[HN Gopher] I Really Blew It (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
I Really Blew It (2020)
Author : webmaven
Score : 303 points
Date : 2021-02-15 05:14 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.erasmatazz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.erasmatazz.com)
| [deleted]
| shkkmo wrote:
| Ugh, this content might be worth reading, if the layout weren't
| so broken that reading on any small device is impossible
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The Firefox reader mode got me through it, so I'd recommend
| trying that if like me this happens to you often.
| rmetzler wrote:
| I also missed a TLDR. Is this why all his efforts failing?
| Because he writes so many words without saying much?
| bo1024 wrote:
| This was really intriguing, but I wish the author was able to
| communicate more about this difference of perspective. Process vs
| objects? Those formula seem unsurprising, I wasn't able to
| understand. I guess if it was easy to communicate, they wouldn't
| be writing the post in the first place.
| vessenes wrote:
| I am sure readers will dislike the genius claims, but I think it
| would be missing the main point to get distracted by the tone.
|
| The point I hear most loudly is that some sort of systems
| thinking combined with math is a pretty useful and powerful way
| to think about the world, but for some reason people don't care
| to learn that way of thinking.
|
| I think this is pretty profound. Systems theorists are super
| quirky, (I highly recommend the systems bible btw) and some of
| the earliest writers were not mathematically inclined - they tend
| to balk at hard predictions for a variety of reasons. It is a
| vanishingly small group, but I think one that has a lot to offer.
|
| Anyway, I charitably read this as a plea to care about the
| systems that make up the world, and second that plea.
| solipsism wrote:
| Would you say the contents of this article indicate that the
| author is "mathematically inclined", in any significant way
| (compared to, for example, the early systems theorists you
| refer to)?
| morelisp wrote:
| As someone who has followed Crawford's trajectory for the
| past 15ish years I have to say his biggest problem may be the
| opposite. He is so tightly married to the idea that narrative
| simulations must produce _concrete, written, book-like
| stories_ that he misses how effective modern simulation games
| (not just computer games, but also boardgames, RP, consims,
| "paxsims", etc) can effectively engage systems literacy -
| even though they do not process "natural-language" textual
| inputs, through a mathematical ur-model, into "natural-
| language" textual outputs.
|
| I think the average group of analysts running a matrix game
| is considerably more "mathematically-minded" in that they are
| much more interested in _what the simulation does_ than
| whether it produces a particular form of output.
| [deleted]
| alangibson wrote:
| I thought of Ted Nelson (pioneer of hypertext) while reading
| this. Nelson could have contributed a lot more to the world if he
| hadn't convinced himself that his Project Xanadu was the answer
| to life, the universe and everything and that the Internet today
| is "a crime against humanity."
| rutierut wrote:
| So if I'm getting this right, and I might not, the author:
|
| - Is a genius. Outside the bounds of usual intelligence and thus
| unrecognizable for average people.
|
| - He however is not able to use his genius to create value in any
| way. He specifically mentions failing to teach others to do so
| but this is because they are unable to comprehend his genius.
|
| - Finally he his also not able to signal his genius (in any of
| his numerous publications) in such a way that someone who does
| have the tools/skills(money/better communication) to exploit this
| enormous unused potential is willing to do so.
|
| If it's a duck but:
|
| - nobody thinks it looks like a duck,
|
| - it doesn't quack and
|
| - it isn't able to produce any offspring that -
| can quack or - look like a duck
|
| Is it really a duck?
| speeder wrote:
| He is a literal legend in the field of gamedev.
|
| 1. He made some commercial and critical successes. 2. His
| writings are studied in game design academia. 3. His reason to
| pursue what he is pursue, is a good one, he gave some awesome
| speech on GDC about it when he was about to quit the normal
| industry and attempt this, long story short, he is upset with
| the AAA-style games and wanted the game industry embrace the
| fact they can make interactive art, and should take more risks.
| 4. He created GDC in first place!
|
| By the way, his goal is not completely nuts, "AI Dungeon" for
| example is close to what he wanted, he has a text to explain
| why he doesn't consider it a fully valid attempt though: the
| fact it is entirely AI generated using deep learning, what he
| wants is to create a tool that the end result is like AI
| Dungeon (For players) but that is actually some kind of
| authoring tool, where game designers can actually be creative
| and create something fun.
|
| I personally think his goal is a cool one but I have no idea
| how to make it possible without heavy-handed AI in the middle.
| chris_st wrote:
| > _He however is not able to use his genius to create value in
| any way._
|
| Well, he did create (at least) two video games that were well
| received -- in fact, I remember that "Balance of Power" got
| amazing reviews when it came out.
|
| So not entirely barren in production.
|
| I'm _guessing_ that he 's unhappy that people, when taught his
| ideas, don't follow them closely enough?
| neogodless wrote:
| Took a peek at the game[0].
|
| From the initial game setup (options) screen:
|
| > People who play this game without reading the manual are
| wasting their time.
|
| Cannot judge by this emulator but I agree... started playing
| and had no clue how to "do" things. But then I read on
| Wikipedia[1]...
|
| > It was praised for its inventive non-action gameplay that
| was nevertheless exciting and distinct. It has been named by
| Computer Gaming World as one of the most innovative computer
| games of all time.
|
| Apparently at some point events will start to take place, and
| then you'll get a chance to choose how you react.
|
| [0] https://classicreload.com/balance-of-power.html
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
| rutierut wrote:
| Yes "to create value in any way" is wrong, I should have
| written something more nuanced.
|
| I think you are right on this mainly being about his super
| valuable teachings not being utilized and this specific post
| not being about the author thinking he's a genius although he
| does think so[0].
|
| [0] http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/a-genius.html
| m3talsmith wrote:
| You are not getting it right: he specifically excludes himself
| from the category of genius. What he bemoans is the languishing
| of his ideas and posits that, despite the several interests in
| them and efforts to fulfill said interests, the timing may be
| wrong for them to be taken up.
| duxup wrote:
| You're right that he does seem to indicate he does exclude
| himself, but I feel like he puts more effort into that
| article to include himself with the comparisons made.
|
| But maybe that's not the issue as much as:
|
| I think the larger issue is that he really doesn't make the
| case (and maybe that's not the point) that these ideas are in
| fact as great as he makes them out to be. He mentions then
| and then goes on to mention some basic math, about the
| matrix... that's not convincing and raises all sorts of
| questions in my mind.
| 300bps wrote:
| At the top of the linked article is a link to a previous blog
| entry entitled "A Genius????" that lists a bunch of "smart"
| things he's done that presumably qualify him for being a
| genius but that he cringes at calling himself that.
|
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/a-genius.html
| neogodless wrote:
| Overall the comments here and several of his blog posts
| make me think of this: https://sive.rs/multiply
|
| > To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are
| just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
|
| I also can think of times where "my" ideas were realized in
| the real world - but in no way can be credited to me,
| because other people also had those ideas, and someone
| implemented them. Was I a genius because I had these ideas,
| or did I just have some similar experiences and knowledge
| to others that had those ideas that (all but) inevitably
| will generate such an idea over a given timeline?
|
| To really see how he views himself in comparison to
| others...
|
| > I don't want my success or failure to be determined by
| the idiots who populate this planet.
|
| I think really there's a fear here to put his ideas "out
| there" to go through the gauntlet of other smart people. If
| they never become popular, you can keep telling yourself
| how significant they are and it will not be disproved. But
| if you work to get your idea out there, and it still fails,
| maybe the idea had less value or significance than you
| assigned it. (Or you can still blame the "idiots on this
| planet.")
| detritus wrote:
| > timing may be wrong for them to be taken up.
|
| Thus underpinning his actual conceit of genius.
| breck wrote:
| Oh man, just reading (http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/course-
| description-2018/ob...) for the first time. This person is
| definitely a genius. We have that word for people like this.
| redisman wrote:
| I don't really understand how this is genius? Basic
| philosophy 101 and systems thinking concepts.
| breck wrote:
| Goes after one of the (potential the) most common patterns
| in nature and offers a new take.
|
| "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points"
| redisman wrote:
| I will say Object Oriented Programming has probably also
| had a giant impact on how we model game systems. Is
| functional programming on the Process end of the scale?
| breck wrote:
| I like that mapping
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I would like if author could read this, as I am writing this with
| deep compassion so I hope it won't be understood in the wrong
| way. I am sorry, but everything dies, and some ideas do not make
| it. In our fear of death, we are trying to make a dent in this
| world, portraying our selves in a bigger light. Truth is even big
| ideas, and great work dies... Imagine, there was how many people
| since the beginning? Give or take ~110 billion, out of that there
| is around 130,000,000 (130 million books). How many books do
| average person reads over the lifetime? It is said that super
| readers read about 80 books a year, equal max ~8000-10000 books,
| which is a 0.0076% of all books.
|
| So out of: 110,000,000,000 people Truly remembered are how many
| writers, scientists, inventors? How many names of famous people
| and their ideas average person really knows? Million? Hundred
| thousand? Thousand? Maybe hundred or more likely ten-ish?
| Einstein, Tesla, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain,
| Mozart, Goethe ... forgive me for this random list, how many
| names could you write on the list?
|
| And this is for educated people, what about those who are not?
|
| I am trying to say that our ability to absorb ideas is the
| bottleneck, so over time many good ideas will simply die, and
| then maybe, just maybe they may re-appear after some time. Ideas
| the same way as businesses will only succeed if authors find a
| way, the compelling story, so they become simple enough to become
| viral and start spreading independently. But like with everything
| live, it will need fertile ground, energy and bit of luck...
| actually great portion of luck ;/
| redisman wrote:
| As a game developer I like Chris Crawford but it's like someone
| should have told him decades ago that the first step of making
| game devs listen to you is to create games that are fun or
| interesting to play. Last thing of his I tested felt like a web
| toy proof of concept which wasn't doing anything mind blowing and
| not really a game at all. In my professional opinion he has been
| far too much the "ideas guy" but without compelling execution,
| he's just one of hundreds of "misunderstood" game design geniuses
| out there who never got a great game produced.
|
| It's sad because I think his mission is very worthwhile. He
| reminds me a quite a bit of a few other tragic underground game
| developers like Ullillillia and "Bobs game".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Someone did tell him that 30 years ago and he basically said
| "if that's the rules I'm leaving"
| adenozine wrote:
| Source of this? Unless you meant it as an anecdote
| morelisp wrote:
| It is probably the most famous moment of any GDC.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI
| adenozine wrote:
| Guess I'm just out of the loop! Thanks for the link
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Oof, comparing himself to Beethoven and Shakespeare (both
| fairly successful because people wanted to and continue
| to want to experience the products of their artistic
| abilities) while dismissing that nobody wants to play his
| game because it isn't "fun" is the biggest mental
| disconnect I've ever seen.
| smokey_circles wrote:
| It's ironic that a lot of the commenters here lack the basic
| comprehension skills required to see this is an old man lamenting
| his life's work because of a reason I struggle to pin down
|
| either
|
| - he was born to the wrong era
|
| - he didn't spend the time to create the demand for the ideas he
| peddled
|
| In any event: If you want to post something about how "he's not
| that smart": the problem is actually you. The dude's a legend, is
| incredibly bright, but can't articulate that well.
|
| But please, by all means waste your bandwidth being angry at an
| old man rationalising the long list of life decisions they have
| behind them
| kazinator wrote:
| Oh, he is "that smart"; but you have to be smarter than just
| "that smart" to be an actual misunderstood genius. What your
| wife says is not a statistically valid sample.
|
| Throngs of his peers in the same disciplines are, or have been,
| "that smart". Not everyone is celebrated as a genius.
| username90 wrote:
| Nobody here is angry at him. He just comes off as a person who
| refuse to acknowledge that his ideas are dated, there was a
| very short time when his ideas were demanded and it was exactly
| when he was active. People bought and enjoyed his game for a
| couple of years, then they moved on and no longer wanted his
| style of games, and demand never picked up again.
|
| It is like how Einstein refused to acknowledge quantum
| mechanics, and if Einstein wrote a post about how his ideas are
| so much better than those who studied quantum mechanics and
| that he was just born in the wrong time then Einstein would be
| ridiculed as well. Not because Einstein isn't smart or didn't
| add a lot of value, but because that kind of post is
| ridiculous.
| piyh wrote:
| There's so much ego involved. "I'm a misunderstood genius" is
| enough of a trope that it translates to "I'm above average
| intelligence, stubborn and can't relate to people" in my
| experience.
|
| >In 2018, Crawford announced that he had halted his work on
| interactive storytelling, concluding that it will take
| centuries for civilization to embrace the required
| concepts.[1]
|
| "No, it's the children who are wrong."
|
| Being married has taught me that in life you can be right all
| the time, or you can compromise and be happy. I can
| appreciate the people who are unbreaking in their resolve to
| make the world a better place, but his particular
| philosophical hill is not one I'd choose to die on.
