Quotulatiousness

March 30, 2023

The use and mis-use of wargames

Filed under: Gaming, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Cheating in wargames must be approximately five minutes younger than wargames themselves … famously, the Imperial Japanese Navy didn’t like the outcome of wargaming what became the Battle of Midway and “cheated” by refloating the aircraft carriers shown as sunk in the simulation and Wehrmacht General Paulus ran a wargame that showed Operation Barbarossa would fail and he was also told to ignore the results and ended up in Stalingrad. Lessons can be learned from formal wargames, but as CDR Salamander points out, a wargame outcome can be custom-tailored as the leaders require:

Not this kind of civilian wargame … a real wargame run by professional military staff!

One of the things that will get my eye twitching faster than about anything else is when someone responds to a question or concern with a, “Well, in our wargames …”

Bullshit.

That may work for civilians or under-briefed lawmakers who lack the depth in military matters, but anyone who has run or been part of a wargame knows that you can design one to give you the outcomes you want.

Planning assumptions etc … it is all flexible.

Wargames, done right, don’t tell you the future, but they do help inform gaps in your OPLAN, thinking, or expectations of the enemy … and shortfalls you might have.

At the POLMIL level — where our most senior uniformed and civilian leaders live — you have distinctly different concerns than Tactical, Operational, or — if your Planning Confession separates Strategic from the POLMIL level — Strategic level.

For the senior uniformed leader to make this statement, as if it were a bolt out of the blue, is simply gobsmacking;

    A “big lesson learned comes out of Ukraine, which is the incredible consumption rates of conventional munitions in what really is a limited regional war,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee.

    “If there was a war on the Korean peninsula or a great power war between United States and Russia, United States and China, those consumption rates would be off the charts,” he said.

Whose charts? Who made them and using what metrics and dataset?

Yes … that is a lesson for most out there … but it should not be for the CJCS. Hell, I remember certain aspects of updating the OPLAN for Korea a quarter century ago when we beat the drum that, “We don’t have enough ____ and only a few days of ____ before we are combat ineffective.”

This. Is. Not. New.

As we mentioned last July, magazine depth has been a chronic shortfall for a long time.

I have trouble believing that the CJCS is shocked, SHOCKED, that this is an issue.

It isn’t a “lesson learned” — it is a lesson ignored.

One of the easiest, most obvious-to-the-accountants economy any military can make is to scrimp on the inventory of live ammunition … if there’s no war, much of the stored munitions must be disposed of at a cost, and what’re the chances they’ll throw a war before the next election? Plus, if there’s only so much in storage, it’s not economical to have the training allowance of ammunition go up, so you can reduce the resupply levels and free up money in the budget for sexier, more mediagenic toys.

February 16, 2023

The mass spell to destroy Hogwarts Legacy turns out to be a squib

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

All the angry people on social media had a new thing to be angry about: the release of a new online game based on the works of she-who-must-not-be-named (that’d be J.K. Rowling if you haven’t been keeping up with the woke’s ledger book of cancelled persons). They’d gather in their mighty legions, denounce the evil woman and the tech company would shiver and shake and then apologize for offending them and pull the game from the market, just like so many other companies had fallen to their online rage before.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, as Tom Knighton relates:

The extreme left, those we term as “woke”, like to think they have a great deal of power. They think they’re the majority of the nation, and that they can shift the world based on their own whims.

And, in the past, it sure looked like it.

They’d get on Twitter and scream in outrage and brands would back down. They’d issue apologies and capitulate with the mob.

Then JK Rowling got on their bad side. She doesn’t think transwomen are women, that they haven’t lived with the struggles that women grow up with.

So, they decided to destroy anything they can associate with her.

That included the new video game, Hogwarts Legacy. Before the game came out, they tried to sabotage it on Steam, describing it as a “genocide simulator”.

I’ll be honest, that made me want to play the game. Apparently, I was far from alone.

    Hogwarts Legacy has got off to a very big start at UK games retail, and is comfortably the No.1 game of the week (GfK data).

    It is the biggest launch for any Harry Potter game ever, with sales 64% higher than the previous best — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 2001. In fact, the biggest week for a Harry Potter game wasn’t a launch week at all, it was the second week of the Philosopher’s Stone (due to hype around the movie). Even compared to that week, Hogwarts Legacy was still bigger by 2%.

