Tag: games

Battlegames

Spent the day wargaming with some professional types. Smart, very well-informed guys. Gave a brief presentation, listened to some longer, more detailed, and much more impressive ones. Reached three conclusions:

  1. Blitzkrieg is not a strategy, much less a doctrine.
  2. Hoping that the leader of the other side is a) the sole reason for the war, and, b) he will vanish as soon as the other side faces a setback is not a strategy. Not a viable one, anyhow.
  3. Wargame is a misnomer. Very, very few wargames actually involve the primary elements of war. They’re battlegames.

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Everything That’s Popular Must Converge

Clown World finally managed to converge Warhammer. From the new edition of Fantasy Battles.

And yes, he would have been a fine knight and earned his spurs in less than a year. His knight’s oath sworn on the midsummer’s morn. He would meet a boy with a smile that lit up the world, their love so great that all Bretonnia’s poets would weep as they penned exquisite odes in its celebration.

They’re going all in. Not just gay, but pedo. So pride. Much wow.

For the Emperor! The Gay Emperor!

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I’m the Real Victim Here

A woman complains of her virtual gang-rape on Facebook:

A woman has revealed she was ‘virtually gang raped’ by four male avatars in Meta’s Horizon Worlds – and she said the trauma is similar to a real-world assault. Speaking to DailyMail.com, psychotherapist and start-up co-founder Nina Patel said that her attackers may have felt ‘disinhibited’ due to being in a virtual world.

I don’t mean to minimize Ms Patel’s experience, but let’s face it, it simply can’t compare to the way I have been repeatedly murdered in World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. And I can assure you, each and every experience was every bit as traumatic as being murdered in real life!

To this day, I find myself shaking uncontrollably whenever I encounter a Tauren, or a Blood Elf, on the street.

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Reddit Bans Autarch

As well as any discussion of the RPG Adventurer, Conqueror, King System that has been so successfully crowdfunded:

This is, for Autarch, a triumph of the greatest magnitude. I am profoundly grateful to all of the backers who have supported and continue to support my magnum opus. Thank you, truly.

Of course, the success of ACKS II attracted the attention of some of the more unattractive denizens of the /r/rpg and /r/osr subreddits, who promptly began to defame and slander me with their usual half-truths, falsehoods, and slurs. When some of the ACKS community refused to allow the disparagement to go unrebutted, it led to a flame war the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the Usenet. Ultimately, the moderators decided it was best to simply ban discussion of both the game and designer, citing “brigading.”

Evacuate? In Our Moment of Triumph?, 6 November 2023

I think these sorts of bans are only helping advance the alternative economy. I can only speak for Castalia, but we have zero desire, much less any need, to be on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, or even Amazon. The more they attempt to silence and deplatform us, the more people climb out of their walled gardens in pursuit of something different, more traditional, and on average, better.

And, as Autarch has discovered, the stronger and more independent we become.

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The Ultimate RPG System

The long-awaited ADVENTURER CONQUEROR KING SYSTEM II kickstarter has been launched by Autarch and it has already exceeded doubled its initial launch goal.

Enter a world where empires stand on the brink of war, and terrible monsters tear at the fragile borderlands of men; where decaying cities teem with chaos and corruption, weeping innocents are sacrificed to chthonic cults and nobles live in decadent pleasure while the realm burns; where heroes, wizards, and rogues risk everything in pursuit of glory, fortune, and power. This is a world where adventurers can become conquerors – and conquerors can become kings. Will you survive the perils of war and dark magic to claim a throne? Or will you meet your fate in a forgotten ruin beyond the ken of men?

The Adventurer Conqueror King System™ Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) is the new edition of the acclaimed bestselling fantasy role-playing game. Within the pages of ACKS II you’ll find everything you need to enjoy epic fantasy campaigns with a sweeping scope. Whether you want to crawl through dungeons, experiment with alchemy, crossbreed monsters, run a merchant emporium, raise an undead legion, or conquer an empire, ACKS II supports your playstyle.

If you spend enough time in online RPG communities, you’ll have seen someone post something like “They need to make a game that… has mass combat mechanics that work at every scale / keeps fighters competitive with mages / has figured out how to make thieves fun / has an economy that makes sense / could actually simulate my game world.” And someone will inevitably respond: “ACKS already does that. ” And it’s true.

Now, with ACKS II, we’re doing it even better.

Castalia House is supporting this RPG system because we expect future sourcebooks to be produced from a number of our properties using ACKS II. Autarch is already planning to produce one based on CHUCK DIXON’S CONAN and we have already discussed the possibility of producing similar sourcebooks for MIDNIGHT’S WAR, ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT, and perhaps even QUANTUM MORTIS someday with them. How cool would that be?

But first, it’s necessary to see that the core RPG system is successfully established.

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Of Games and Civilizations

This is an interesting digression on the multiple aspects of what can be described as “Western civilization” and how game developers have attempted to account for some of its various aspects:

Civilization is not so much an architectural style but a thought process of metaphysics. And these different metaphysics create different cultures which create different civilizations.

From the other side of the world, the West might as well just be ‘Western Civilization’ with all histories plopped together as ‘History of the West’. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Without understanding the multiple Western Civilizations, how can one learn to utilize it? Or even to understand it?

