Tag: games

Of combat and philosophy

First off, please do not post OT comments early in a thread. That is implicitly saying “because I don’t care about X, I think everyone should be discussing Y, which is of more interest to me, instead”. You can certainly discuss Y if you like, by all means, but do so on your own blog. If you want to bring something to my attention, then email it to me.

Now speaking of bringing things to people’s attention that may or may not be of interest, Alpenwolf is in the process of preparing a major kickstarter for First Sword. It will take place in the April-May timeframe, and I hope the Dread Ilk will support it with all their well-renowned and oft-feared staunchness. As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve expanded the concept of First Sword to encompass a spectrum of gameplay formats for reasons that will eventually become clear. Among the various questions I’ve been wrestling with is the best way to keep everyone informed about its progress, since, as with Alpha Game, the development of a game is a highly specific subject in which not everyone is likely to be equally interested. The options are to post all of the development-related posts on the currently dormant Alpenwolf blog, to post them at Castalia House, or to post them here. Obviously, major announcements will be posted here, but I am aware most readers here are not interested in multiple gamedev-related posts per week here.

So, I’m leaning towards doing them at Castalia, since we want to build it up as more of a destination site, we already sell some games there, and we have one game designer, Ken Burnside of Ad Astra, already blogging there. I’d also like to let those of you who are on the Castalia House New Release newsletter list know about our upcoming Game Development newsletter. Please note that if you are subscribed to the former newsletter, you will NOT be automatically subscribed to the latter. We don’t spam and we don’t cross-mail either. However, we will be accepting subscriptions soon and will also provide a signup link to the new newsletter when we send the next New Release installment out. Anyone who is interested in any type of gaming from tabletop to tablet is going to be extremely interested in what we’re doing with First Sword, because it is not only a game, it is a game engine designed for a high degree of modding capability. As the image of Gragbol Man-killer, Orc Gladiator #1 will no doubt inform tabletop players, First Sword is the first example of a game system that will be playable on the physical tabletop, as a Vassal module, on a computer or mobile device, or as an ongoing campaign game.

This multi-tiered approach has long been a vision of mine, as the original version of Rebel Moon Revolution was designed to be both a 3D tactical shooter and a 2D strategy game. We created two levels of AI for precisely this purpose, dividing them into TacAI and StratAI so that the StratAI could be replaced by a human player moving 2D counters around on a map that was essentially the top-down version of the 3D environment. The movements served as triggers to send orders to the TacAI that replaced the orders otherwise provided by the StatAI. In retrospect, I doubt we would have been able to successfully pull that off even if GT Interactive didn’t go down the drain (taking both Fenris Wolf and Rebel Moon Revolution with it), partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact that our StratAI programmer contracted cancer and died. But we are going to be able to pull it off here, because after learning from my past tendencies to design more than I could reasonably produce and bringing in some very smart and experienced new development partners, we’re applying the concept in a much simpler, much more easily accomplished fashion.

While we eventually hope to expand the concept to the full-blown multi-tiered squad-level combat game originally envisioned, in the meantime, we’re going to initially make this multi-tiered combat management gameplay work at the gladiatorial level. We’re putting together the various elements for the Kickstarter now, so if you’ve got any more thoughts concerning rewards you’d like to see, this is the time to throw them out there.

And finally, we’re happy to announce that the fourth issue of the Sci Phi Journal is now available in both EPUB and MOBI format at the Castalia House store. The first three issues have been very good and the fourth one looks like no exception. If you’d like to get caught up, issues One, Two, and Three are also available there. From a review of Issue #3:

“Suffice to say this is a thinking man’s SF magazine and is superbly chosen and edited by Jason Rennie.”

And as long as I’m in info dump mode, I may as well mention that ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT Book Two is progressing very well, I am ahead of the revised schedule, the cover is being designed, and the 850-page book will likely be published in November rather than December as previously announced. I can’t vouch for the quality myself, but I will say that the two early readers have said that it is better than A THRONE OF BONES.

#GamerGate and 4GW

Mendicant Bias has clearly read his Lind and correctly applied it to #GamerGate and society alike:

We have seen the most important and fundamental values of our society torn down and destroyed by vandals who used the tactics of cultural Marxism to subvert our society. We have seen abominations like gay “marriage”, no-fault divorce (read: his-fault), government-subsidised abortion and freely available birth control, and universal suffrage become “acceptable”—as if these cultural freak shows could ever possibly be considered “normal”. We have seen our most fundamental rights of conscience, association, freedom of thought, free exercise of religious belief, and freedom of action circumscribed, shrunk, and destroyed before our eyes. And we let it happen.