    This result is more impressive when you consider this is just for physical sales. Hogwarts Legacy would have received a substantial number of digital downloads (that data will come later in the week), whereas Philosopher’s Stone didn’t have any digital sales back in 2001. Therefore, the success will be even more pronounced once all the data is in.

In other words, the woke don’t have the pull they like to believe they do.

In a rational world, companies would see this and take it to heart: despite their apparent popularity on some social media sites, the very very woke are a tiny layer of froth on the ocean of non-woke customers. It’s often said that the terminally online think that Twitter is the real world — which is why Elon Musk taking over their preferred online megaphone was so traumatic to so many of them — but they’re mostly bellowing at one another, not at the population as a whole.

December 30, 2022

My Top 10 Favorite Avalon Hill Games

Filed under: Gaming, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legendary Tactics
Published 1 Apr 2021

Avalon Hill has such a rich history as a board game company, and has contributed so much to our hobby, our sense of history, and our lives. I sat down to reminisce about my top 10 favorite Avalon Hill games of all time. Are these the best games of all time? What games would make your list? Let us know in the comment section below.
(more…)

April 10, 2022

QotD: Most MMORPG portrayal of iron-working is incredibly unrealistic

Filed under: Gaming, History, Quotations, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. And I want to stress that broad framing: iron was made into more things than just swords (although swords are cool). If you are here wondering how you go from iron-bearing rocks to a sword, these posts will tell you, but they will equally get you from those same rocks to a nail, or a workman’s hammer, or a sawblade, or a pot, or a decorative iron spiral, or a belt-buckle, or any other of a multitude of things that might be produced in iron.

Iron production is a unique topic in one key way. If the problem with farmers is that the popular understanding of the past (either historical or fantastical) renders them effectively invisible – as indeed, it tends to render most ancient forms of production invisible – iron-working is tremendously visible, but in a series of motifs that are almost completely wrong. Iron is treated as rare when it is common, melted in societies that almost certainly lack the furnaces to do so; swords are cast when they should be forged, quenched in ways that would ruin them and the work of the iron-worker is represented as a solitary activity when every stage of iron-working, when done at any kind of scale, was a team job (many modern traditional blacksmiths work alone, often as a hobby; ancient smiths generally did not). The popular depiction is so consistently wrong that it doesn’t really even provide a firm basis for correction. We are going to have to start over, from the beginning.

[…]

In most video games, if you are looking to produce some iron things, the first problem you invariably have is finding some iron ores. Often iron is some sort of semi-rare strategic resource available in only certain parts of the map, something that factions might fight over. Actually finding some iron might be a serious problem.

Well, I have good news for historical you as compared to video game you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a billion tons (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. And that’s the point.

One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just so damn abundant. Of course iron can be used to make better tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was cheap. Now, as we’ll see, while the abundance of iron makes it cheap, the difficulty in working it poses technological problems; that’s why the far rarer and also generally inferior (to proper, work-hardened, heat-treated iron or steel; bronze will often exceed the performance of unalloyed iron) copper and bronze were used first: harder to find, easier to work. […]

Very small amounts of iron occur on earth as pure “native” metal; the term for this, “meteoric iron” is an accurate description of where it comes from (there is also one known deposit of native “telluric iron“); in practice, the sum total of these iron sources is effectively a rounding error on the amount of iron an iron-age society is going to need and so “pure” iron may be disregarded as a meaningful source of iron.

Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.

March 7, 2022

Wargaming the Spanish Civil War

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Of all the wars of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War has to have been one of the most confusing to outsiders at the time and virtually unreadable to moderns who didn’t live through that tumultuous era. I’ve read and enjoyed Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, but it’s not a history of the whole war: Orwell was an enlisted volunteer who served on a “quiet” sector until he was seriously wounded by a Nationalist sniper. He discusses the situations he encountered personally and avoids, for the most part, editorializing the larger strategic conflict (the TimeGhost team did a pretty helpful video on how the war was triggered that may be informative). As a result of the lack of clarity and the confused narratives, the Spanish Civil War hasn’t been covered in wargames to any great degree, but Jonathan Kay found a scenario for Advanced Squad Leader on part of the conflict that he clearly found intriguing:

The Spanish Civil War was, in human terms, an epic clash of arms: Almost 300,000 combatants are thought to have been killed, as well as more than 150,000 civilians. The conflict also looms large in the history of the 20th century, having been memorably described by U.S. ambassador to Spain Claude Bowers as the “dress rehearsal” for World War II.