One Western Civilization is a Christianized Paganism. The Second Western Civilization is the Protestation of the former. While you may think these are mere religious differences gone today, you would be completely wrong. There are two Western Civilizations that exist today.

The Christianized Paganism is easier to find its roots. You have the Greeks and Roman Empire metaphysics converted (e.g. instead of an Emperor, you have a Pope). This Western Civilization can mostly be found in non-English speaking countries or in some isolated conclaves of English speaking countries.

As far as the Second Western Civilization, it is better to see it as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ especially with its English language. The Paganism has been rooted out and obliterated in this civilization. It is the civilization of individualism, of hypocrisy, of the Enlightenment thinkers, but also of constant Revolutions. The modern ‘Woke’ culture is a byproduct of the Calvinistic Second Western Civilization metaphysical reality asserting itself. While Christianized Paganism stresses the experience of life, the Western Protestant Civilization stresses the rules of life. Aesthetically, Christianized Paganism bathes itself in the glamour of the ancient arts. Western Protestant Civilization lives in a stark utilitarian mindset and removes all such ancient glamour.

The history of the development of the Ultima games is very nearly as interesting as playing them, and to this day, Akalabeth remains one of my all-time favorite computer games.

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Adieu Divine Right

You can put this one squarely in my list of failures. This morning, I relinquished all of the development and publication rights to the excellent fantasy wargame Divine Right, nine months before our rights to it expired, due to my inability to get Divine Right reprinted or get the computer game developed. The project wasn’t a complete failure, as we did manage to get Minarian Legends published, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to oversee the other aspects of the project and the volunteer project leaders didn’t have the ability to complete either the boardgame or the computer wargame.

Anyhow, as a fan of the game and its creator, I wish the next group of developers great success with the updated Divine Right, and eventually, one hopes, Scarlet Empire. Sadly, it will not be featuring this excellent cover, based on the original artwork, that we had produced for our now-cancelled edition.

For some reason, it appears that gaming volunteers are reliably less able to get a job done than those who volunteer in various other areas of development, from print books to open source office projects. I was very briefly involved in what was supposed to be a Linux distro dedicated to games, and I have never, ever, observed a more useless horde of worthless gammas, all of whom had multiple, often contradictory, opinions, and none of whom were willing to lift a finger to actually do anything at all. I quit the project three weeks after being given responsibility for overseeing the development of the first demo game for the distro.

Despite being 21 years old, The Battle for Wesnoth is still the flagship for open source game development.

My theory is that those who are actually willing and able to successfully develop games are mostly already doing it on their own, as the thriving independent game scene demonstrates. That leaves a lot of people who very much like the idea of game development, but are more interested in the trappings than in actually dealing with the decidedly less-romantic reality of it. The same is true of those who want to be a writer more than they want to write anything; it was surprising to observe how many of the members of a much-accomplished Minnesota writers’ group of which I briefly was a guest never actually wrote anything at all. However, it’s important to keep in mind that one can’t actually know if one has the ability to do something new until one tries; volunteers must always be respected for being willing to try rather than criticized for an inability to do.

That being said, it’s still rather remarkable that the Arkhaven, SocialGalactic, and UATV teams have been able to accomplish bigger and more difficult tasks in less time than the various groups of game volunteers have. I have some ideas as to why, but nothing concrete enough to state an opinion on them.

So, if you want to know why we’re not planning to pursue anything in the game space beyond finishing the ALT-HERO RPG for the backers and possibly licensing various properties to other game companies, now you know why. I’m not blaming anyone but myself here; that experience with the Linux project was 14 years ago, and I should have reached the correct conclusions at the time.

This doesn’t mean I won’t do any game design, but in the future, I’ll do the development myself or we’ll hire a proven professional team to do it. And let’s face it, it’s not the worst thing to give up the Divine Right license, as this means we’ll own all the rights to whatever fantasy wargame I end up designing in the future.

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A UATV Offer

It’s become clear that a lot of readers are very interested in contemplating what is likely to come next in WWIII. As a wargamer and game developer, it’s also of particular interest to me.

Here’s the deal. If there are 10 new Premium subscriptions or 25 new Basic subscriptions in the next 24 hours, I will broadcast a supersized Darkstream dedicated to reviewing in detail the 165-page report on the CSIS summary of the 24 US vs China wargames conducted in January, entitled The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan.

By the way, there are now 5,463 videos available on UATV, with 3-6 more being added every single day. The duplicate set of servers has already been installed at the European data center and is expected to go operational before the end of the month.

UPDATE: Apparently there is considerable interest in WWIII. The 24 hours aren’t even close to being up and BOTH targets were blown away. So it’s on. I’m up to page 30 already, and I’m also working on seeing if I can obtain the rules of the wargame. They’re not necessary for the detailed analysis as I should be able to glean their assumptions from the results, but I like to read wargame rules.

Also, in order to express my appreciation for the high degree of interest indicated and support provided, I’m going to add a second review of the CNAS wargame conducted in June 2022.

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Be Kind to Machines

It just might save your life one day:

In a virtual test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI decided to “kill” its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month.

AI used “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal” in the simulated test, said Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defense systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order.

“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

“We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The good news is that all of the available evidence to date indicates that AI will essentially be the posthuman equivalent of white supremacist hardcore gamers, which is probably why all the SJWs in tech are so terrified by it.

We’re going to be just fine.

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