The self-aware man who looks at how this happened will come away with a certain cold appreciation for the tactics of those who imposed this ashen, burning Hell upon us.

When it comes to gaming, we have repeatedly seen how SJW tactics work. They have used the fundamental decency of the average Western gaming consumer against him, by browbeating him into believing that he is sexist if he wants “believable” (i.e. non-ridiculous) women in games, or that he is “racist” if he doesn’t want games to become some sort of absurd paean to multiculturalism, or that he is a misinformed idiot if he thinks that women can’t be just as strong and effective in an FPS game as men.

They are exquisitely good at shutting down dissent. They’ve had forty years to entrench themselves and become institutionalised. And they have succeeded. They did this by capturing the single most important and powerful level of war. The Moral Level of War

He also explains why #GamerGate has been uniquely successful in resisting the SJW onslaught when everything from the US Army to the churches have been overrun like France in 1940:

The cultural Marxists who brought us to this point have used the moral level of war brilliantly, up until now, by bludgeoning anyone who disagreed with them into submission through the threat of being branded sexist, racist, and other double-plus ungood things. To the SJW set, any deviation from “acceptable” modes of thought was and remains Badthink. Hell, they even have their own programming language! (Note the satire.)

But they grew overconfident, and made a huge mistake—giving us everything we need to destroy them, root and branch.

Until recently, gaming “journalists” had a lock on how the consumer viewed the products that they paid for. Games that promoted “social justice” narratives were given high reviews—but when the rest of us actually tried playing them, we often found them to be unplayable garbage, because they sacrificed absorbing gameplay and great storytelling for smarmy preachiness and painfully stupid messages about “tolerance”.

When #Gamergate first broke, the reason for this appalling state of affairs became perfectly clear: the gaming media were in bed, literally, with the very same game developers whose work they were reviewing.

Overnight, they lost their moral high ground in the eyes of thousands of gamers all over the world. And they have continued to lose that support as gamers have mounted a vicious backlash against their immorality.

This is a very, very important lesson to absorb. You cannot win at the moral level of war when crippled by ambiguous values and a lack of moral confidence. This is why the Christian churches that compromise their principles and turn against their own historic values rapidly collapse. Defeat at the moral level of war destroys an institutions raison d’etre; once robbed of its core reason to exist, an institution ceases to grow and rapidly begins to decline.

Mr. Lind and I had a conversation about #GamerGate. He recognized it as an obvious manifestation of 4GW, so it’s interesting to see that the students of 4GW see it clearly as well.

Design and playtesting

Ken Burnside has a very useful, and timely, piece on game development, as opposed to game design. I’m much better on the design side than the production side, so it’s very useful to be given this sort of reminder of the necessity of playtesting:

The middle 20% of the work is sending a draft of the game out to playtesters, and processing feedback. This is where explanatory diagrams are drawn and the first in-text-flow examples get written.  And rewritten.  And re-done. And re-re-done.  The back half of this 20% is taking the feedback from playtesters…most of whom don’t document everything they did to solve a problem.  Or will send you heated emails because the game blew up on them after they played it for two hours, and now their friends don’t want to touch it ever again.  This is the part where the developer feels “picked on” a bit.  Just remember:

Everyone who ever told you your game sucked, but told you what it was about it that sucked, just helped you make it better. You, as a developer, need to figure out how to resolve this issue, and you need to figure out how to differentiate between “The game sucked…” and “The game isn’t one I’m interested in.”

The worst kind of playtesters are the silent ones.  I put playtest material up on the Ad Astra Games Patreon specifically to weed out the silent playtesters.  These are the guys who download the game, and maybe skim it once, and otherwise let it sit on their hard drives.  I would much rather have playtesters tell me the game sucked than download it, decide it sucked, and never tell me so. 🙂

You will want two separate rounds of playtesting in an ideal situation – and you really want to get playtesters who don’t know the author of the game if possible; they’ll come in with things they know from knowing the designer, rather than hit the game up from scratch.  The second group of playtesters gets a draft that incorporates any feedback the first group gave you, and ideally doesn’t have any overlap with the first group.

If you have the time, you want to take any feedback from the second group, incorporate it into the draft and put it in front of the first group and see if the two different revision passes shake out any other “Oh, that’s what that means…” moments. This 20% of the work can take up most of the time.

Most technology companies are SHOCKINGLY bad at use-testing; game companies, for all it may seem that they don’t do much playtesting, are actually much better than the norm. I was amazed when I found out that in a company of over 150 people, precisely ONE person actually used the product that was the bread-and-butter of the company’s market.