Among the idealistic combatants who travelled to Spain to join the fight against fascism were Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, whose war experiences served to inform, respectively, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia. The war also inspired Pablo Picasso’s unsettling surrealist masterpiece Guernica, which depicted the bombing of the Basque town of the same name on April 26, 1937.

Picasso’s Guernica in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.

All in all, something like 50,000 foreigners assisted the Republican side through the International Brigades — whose Brigada Abraham Lincoln included a Washington Battalion made up of Americans, and a Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion made up of Canadians. At least a quarter of these international volunteers died in combat, but most of the rest went home with frightening stories to tell. Even before the Nazis invaded Poland, the world’s understanding of fascism’s existential threat to humanity was shaped by General Francisco Franco’s successful campaign to topple the Second Spanish Republic.

And yet one thing that the Spanish Civil War has not yielded is a wide array of popular boardgames. This may be partly due to the fact that the conflict was so greatly overshadowed in scale and importance by World War II. But it may also be due to the fact that neither side emerged as sympathetic. As Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia (and as Adam Hochschild described, from a U.S. perspective, in his 2016 book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939), the Republican war effort turned out to be incompetent, fractured, and cynical, with the dominant pro-Stalinist faction eventually turning murderously upon its Trotskyist and anarchist allies. And as late as early March, 1939, just weeks before Franco conquered Madrid and ended the war, Republican forces inside the capital city were engaged in a deadly power struggle within their own ranks. All in all, the many regional and political subplots make the war difficult to model in any kind of conventional wargame (though, of course, this hasn’t stopped numerous game designers from trying).

However, The Beleaguered Capital, HazMo scenario 11, presents a reminder that when Republican and Nationalist forces fought each other in pitched battles, the mode of combat really did offer a preview of World War II, including the use of air power and tanks. (While the only tanks that existed in Spain when the war broke out were a handful of tiny, World War I-era Renault FTs, the Russians sent T-26s to the Republicans while Germany dispatched Pz Is to the Nationalists. In both cases, these vehicles arrived in Spain during the Fall of 1936, just a few months before the December 16 dateline on The Beleaguered Capital.)

March 3, 2022

QotD: Diversity was Rome’s strength … as is true of almost every empire in history

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, History, Italy, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The actual Roman Empire was fantastically diverse and more importantly, its military success hinged on its diversity at every stage of its existence. In many games and cultural products, that diversity is obscured because we lose sight of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural divisions which were very important at the time, but no longer matter to us very much. Let’s take a snapshot of Roman territory in 218 B.C. to give a sense of this.

Quite a few people look at a map like that, classify most of Rome’s territories as “Italian” and assume there is a large, homogeneous ethnic core there (except, I suspect, anyone who has actually been to Italy and is aware that Italy is hardly homogeneous, even today!). But Roman Italy in 218 B.C. was nothing like that.

Peninsular Italy (which doesn’t include the Po River Valley) contained a bewildering array of cultures and peoples: at least three distinct religious systems (Roman, Etruscan, Greek), half a dozen languages (some completely unrelated to each other) and many clearly distinct cultural and ethnic groups divided into communities with strong local identities and fierce local rivalries (if you want more on this, check out Salmon, The Making of Roman Italy (1982), Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage (2010), and Keaveney, Rome and the Unification of Italy (2005)).

The Roman army was by no means entirely Roman – it was split between Roman citizens and what the Romans called the socii (lit: “allies”) – a polite term for the communities they had subjugated in Italy (a periphery!). Rome demanded military service – this was the resource they would extract – from these communities; the socii pretty much always made up more than half of the army. Diversity was literally the Roman strength, in terms of total military force. Without it, Rome would have remained just one city-state in Italy, and not a particularly important one besides.