| greedo wrote:
| It is fascinating how some style of games wither on the vine.
| When I was young, I was into combat flight simulators:
| EF2000, Falcon 4.0 etc. And wargames like Harpoon. People
| were building cockpits with realistic HOTAS setups, and it
| was amazing. I anticipated that with increasing computer (and
| GPU) power, that the future was bright.
|
| 20+ years later, MS Flight Simulator is about the only thing
| around. And while a good app, it's nothing like Falcon 4.0.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I disagree. MSFS is far from the only thing around. There
| is also War Thunder, VTOL VR, and X-Plane. The first two
| are amazing and I suggest trying them in VR.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| For combat flight sims, in addition to the suggestions
| offered by sibling, I'd also recommend looking at DCS and
| IL-2. Great attention to detail, tons of well-made DLC
| available, online play is solid, and you can spend as much
| on your cockpit and controls as your retirement plans can
| stand.
|
| For example, I recently bought the F-14 DLC. A fan-made
| manual that takes you through the basics, in a mere ~500
| pages (!), can be found here:
| https://www.mudspike.com/chucks-guides-dcs-f-14b-tomcat/
|
| Lots of manuals for other aircraft on that site too, check
| it out.
| runarberg wrote:
| Aside: Einstein (et. al.) wrote such a post (or a series of
| papers) as part of the Bohr-Einstein debates. Einstein was
| later proven to be wrong.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafGL02EUOA
| avindroth wrote:
| Yeah people nowadays are unnecessarily obsessed with expressing
| a "correct" opinion from their perspective. Sometimes you just
| can't comment on someone else's life work like that, especially
| if they have put their heart into it.
|
| It's really hard to work on the right things, and we should
| appreciate people having been steadfast in the direction they
| are heading in.
| neogodless wrote:
| I think the posts focusing on what you consider to be within
| your control and influence are more useful than a bland
| judgement of "smart or not smart."
|
| You can be smart, but if you focus on external variables, if
| you choose to limit the efforts you'll put forth to create
| value out of your ideas, or spread knowledge that has value, or
| you put your ideas out there and they fail but you just blame
| everyone else - it doesn't really matter how smart you are or
| even if the ideas have value. It matters that you've taken
| whatever influence you have over the end result and handed it
| over to everyone else.
|
| Similarly, there's just not a lot of value of idly lamenting
| that your ideas are great but not recognized by others. That
| the world is "populated by idiots."
|
| Certainly, many of us have had ideas we cherished that didn't
| take off - most of us have seen smaller successes compared to
| Chris' game sales in the early 80s. That kind of success could
| certainly alter anyone's perception. Perhaps my own humble life
| has prevented me from becoming too focused on my own genius,
| but I also recognize the perspective from moments in my past.
| At this point, I feel like I'm fortunate to have a brain that
| works well enough to have the career I have, as well as the
| home life I enjoy. It's not going to make me super wealthy or
| even slightly famous, but I can extract a lot of joy out of my
| life. And it will not benefit me to complain that the
| potentially good ideas of my past will not be realized. But
| it's certainly possible as the balance of years ahead shrinks
| in comparison with years past, I'll find myself more focused on
| what could have been and wish the world did more to appreciate
| me.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| For anyone lacking the context (I just read someone claim "I've
| never heard of this author or his games").
|
| Crawford, Eastern Front and Balance of Power were a big deal in
| their day. These were always niche games, but for those in the
| know, they were brilliant.
|
| You can read more about this period of videogame history in the
| freely available online book "Halcyon Days":
| https://dadgum.com/halcyon/
|
| Feel free to disagree with Crawford, but please don't do it out
| of ignorance. Know your history. Otherwise you'll be like someone
| who argues Charlie Chaplin has no business arguing about cinema,
| because he doesn't ring a bell to you and who watches silent
| black & white movies anyway?
|
| If there's one thing I take out of this: how easy we forget the
| history of computing and videogames. Past celebrities and heroes
| get forgotten, unlike with book and movie authors.
| kewp wrote:
| I connected a lot with this right until the Why Failure section.
| I thought he was going to admit that he had a blind spot, that
| thinking he was the one who needed to 'imbue (others) with (his)
| style of thinking' was solipsistic.
|
| It reminds me a lot of myself. I'm always sitting with a feeling
| like I've got some special perspective, that I'm the only one
| trying to 'figure it all out' and I'm always on the verge to, and
| when I do it will be incredible. And as I get older at the heart
| of it I feel something much sadder - a fear and a loneliness. An
| inability to engage and stand my ground with the people around
| me. Though that could be just me.
| lnanek2 wrote:
| I'm too young to have played his games, but looking at the wiki
| page for Balance of Power, it looks very similar to Plague Inc..
| You have a world map and you react to events. Plague Inc. is so
| super popular even my kid nephew plays it on his iPad and can
| talk at length on it for hours.
|
| Personally, I played a lot of XCOM which is a similar world map
| UI with random alien invading events you react to.
|
| So anyway, writing the books might have been a waste, but people
| seem to copy the game format quite a bit. Very influential.
| Probably should have written more games instead of the two books.
| sago wrote:
| Oh my!
|
| "Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I'm too far
| ahead of my time... I'm a misunderstood genius. ... the world
| doesn't yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885,
| physicists didn't perceive a need for special relativity, and
| they would have rejected it out of hand."
|
| Or... you're wrong.
|
| [In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the
| hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is
| numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."
|
| I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who
| have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather
| bemused by the way he described them here!). The general
| consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.
|
| There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years.
| Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him
| think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it
| was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-
| doc justification he can ladle on them).
|
| I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning
| in my eyes.
| augustl wrote:
| > his success at 80s game development made him think it was the
| wrong thing that caused the success
|
| I love this!
|
| Believing that you have complete insight into why you were
| successful the first time seems to be a major blocker to
| continued success.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's often honestly much better to attribute it to luck and
| hard work (often because it just IS luck) - trying to get
| lightning to strike twice precludes you doing something new.
| megameter wrote:
| I believe the most troubling thing about Crawford's path is
| simply in the inability to develop self-critique of his own
| philosophy. His thoughts on a subject seem to terminate in the
| thing of _having_ a mathematical model of a topic, not what we
| get out of that model. It does not seem to matter if the model
| is inscrutable when presented within a system, or if the system
| degenerates into a single strategy. (I have a memory of playing
| "Balance of the Planet" and after struggling for some time,
| discovering that the model did not restrict my taxation of
| dirty energy. Therefore I could gain a nearly infinite budget
| to clean up the planet on turn 1 with no negative consequences
| beyond "people falling off roofs while installing solar
| panels." I'm not even kidding - for some reason roofing
| accidents are ranked up there with deforestation and carbon
| release as very important things to model about our impact on
| the planet.)
|
| Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological
| model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which
| doesn't exactly help matters.
|
| Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces
| simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though.
| This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is
| now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.
| amatic wrote:
| His article "Am I a genius" is also interesting:
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/a-genius.html
|
| > the main reason for this is that I've made no attempt to
| sell the idea. I simply wrote it up and put it on my website.
| I suppose that, were I to jump through the appropriate hoops,
| I could garner more interest for the idea. But that is
| beneath my pride; I am a thinker, not a salesman. I refuse to
| promote myself. I put the idea before the world and the world
| can take it or leave it. The world mostly leaves it.
|
| I've heard some other people blaming a lack of "sales" for
| their ideas not spreading. As if you can not sell. Any sort
| of presentation is sales, if your product or idea is out
| there, it is selling itself.
|
| Maybe the focusing on sales would, ironically, bring the
| understanding of what people find impressive in ideas, in
| games or products, and it might be completely different from
| what we thought before.
| notahacker wrote:
| The most important bit of doing any kind of complex sale is
| listening to others.
|
| Reading the "most important" idea article that he made no
| attempt to sell is also illuminating. It's a mildly
| thought-provoking blog about how many fields have concepts
| of state and state change, and the concepts are
| interdependent and blur at the edges, leading to an
| unsupported conclusion that we think too much about data
| and inputs and not enough about CPUs. It would probably get
| a few upvotes and a few confused replies on LessWrong, but
| there's not really much for the computer scientists and
| creatives he clearly hopes will take notice to work with.
| Perhaps they might find a different version or some of his
| other ideas more valuable
| joshspankit wrote:
| Sales is morally bad: this idea that in order to sell, you
| must manipulate. Eg: "Used car salesmen" (said with
| disgust)
|
| Money is evil
|
| A bit to the side of the OP, but I feel like these two
| narratives have been particularly damaging to our planet's
| long-term growth. To your point @amatic: If the author had
| let go of pride and at least explored the idea of effective
| communication with people as a way to spread ideas (aka
| sales), he may be far more objective in his self-appraisal
| and certainly gain perspective on _how his ideas can be
| applied by others_.
| notahacker wrote:
| My first thought on reading him talking about equations to
| estimate numbers of fighters based on a few parameters is
| that there are _entire subfields of academia_ devoted to
| debating regularities like this: most of economics, most of
| modern IR theory, substantial parts of psychology, sociology
| and politics. And the standard criticism (within the
| subfield, at least) isn 't that there is something inherently
| wrong with expressing part of the world as a mathematical
| model, but that the mathematical model chosen is wrongly
| specified. The world isn't hostile to the concept of
| simulations, but it does have a horrible tendency to produce
| data that casts doubt on their accuracy.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I'm always baffled by how little self proclaimed geniuses
| actually read current research papers.
|
| It's almost like they protect their pride by not
| challenging themselves, thereby being able to say they are
| knowledgeable with a conscience.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Do you have advice on how one can get more into reading
| interesting research papers in Computer Science and
| Software Engineering? I've previously tried subscribing
| to ACM but found that too many of their articles weren't
| of much interest or relevance to me. I definitely do feel
| like I've gotten lazy and that I don't challenge myself
| enough, but it's hard to break out of these patterns so
| I'd welcome any suggestions or recommendations which
| could help me grow.
|
| I usually start reaching for research papers when I'm
| aware of a specific problem and I'm looking for the
| different approaches that have been taken to try and
| solve said problems.
|
| Every few months I visit the NIST website and I browse
| through their catalogue to pick out interesting articles
| and publications to add to my queue.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Most papers are available on author websites or arxiv.
| I'd check out the titles of papers in recent software
| engineering conferences (ICSE is a great starter) and
| read what you are interested in. For CS more broadly
| you'll need to start with a field and then find
| conferences since conferences are broken up by topic.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I like to check the award section of "best thesis paper"
| of my local university for fun and then at work I have to
| read research papers in my area but then I just use a
| search engine to find it.
|
| Start small and don't take it too seriously! Little by
| little, just as learning a new language.
| partyboat1586 wrote:
| >Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological
| model of society that is quite out of fashion these days,
| which doesn't exactly help matters.
|
| >quite out of fashion
|
| Yeah I don't get the impression this guy is into intellectual
| fads. If anything he's a contrarian and will deliberately
| take the opposing position to the mainstream.
|
| Evo Psych is out because a bunch of idiots (and self
| proclaimed non intellectuals) use it to justify and explain
| everything and anything with stories and no evidence.
| Meanwhile real research continues but is sidelined due to
| this bad reputation.
|
| Understandably contrarians see this happening and immediately
| take the position of Evo psych because it allows them to do a
| lot of hypothesis generation (their favourite pass-time) and
| because it flies in direct opposition to current political
| and academic movements.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I stopped reading after the first paragraphs because it felt
| like the author is at best a lazy writer and at worst an
| intellectual imposter.
|
| I loved _The Matrix_. It was a great flick. It wasn 't art
| though and somebody using this lame reference today makes me
| question their expertise on the subject. The Matrix used ideas
| from Baudrillard & Borges. Both are cornerstones in post-modern
| literature while the Matrix is just an action flick rehashing
| the ideas from Plato's cave. The director hoped it would rub
| off on them so that they can shrowd themselves in philosophical
| wisdom. Everyone on the set was given a copy of Simulacra by
| the director to read. (this is often quoted along with Neo's
| own copy in the film and makes me question who actually read
| the book and how many of them read it enough times to
| understand it)
|
| Baudrillard who was asked about what he thought about the film
| said it was merely another copy of Plato's cave allegory and it
| made no effort to actually touch the core-ideas of the book.
|
| _> > Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the
| agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers.
| ...._
|
| When somebody uses _The Matrix_ in a blog post >20 years later
| I can't help but wonder why they chose it. Something tells me
| they have a poor understanding of the world. It's like somebody
| referencing a Mickey Mouse comic to talk about ducks. It means
| your audience are probably fools (and by extension the author).
| How can they be taken serious when they don't understand even
| their own self-chosen references/allegory.
| matwood wrote:
| The Matrix is an interesting movie and I bet got a lot of
| people interested in learning more. The problem as you note
| is that the author in this case is 70 or so years old and
| doesn't seem to have moved beyond the reference.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn 't art
| though_
|
| Why not? What would it need to become "art"? Maybe if it had
| less action, would that be enough?