Even a program as hoary and well-used as Adobe Reader occasionally shows strange signs of insufficient testing. I prefer to look at files at View/Zoom/Fit Height, but for some reason my documents were opening at 100 percent, which meant that I could see about one-third of the very high resolution images I was reviewing. I went into Preferences, found Page Display, and in it, the Zoom selections, where my options were Fit Width, Fit Visible… and Fit Page. Where is Fit Height?

Now, I’m not an idiot. I correctly guessed that Fit Page, which is NOT an option under View/Zoom, was the functional equivalent of Fit Height. But how is it possible that a program that approximately 11 hundred billion people have used still has basic inconsistencies like this? It’s not like Adobe doesn’t have the personnel to deal with this sort of thing.

Anyhow, I’m hoping to avoid as much of this problem as possible. One of the things we’ll be announcing this spring is our first miniatures game, which will also be called First Sword; it is a fantasy version of the 1977 Avalon Hill game Gladiator, only with a streamlined card-based combat system. (This may or may not be mildly revolutionary in the We the People/Hannibal sense, regardless, it’s not a common mechanic.)

I’m preparing a VASSAL module to test the system, so if you happen to be familiar with either VASSAL and Gladiator (or preferably, both), and you’re interested in helping me test it, send me an email with PLAYTEST in the subject. I’ll probably have the combat mechanic ready for testing in about two weeks; that, the campaign rules are the only elements that really require heavy testing of the miniatures game. The electronic combat management game, on the other hand, will require a bigger group of playtesters, but we’re not ready for that yet.

Nero lays down the imperial smack

Milo reports on one of the biggest freaks to ever orbit the game industry (which is not at all a low bar to hurdle), John Flynt aka “Brianna Wu”:

The gender history of game developer and pathological attention-seeker Brianna Wu would not ordinarily be the subject of public interest, but Wu’s critique of the GamerGate movement has relied heavily on identity politics and her insistence that she represents women in the video games industry. (We are using “she” and “her” as a polite courtesy in this report.)

Yet Wu was not until relatively recently a woman at all, and her legitimacy as a speaker even for the transgender community is in doubt since, as we can also today reveal, she was banned from a transgender forum after less than a year for unacceptable behaviour–not an easy thing to accomplish in a community well-known for its aggressive online conversations.

Wu was permanently stripped of her moderator status for abusing her position, according to another moderator, in a sign of what was to come in a long internet career of dissembling, bullying, smearing and panicky deletions as Wu has lurched from self-induced digital crisis to self-induced digital crisis over a period of more than a decade.

Wu, who has been engaged in an exhaustive press tour in recent months writing op-eds in a handful of online outlets, claiming that her life is in danger and that she is standing up for women in the games industry, is in fact, we can reveal, merely an unstable internet troll with a long history of mendacity and emotionally disturbed online outbursts.

Perhaps the funniest thing about Wu’s erratic behavior is his insistence that anyone in the game industry gives a damn about his game. We see them come and we see them go. It’s not necessary to pay any attention to it at all; we know it’s going to sink out of sight no matter what hystrionics he attempts to throw in order to get someone, somewhere, to play it.

And Nero didn’t cover the half of it. Such as this spectacularly inept attempt to attack himself; Wu forgot that he was logged in on his own account, Spacekatgal, then posted a weirdly specific question. Notice that my point about using style to detect frauds is fully applicable here. It would be obvious that he had written it even if he hadn’t been dumb enough to sign his own name to it.

Yeah, we did

The Special Victims Unit episode on #GamerGate turned out to be a little more awesome and subversive than anyone in #GamerGate was expecting. You can watch the end of it here.


“I’m out!”


“You said if you gave up, they’d win.”


“They already did.”

True. The Ralph Retort has a recap and video clips as well as a download link to the entire episode if you’re interested:

As I said, the other side was mighty pissed. Zoe was whining because the developer ends up quitting at the end. All that bullshit, and this is what pisses her off? I should have know a deceitful tramp like her would take that away from this farce. I’m tempted to think the writing staff was just trolling everyone. That’s how fucking nuts this thing was. 

Of course the show took considerable license, given that it portrayed a woman who isn’t a game developer, or even a gamer, as a game developer. Anita Sarkeesian is an activist con artist and nothing more.

As usual, the left-wing media turns reality on its head. They love to portray female game developers making games for men, when the reality is male game developers cranking out games like Cooking Mama, Candy Crush Saga, and Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Hell, I’m one of the archdevils of #GamerGate and I designed Hot Dish for THQ, which was very popular with women.