(As an aside: while citizenship is extended to nearly all of Italy in the 80s B.C., by then Rome is making extensive use of non-Italian troops in its armies. by the early empire, half of the army – the auxilia – were non-Roman citizens recruited from the provinces. Roman armies were essentially never majority “Roman” in any period, save possibly for the third century. And before anyone asks what about even earlier than my snapshot – it is quite clear – both archaeologically and in the Romans’ own foundation myths – that Rome was a fusion-society, culturally diverse from the city’s foundation. Indeed, sitting at the meeting point of Latin and Etruscan cultural zones as well as upland and coastal geographic zones was one of the great advantages Rome enjoyed in its early history, as near as we can tell.)

Outside of Italy, narrowly construed, the diversity only increases. Sicily’s population included Greeks, Punic (read: Carthaginian) settlers, and the truly native non-Greeks. Sardinia and Corsica had their own local culture as well. Cisalpine Gaul – the Po River Valley – was, as the name implies, mostly Gallic! As the Romans expended into Spain during the Second Punic War, they would add Iberians, Celt-Iberians, and yet more Punic settlers to their empire. And even those descriptions mask tremendous diversity – Iberians and Celt-Iberians were about as diverse among themselves as the Italians were; a quick read of Strabo reveals a wonderful array of sub-groups in all of these regions, with their own customs, languages, and so on.

Even if the Romans didn’t raise military force directly from any one of these groups, they do need to raise revenue from them – remember, the entire point of having the empire is to raise revenue from it, to make other people do the farming and mining and other labor necessary to support your society from the proceeds of their tribute. To keep that revenue flowing – revenue that, as the Roman army professionalized in the late second century B.C., increasingly paid for Roman military activity which held the empire together – you need to be good at managing those groups. Empires that are bad at handling a wide array of different cultures/religions/languages do not long remain empires.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.

February 23, 2022

Peter Cushing (1956)

Filed under: Britain, Gaming, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published 14 Apr 2013

Kensington, London.

M/S of actor Peter Cushing sitting at his desk looking at papers in his hand. He takes a model toy soldier on a horse and compares it with its drawing. He puts it back and takes another toy soldier. C/U of his hand painting a white belt on the little soldier’s uniform. C/U on his eyes as he works — he must have a good eyesight to do this!

Peter Cushing, enthusiastic member of Model Soldier Society, collects, makes and plays with toy soldiers from all periods of military history. He plays with his toys in accordance to the rules laid down by H.G. Wells in his book Little Wars. M/S of Mr Cushing getting off his chair, approaching a little battlefield laid out on the floor. He organises the battlefield to match a map in his hand.

Voiceover tells the audience that many of historical figures played this game, for example Napoleon [obv. not following the rules devised by Mr. Wells]. It engages the mind of a person as much as the game of chess, which means it is not as simple as it looks. M/S of Mr Cushing kneeling on the floor, putting a horse drawn carriage next to a little house. Top panning shot reveals his little battlefield: soldiers, huts, horses, trees, farms …

M/S of Mr Cushing taking a cigarette, putting it in his mouth and lighting it while observing the battlefield. C/U shot of H. G. Wells’ book Little Wars.

A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/

British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 136,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1984. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website.

H/T to Jon Salway for the link.

December 18, 2021

QotD: The Game of Life

Filed under: Gaming, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Life, as it is often called, was conceived as a modern take on a board game designed in 1860 … called the Checkered Game of Life …

    By 1960, the Checkered Game of Life had disappeared from most American game tables. It had been replaced by such as entrants as Monopoly, which rewarded winners with riches, punished losers with penury and became one of the top-selling board games in the United States during the Depression. Mr. Klamer’s task, as assigned by the Milton Bradley Co., was to create a game to mark the company’s 100th anniversary … With the assistance of colleagues … Mr. Klamer updated [the Checkered Game of Life] for the aspirations of contemporary players. For instance, players of the new version would choose between a “business” route, which afforded an immediate salary, and “college”, which promised a larger but delayed one … To board game enthusiasts, the Game of Life was a beauty: a marvel of topography with raised roads that players traversed in their station-wagon game pieces. According to the volume Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them, by Tim Walsh, Life was “the first three-dimensional game board using plastic.” … Destinations in the 1960 version included “Millionaire Acres” — or the “Poor Farm”.