| prox wrote:
| My idea as well. The Matrix has a lot of allegories in it,
| and you can shoehorn a lot of your own ideas onto it. I would
| say the Matrix is great starting point to get you interested
| in philosophy though.
| smogcutter wrote:
| I think the silly Matrix analogy is really telling.
|
| Forget about Plato's cave and Baudrillard for second, The
| Matrix is about that stuff the way tic tac toe is about
| drawing circles and x's.
|
| The Matrix is about _ego_. It's about the fantasy that one
| day soon your unique magical gifts will finally be
| recognized. To the untrained eye you might appear to be
| another TPS report filing schmuck, but deep down you've
| always been a hero. Any day now your circumstances are going
| to change, and then your _real_ life will begin.
|
| This is not a path that generally leads to happiness or
| creative accomplishment, and I think its traces are pretty
| plain in TFA.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Okay now I've got Matrix on the brain. Going to self-
| indulgently reply to myself instead of just editing my
| first post bc this is totally off topic and I just want to
| spitball about _The Matrix_.
|
| I think a lot of my problems with _The Matrix_ are rooted
| in how it (mal-)adapts Campbell's hero's journey.
|
| Here's the basic outline of the hero's journey:
|
| - There's a mundane ("real", we'll come back to that) world
| and a magical world. A problem in the magical world
| threatens the mundane world. (Sauron is rising in the east,
| Grendel is lurking in the forest, etc)
|
| - A hero is identified in the mundane world who has the
| power to navigate both. (Luke is both a farm boy _and_ a
| jedi. Neo is a programmer _and_ the chosen one)
|
| - The hero enters the magical world and resolves the
| problem.
|
| - The hero (usually) returns to the mundane world, bringing
| power from the magical world. Even if the hero doesn't
| return, the mundane world is brought to a new equilibrium.
| This is the real point of the story: the hero's journey
| isn't about the magical world, it's about healing the
| mundane world.
|
| The twist in _The Matrix_ is that the mundane world turns
| out to be an illusion. But that's a trick: the "real"
| world, unplugged from the matrix, is in a story sense
| magical. It's a fantastical sci-fi world, just as far down
| the rabbit hole as the matrix itself.
|
| So the last, most important step in the hero's journey
| falls apart. You can't heal the mundane world if it doesn't
| exist. This helps move the focus of the story back to the
| first stages, the ego-fulfillment part where the hero is
| identified. Everyone remembers the red pill and "I know
| kung-fu"; not so much the incoherent sequels.
|
| We're actually circling back around to Baudrillard here,
| but I think maybe not in the way the Wachowskis intended.
|
| I think you could also probably read _Total Recall_ as an
| anti- _Matrix_. If _The Matrix_ is about the allure of
| imagining yourself to be innately a hero, _Total Recall_ is
| about the _danger_.
| Rapzid wrote:
| > There's a grain of truth in these answers, but I don't think
| that they capture the bulk of the truth, because I am dead
| certain that most other people have the native intelligence to
| understand the ideas I've been peddling.
|
| I'm curious why you quoted around this bit.
| genewitch wrote:
| The entire post, out of context, seems, as some people have
| called it, narcissistic or pretentious. I guess no one wants
| to hear someone laud themselves as a genius.
|
| As someone who's designed many things 5-10 years before a
| market is available for those things, i have to constantly
| bite my tongue any time i have a "novel idea" - since i have
| no patents or published papers, why would anyone listen to
| me? Furthermore, the end result of bragging (even in this
| limited context, here) is that people like me less.
|
| I think the linked text is interesting, although meandering.
| The author appears to understand that their approach to
| teaching / sharing their ideas is lacking, and seems to be
| misguided on _why_ that is. Like the Simpsons image macro:
| "Could I be out of touch? No. It's the children who are
| wrong."
| tobr wrote:
| It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous
| vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he's been
| incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable
| version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide
| web. For some reason he does not accept that as validation of
| his vision, but as a poorly designed rip-off.
| balhbloo wrote:
| Of course the first HN comment has to be something negative,
| derisive and lacking in compassion. When there's blood in the
| water the sharks come, but when people are being vulnerable and
| exposing themselves (by saying something that's easily ridicul-
| able) like this, there's no need to be cruel. Not saying you're
| wrong just like, why not...look for the good, and why not that
| be the first HN comment. This place...Maybe everyone's just so
| scared of vulnerability..."innocence cannot exist underground,
| it needs to be stamped out." -- Prisoner in Bane's prison, Dark
| Knight Rises. Man it would be great to come here and be
| surprised. "Hackers" are commonly so intellectually arrogant,
| it's funny they attack anyone who's doing it in a vulnerable
| way... _sigh_ sad.
|
| People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is
| wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius"
| writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others)
| before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned,
| had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up"
| being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the
| important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it
| must be for this guy. _sad smile emoji_
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I don't know, in just the previous blog linked on top "am I a
| genius?" he says "I am reluctant; I hate having to depend
| upon anybody else for anything. I don't want my success or
| failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this
| planet." I don't think it does him any good to encourage the
| bitterness that leads people to post things like that.
| mcv wrote:
| I don't see the vulnerability you speak of. It sounds more
| like arrogance. Claiming to be a misunderstood genius is not
| presenting yourself as vulnerable, it's a shield to defend
| yourself against criticism or the lack of praise, to enable
| you to continue to see yourself as the genius that nobody
| else recognises in you.
| brundolf wrote:
| There's something intoxicating about the idea of building
| worlds out of systems, feeling like you've captured infinite
| permutations of some phenomenon in a simple set of rules. This
| idea of writing worlds into existence with the flick of a wrist
| is the thing that first got me into computers. In some sense
| it's the dream that still keeps me going.
|
| My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years -
| these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they
| could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might
| give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
|
| The egoism on display here is pretty offputting, but I feel
| kinship with the "dreamer" mentality underneath. This guy had a
| vision, and he was uncompromising in his pursuit of it, and
| even if the end result wasn't worth much to anyone else, some
| part of me has to respect that.
|
| I'm reminded of The Room (movie)'s Tommy Wiseau. Another
| creative who thought he was a genius and poured his blood,
| sweat, and tears into his life's passion project, and it turned
| out to be pretty objectively bad. But it was meaningful to him,
| and there's something to that. There were no ulterior motives;
| he wanted to put this piece of himself out into the world.
| There's a purity of spirit. I think what's missing for these
| individuals is the self-awareness to _know_ that this thing is
| mostly just for them, and to be okay with that idea and embrace
| it. That way lies happiness, I think.
| tomxor wrote:
| > My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years
| - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they
| could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might
| give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur.
|
| Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different
| perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go
| low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent
| behavior... it's not that we cannot necessarily capture the
| former, but that our concept of computer is far too tiny to
| run those rules in enough depth or breadth. It hasn't
| lessened the interest for me though. The more I understand
| the less those childish ideas of "grandeure" make sense, to
| the point that my instinct is to be suspicious of ideas
| focused on exploitation rather than exploration, although
| they can be good seeds for exploration in the form of "what
| ifs".
| thecupisblue wrote:
| >Likewise, although i've settled on a slightly different
| perspective: that most systems have simple rules (if you go
| low enough), and that the complexity is in the emergent
| behavior
|
| I concur with this. The emergent behaviour is usually the
| only thing we can observe, so we model our systems
| according to it. The most beautiful (and usually the
| truest) models lie in the simplicity that causes the
| behaviour to emerge.
|
| I wouldn't say our computers are too tiny, just that our
| brains aren't used to thinking in those terms, but we
| discover it by deep thinking and "deep iteration" in the
| topic and have to approach it from multiple sides.
|
| Imagine yourself as a kid sitting at a chess-game, playing
| against Magnus Carlsen. You don't know who the guy is, you
| were just sitting at the sundae bar when the dude at the
| next table said "hey", pulled out a chess et and asked
| "Wanna play?". So you naively say ok, you got some time to
| kill while waiting for mom to pick you up.
|
| And you start playing. You kinda know the basic rules and
| what the figures do. So you make a move, he makes a move,
| you make a move...a minute later, you eat his pawn. Ha! He
| did not see that coming. Soon, another one. You're killing
| this guy. 2 moves later, you're left with nothing but the
| king, running around the board. What the heck even
| happened?
|
| Our minds are used to the "Eat figures = Win games"
| outlook, where simple steps lead to simple outcomes. While
| for Magnus, the figure you ate was a sacrifice that opened
| up a spot he will move his queen through in 3 moves. He
| knows the common patterns, permutations, defenses and can
| see moves ahead.
|
| Our minds aren't used to thinking ahead and seeing what the
| sideffect of a sideffect does to the result of the
| sideeffect of the sideffect. Maybe once we were better at
| it, but we have more interruptions so less time and depth
| to it (in general).
|
| That is why we can't figure out the simple rules at first -
| we can't see the trees from the forest.
| bredren wrote:
| The Room is not objectively bad.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Hi doggie!
|
| You must admit that the flower shop scene was a tad
| unrealistic, in that he was able to find a free illegal
| parking space right out in front of the store in San
| Francisco, and he didn't even get ticketed.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkoXhgtI58
| joosters wrote:
| The flower shop staff were looking out for him, after all
| he is their favourite customer :-)
| tekkk wrote:
| I admire you taking a stance for The Room but when a movie
| is generally lauded as one of the worst movies ever made,
| you are kind of on the losing side. Maybe there's good
| parts in there and sure, what is bad depends on the viewer.
| Yet sometimes you just have to admit that even with all the
| subjective bias removed something is just bad.
| bredren wrote:
| Generally lauded as a bad movie does not make The Room
| bad art.
|
| Have you seen the film at a sold out crowd at cinema 21
| in Portland?
|
| There is a culture of the film and its participating
| attendees Marvel movies do not match.
|
| You can say it is a bad film or you can say you don't
| like that it doesn't fit with your idea of what makes a
| movie objectively good. But it is absolutely not bad art.
|
| Bad art is all around us. But it is not The Room.
| redisman wrote:
| The Room is like outsider art. Which is a really dumb
| label if you think about what art is supposed to be
| monopoledance wrote:
| > The egoism on display here is pretty offputting
|
| This is not egoism, but indeed straight narcissism. And it
| matches overstating a "vision". The intoxicating part may be
| the dream of recognition and importance. I don't think this
| is a good metric to assign value, at all.
| jfc_taxman wrote:
| "The Matrix Was a Trans Allegory, Confirms Lilly Wachowski"
| https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/08/the-matrix-
| tran...
| NestedLoopGoBrr wrote:
| Sure, but what's the argument here?
| me_me_me wrote:
| No it wasn't. Its whatever you feel like it is.
|
| That's the whole point of art.
| user-the-name wrote:
| (That is not the whole point of art)
| arken wrote:
| Guernica is a painting about how great war is.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Not really into art so i googled it.
|
| Guernica is a large 1937 oil painting on canvas by
| Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is one of his best known
| works, regarded by many art critics as the most moving
| and powerful anti-war painting in history - wikipedia
|
| Anyhow, art is subjective. You can interpret it as you
| like, because its how it makes you feel. And you can
| argue for or against a point, but it doesn't really
| matter. As its almost like arguing what flavor of ice-
| cream is the best.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Art is not _entirely, 100%_ subjective, or else there
| would be nothing to say about it, nothing to discuss.
| Authorial intent is not the last word but it can be
| interesting, and it can impact the interpretation we come
| away with.
| me_me_me wrote:
| I agree. Art is very loose term, when line between when
| craft becomes art is very blurry. Same with the meaning
| behind it.
|
| Someone might argue that author interpretation was
| intentionally stated in bad faith as a artistic
| performance etc.
|
| But in the end an interesting discussion is probably the
| thing of most value (for me at least).
| stickfigure wrote:
| Sure... but authorial intent is also sometimes completely
| irrelevant. Ask the creator of Pepe the Frog.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Is it even self awareness or a lack of editing? Like okay,
| yours is a game that doesn't get a lot of traction, but you
| know what else doesn't? Board games in general. No one said
| you have to be entirely selfless, and one's conviction would
| appear just as fraudulent if it came in the guise of piety.
|
| Here's what you could have done: Find five other great board
| games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are
| dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this
| class, and why you are proud to be in that group.
|
| It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it's
| time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
| brundolf wrote:
| (I want to clarify, in case it's unclear, that I am not the
| OP)
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Oh I know, I can't write for shit, so did something
| rhetorically lazy.
| breck wrote:
| > lack of editing?
|
| Lack of editing I think has it's place.
|
| When you know roughly where to go and want to make money
| and go to market, build a team and have the team edit each
| other's work.
|
| When you want to figure something out in a totally new
| domain, don't waste time on editing just throw shit out
| there and run.