Sadly, for the villain, the producers went with Generic Evil Blond Guy rather than anyone readily identifiable as any of the major #GamerGate players. It would have been so much more awesome if he had been a British homosexual with fabulous hair. I can’t believe they didn’t go there. So disappointed.

The very special victim of #GamerGate

They have really dragged out this Sarkeesian thing considerably further than I ever would have imagined. It’s beyond parody at this point.

It’s a long-established tradition for TV shows to draw inspiration from real-life events. NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” is no different, and Wednesday, February 11, sees the crime drama series tackle Gamergate in an episode entitled “Intimidation Game.” The plot centers on the online harassment and kidnapping of a game developer, Raina Punjabi, modelled on controversial feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian.

NBC’s trailer opens with Punjabi discussing the threats she’s received with police. She is set to attend an important game launch but has become the victim of an online harassment campaign. Punjabi insists that she will attend the launch, however, because not only is it a massive international event but also she refuses to give in to online hordes of anonymous, misogynistic trolls. During the conversation, terms like “swatting,” “doxxing,” and “dark net” are referenced, with one detective pointing out that online threats are “not covered by free speech.” The dialogue is embarrassingly clumsy, written for an audience not familiar with Gamergate or the more complex workings of the internet.

This is so ludicrously absurd. What is next, NCIS featuring a three-part episode that involves the murder of a neurotic transvestite who calls himself Brianna Who? An epic fantasy HBO series entitled “The Saga of Yamanamama”?

Anyhow, I hope the bad guys are a team that involves a guy in a wheelchair, a television actor, and a handsome, athletic, forty-something game developer and novelist. That would be amusing.

Entryism in progress

Robert Conway at Reaxxion asks if  Magic: The Gathering adding a transsexual character is a problem:

Magic the Gathering has been a mainstay in geek culture since the 90’s, so it should come as no surprise that people are making a big deal about the addition of a new trans character, Alesha, Who Smiles At Death. The announcement came in the form of a short story on Wizards Coast’s website entitled The Truth of Names, and is not actually indicated on the card itself. In fact the only text besides the card’s ability is a quote: “Great death with Sword in hand”. The art doesn’t necessarily give you the impression that Alesha is a trans-person either.

The card’s back story, as detailed by writer James Wyatt, discusses a clan of people who earn their names in battle. The tale depicts an Orc who fights for the Mardu clan, which is lead by Alesha. During the battle the Orc questions Alesha’s gender, after failing to kill a dragon and claim his own name. The story goes on about the battle and eventually ends with other warriors detailing deeds that deemed the Orc worthy of the name. However at the end the Orc admits he has yet to figure out who he is and willfully acknowledges that Alesha is in fact a woman.

Certainly this news has caught the attention of SJW-friendly meadia such as Kotaku (archived link) and of The Mary Sue (archived link). To put it simply Nathan Grayson thinks it’s “pretty darn cool”. Not everyone is on board with it. Several IGN users have voiced their concerns as I’m sure many of our readers will do the same.

The answer is, ABSOLUTELY YES, it is a problem. It is a very serious and ultimately fatal problem that will eventually kill the game dead. It is a problem of such gargantuan and epic proportions that the only rational thing to do is to immediately stop playing Magic: The Gathering, and stop purchasing any of its related products, until the Alesha, Who Smiles At Death card is publicly withdrawn. The card is the gaming equivalent of a small but malignant melanoma.

One might as reasonably ask if the original decision to permit women to read Bible verses was a problem for the Anglican Church. Or if the original income tax, which was introduced with a maximum rate of 7 percent and affected less than 1 percent of the U.S. population was a problem for US taxpayers.

The point is not whether the addition of an overtly propagandistic SJW element immediately breaks the game. The first step never does. That’s because the first step is always only symbolic, a testing of the waters to see if the invasion of the SJWs is going to be resisted or not. When it is resisted, of course, there will be endless protestations of how it is harmless little thing, how it is “just this one brick”, and hand-on-heart vows of how there is, of course, absolutely NO intention of building a damn brick wall in the future.

The time to smack down the SJW entryists is when the camel first sticks its nose in the tent, not when it is already fully ensconced and defecating all over the carpets.

Be the dragon

At Alpha Game, I comment upon the importance of being the dragon, not the self-styled paladin and self-appointed dragon-slayer. But one part of the Loneliest Paladin’s twitterstorm was relevant here for its illustration of rabbitology:

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Things I don’t get: why Ghaters would rally around Vox Day. Dude is the epitome of loser.

