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Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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