| WA wrote:
| The funny thing is that most creators experience this, if
| they put their work out there: What they think is their
| greatest piece often isn't really perceived as such and
| some random thing of theirs might struck a nerve in others.
| This applies to a lot of things: blog posts, Tweets,
| videos, music, paintings, and obviously games.
| TRcontrarian wrote:
| I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower
| series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his
| fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced
| from the public reception of it.
|
| [1]
| https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_Series
| [2] https://stephenking.com/darktower/ [3]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-
| shopper/2021/02...? [4]
| https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/which-king-
| book...
| tincholio wrote:
| Well, the first 4 books are some of his best writing, I
| think... The final 3 suck terribly, and were a great
| disappointment (to me, of course, maybe some people
| actually liked them)
| agentwiggles wrote:
| Overall I agree, but I actually quite like the ending of
| the series. I've read lots of folks online who absolutely
| hated what ultimately happens to Roland - I thought it
| was a cool ending which was very much in keeping with the
| sort of "cosmic cycles" theme of the books. That said,
| there is a _lot_ of junk in those final three books, and
| the seventh one in particular drops the ball in several
| disappointing ways before it ends.
| arkh wrote:
| It was the best ending possible. The first line of the
| first book was what hooked me on this universe, so I
| loved reading the last line years later.
| dash2 wrote:
| Reminds me of Archy on Shakespeare [1]:
| here i am ben says bill nothing but a lousy
| playwright and with anything like luck in the
| breaks i might have been a fairly decent sonnet
| writer i might have been a poet if i had kept
| away from the theatre ... well says
| i pete bill s plays are highly esteemed to
| this day is that so says pete poor mutt
| little he would care what poor bill wanted
| was to be a poet
|
| [1] http://ianchadwick.com/blog/three-archy-poems-by-don-
| marquis...
| pram wrote:
| This is painfully true. I put my art on Twitter/IG and
| the most popular things overall are nowhere close to my
| favorite. I genuinely can't even comprehend why they are.
| I'm not sure I could even attempt to "pander" by making
| more of the same subject matter, because I'm not
| convinced I'd replicate the correct thing lol
| WA wrote:
| Maybe ask people, but not sure if it's the same thing. Or
| put more stuff out there at random.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Apex Twin (the electronic music producer) put hours and
| hours of unreleased work[1] out for free a few years ago.
| One striking thing about the release is the number of
| true gems in there that outshine published work.
|
| 1: https://archive.org/details/AphexTwinAllUser18081971So
| undclo...
| 0x008 wrote:
| I just feel the statement from Peter Thiel's book where he says
| a good product is nothing without a good distribution channel
| is rather fitting here.
| WA wrote:
| Maybe the author of the article missed the simple fact that
| game designers want to come up with their own rules and
| mathematical models, because they enjoy the process more than
| reading 500 pages of explanations from a genius.
|
| We all like to start from scratch, don't we?
| redisman wrote:
| Especially in a game context, you usually have to pick a few
| details from the real world to simulate to make a compelling
| game. Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to
| track what's the cause and effect of what is happening.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| > Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to
| track what's the cause and effect of what is happening.
|
| This is a programming lesson, too.
| mcv wrote:
| Yeah, the article comes across as rather arrogant.
|
| And he doesn't really make the case that there's no demand yet
| for his ideas; his ideas involve simulationist games of some
| sort, and there's tons of demand for that. It is true that many
| of these sort of games used to take really ugly shortcuts in
| the 1980s, but where SimCity just faked traffic, City Skylines
| simulates every person in the city, including the traffic
| resulting from that.
|
| If you want to see a game with complex interactions of
| simulated systems, check out Europa Universalis. It simulates
| every country in the world, its armies, ideas, economy (tax,
| production, and trade resulting from production). In combat it
| simulates how the units of those armies interact. How trade
| flows around the world is incredibly complex (but also too
| hard-coded in my opinion; I think it could still be improved).
|
| Seems to me that plenty of games are incredibly successful
| doing the sort of thing he did. If he does have a misunderstood
| genius that these games can't touch, he's not making that case
| in this article. It sounds more like he has a rather overblown
| sense of the importance of his work, and a lack of appreciation
| of the work of others.
| zwaps wrote:
| Comparing oneself with Neo Einstein to start with led me to
| write a rather scathing reply here. A moment of reflection led
| me to delete it.
|
| I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor
| any of his games.
|
| I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are
| not defining moments - games that people consider milestones.
|
| We also know that today's games feature much more "realistic"
| and complex systems than the affine or multiplicative equation
| the author gives us. After all, interdependent agents on
| different levels produce results that can rarely be described
| by such simple measures. Getting a well-defined, realistic,
| complex yet FUN game system from such agent-based approaches is
| hard, but ultimately the goal of most game designers.
|
| It seems to me that the author may have had some initial
| insight, and got snubbed in the mid-eighties by other designers
| or successes. It further seems that he has since then not
| reevaluated the state of the game industry. Or, perhaps, he
| lacks the ability to describe his unique insights in terms the
| reader can understand?
| morelisp wrote:
| > I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author,
| nor any of his games. I know that in the wider context of the
| game industry, they are not defining moments - games that
| people consider milestones.
|
| You definitely lack context. I think Crawford's artistic
| program is completely in the wrong, that the Erasmatron is a
| joke, and that narcissism is largely responsible for leading
| him down this path.
|
| But _Eastern Front_ and _Balance of Power_ are seminal in
| wargaming and computer gaming, _Siboot_ remains an oft-
| studied object, and the idea of the storytron was both
| reasonable and radical in 1993 even though Crawford ended up
| on a useless path developing it.
|
| Crawford was a looming figure in the industry in the 80s,
| exited (rightly, and literally to applause!) to protest the
| commercial direction the industry was taking in the 90s, but
| then disappeared up his own ass for way too long. There's the
| oft-quoted line from Hamming about productive research, of
| which Crawford is probably among the most intense, and
| definitely among the most tragic, example:
|
| _I notice that if you have the door to your office closed,
| you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more
| productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don 't
| know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the
| hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance._
| zwaps wrote:
| That seems reasonable to me. Other figures in the game
| industry retain their relevance and are known to me, a
| contemporary. Crawford, instead, is not.
|
| His writings are difficult from my perspective. He claims
| to be a genius in quite a few areas, including AI. However,
| in each of these areas, history has passed him by. None of
| his ideas seem substantial or important from today's
| perspective.
|
| And this is not, how he claims, only our fault for missing
| his genius. Instead, this person seems to be what we
| academics call "not well read".
|
| His musings about AI do not predate the science. What he
| writes about, his work in the mid to late 70s, was already
| known in the 50s and 60s, as far as I can tell.
|
| Similar to his insistence that game designers somehow do
| not know about systems, I think this is in part because he
| does not read or engage with work that is not his own.
|
| It's one thing to fail to communicate one's work. It is
| another thing to ignore the work of other's and use this to
| fuel one's own impression of the state of the world.
|
| Let me put it differently: To be a successful researcher
| or, I'd argue, developer, you have to learn to deeply
| respect the contributions of other people. This includes
| being honest about them. One needs to see deficiencies,
| yes, but also allow for the possibility that there are many
| geniuses that share discoveries - as frustrating as that
| may be. The second element of this respect is then how you
| engage with others. If one dismisses the approaches
| outright, one is not only usually unfair or wrong, one also
| quickly becomes disliked in any community. Internally, we
| all develop ideas, and we always like our own ideas.
| However, the process of science or progress is also fueled
| by interaction, and interaction requires respect. People
| with an overt superiority complex will always find it
| difficult to frame their contributions in a way that is
| accessible. And, with very eminent exceptions, will not
| really contribute to human progress.
|
| Case in point, Crawford is obviously a deep thinker with
| important contributions to game development. I do believe
| you there!
|
| However, from today's perspective, it is hard to find
| anything at all that one could consider important. Even if
| some inventions predate the state of the art at the time,
| our progress was guided by other people - people that were
| able to cooperate. From my perspective, his ideas were
| worked out either by people that predate him (or in
| parallel), or done better by other researchers in what
| followed. So while I lack context, and recognize that my
| opinion does not reflect the truth, the simple fact that
| Crawford shows close to zero respect for other thinkers
| ultimately leads to a state of the world where I find
| almost nothing notable, revolutionary or important in his
| writing - be it wrong today's or yesterday's perspective.
| Instead, I find that his website does not lend itself to a
| very charitable impression of this person. Most of all,
| because he implicitly insults other researchers that have
| at least his level of genius, and which I deeply respect.
|
| Instead, I need someone like you telling me that yes, this
| man is or was important.
| morelisp wrote:
| I don't mean to give a charitable impression of him (I
| also don't have one), but only try to provide context I
| feel is missing here - a lot of people are reading this
| as "another indie game developer feels he didn't get his
| due" (boring) but the reality is "industry _founder_
| completely out of touch after 30 years " - which I think
| has more of a useful lesson for all of us. And that all
| of us (perhaps especially Crawford) should study modern
| history more deeply before passing any judgement.
|
| > Other figures in the game industry retain their
| relevance and are known to me, a contemporary. Crawford,
| instead, is not.
|
| It's hard for me to think of someone from Crawford's
| cohort who has remained more well-known than him, to be
| honest. From Wikipedia's description of the first GDCs:
|
| _About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don
| Daglow, Brenda Laurel, Brian Moriarty, Gordon Walton, Tim
| Brengle, Cliff Johnson, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan
| Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a
| Holiday Inn at Milpitas, attracted about 125 developers.
| Early conference directors included Brenda Laurel, Tim
| Brengle, Sara Reeder, Dave Menconi, Jeff Johannigman,
| Stephen Friedman, Chris Crawford, and Stephanie Barrett.
| Later directors include John Powers, Nicky Robinson, Anne
| Westfall, Susan Lee-Merrow, and Ernest W. Adams._
|
| Of those, I can only place Crawford, Moriarty, Westfall,
| and Adams off the top of my head. A few others I am
| familiar with their work if I follow through on the
| links, but can't easily associate the name with the
| product or company. Moriarty is the only one I would
| consider to have a current stature near Crawford's.
|
| Keep in mind we're not talking about the usual "game dev
| ancient history" cohort of early PC developers - Romero,
| Carmack, Sweeney, et al. - here. This is a full
| generation earlier and for a set of machines that didn't
| come to dominate the world. Crawford _exited_ the
| industry, after a long career, just as this phase was
| starting.
| zwaps wrote:
| I absolutely take your points and share your sense that
| this is unfortunate both for him and, likely, for the
| industry as a whole.
|
| I did not want to imply that he or his contributions are
| in fact unimportant. Rather, the way he approaches
| communication leads to that feeling among the uninformed
| such as myself. The unfairness he feels seems to be, in
| part, a result of his own writing style.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I do not have a lot to add to the conversation, except some
| examples from ML, in particular, the Support Vector Machine was
| conceived much earlier than it was published but Vapnik's work
| was repeatedly rejected, yet SVMs are one of ML's brightest
| achievements.
|
| Similarly, the Neural Network was repeatedly dismissed, with
| Minsky being a prominent example.
|
| Not all ideas amount the same, but perhaps, at least in ML, we
| need to be open to exploring as many ideas as possible instead
| of performing grad student descent on the current consensus
| valley.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Chris Crawford is a name I immediately recognize as a pioneer in
| early video game development, particularly the Atari 8-bit. I
| eagerly consumed every bit of information about the Atari in BYTE
| and pieces of De Re Atari (the bible for that platform) I could
| get my hands on.
|
| I've played Eastern Front and Balance of Power (on Atari ST) but
| they weren't my cup of tea--I was into graphics and animated
| gameplay. Similarly I preferred Risk to Avalon Hill board games.
| I did have a friend/roommate who was really into Balance of
| Power, he would play it all the time, over and over. I didn't
| 'get' it, but he obviously did.
|
| From Wikipedia entry[0]
|
| > I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable
| medium of artistic expression -- an art form. I dreamed of
| computer games encompassing the broad range of human experience
| and emotion: computer games about [...] All of these things and
| more were part of this dream, but by themselves they amounted to
| nothing, because all of these things have already been done by
| other art forms. There was no advantage, no purchase, nothing
| superior about this dream, it's just an old rehash. All we are
| doing with the computer, if all we do is just reinvent the wheel
| with poor grade materials, well, we don't have a dream worth
| pursuing. But there was a second part of this dream that
| catapulted it into the stratosphere. The second part is what made
| this dream important and worthy: that is interactivity.
|
| I feel some of this too, like the poor quality games that came
| out with CD-ROM, and each new technology recently VR that
| initially only scratches the surface. I do see this has been
| improving steadily with the diversity, budgets, and mind share
| that video games are gaining. I do see the art form in many
| recent 'game' titles so don't despair the future of gaming.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
| breck wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that context. I don't remember his games but
| cool to read about his impact from a contemporary.
