistic, cartoon graphics, and a sandbox game, Prison Architect tackles a whole slew of heavy material. The game itself is pretty much all in the name: you build and administer a prison. In doing so, you make a variety of choices, big and small, which have moral, political, and strategic implications and consequences. Do you maintain order through the brute force, or balanced incentives? Do you aim primarily to rehabilitate, or punish? Are you willing to bend human rights to satisfy a tight budget?

These aren’t questions that are pitched to you directly through narrative. Even in a sandbox game, these are all still legitimate strategic questions that you have to contend with. There aren’t developer-ordained right answers, though there are consequences. If you treat your prisoners too badly, and they will be more motivated towards violence and escape. Forget to lay down the law, and they will walk all over you; to say nothing of your company’s shareholders, who are footing the bill for all this expensive “rehabilitation”.

This game does a lot to show, in an approachable, understandable way, a lot about the current situation in regards to criminal justice and the debate about reforming it. It shows how you can get to a place with such an atrocious system as we have in the US today acting from perfectly good (or at least, defensible) intentions, while also demonstrating some of the paths forward, including the costs that need to be considered. It tackles real world themes that we often shy away from, because they’re dark and ethically charged, without, as I usually put it, “The author standing over you and beating you with a sack of morals”.

Papers Please

This game is often described as a “bureaucracy simulator”, which is dark and depressing in and of itself, but the theming and story of the game take this further. Your work as a border checkpoint officer takes place in a brutal totalitarian regime, where failure to follow the rules means certain death. Even the unwritten rules. Especially the unwritten rules.

It is incredibly difficult to be a “good person” in this game, because in order to have the resources to do the right thing, you have to be good enough at your job to not be replaced (or arrested, or killed, or some combination thereof). Which means you have to be good at picking out the smallest discrepancies in paperwork, and ruthlessly enforcing the order of the day. Which means you develop a certain paranoia and disdain towards, well, everyone. (“You changed your name. A likely story. Guards, arrest her!”)

The game manages to not be ham-fisted in the way it presents player choices (most of the time) while also not pulling any punches. This game also manages to humanize a particular kind of job that tends to get the brunt of a lot of criticism: the poor schmo on the ground responsible for implementing bureaucratic orders, in this case, government security and immigration directives, and absorbing the abuse of the people on the receiving end. You can see how this position is both terrible to start with, and could easily wear a person down into being a terrible person.

Honorable Mention: Democracy series

This isn’t exactly dark, though it can be. It is, as the name implies, a democracy simulator. You play as someone in a position of power in a country, and you need to balance your policies carefully, not just to keep your country afloat, but to appease your constituents. It isn’t realistic by a long shot, but it does a good job of getting across the central message: every policy comes with a cost and a tradeoff.

What’s right may not be popular. What’s needed to keep the country from plummeting into fiery chaos tomorrow may not be popular, or even workable, today. This can be really frustrating and depressing if you’re the idealistic type, or if you favor niche policies that aren’t added into the game. If you really just want to force your agenda through, you can always fiddle around with the difficulty settings, and can exploit some quirks of the game. Or you can do as I do: invoke emergency powers to have your critics dragged from their homes and imprisoned without trial. Admittedly this won’t do much for your approval rating, and won’t stop you from being voted out of office (somehow, your fanatical police state can’t seem to rig elections properly), or being assassinated (an unlimited secret police budget, and they can’t stop one idiot with a gun?).

My biggest complaint about this series is that the fingerprints of the developer are all over which policies work and which don’t. Policies are blunt and one dimensional (maybe this is more accurate than I give credit for), and change is either immediate and dramatic (you can effectively abolish religion, capitalism, and liberalism in one term) or nonexistent (I have complete censorship, and yet somehow attack ads against me are sending my administration into a tailspin), and the policies you can implement tend to be, with a few exceptions, pretty bland and generic.