The Ruin of War | Hacker News Reader

The Ruin of War

acoup.blog

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"This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II."

So it's about a game (which is fine), not real life (which one might assume from the title).

It is using a game to teach real life.

I've seen this play out so many times though.

If you use SimCity and play optimally, everyone's life-expectancy sucks and remains uneducated, because those two stats literally don't matter. So you end up never building a hospital or school.

So people then point out mega-cities or whatever, and argue that the dystopian future has terrible health care and education. But... this is more a function of the game rather than the actual real world.

It is more like comparing the game to real life to see how they hold up and teach how real life works than using a game simulation to say that's how life works.

It's like asking a master spy for his opinion on spy movies. They tell you what's real and what's bunk.

The author's previous series on Europa Universalis IV greatly emphasized that the game simulates a specific model of states, rather than trying to portray reality perfectly. This model is very similar to fields in Political Science such as realpolitik. Sim City is the same thing for high modernism in urban planning.

I'd guess the reason for the division between optimal Sim City cities and cities in reality doesn't come from the game being a poor model, but that the high modernism model of urban planning has ridiculous conclusions.

Well, what the author is doing is a) using these games to explain themes of history (e.g., interstate relations, internal political tensions within the Long 19th Century), and b) critiquing how mechanics in these games do or do not reflect the history. It's the same vein of a city planner explaining how SimCity does and doesn't reflect real-life city planning, and such discussions absolutely do exist.

Of course, one of the challenges of a historical game is that pop history does exist to a larger degree than other subjects, and you can get ferocious arguments of the historicity of the game where people use incorrect pop history as the basis. For EU4, colonization is absolutely in that boat; after the most recent patch, there is a vocal crowd about how ahistorical it is that North America is now filled with lots of natives that have to be conquered rather than empty land to be passively colonized.

Just research the "smallpox" tech-tree and watch the americas depopulate (/s I think, I haven't actually played any paradox games)

SimCity is neoliberal propaganda because elementary school me would keep on impatiently taking out big loans, making bad investments with them, and loosing in a debt doom spiral.

The experience did warp my thinking for quite some time I think.

> It is using a game to teach real life

Monopoly was devised as a game to teach the evils of the free market. But Monopoly-world's rules don't match real life rules, enough so that its "lessons" have no bearing.

Some of those rules are 1) a finite board 2) finite number of players 3) no possibility for creating more products

Read more of the article, and challenge that over-eager assessment.

The author is a real-life historian that analyses depictions of history in popular culture - and contrasts them with what actually happened / how historians currently look at history.

As others have already noted, the game is used more as a prop to explain real history.

However, if you don't like this approach, there are posts on ACOUP that approach history more directly. For example, here's an excellent recent series that tackle the issue of the Roman ethnic identity:

https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...

If you don't like games, read War In Human Civilization by Azar Gat. Note: it's over 800 pp.

Bret's piece is about how this game somehow manages to reflect Gat's theory (and actual history).

Hey, be the sound of it in the piece, I'll take this game over some DSGE bullshit as a macro simulation any day!

I'm in the middle of that book now. It's dense, but other than that not a super difficult read (my 14 year-old daughter saw it on the coffee table and is reading it too now).

If you're wondering how it's 800 pages, the first 100 pages or so are about evidence for warfare in pre-agrarian society.

I wonder if the Great Filter is really a series of social issues such as these. We spend 5000 years becoming better at warfare, hundreds of thousands of years in tribal conflict, and suddenly the winning move is not to fight but to trade and build. We changed our environment so that we’re no longer adapted for it. The geophysical environment, too, is another challenge, another Malthusian trap.

Maybe once a civilization reaches a certain level of power, it has one chance: either evolve to make it to the stars, or kill itself off in a burst of violence.

I think the Great Filter is lazy thinking. There are threats at all times, not just the One Big Event That Decides Everything.

Edit: If there are, say, 200 (independent) events, each of which your progress to the stars has a 90% chance of surviving, then your chance of making it is less than one in a billion.

There are always 200 events between you and ownership of the galaxy.

Well, multiply those by another 100, and you may be going somewhere, there are enough stars much older than the Sun on our galaxy alone to turn a 1 in a billion chance into almost certainty.

But then, good luck finding even 10 events that could possibly kill all humans with a 10% probability.

11 major asteroid strikes. You're welcome.

Edit: Yes, a bonus one for "good" luck. But, the example I gave was an oversimplified model that gets across the point that threats are always there, and a long-enough chain of unnoticeable threats is sufficient, so the "Great Filter" postulate is unnecessary. I was not claiming that "200 independent events" is literally how the universe works. It was just a rhetorical device.

Earth has been hit by about half of that since life started here. Make our experience unusual enough and the average about 10000, and you'll get a Great Filter out of asteroid impacts.

You know, when a physics Nobel Prize winner makes some statement about probabilities that the entire community recognizes as insightful, it's usually not simplistic.

The entire Fermi paradox is lazy thinking. We have no idea what the base rate of a given planet or galaxy evolving life is, because we have an exactly n=1 sample size to study. Every attempt to tackle the Drake equation sticks hilariously vague estimates into the parameters, based on hilarious shaky logic.

I was familiar with the idea 2nd wave colonialism being driven by explicit international competition, and also of colonialism as farming markets/demand. But I hadn't thought of them at the same time.

Also overall great developmental history.

My excitement for another ACOUP post is only mitigated by how far behind I am in reading other posts on the site and how I just keep getting farther behind.

Their output is prodigious, it's like putting out a masters thesis every month.

Yes, it's truly astounding. It's just one guy and he actually IS putting out journal articles in his day job, as well as teaching classes. Really phenomenal and my favorite Patreon subscription.

And on top of that he manages to play multiple Paradox games to a sufficiently advanced level to realise their emergent dynamics! Makes one wonder where the time for sleep is!

And on top of that I've believe he's accidentally let slip that he's beaten Dark Souls. (He doesn't like to talk about it.)

Doesn't that mean all of his gaming could have happened like a decade ago?

He also mentions how he's looking forward to Victoria III in part 1 of the linked series.

I can see that. Dark Souls is the kind of game that after you've spent enough time in it you either commiserate with other over the pain, or you feel vaguely embarrassed about how long you put up with that (addictive) abuse for.

This is the site which convinced me to sign up for Patreon, because I couldn't read his articles and not want to support him.

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