|
| I can relate to having friends that were into more intelligent
| games than me, although in my case it was was worse. (Me: WOW!
| DUKE NUKEM 3D HAS SWEARS!). Hopefully my tastes eventually
| matured.
| randomsearch wrote:
| It's terrifying to be self aware enough to note that this
| problem, of assessing our own abilities and potential
| contributions, is so difficult.
|
| Over time I've been fortunate enough to meet people sufficiently
| better at mathematics than me to crush any hope I had of solving
| significant problems in quantum theory. So at least I'm not
| wasting my life there.
|
| But now I'm focused on other goals that seem more suited, but how
| do I know I'm not an idiot here too? Maybe I'd be better helping
| a genuinely smart person achieve their goals.
|
| I've had encouragement from a few people who know me well, which
| helps. I respect them so their validation is encouraging.
|
| Are there any other ways to assess yourself to ensure you're not
| (amongst other things) out of your depth without being aware of
| it?
| mlac wrote:
| >"So at least I'm not wasting my life there."
|
| Do you enjoy that work and thinking about it? Sure, you may not
| make groundbreaking discoveries, but there is a lot of space
| between groundbreaking and implementation. If you can
| understand the groundbreaking work and see the applicability to
| other problems, you are in a good place.
|
| It's not a waste of life if you enjoy the work and are adding
| some value (e.g. someone's paying you for your output, or some
| other measure of value).
|
| >"how do I know I'm not an idiot here too?"
|
| Who judges what is an idiot? There's raw talent, the ability to
| synthesize information, the ability to retain a breadth of
| knowledge and draw connections between ideas, the ability to
| communicate ideas, and many other dimensions of "smart".
|
| You can have a truly unmotivated genius that will achieve and
| contribute much less than someone who is just "smart" but has
| the work ethic. Einstein had both. That's why he is so rare.
|
| > "Are there any other ways to assess yourself to ensure you're
| not (amongst other things) out of your depth without being
| aware of it?"
|
| Again, IMHO, if you are still learning things and feeling out
| of your depth, then you are in a good spot. If you don't
| understand the topic, then you've either missed a step between
| the fundamentals and what you're working on or maybe you've hit
| the limit of your ability. But truly hitting that limit is rare
| - most times people could return to learning the basics and a
| few more intermediate items, return to the problem, have a
| "breakthrough", and keep going. Progress is not linear.
|
| But it makes sense - as you work on more and more difficult
| problems, it takes longer and longer to make visible progress.
| If it were easy, it would have been figured out already. While
| making progress, it never feels like you're making a big
| accomplishment day after day.
|
| I think working on goals that are "more suited" could stick you
| in a place where you've under-achieved to feel "smart" and have
| not achieved what you could have. Personally, I'd rather be
| failing (in a way that isn't life altering or career ruining)
| consistently to make sure that I'm not under-performing or
| selling myself short. It's an uncomfortable place to be, but
| that's where you find personal growth and progress.
|
| Last thing - to be successfully measured, it means someone
| needs to have covered the territory, solved all the problems,
| figured out and ranked how difficult the problems are, and then
| put them out there to judge others. If you want to compete in a
| space that is that mature, have fun, but it seems like you may
| be operating in a place where the measuring stick isn't built
| yet.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > I can look at a car traveling down a road and know that the
| distance it will cover is equal to its speed multiplied by the
| time interval.
|
| Is this write up supposed to be tongue in cheek? This is the most
| basic concept almost everybody understands.
| gw wrote:
| Crawford says nobody truly followed in his footsteps but I think
| Jason Rohrer qualifies. The two even shot a documentary together,
| and the scene where Crawford showed off his Storytron project to
| Jason was pretty revealing. Jason called it baroque and Crawford
| responded that he'd consider his life a failure if the project
| fails:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA_0_dSD3-Q&t=27m35s
|
| Crawford definitely is not doing enough introspection. I hope the
| man resets and makes an inspiring project without the self-
| romanticizing or self-pitying.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The dragon attack at 4:05 was worth the price of admission.
| Miraste wrote:
| Crawford's travails remind me of the story of the pottery class
| (https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-
| ceramic...), in which half a studio is graded on the sheer
| quantity of pots they produce, while the others are graded on
| making one perfect pot. The "quantity" group ends up making
| higher quality pots because they've practiced and learned from
| their failures.
|
| More succinctly, "real artists ship."
| agumonkey wrote:
| The lesson for this kind of problems: realize that timing is key
| and an art. Too early or too late and you die.
|
| Keep your passion alive, wait for the right time or find a better
| soil. Like moving to a different country because culture will
| react better to your ways and proposals (a very regular issue in
| France for instance)
| jariel wrote:
| Self awareness, which is the 'real' topic of this post is a
| challenging thing.
|
| Growing up, I was naturally humble, and I knew I didn't know much
| and was amazed to find some confidence after ostensibly earning
| it to some degree.
|
| What I found was a world of BS-ers so many people convincingly
| telling others they are the best, and having others believe that.
|
| Then I found that many of these BS-ers believe their own drama -
| that's scary.
|
| It's doubly scary when these people are in fact, talented, but
| they project it 10x further with their egos. (Think: Kanye West
| etc.)
|
| I use the term 'I' here but I think this is at least a common
| path.
|
| But something I struggle with is just how many regular people are
| like this? Is tech full of 22-year holds who think they are
| really that smart? It's one thing to _try_ to change the world,
| fine, but another to think that you know better or are entitled
| to that. Or is it a generational issue?
|
| I think we all have sparks of genius, and it takes a lot of
| hustle to communicate even basic ideas. We need to reinforce
| ourselves to keep it up. But on some level, we have to try to be
| objective as well. That's really, really hard, especially if you
| know something that others might not know, or at least feel that
| you do.
| sombremesa wrote:
| > But on some level, we have to try to be objective as well.
|
| That's not untrue, but it's all about marketing now. Marketing
| really is all there is -- some people call it 'growth hacking',
| but in the end it's what separates the wheat from the chaff.
| Having knowledge or skills is all well and good, but having
| _perceived_ knowledge and skills is better for all extrinsic
| intents and purposes, so long as you 've got enough to sustain
| the facade.
|
| Objectivity in self-assessment isn't a bad thing, but success
| nowadays is defined by what you can make others believe.
|
| Of course, there's the other kind of success - the kind Saitama
| in One Punch Man enjoys - getting good at something almost by
| accident, just because you love doing it. If you can make a
| living just doing what you love, who gives a damn whether other
| people know of you?
| username90 wrote:
| When you are an individual making games then it doesn't
| matter how much people perceive you to be a genius, people
| don't play games they find boring.
| jka wrote:
| The ability to sustain a facade thanks to marketing may be
| possible currently, in some circumstances; but that might not
| be true forever.
|
| It's also true that success doesn't require marketing; plenty
| of popular software and libraries, for example, have achieved
| their position not by advertising themselves, but by
| providing the correct solution for the task at hand.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I should clarify that I meant success in the context of
| personal status. Even the authors of popular software and
| libraries usually remain obscure unless they choose to
| market themselves. For example, take the author of Flappy
| Bird who I can't even name offhand vs. Jonathan Stroud. The
| difference is in the marketing.
| anonymousisme wrote:
| I was hoping that he might realize that more people would embrace
| his ideas if he shared them freely. I understand and appreciate
| the need to earn a living, but he's apparently been doing that
| anyway by writing games.
| gambiting wrote:
| As a side note - I _LOVE_ when people continue to use this super
| basic HTML 1.1 web design. It 's just superior in literally every
| way to the garbage we use today, with its overblown everything,
| just so the site can scale to every device imaginable under the
| sun. Guess what, this is perfectly readable on a phone, I have
| two fingers, I can zoom in and scroll about, no need to load 70MB
| of javascript just to adjust it for me thanks.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I like the useless horizontal scroll and the clashing colours
| the best.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Just to provide a different perspective - the page is perfectly
| UNreadable on my fairly normal 1080p phone with Firefox and if
| I wasn't browsing HN on my Mac atm I would've closed the
| article immediately for that sole reason. Yes, I am that petty.
| I value my time, even my lazy browsing time.
|
| Also, a couple lines of CSS would be enough, no need to load 70
| MB of JS.
| gambiting wrote:
| Interesting - for me on Android in Chrome the website scales
| to the correct width automatically.
| bartread wrote:
| Ah, yeah, fixed width layout: that's pretty annoying and one
| thing I don't miss from the "old" web. I do quite appreciate
| the overall aesthetic - as well as the page load speed - of
| this particular site.
|
| As you say, variable width and proper viewport support are
| easily fixed with a line or two of CSS, and if he did that it
| would work as well on mobile as it does on desktop.
| lmm wrote:
| That's crappy defaults from those browsers. I hate the point-
| size inflation that we've gone through because browser makers
| refused to do anything sensible until it was pushed by Apple
| and designers would always use a font size that looked right
| on their expensive mac, so now the only way to view a site
| right is to guess how old it is and then adjust your zoom to
| compensate. It didn't have to be like this!
| breck wrote:
| But 120 characters line width is 2x as wide as a line should
| be. Publishers have known that for centuries.
|
| Don't think the people who spent years to typeset a book
| centuries ago were dumb.
|
| They thought hard about what they were doing.
| raister wrote:
| Yes! Me too. Check this out: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maxion/
| elwell wrote:
| > It's just superior in literally every way to the garbage we
| use today
|
| Nostalgia can be blinding. I love plain HTML pages too though.
|
| > this is perfectly readable on a phone
|
| There's some jQuery driven magic at the bottom of the source
| for that.
| krylon367 wrote:
| If all of a sudden, Hacker News decided to add a 2px blur
| filter to this entire website using CSS, making everything
| harder to read, would your desire to have it go back to the
| way it was be for 'nostalgic' reasons? I suppose you could
| argue 'yes' because presently reading this site right now is
| satisfying in some way, and you would want to return to it
| being satisfying. But is that THE reason? If someone walks
| into your room right now and begins to torture you with a
| knife, do you say 'Hey stop i have nostalgic memories of not
| being tortured 30 seconds ago?' Again yes... damn you are
| right nostalgia is blinding!
| warbaker wrote:
| I think he's trying to say that there's art in simulation, in
| taking complex real life phenomena, turning them into simple
| math, making a computer run that math, and giving a person a way
| to interact with it.
|
| Some games today do this, but it's rare.
|
| Game _systems_ being treated as art (as opposed to the story
| /visuals/sound) is rarer still.
|
| Incidentally, the reason he chose to present simple formulae in
| the post was that he wanted to show elegant simplicity, not
| dazzle with mathematical wizardry.
|
| Regardless, you don't need to dunk on someone who is already
| dunking on himself, _hard_ , harder than most of us are even
| capable of, just because in your opinion he isn't doing it in
| quite the right way.
| warbaker wrote:
| To me, there can be almost a . . . cuteness to good simulation.
| It's a small, holdable version of something big, like a tiny
| stuffed giraffe.
| moonbug wrote:
| Shit Wolfram speaks.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| Hi all, it seems there is some important context to this article
| in the following blog posts, specifically "Seventy" and "Gemma".
| I think there is something to be learned from this article about
| loneliness as we age and look back on our impact on the world.
| Hope everyone reading this can find someone to appreciate the
| work they're doing because I find it impossible to believe that
| everyone isn't doing at least one thing of value to someone else.
| golly_ned wrote:
| Thank you for noting those other blog posts. The author is
| seventy, has lost his closest friends, and is grieving,
| reflecting on his life.
| breck wrote:
| Thanks for that context. Personally I was amazed by the
| content, and didn't need the extra context, but makes it a
| little bittersweet.
|
| Reminds me of this visualization I just saw (warning, may
| cause a tightening in the chest):
|
| https://twitter.com/pavtalk/status/1360264692250288131
| saeranv wrote:
| The image says "Spend time with those you love. One of
| these days you will say either 'I wish I had' or 'I'm glad
| I did'."
|
| But another way to interpret this graph is to spend less
| time attempting to cultivate relationships (which yield
| less and less value over the long term) and spend more time
| developing interests and skills that keeps you happy and
| occupied as on average we tend to age in isolation.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I think the most important thing I've got from that graphic
| is to choose your partner very well, being careful of how
| they will keep you company in the very long term.
| breck wrote:
| This trick worked for me: find an amazing woman with bad
| eyesight.
| imdsm wrote:
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/gemma.html
|
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html
| janee wrote:
| thanks for mentioning these. They're quite sad, but touching
| and for a lack of a better word very human.
|
| I can't help but read this and think about my own path in life
| and especially family.
| dwhitston wrote:
| Agreed, and thank you for pointing out the other posts. The
| remembrance of his friend was particularly affecting. I recall
| playing Balance of Power, and reading Chris Crawford's book on
| game design as a teenager in the early 90s. He's had an impact,
| beyond tilting at windmills and watching his friends grow old.