From “Reuben Klamer, toy inventor who created the Game of Life, dies at 99” (WaPo).

I played that game when it was new in the 1960s, and I guess those 3-dimensional aspects and the built-in spinner were pretty exciting. But what a drag it made life seem! You’re a peg in a car and you gather family members to fill the hole in the car and keep driving till you get to the end. At least the end wasn’t called Death.

And it seems that this is where we Baby Boomers learned we’d better go to college. The game had determined the income difference. But you didn’t even have any fun in college or learn anything deep. You just upped your earning potential, and the point of life/Life was to make the most money. What an awful game!

Ann Althouse, “Life as it is often called, was conceived as a modern take on a board game designed in 1860 … called the Checkered Game of Life“, Althouse, 2021-09-17.

November 4, 2021

You think software is expensive now? You wouldn’t believe how expensive 1980s software was

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A couple of years ago, Rob Griffiths looked at some computer hobbyist magazines from the 1980s and had both nostalgia for the period and sticker shock from the prices asked for computer games and business software:

A friend recently sent me a link to a large collection of 1980s computing magazines — there’s some great stuff there, well worth browsing. Perusing the list, I noticed Softline, which I remember reading in our home while growing up. (I was in high school in the early 1980s.)

We were fortunate enough to have an Apple ][ in our home, and I remember reading Softline for their game reviews and ads for currently-released games.

It was those ads that caught my eye as I browsed a few issues. Consider Missile Defense, a fun semi-clone of the arcade game Missile Command. To give you a sense of what games were like at the time, here are a few screenshots from the game (All game images in this article are courtesy of MobyGames, who graciously allow use of up to 20 images without prior permission.)

Stunning graphics, aren’t they?

Not quite state of the art, but impressive for a home computer of the day. My first computer was a PC clone, and the IBM PC software market was much more heavily oriented to business applications compared to the Apple, Atari, Commodore, or other “home computers” of the day. I think the first game I got was Broderbund’s The Ancient Art of War, which I remembered at the time as being very expensive. The Wikipedia entry says:

A screenshot from the DOS version of The Ancient Art of War.
Image via Moby Games.

In 1985 Computer Gaming World praised The Ancient Art of War as a great war game, especially the ability to create custom scenarios, stating that for pre-gunpowder warfare it “should allow you to recreate most engagements”. In 1990 the magazine gave the game three out of five stars, and in 1993 two stars. Jerry Pournelle of BYTE named The Ancient Art of War his game of the month for February 1986, reporting that his sons “say (and I confirm from my own experience) is about the best strategic computer war game they’ve encountered … Highly recommended.” PC Magazine in 1988 called the game “educational and entertaining”. […] The Ancient Art of War is generally recognized as one of the first real-time strategy or real-time tactics games, a genre which became hugely popular a decade later with Dune II and Warcraft. Those later games added an element of economic management, with mining or gathering, as well as construction and base management, to the purely military.

The Ancient Art of War is cited as a classic example of a video game that uses a rock-paper-scissors design with its three combat units, archer, knight, and barbarian, as a way to balance gameplay strategies.

Back to Rob Griffiths and the sticker shock moment:

What stood out to me as I re-read this first issue wasn’t the very basic nature of the ad layout (after all, Apple hadn’t yet revolutionized page layout with the Mac and LaserWriter). No, what really stood out was the price: $29.95. While that may not sound all that high, consider that’s the cost roughly 38 years ago.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator, that $29.95 in September of 1981 is equivalent to $82.45 in today’s money (i.e. an inflation factor of 2.753). Even by today’s standards, where top-tier games will spend tens of millions on development and marketing, $82.45 would be considered a very high priced game — many top-tier Xbox, PlayStation, and Mac/PC games are priced in the $50 to $60 range.

Business software — what there was of it available to the home computer market — was also proportionally much more expensive, but I found the feature list for this word processor to be more amusing: “Gives true upper/lower case text on your screen with no additional hardware support whatsoever.” Gosh!

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

August 29, 2021

QotD: “LEEEERRRROOOYYYY JEEEEENNNNKIIIIINS!”

