Lynx, 27 Frimaire CCXXVII

[oligopsony]

• Someone scoops me on something I've wanted to do for a while. But it's more of an outline for a project, so maybe I'm still good.
  
• Most public housing isn't associated with crime, but rather a few projects are typically associated with a lot of it. How to convert physical engineering into social?
  
• Anonymization reduces gender gaps in funding, although I wonder how much of the effect is specific to e.g. subconscious gender stereotypes vs. an overall decrease in the returns to well-connectedness (where male advantage could be due to generational effects or to something more stable like who can invite whom out for drinks after a conference without anxiety.) Seems like good practice either way, though.
  
• Ken Hite's homegame 13th Age setting being adulterated into a 5e product. (Absent some eyerolling about how he'll turn Persia or something into a metaphor for Vladimir Putin or whatever, I expect it to be super neat.)
  
• On strategy and dexterity.
  
• Interactive prehistoric globes!
  
• Replication crisis activism in the long view.
  

Comments

[collapsedsquid]

I expected the left neo-cameralism thing to lead to industrial congresses but instead it just led to mutualism. It's going hard de-centralization in a way that doesn't really seem workable in the modern interconnected era. That whole thing seems very early 1900s.

Reminds me thought that I keep meaning to look into the history of corporatist thought that exists pre-fascism.

[discoursedrome]

Nice! I haven't checked out the serious ones yet because they require spoons; I'm keeping them in tabs because imagining that I'll read them later makes me feel virtuous.

I did have a look at the RTS mechanics piece though, since that's a subject I'm pretty interested in. My feeling was that it mades good points about the merit of mechanics as a skill differentiator, but overreached in its claims. In particular, there's a kind of sleight of hand where it starts out by saying "I think you probably couldn't make a game without one dominant strategy for every side", and then later treats this as a proven conclusion. I'm not sure you could do it on purpose, in one try, but I'm skeptical that it couldn't be done with the kind of ongoing rebalancing and large-scale metrics that we have nowadays, and "just blow up the metagame every six months" is a real possibility nowadays with stuff like LoL. Magic: the Gathering is a lot like a turn-based RTS, and has no problem being 100% non-mechanical and -- despite having clearly dominant strategies -- staying lively enough to keep things interesting at the competitive level. Again, the willingness to regularly scramble the meta with updates seems like a big factor here.

The author also argues that an RPS equilibrium reduces the winning strategy to luck, which I don't agree with. RPS is a game of skill! If the three Starcraft races were arranged in an RPS setup and that was the extent of the strategy, it'd be dumb, but it'd be dumb not because RPS is random but because then one round of RPS takes 15 minutes. Comparatively, fighting games are heavily built around RPS -- Sirlin's yomi essay is of course the seminal work on that -- but these RPS exchanges happen dozens of times over the course of a few minutes and it generally takes multiple successful reads to win a round, so it works fine. This I think is the fundamental pitfall with RTSes compared to other sorts of games -- matches take a long time, but you make huge, irreversible commitments almost immediately, so your mid-to-late-game strategy is too heavily constrained to provide much depth of guessing games.

The last thing I'd note is that complaints about micro tend to focus on micro that feels like drudgery -- on stuff that's just not fun to do. It's often said that players are bad at identifying what needs to change in a game but good at recognizing that there's a problem, and I think that there are a lot of situations where complaints about execution boil down to complaints that the execution is unpleasant in a gratuitous way. (Again with a fighting game example since I don't know shit about RTSes: people complain a lot more about moves that require convoluted inputs than about combos that require precise timing, even though both are execution barriers, simply because the former feels more obnoxious.) Compare this to complaints about "grind" in RPGs despite RPGs being little more than cow-clicker Skinner boxes, from a gameplay standpoint. This isn't a contradiction to what the author was saying, but suggests that you do have to think hard about the nature of mechanics and not just about how much of them there is.

[youzicha]

I feel the author walked back his point into basically nothing---he starts out by saying that "mechanics" are things that require manual dexterity but no conscious though, then someone in the comments asks "what about chess", and they reply "ah well, in the case of chess the relevant mechanics is being good a chess tactics". Anyway, I think the fact that games like chess and go exist and are interesting strongly suggests that you could also construct an RTS game which doesn't rely on micro-management.

[discoursedrome]

Ah, I missed that; it is indeed pretty ridiculous. That said, I think his point that highly asymmetric games tend to rely having a trillion moving parts to avoid degenerate solutions, which then makes them too hard to balance intentionally, holds water. I just I guess am more optimistic about the kind of meta that can result from that in the presence of regular updates -- either to refine what's there or just to totally mess everything up and start from zero. In that situation, you can let the community do the work of exploring your design space for you.

[brin_bellway]

My main reaction to that post was not any particular assessment of his point, but rather "huh, a lot of people have a completely different experience of Age of Empires".

I think cryptovexillologist recently called AoE2 a great Dicking Around RTS, and that's *much* more my own experience. I never used the multiplayer option, and was indeed only dimly aware of it. I found the combat the least interesting part of the game, and usually handicapped the AI in setup so that it could never seriously attack me. (My personal win conditions tended to be things like "make a swarm of resource-gathering units and devour the world" or (AoE3 only) "reach the per-game XP cap as quickly as possible".) The storyline scenarios were fun too.

(I use past tense here, but I keep the games around and once in a blue moon I do still play. But it seems that "Dicking Around RTS" is not a psychological niche I need filled very often these days. (Also, it's inconvenient to have to boot into Windows for it.))

I've since read a couple more Illiteracy Has Downsides posts and plan to continue, mostly because it's interesting to see the genre from the perspective of a competitive player.