| solipsism wrote:
| "Seventy" indeed was touching and sad. Made all the more sad by
| the delusional statements of grandeur.
|
| It must be truly sad to think you're a genius who was never
| appreciated. I say that without any sarcasm.
| pram wrote:
| Yes the entire chain of posts is just incredibly depressing.
| throwawaygimp wrote:
| Keep it respectful guys - while a lot of you are earning a shit
| load to peddle ads, this dude make some amazing original things
| and more importantly spent a huge portion of his life trying to
| help others get value from his thoughts and ideas.
| HourglassFR wrote:
| He has some interesting idea and is more than ready to share
| them with others, which is a respectable thing to do I agree.
| On the other hand, I find his models hilariously bad, e.g. :
|
| > With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for
| the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the
| government:
|
| > `Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous
| Success of Insurgency`
|
| > Here, `Political Immaturity` is a constant I defined for each
| country based on my estimate of how much people respected the
| rule of law.
|
| I mean, come on...
| bartread wrote:
| Of course, but such simplifications are necessary given the
| limited power of typical 8- and 16-bit home computers of the
| time. And you don't need to do anything particularly advanced
| to create an engaging game, which Balance of Power is.
| mcv wrote:
| Of course you need to keep things simple on the hardware of
| that time. But still, I don't understand his complaint that
| nobody else followed in his footsteps; Europa Universalis
| has tons of calculations like that, all of them a lot more
| sophisticated than that. They're still massive
| simplifications of course, but I don't see how it's not a
| natural progression from his work in the 1980s.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > Europa Universalis has tons of calculations like that,
| all of them a lot more sophisticated than that.
|
| 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 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.
| mcv wrote:
| Big game companies just make what sells. I don't see why
| anyone would expect that to change. It shouldn't surprise
| anyone that many games aren't very good; most of
| everything is crap, and games are no different. But the
| logic in the best games has absolutely progressed since
| the 1980s, and even many (though not all) FPS games put
| quite a bit of effort into making their game characters
| move and act in a believable way. Far more than they did
| 34 years ago.
|
| Though there's undoubtedly still plenty of room for
| improvement. In terms of how smart computer characters
| move and act, I think _Robin Hood, the Legend of
| Sherwood_ (2002) still stands out: there, when a guard
| spots you, they first become curious and come check you
| out. When they 're sure they've seen you, they raise the
| alarm and attack you, and other guards that hear them,
| join them. When a guard finds a dead guard, they look for
| their boss, who then organises a search party. It's all
| very logical, and it results in a very exciting isometric
| stealth game. Especially the fact that the guards
| cooperate, but need to communicate over credible
| distances first, makes the whole thing work very well.
| There may well have been other games that work like this;
| I don't pretend to know most games, but I've never played
| anything else quite like it.
| kace91 wrote:
| > Keep it respectful guys - while a lot of you are earning a
| shit load to peddle ads,
|
| What an entrance.
| afterwalk wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I make my $$$ selling saas tools to people
| who make tools for people who invest in tools for ad peddlers.
| bartread wrote:
| I don't get the "nobody used my ideas" sentiment.
|
| Think about Eastern Front (which I haven't played) or Balance
| of Power (which I have, on the Amiga). There are _tons_ of
| games that are similarly built, in whole or in part, on such
| mathematical models: SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, the Civ
| series, any number of turn-based and real-time strategy games
| going back to the 8-bit era. Even RPGs use mathematical rules,
| with a handy dose of chance, to decide the outcome of different
| kinds of attack.
|
| There's even a whole (I seem to remember) chapter in Stephen
| Hill's "Amiga Game Maker's Manual with AMOS Basic" on building
| "simulation games" using simple mathematical models.
|
| Whilst I respect Chris Crawford's contribution to the video
| games industry I don't understand this perspective at all.
| Badfood wrote:
| I know who I'd want to spend an afternoon talking to
| orange3xchicken wrote:
| Some tier-A mathematicians working on some pretty fucking
| cool problems in online decision making and machine learning,
| or someone who writes shit like:
|
| "Young people these days, I am told, are illiterate and
| cannot understand the written word. They can learn only from
| video. So should I speak to them in the language they
| understand?
|
| Yes, I probably am a genius--but the issue is meaningless."
| sarakayakomzin wrote:
| >Some tier-A mathematicians working on some pretty fucking
| cool problems in online decision making and machine
| learning,
|
| bahaha
| paganel wrote:
| Efficient matrix multiplication does not make one a "tier-A
| mathematician". And to add to that, even tier-A mathematics
| can be pretty damn boring.
| orange3xchicken wrote:
| I wasn't talking about methods for matrix multiplication.
|
| The algorithms that are used by most ad recommendation
| services are deep enough themselves.
|
| The ICML test of time award this year was for an
| adaptation of a technique used to study online decision
| making algorithms.
| Donckele wrote:
| Write shit or talk shit? I'll take write shit.
| solipsism wrote:
| This guy seems to try to bluntly tell it like it is. He's
| _completely wrong_ , but hopefully he can appreciate the same
| sort of blunt feedback from others.
| lmm wrote:
| > spent a huge portion of his life trying to help others get
| value from his thoughts and ideas.
|
| Did he really? Or did he spend that time satisfying his own ego
| and tell himself it was for the sake of helping others?
| Certainly it sounds like he managed less actual helping others
| than those of us "earning a shit load to peddle ads".
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >Why have I failed after so much effort? The simple answer is
| that, as my wife says, I'm too far ahead of my time. Perhaps I'm
| a misunderstood genius.
|
| What a cope - damn your ego.
|
| I don't want to believe that a man of his age is so self-
| aggrandizing, so lacking in humility. "Oh, it's nothing wrong
| with me - it's them! I'm actually a messiah!" Complete and utter
| anti-wisdom.
| bumbada wrote:
| Crawford is not a genius, he is a visionary. He has some idea in
| his mind and for him this idea is as real as reality. But it does
| not.
|
| The early successes he had made him overconfident. I don't see
| the formulas he displays as anything sort of revolutionary.
|
| Any computer game today have systems way more sophisticated than
| that, or even old systems like the "sims" engine(original
| CimCity, Spore), Civilization series, doom, mafia, a flight
| simulator or Age of Empires to name a few. All those systems have
| incredible internal mathematical models.
|
| He risked anything he had on his vision. His vision came sort. He
| does not accept reality. Even today he believes his visions are
| right and the world is wrong.
|
| The "I blew it" is not acceptance of his failures. It is an
| acceptance of the failures of society that was not prepared for
| his revolutionary ideas. Society was not yet prepared for his
| genius. He made the mistake of valuing society more than what is
| worth.
| erikbye wrote:
| > Crawford is not a genius, he is a visionary.
|
| Why is it that judging someone as a genius or not comes so easy
| to everyone?
|
| I find making that assessment incredibly challenging.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's very easy because there is nothing objective about being
| a genius. It's purely about social perception and for this
| man the only social perception he cares about is himself.
| That's why he can confidently declare himself as genius and
| other people don't.
|
| Why would I care about someone whose latest accomplishment
| was half a decade before I was born? The complexity of modern
| games is so incredibly high that his equations look like
| toys.
|
| I once had an idea of making a simulation game about
| constructing dyson sphere. Now that dsyon sphere program
| exists do I claim credit for that even though I never
| communicated with the developer of that game?
|
| That's the behavior Crawford is engaging in. He's shutting
| himself off and blames other people for his problems and he
| never wants to rely on anyone else for his successes. The
| superiority complex is exactly the thing that is holding him
| back.
| wizardofdos wrote:
| Yes, i think there is many Einsteins and Mendels that weren't
| rediscovered after their time.
|
| Some because their ideas were wrong, but some also with
| innovative and correct ideas, many of which were reinvented
| and some probably even never reinvented and lost to
| obscurity.
| hobofan wrote:
| Depending on how high you set the bar it's very easy to make
| that assessment because barely anyone even comes close. E.g.
| I have a very high bar, going so far that I couldn't even
| come up with any living person that I'd call a genius from
| the top of my head, so I'm _pretty_ sure in not calling the
| author a genius.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I would suggest for the author to play "Democracy 3",
| "Stellaris", "Europa Universalis", "Hearts of Iron" and "Dwarf
| Fortress". This mode of game is not actually so uncommon.
| Stellaris does so much computation and simulation that some
| relatively modern computers cannot run them.
| saberdancer wrote:
| Aurora 4x is a great example. It's a highly niche game
| developed by a single programmer that models variety of systems
| and is completely free.
|
| It's hard to get into, but the systems it implements compliment
| each other really well to create a realistic space empire
| building game.
|
| Examples you mentioned above are all "mass market" (except DF)
| in comparison.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Indeed. But that's his problem. He's been in a hole for 30
| years while the gaming industry grew and evolved exponentially
| through the actions and competition of thousands of individuals
| and companies. His vision of simulating complex systems with
| simple approximations from mathematical formulae and algorithms
| has been realized countless times. You mentioned some great
| (and sophisticated) examples but honestly, almost every single
| game has some elements of these these design ideas. It's
| nothing new ... and honestly kind of obvious. Anyone who wants
| to make a strategy game has to figure out how to believably
| simulate behaviour on computing devices of the time. If you're
| talking about computers in the 80s, you are forced to find
| simple mathematical expressions because a more complex
| simulation will bog your game down. So I'm not even sure how
| novel his ideas were, even in the early 80s.
|
| This is also why it's so hard to meaningfully come up with
| something novel by thinking really really hard about it in a
| secluded cave. You need to refine your ideas by constantly
| testing them in the market of ideas either through
| collaboration or concrete implementation.
| bombcar wrote:
| I was looking for the mention of Dwarf Fortress - it appears to
| implement much of what he's describing in the story simulations
| of Worldgen.
| kerbobotat wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress' creator Tarn Adams is the antithesis of this
| guy, as far as I can see from a brief perusal of his articles
| beyond this one. Tarn is humble, often plays down his
| acheivements, is really interested in how his players and
| community interact with the systems, and builds out
| complexity based on the desires and needs of the players.
|
| I don't mean to diminish the work of Crawford, but he is
| building the same kind of simulationst mechanisms that Adams
| is, but Adams hit on success partly because of his
| personality.
| bombcar wrote:
| I agree - Adams is incredibly humble (and shy) - and he's
| driven by making the game he wants to play; he cares less
| about the mechanisms and more about the results - he wants
| edifying gameplay and a game that can tell STORIES.
|
| It's almost perfectly the academic/amateur divide if you
| will; which is amusing given Adams' background in
| education.
| A12-B wrote:
| At the end of the day, self-awareness is the highest sign of
| cognition and intelligence. OK, thats not quite true, but they do
| use it to test self-consciousness in animals.
|
| I think it's important because, even if you have some really good
| ideas, and maybe this guy does, if you can't hold a mirror to
| them they will just end up hitting a wall. Ideas only improve if
| they can beat themselves up.
| vonwoodson wrote:
| HN is really showing their collective asses here. Way to
| thoroughly thrash someone who dared to open up on the Internet.
| username90 wrote:
| Nobody wants to end up in his position, so we analyse it to try
| to see where he went wrong. In his case the issue is pretty
| obvious, I don't think it is wrong to bring that up.
|
| If you write a sob story then don't paint a huge target around
| yourself as the main problem and antagonist in your story.
| carapace wrote:
| Yeah, FFS is today "Asshole Day" or something?
|
| I played Balance of Power. It has no rivals.
|
| Have some goddamned respect people.
|
| And remember that, unless something worse happens, you'll be
| old too one day.
| burnthrow wrote:
| But he used the word "I" too many times. Case closed. Throw
| your unread TAOCP at him!