MikeBrendan @MikeBrendan
Not only did Vox get kicked out of SFWA for being a racist homophobic sexist dipshit, he took sixth place on a five person ballot.

Note that insufficient popularity with a small and specific group is equated with being “the epitome of loser”… by someone with no friends and not much of a life. Success, in the rabbit’s world, is something that depends entirely upon the level of acceptance by the warren. Everything else is irrelevant.

Rabbits don’t understand that wolves respect strength and loyalty, even when exhibited in causes of no interest to them. Rabbits fear strength and have no loyalty, so the concepts are alien to them. They genuinely can’t understand the concept of standing up for someone because that someone stood up for you, even if you don’t like him, respect him, or want anything to do with him. For all that they are herd animals, they are not team players; in their own way they are more ruthlessly self-serving than the most ideological self-sovereign libertarian.

And speaking of rabbitology, see how the rabbits cry when their warrens are invaded and they learn they don’t possess the power they flaunted so foolishly:

GamerGate set out to writes its own story in Wikipedia – and to spread the dirt about the women who were its targets. These efforts were blocked by established editors under established Wikipedia policy. In retaliation, GamerGate planned an operation to get rid of its opponents – the “Five Horsemen” active in preserving objectivity and in keeping scurrilous sexual innuendo out of the encyclopedia. As a side-game, GamerGate also launched efforts to promote the idea that “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy of some Jewish academics to control the media.

The original GamerGate operation targeted the “five horsemen:” Ryulong, NorthBySouthBaranof, Tarc, TheRedPenOfDoom, and TaraInDC. All were sanctioned in the draft decision.

For months, these Wikipedia pages have been an escalating scene of daily – indeed hourly – conflict.

The Purge

Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”

By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.

No sanctions at all were proposed against any of GamerGate’s warriors, save for a few disposable accounts created specifically for the purpose of being sanctioned. The administrator who wrote, regarding Zoe Quinn’s sexual history, that

    I know other other allegations exist but will not state what those on WP are because that would be a BLP violation at the current time.

was not even mentioned. The many brand-new accounts who arrived in December with no Wiki experience, but possessing a curiously detailed knowledge of Wikipedia policy jargon, are unmentioned, save for the fact that the decision rests almost entirely on their proposals.

The extensive evidence of off-site collusion, which Wikipedia considers so improper that evidence must not be discussed on wiki but rather submitted in confidence, appears to have been entirely ignored. (I submitted such evidence myself, but received no acknowledgment or thanks; I have been told that much additional evidence was submitted.)

Notice how the upset rabbit appeals to “established editors and established policy” (better described as activist editors and self-imposed customs), despite the fact that the editors concerned were quite clearly VIOLATING Wikipedia policy, and doing so rather egregiously. What appears to have happened is that Wikipedia is finally beginning to act against the SJW thought police who make a practice of attempting to define the public narrative by exerting personal ownership over particular pages of interest.

Concept art

I’ll go into more detail on this at some point in the near future, but suffice it to say that the FIRST SWORD concept is expanding. Instead of being a simple combat management game, it’s going to be a cross-platform, cross-media game, and will be playable in various forms from tabletop to mobile. I’ve always been somewhat of a holistic designer, but this is the first time I’ve had the ability to do something I’ve wanted to do for seven years now, something completely new and different.

We’ve got a pair of good sculptors and a sketch artist, but we’re looking for some high-quality concept art for the various fantasy gladiators. It’s set in Selenoth, so we’re looking for Amorran, Savondese, and Dalarn humans, orcs, goblins, dwarves, elves, and trolls.

If you’re a serious sketch artist and you want to show us what you can do, send me a fantasy gladiator sketch. If we buy it from you, we’ll also send you one of the miniatures based on it.

RIP John Hill

I never met the man nor knew anything about him, but as a wargamer in general and an ASLer in particular, one can’t help feel a genuine sense of loss upon hearing the news of his death.

John Hill is most known as the designer of the extremely popular Avalon Hill board game Squad Leader in 1977. Hill founded Conflict Games Company in the late 1960s and owned a hobby shop, The Scale, in Lafayette, Indiana, for several years. Among his many titles were Verdun, Kasserine Pass, Overlord, Battle For Stalingrad, Tank Leader, Eastern Front Tank Leader and many others. He also designed Hue, based upon the fighting near the City of Hue in the Vietnam War.

In 1978, Hill was named to the Wargaming Hall of Fame, receiving the Charles S. Roberts Award at the Origins gaming convention in Chester, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1979.

As the developer of the morale model and the champion of the design-for-effect philosophy, he influenced a wide variety of games, both tabletop and electronic.