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Would it be confessing too much to admit that one of my generation’s formative moments happened in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft?

The year was 2005, and a diverse collection of mages and warriors were about to storm a mythical castle swarming with flying dragon-like creatures, particularly deadly to their guild. Like true and proper nerds, they met beforehand to discuss their strategy, and with all the detached analysis of a corporate board discussing the latest results of a focus group convened to discuss a brand refresh.

“Christ. OK. Well what we’ll do I’ll run in first, gather up all the eggs,” the leader begins. “I will use Intimidating Shout to kind of scatter them so they don’t have to fight a whole bunch of them at once. When my shout is done, I’ll need Anthony to come in and drop his shout too so we can keep them scattered.

“We’re going to need Divine Intervention on our mages … it is a pretty good plan. We should be able to pull it off this time. What do you think, Abdul? Can you do a number crunch real quick?”

The resident numbers guy responds: “Uh, yeah, give me a second. I’m coming up 32.33 — repeating, of course — percentage of survival.”

“Ah, that’s a lot better than what we usually do …”

Then one of the guild’s resident numbnuts breaks into this dull planning.

“Thumbs up. Let’s do this.

“LEEEERRRROOOYYYY JEEEEENNNNKIIIIINS.”

“Oh my God, he just ran in.”

His team dutifully follows … and proceeds to get slaughtered by the dragon things.

“Goddamnit, Leeroy. You moron.”

Whether or not the scene was staged is irrelevant. The guild, “Pals for Life”, may have died in that fight, but glory lives forever. Or, at least, meme glory does. It was a perfect encapsulation of what happens when the best-laid plans come to nothing, when life goes pear shaped, when the odds are bad so, fuck it, you storm the castle anyways.

Jen Gerson, “Alberta goes Leeroy Jenkins on Summer”, The Line, 2021-05-28.

May 20, 2021

Men Will Be Boys (1970)

Filed under: Britain, Gaming, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Pathé
Published 13 Apr 2014

Men will be boys. Various locations.

M/S men round lake with boats. C/U man in lake with waders with model boat. C/U another man with model boat. Man lighting boiler. C/U engine working. M/S as model of paddle boat moves through water. M/S paddle boat on water. In foreground a swan. C/U another model boat going through water. M/S pan scale model of Hitler’s yacht. M/S men playing with model cars on race track. C/U cars going round race track. C/U men’s hands on controls. C/U men looking at cars go past. L/S of cars going round race track.

L/S men playing war games with model soldiers. on large table. C/U as man moves soldiers out of line laying them on ground. M/S man moves horses forward. C/U hand placing cannon into position. C/U hand places horse troops in position. M/S lines of soldier. Hand places another in position. M/S of troops being moved.

M/S Mr Victor Martin and wife go through gate by railway crossing dressed up in their uniforms, carrying lamps etc. M/S as they make their way to their signal boxes. C/U railway notice ‘By Midland Railway’. Pa off notice to show Mr Martin approaching his signal box. M/S Martin going into signal box. M/S Mrs Martin going into signal box. C/U Mrs Martin going into signal box. C/U interior. Mr Martin hanging up his jacket inside signal box. He then sits at the controls. C/U signal controls working. C/U of Mr Martin operating signals. Camera zooms back and we see train going past him along track. C/U model train over track. C/U Mrs Martin working in her signal box.

M/S Mrs Martin working signal controls. C/U Mrs Martin. M/S showing trains going over track. C/U trains moving. Camera zooms out to show tracks . C/U trains moving. C/U looking along tunnel showing trains moving. C/U exterior. Signals working. Then camera pans to show where the trains run on an enclosed section out in the open. C/U goods train and passenger train moving. M/S Interior. Trains going over track and Mr Martin at controls.
FILM ID:2241.18

A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/​

FOR LICENSING ENQUIRIES VISIT http://www.britishpathe.com/​

British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 136,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1984. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website. https://www.britishpathe.com/

May 16, 2021

Gambling machines have come a long way from the “one-armed bandit” days

Filed under: Books, Business, Gaming, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is another reader book review for Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, looking at Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll. I’m incredibly risk-averse, so I’ve never even set foot in a casino, but from this review I do not regret my aversion one tiny little bit:

“Hiking the Las Vegas casinos” by davduf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

    Sometimes employees at Netflix think, “Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon” … [W]e actually compete with sleep.