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Hate to pile on, but the man's post reads like an incel post,
| except incel's are funny about their entitlement.
|
| Oddly, I never heard of him but find the concept of a
| geopolitical subversive game extremely interesting (his Balance
| of Power game). In a sense, our current geopolitics literally has
| five or six actors operating via undercurrents to destabilize a
| variety of forces in our world. It's a poker game, who is doing
| it and can you stop it from impacting your own country? Okay, so
| who the hell would be interested in this game (it seems like not
| many), but I'm interested you little incel, why so entitled?
|
| Narcissism is like getting sprayed by a Skunk (not us, or
| possibly many of us, but in this case him), where you need many
| many washes to get rid of the smell. It's possible, but it takes
| a lot of time. Talk about the work, force yourself to remove
| yourself from the equation at all cost, and hide your
| entitlement, and indulging in woe-is-me.
|
| Small-aside:
|
| If anyone wants to think about just how dangerous and self
| destructive this type of martyrdom thinking actually is, if you
| mix this post with any kind of drug or alcohol abuse, you pretty
| much have jet fuel for self pity and serious long term substance
| abuse issues. It is way too comfortable of a thing to slip into
| with the right lubricants on a daily basis.
| username90 wrote:
| He makes the basic error of not recognizing that the user is
| always right. If nobody thinks your games are great then they
| aren't great. You missed at least something when you made the
| game. If he actually made great niche games he would have built
| up a community around them of people who love that style in the
| 40 years he has been making games, but ultimately nobody cared
| about his games.
|
| You don't have to make everyone think your game is great, but you
| have to make at least a fraction of people think so. Even just 10
| 000 dedicated fans of the genre is more than enough to keep an
| indie developer going, but he couldn't even manage that.
| redisman wrote:
| I agree. If you want to influence a art form like games or
| music or writing, you have to have skin in the game and release
| things. Telling others their way is wrong isn't going to change
| anything, the burden is on you to present that your model works
| and is superior in some way. You just have to have hard
| material you've created for that to happen. Everyone has their
| own great ideas to validate
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Being a successful game developer for Amiga is like being Puskas,
| the footballer in 60s. To be successful nowadays requires a
| different (more commercial) mindset.
| samwestdev wrote:
| Guys cut him some slack. I mean dude is what, in his 70s?
| watt wrote:
| He is, and the heaviness of that is not lost.
|
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html
|
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html
| [deleted]
| kabdib wrote:
| In the early 80s, Atari was desperate to portray video games as
| constructive social objects, rather than as the quarter-sucking
| homework-wreckers they actually were. In an effort to legitimize
| themselves and the market, Atari produced a "documentary" called
| _Video Games: A Public Perspective_
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gBWDlr3Rx0) which is full of
| stuff like "We're trying to put computer power into the hands of
| children..." and other projects of the fuuuuture. A powerful
| contingent in Atari management seemed to be ashamed of the
| industry's quarter-sucking past and desperately wanted to "go
| legitimate". There were internal mandates in some organizations
| that forbade the development of "shooting games".
|
| Atari had a corporate research outfit, a building not far from
| Corporate HQ where some luminaries like Alan Kay were seeded, and
| they were very plugged into the question of "Well, if we can't
| make shooty games, what _can_ we do? ". To answer this question
| they bought a lot of Vaxes and LISP machines and hired a bunch of
| other researchers you've definitely heard of. There was a lot
| going on. Atari also hired Chris Crawford to run a small group of
| game developers, presumably because "Your games look educational
| and this grants us legitimacy, do more of that."
|
| It was not a happy group (judging from the sidelines; a couple of
| my housemates worked in it) and its output reflected the group's
| turmoil. Infighting and bickering, game demos that were largely
| retreads of prior not-very-much-fun efforts, attempts at new
| forms of non-shooty games. My favorite mini-game was _Gossip_ , a
| game involving facial expressions where you held conversations
| with virtual people and tried to get them to like each other. An
| anonymous member of the team turned the internal math on its head
| and changed the goal to "make everyone hate each other". The
| thing is, the politically incorrect version was MUCH more fun
| than the original. Crawford should have taken the hint. I don't
| think he ever knew how to do fun.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > I see the same thing when I look at the real world: it is not a
| collection of objects, but rather a system of processes, and
| those processes are best understood through mathematics.
|
| This sentence gets to me. He's _so close_ to right, it's just
| that the answer is from a world so different than where he lives.
|
| In management consulting, I learned the exact same thing,
| _except_ that the best way to understand the system is through
| _social relations_ (read: office politics), not math. Such an
| understanding inevitably leads you, when you hope to create
| change, to FIRST establish a need, and THEN pose a solution.
|
| He didn't blow it. He just needs to learn to establish the need.
|
| > there's no sense of desperation, ... People are still bewitched
| by the progress
|
| People are desperate for "artistic expression". But needs don't
| exist in a vacuum.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Thanks goodness for people like Chris Crawford. He is the crazy
| guy in his lab doing weird things. He may be misguided but it is
| good to have him and people like him around to be contrarians and
| try to push/pull things in a different direction.
|
| I think Crawford has been barking up the wrong tree with his
| storytron thing ( http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Storytron ) for
| decades but good for him for trying.
| ffggvv wrote:
| seems very unclassy to dunk on an old lamenting his life,
| regardless if he is right or wrong. this is part of the problem
| with the internet
| weeboid wrote:
| lol, bro it's much simpler than that. people play games to have
| fun, and the intersection of complex, time intensive games and
| those who's idea of fun is complex, time intensive games ... it's
| a small intersection.
| breck wrote:
| Picture a person's brain not as a single being, but as a forest,
| where the current tree in charge changes, and where trees are of
| different ages.
|
| Some of these trees are a lot "older" than others. They have more
| rings to them. Perhaps a 50 year old might have some trees in
| their brain that you would expect to find only in a person 500
| years old. For that person, when that tree is in charge, it must
| feel a lot like they are very ahead of their time. The solution
| is patience and to go chase a ball or drink a beer and put
| another tree in charge for a bit.
|
| https://giphy.com/gifs/wHB67Zkr63UP7RWJsj
| ghaff wrote:
| I remember Balance of Power shipping on a PC with a Windows 2.0?
| runtime. (Windows wasn't really mainstream until 3.0+.) I also
| remember it was a pretty unplayable game. Perhaps instructive in
| the "Do you want to play global thermonuclear was?" sense but not
| much fun to play. And game designer friends of mine were of a
| similar opinion.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The style of modeling that he describes as used in Balance of
| Power seems the equivalent of the field of system dynamics
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics) which is applied
| in various fields, in some cases also in gaming.
|
| My impression that far from being ignored, such ideas are
| actually applied - though they do not necessarily involve _his_
| ideas, as it 's unclear whether they contribute much novel except
| from that particular application in the game Balance of Power,
| since the key concepts and methods (e.g. Jay Forrester's work)
| significantly predate the game and were widely published long
| before Chris Crawford's writings. Since Crawford seemingly does
| not "integrate" with that field of research, it also makes sense
| that people writing simulations like that (which are actually
| quite common in certain genres of gaming and also non-gaming use-
| cases) would not rely on his work but on the similar, but more
| developed practices of others.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I kinda feel for this guy.
|
| Sometimes I feel like we're under the tyrannical yoke of
| algorithms.
|
| Not modern algorithms that display ads, but like super-simple
| ones.
|
| E.g. consider a basic rope pulley or some simple gears. Rig some
| of those up and suddenly it becomes easier to move a weight. Why?
| _Because Work = Force x Distance_ and you 're increasing the
| distance for the same amount of work so force goes down.
|
| .... okay, I understand the maths, but _why_ does turning a small
| gear more quickly than the big gear make it easier? Forget the
| equation that models this for a moment - intuitively my brain
| does not grok why it gets easier to move something by pulling a
| bit more rope than usual. Most explanations from the teachers at
| school was something like "Because physics", but I am still not
| comfortable understanding intuitively what _precisely_ is going
| on with the physical forces without just shrugging and and going
| back to the mathematical model W=F*D ruling our lives without
| really understanding _why_.
|
| ...so I guess I just have to see the universe in numbers like
| this guy, and so am also a genius ahead of my time?
| imtringued wrote:
| >intuitively my brain does not grok why it gets easier to move
| something by pulling a bit more rope than usual
|
| Warning: This is probably wrong because I am conjuring this
| from my mind without looking up any resources.
|
| You have rope. The rope can carry 50lb. You want to lift
| something that weighs 100kg. You cut the rope in half and
| attach two ropes to the stone and the ceiling. Now you got a
| 100lb weight attached on two 50lb ropes. The cross section area
| of the rope is 1 square inch (random number). The rope happens
| to hold exactly 50lb per square inch. We write this down as 50
| psi. But wait. Since we added two ropes we have increased the
| cross section thus we have 100lb hanging on 2 square inches of
| rope. We are still within 100lb/2i^2 = 50psi. What if we have 4
| ropes? 100lb/4i^2 = 25psi and so on. The amount of force each
| rope applies on the stone is shrinking. Since 1 rope = 1 square
| inch we get 25 pounds of force on each rope.
|
| Now lets go back to pulleys. There is no meaningful difference
| between statically attaching rope (although one end has to be
| attached) and letting it hang off a pulley or letting an object
| hang off a pulley. The end result is that you have effectively
| attached the rope 3 times to the ceiling and what you are
| holding is only a faction of the cross section area that is
| actually holding up the stone. You have to pull more rope
| because there is 4 times as much rope and the wall is just
| holding the rope at a fixed point.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Your muscles work by contracting little strings, which
| transfers energy. They've got a limit for how much energy per
| distance-contracted (aka force) they can apply.
|
| Levers and pulleys are simple devices that move one thing a
| certain distance while another thing moves a different
| distance, but transfer the energy while doing so. They let you
| transfer the same amount of energy over a larger distance, so
| there's less energy-per-distance (force), so your muscles can
| cope with it. (They have to do more contraction-expansion
| cycles, but it's easier because there's less energy going into
| each of them.)
| intrasight wrote:
| Building up a complex simulation from a simple set of equations
| made me think of...
|
| Life, the universe, and everything.
|
| So I'll thank this visionary for spawning this interesting
| discussion thread, which in turn has me contemplating my
| existence.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| I don't mean to pile on here, but this text reminded me of The
| Inertia Variations poems by John Tottemham:
|
| -----
|
| BORN WINNER, SELF-MADE LOSER
|
| There was a time when I thought
|
| I might have done something by now;
|
| But that was long ago, and over the intervening
|
| Decades I have shifted from prodigy to late-bloomer
|
| To non-bloomer; I have passed my peak without having peaked
|
| Or even begun the ascent, and unless there is something
| inherently
|
| Salutary to the energy I expend in frustrating myself then
|
| My sacrifices have all been in vain.
|
| -----
|
| I recommend listening to Matt Johnsons reading of them:
| https://open.spotify.com/track/3XrxjjUHhJ5tFVRki44ljA?si=d1f...
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is how I read it too. It must be an incredibly painful
| state to be in, whether one is actually a genius or just a
| narcassist.
| jawilson2 wrote:
| And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
|
| No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
| yesenadam wrote:
| I looked at a few pages on the site. I kept expecting some
| reference to Whitehead's process philosophy from the 1920s but it
| never came.
|
| "Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than
| material objects, and that processes are best defined by their
| relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that
| reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist
| independently of one another."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
| dmux wrote:
| >Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been on
| the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me; none
| of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic
| sophistication.
|
| Isn't this just the "worse is better" principle? Does it really
| matter if others weren't as algorithmically sophisticated?
| Pxtl wrote:
| Complicated invisible simulations that the player interacts with
| only on the periphery do not make for good gameplay. This has
| been proven repeatedly. Orion 3 famously killed the MOO franchise
| trying this approach. A variety of space fighter games promised
| the player a living simulated universe to play in, forgetting
| that the key point of the game was not to watch stellar politics
| that you could only minimally manipulate.
| username90 wrote:
| People like them in the right situations, like your enemies in
| strategy games. You don't interact with their populations,
| civic choices etc, nor have you any insight into how the AI
| makes these choices, but it is still all there running in the
| game.
|
| It isn't easy to create a hard rule of when low interaction
| simulations adds to the game, but it is clearly wrong to say
| that they are always bad.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I would point to "Ghandi threatening you with nuclear
| weapons" as a counterexample. Civ AI players were notoriously
| mercurial and their behavior is so bewildering that people
| developed elaborate theories about software bugs that are
| completely false to explain them (the "Ghandi becomes violent
| late-game because of integer rollover" myth).
| [deleted]
| draw_down wrote:
| I guess being a genius isn't all it's cracked up to be.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work in technology and part of the wisdom of experience is
| knowing certain ideas are X years too early.
|
| After people over 100 years ago realized materials could compute,
| some were immediately theorizing about objects we now call
| 'smartphones'.
|
| It was a learning curve for me to realize it isn't yet worth
| pursuing some technology efforts because society won't be ready
| for them for another 10-15 years. (usually readiness is some
| combination of baseline technologies available, competencies,
| etc.)
| Keyframe wrote:
| He Wolfram'd himself, unfortunately.
| eCa wrote:
| As someone who enjoyed playing Balance of Power on the Amiga
| (without understanding what I was doing) this was a quite
| interesting read. I am reminded of the game over-screen: We do
| not reward failure.
|
| Hopefully his fortunes will improve.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| He got the Charles Babbage anecdote wrong. There was a need for
| reliable computers at the time. At that time, computers were
| people.
|
| Creating navigational charts was the application. Human error
| propagated and it was a big problem at the time. That is how he
| got funding.
|
| I also take exception to the claim it was never built, as that is
| not entirely true either.
|
| For anyone interested, I recommend the 1990 book by Doron Swade.
| It is excellent. I stumbled across the difference engine at the
| science museum in London while I was reading that book! I didn't
| realize the author was from there until after the fact. What a
| lovely coincidence. Such a fascinating device, the difference
| engine will always have a special place in my mind.