    Reed Hastings

Randomness is addictive, in rats. B. F. Skinner learned that when he created his eponymous rat boxes. The boxes had levers that, when pressed, dispensed food pellets. Rats in boxes where one press resulted in one pellet pressed the lever when hungry. But rats in boxes where one press randomly resulted in no, one, or many pellets, became addicted to pressing the lever. That mammalian attraction to randomness lies at the heart of all gambling.

But machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling. The book overflows with metaphors straining to describe how machine gambling is the supercharged version of table games like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Machine gambling is deforestation ruining the rainforest of diverse table games. Machines are invasive kudzu outcompeting and killing the native table games. Machine gambling is the crack cocaine to table games’ cocaine.

In about two decades, machine gambling went from being a side attraction to keep wives busy while their husbands played table games to the source of 85% of casino profits. You know how shopping malls have benches for husbands to sit on while their wives shop in stores? Imagine that those benches became the mall. (If you’re reading this in 2025, shopping malls were, uh, a collection of permanent pop-up stores under the same roof.)

The first time I went to Vegas, I knew a few tricks casinos would use to encourage me to gamble too much. I knew the hotel rooms were purposefully cheap, to entice me to visit Vegas. I knew casinos would have neither windows nor clocks, to help me lose my sense of time. I knew they would be full of bright lights and loud sounds, to overstimulate me. I knew nothing. Those tricks are old hat, as quaint as doilies. Machine gambling is a brave new world.

Machine gambling comes in the form of many games, but one example is enough to illustrate the pattern, so let’s discuss slot machines. Slot machines are games with reels with a variety of symbols on them, like cherries, diamonds, or the number 7. (Fun fact: fruit symbols were initially used on slot machines during the prohibition era to disguise them as gum vending machines.) The game is simple. The player spins the reels. If they land to show symbols in a row, the player wins. Because of their simplicity, these machines are favored by new gamblers and tourists.

Back when Moore’s Law was just Moore’s Prediction, slot machines were mechanical devices. The player would pull on a mechanical lever, which caused reels to spin. The reels would eventually slow down and then stop. The symbols in the middle of the screen when the reels stopped dictated whether the player won or lost.

Now, slot machines are digital. The lever, the reels, the symbols — they are all ones and zeros untethered from reality. This gives machine designers a terrifying amount of flexibility. They can optimize the game to maximize its addictivity.

May 15, 2021

Baelin’s Route review, a discussion on why Viva La Dirt League’s Baelin’s Route is such a great story

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writers Block
Published 10 May 2021

In this video we will discuss why Viva La Dirt League’s movie Baelin’s Route is such a masterpiece of story telling.

Viva La Dirt League — Baelin’s Route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe-Z…

May 10, 2021

Baelin’s Route – An Epic NPC Man Adventure

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Viva La Dirt League
Published 9 May 2021

Baelin (Rowan Bettjeman), a simple background NPC in the video game Skycraft has been walking the same route for as long as he can remember. However, his peaceful (and mindless) routine is violently shaken as a short-tempered Adventurer (Ben Van Lier) drags him off his path and into a dangerous quest to escort a mysterious NPC girl named Willow (Phoenix Cross) across the harsh world of Azerim.

ORIGINAL ‘BAELIN’S ROUTE’ SOUNDTRACK: https://mikenewport.hearnow.com/​

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From the comments:

Young Dad Gaming
36 minutes ago
Okay, I know people keep talking about how good the choreography is … and we need to discuss that a little further. That was almost a full minute of a single take of a fight scene from guys who make comedy videos. That in itself is impressive and should be lauded as one of the best action scenes on YouTube.

February 27, 2021

Overwhelming video game tutorials – Combat Tips

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Viva La Dirt League
Published 25 Nov 2020

When a game tries to give you all the tutorials at once

Get a 12% discount off all SteelSeries products by using our code VLDL12. Not only do you get a special discount but we make 8% on all sales! So get a great deal and help support us!
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