| alecco wrote:
| Made me think of David Bowie's "Thursday's Child"
|
| https://vimeo.com/240799507
| freeone3000 wrote:
| I highly doubt that anyone has not made a game whose systems
| complexity surpassed the algorithmic hurdle of multiplying three
| numbers, or two numbers and a constant. I have not previously
| heard of this person or of their work.
|
| Were it not for HN, I likely wouldn't ever have -- he made two
| 4/5 games, and sold a quarter of a million copies! This is
| absolutely a modest success, but this was thirty years ago. He
| doesn't seem to have published anything since: wikipedia says he
| started working on Interactive Fiction in 1991, but stopped in
| 2018 (having released nothing) since "humanity will take
| centuries to catch up". It seems as if his ego has outstripped
| his accomplishments.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| > I have not previously heard of this person or of their work.
|
| In the late 1980s, he was a significant figure in computer
| gaming. I knew about him because of Balance of Power.
| martin_a wrote:
| > In the late 1980s, he was a significant figure in computer
| gaming.
|
| We all have our time and place. Seems like his time is long
| gone and he struggles to acknowledge it.
| calahad wrote:
| I'd just throw in for context that BoP absolutely had more
| significance at the time than its sales numbers would show.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Don't conflate the simplicity of a formula with its
| significance.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I've heard from several spiritual teachers that whenever one
| feels ready to criticize another, it's a good idea to make a
| mental list of all their shortcomings and then turn the gaze
| inwards and look for those shortcomings in yourself. I think this
| idea is equally applicable to the article and comments.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I feel like Crawford either entirely missed the games Japan
| released from the late 1980's - early 2K (Square, Kojimi, etc) or
| he's confused in that he doesn't want to make games (and thus
| barking up the wrong tree all these years) but rather a new
| medium that he hasn't been able to articulate to the world or
| even himself.
| sombremesa wrote:
| This read to me like it belongs on reddit's /r/iamverysmart.
| Looks like other content from this author [0] is also not well
| received on HN.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868558 (too bad the
| actual site is down)
| [deleted]
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| the site is archived:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101105111623/http://www.erasma...
| sombremesa wrote:
| Thank you. It's kind of sad to read this, though in a way
| that's probably unintended by the author.
| timvdalen wrote:
| Looks like the page moved, this is the new URL:
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html
| jgeerts wrote:
| That was hard to read, it doesn't feel like someone who is
| mentally stable, clinging on to an idea he once had.
| Sometimes you have to listen to the world, adjust your ideas
| and move on, maybe he should have listened more to the world
| instead of expecting the world to listen to him.
| zekrioca wrote:
| I understand what you meant, and it makes sense to majority
| of people. However, I'd argue that the ones who actually
| change the world are those who do not listen or adapt to
| the world. This is true because in the end most of us adapt
| to whatever is given or presented to us by the world.
| sigmaprimus wrote:
| I found the read all over the place with a good helping of ego.
|
| Honestly my main thought reading this was "no wonder their
| books didn't create the result expected" There is no order to
| the article, it starts out good, then morphs into the matrix,
| then a history lesson on phylosophy"
|
| If true, the things they have achieved are "AWESOME" and
| "FANTASTIC" but the rant came off kind of "AWE-TASTIC"
|
| I wonder if there may be some value in them hiring someone else
| to "Recompile" the books they wrote to make them more
| palatable. Of course I have not read the books, they may be
| page turners. I just wanted to offer something constructive
| instead of just putting them down.
| covfiefy wrote:
| I find the author's direct expression of his egotism
| refreshing, and I don't need to worry about his hidden motives
| as much.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Well, I suppose that's something, but it feels like faint
| praise to me.
| thewarrior wrote:
| You just explained the appeal of Trump in one line.
| macawfish wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that subreddit, I'd never heard of it
| before. It reminds me of reading hackernews :D
| bastijn wrote:
| There is a lot of "I" in this story. The examples given do not
| come over as overly genius, but rather trivial. The whole story
| comes over as written from the perspective the world revolves
| around the author rather than the author participating in the
| world. It seems it is the author misunderstanding the complexity
| of the world rather than the other way around.
| aphroz wrote:
| It feels like he spent too much time working on his own work
| rather than looking at what other people were doing and ended
| up disappointed that people didn't follow the same way as he
| did.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yes, pretty much so, and it is not a recent development.
|
| I don't think I'd seen an article from Erasmatazz for like
| 20-25 years. At that time, Crawford was making a lot of
| grandiose statements about "Erasmatron", his interactive
| storytelling system that would be the first actual expression
| of art on computers. And when it was released, it turned out
| to be just laughably crude and mechanistic compared to what
| the interactive fiction community (all of them hobbyists at
| the time) was producing at the time. He clearly had no idea
| of what the state of the art was in that domain, nor any
| interest in understanding it.
| Deestan wrote:
| As someone who followed his work closely, I think that is
| an over-exaggeration.
|
| With his Erasmatron, he did make many working prototypes,
| and recruited a very talented IF-author to try and build
| storyworlds with him in that tool and guide its development
| through that process.
|
| The Erasmatron is still a very interesting idea that hasn't
| been successfully applied yet. Whether it's due to a deep
| weakness in the idea, or that the right execution hasn't
| been found yet, I don't know.
| morelisp wrote:
| What do you feel is the core idea of the Erasmatron that
| is not already well-captured by modern IF, (digital or
| analog) consims, or (digital or analog) roleplaying
| games?
|
| If the answer is "each of those does some subset of
| things well but the Erasmatron would do _everything_ well
| " (and this is the position I implicitly ascribe to
| Crawford after trying to make sense of his last 15 years
| of writing / commentary), do you really think that kind
| of scope is a desirable artistic goal, let alone
| feasible?
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| > He clearly had no idea of what the state of the art was
| in that domain, nor any interest in understanding it.
|
| I think this is the most frustrating thing about these type
| of characters. They are usually very clever people, but by
| refusing to engage with people they look down on, they find
| themselves further and further entrenched in a narrow view
| - the ideas become stale without partnerships. Then comes
| the frustration and bitterness that no one is recognising
| their mastery while the world moves on. They are left
| isolated on an idea island and can only talk in terms of
| what they achieved decades ago. I suppose the idea of
| representing yourself online as one of the greatest
| scholars of the Renaissance unironically(?) says it all.
|
| I once read an essay about Wolfram that came across a bit
| like this, the difference being that he managed to create a
| following against the odds and a earn a living from it.
| Pxtl wrote:
| That is impressively ironic.
| dgellow wrote:
| > There is a lot of "I" in this story.
|
| It's a personal blog. That's what personal website are. People
| reflecting about their own life and thoughts.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It sounds like he was one of the first to make simulation like
| games, felt like Neo and like it was full of stars at the same
| time, and never was able to go beyond that. Hasn't looked
| around, hasn't become humbled by the work of others.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I agree. I went through a phase in my childhood where I tried
| thinking in a similar way for a month or so, and I gave up
| because it just wasn't an effective way to try to understand
| things. I suspect many people tried to do so also. It's very
| human to try to find mechanical, senseful representations of
| the world, but the world doesn't want this.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I read this and the comments, and I can't help but feel... a loss
| for everyone.
|
| I was a graduate student, and I met some fairly miserable
| professors toiling away. It's hard having ideas and then lacking
| the social skills to bring them forth. The social skills help
| with relevance, but also relating the internal ideas with
| external ideas and building real momentum.
|
| There is a lesson here for anyone young.
|
| The mistake here is to assume genius internally. Rather, it is
| better almost categorically to assume you are an idiot and then
| talk with others without the ego. "Hey, here is an idea" and many
| times others will not get it, and that's ok because communication
| is exceptionally hard.
|
| However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you have
| to do is be around people and then help them with their ideas.
| "Have you tried X?" in an applicable way, and people will respond
| because you bridged the gap between their problems and your deep
| understanding.
|
| As an example, I have a lot of dumb projects that excite me. One
| of them, which I refer to a large number of times, is my dumb
| programming language for board games ( http://www.adama-lang.org/
| ). When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine? The
| truth is that it is a mix of both, but it is mostly mine because
| I have the burden to communicate effectively.
| hzhou321 wrote:
| > However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you
| have to do is be around people and then help them with their
| ideas.
|
| Ego may be in the way, but this is a rather missed take.
| Obviously the author was focusing on his idea, rather than
| getting people calling him genius.
| LightMachine wrote:
| Just replied to let you know that you have an amazing take on
| the matter.
| unishark wrote:
| > It's hard having ideas and then lacking the social skills to
| bring them forth.
|
| This article kind of reminds me of a professor I knew, but I'd
| describe him as the opposite: big on vision, self-promotion,
| and the whole social game, while not having the ability to back
| it up with good ideas or implementation. And for both the
| author and the professor I know, I'd say the social side is the
| source of their success, rather than its limit. Not everyone
| can take simple ideas that are semi-common sense to people
| skilled in the area, and build career success from them as an
| independent researcher.
|
| I always suspected the professor was bipolar, because in
| addition to the brimming energy and excitement about taking
| over the world with his vision, there were down days too where
| he got angry at the world for not believing in him etc.
| [deleted]
| kungito wrote:
| I often feel like people formulate the problem wrong. It's
| not that "your idea was great but only 5% of good ideas work
| out" but I believe it's more "your idea was almost great but
| only 5% of ideas are actually great". I feel like it's less
| about needing luck for a great idea to work out and more
| about needing more luck to have a better idea. Often times
| these almost-geniouses are technically talented or creative
| but lack empathy or social intelligence to see the whole
| picture. You or your team need to be the whole package to be
| able to see a problem from all possible angles.
| mightybyte wrote:
| Well said. The book Extreme Ownership has a slightly different
| take of what I think is basically the same idea. It opened my
| eyes to a new way of thinking about people above you in the
| organizational hierarchy and advocated taking ownership _up_
| the chain as well as down. Instead of asking yourself "why
| isn't my boss listening to me?", you should ask yourself how
| you are failing to communicate to your boss. Obviously things
| aren't entirely your fault all the time, but changing your
| ownership mentality is a tremendously empowering idea--
| especially when it goes in the opposite direction of
| traditionally perceived power vectors.
| matwood wrote:
| EO is great and has really changed how I interact with
| people.
|
| > Obviously things aren't entirely your fault all the time
|
| I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because fault
| has so many negative connotations. Things are not entirely in
| your control all the time, but many times they are. How a
| person responds to situation is always in their control. The
| classic one which you refer to is blaming others when a
| failure occurs - communication or otherwise. And yes, it is
| completely empowering and changes how one acts as a leader or
| team member.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Please be careful about the downsides of EO, which can be
| seen in the author's complicated legacy within the SEALS.
| The culture this produced when taken too far can be seen in
| the Ed Gallagher problem[0]. When things are decentralized,
| you have to make sure you can trust your people. When you
| can't, you end up with Gallagher, or LAPD Rampart scandal.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/us/navy-seals-
| edward-gall...
| matwood wrote:
| If you can't trust your people, then you have a big
| problem no matter what management style you use. I would
| argue EO has nothing to to do with it. In fact, if EO had
| been followed in this case, the subordinate operators
| would have put a stop to a crazy officer. What's
| described in that article is the opposite of subordinates
| being empowered.
|
| Also, AFAIK, Jocko have never addressed the issue you
| linked. It might be because he simply doesn't know enough
| to comment. He left the military in 2010 and this
| incident happened in 2017. Do you have anything to attach
| him or EO directly to it?
| mightybyte wrote:
| > I prefer using the word 'control' over fault, because
| fault has so many negative connotations.
|
| Excellent point. I completely agree. I'll have to keep that
| in mind in the future.
| solipsism wrote:
| Never read the book, but this is the well-published
| psychological factor known as _locus of control_.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
|
| You should probably try to give credit for the idea where
| credit is due.
|
| By the way, this is an important part of the growth of junior
| engineers into senior engineers. I've noticed junior
| engineers tend to identify obstacles as blockers. When asked
| about progress or estimates, they just talk about the
| blockers. Completely out of their control. Senior engineers
| find workarounds, solutions, alternatives.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| They are giving credit where credit is due, to the person
| who made that concept real to them. It is literally
| impossible to find the original source of every good idea a
| person has implemented, much less heard. You should
| probably stop telling people what to do and appreciate
| alternate routes to arrive at good ideas.
|
| Love your comment on junior vs. senior engineers. Very
| insightful!
| iamcurious wrote:
| >However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you
| have to do is be around people and then help them with their
| ideas.
|
| Sounds about right, genius is about serving. It's a weird
| status to have.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| I am also interested in languages to model board games, and I
| think your biggest mistake might be in relying too heavily on
| imperative programming models for a domain that doesn't require
| them.
|
| Have you tried converting games to your language, or read other
| literature on codifying game rules? It's much more popular to
| use declarative or logic based designs to state how a game can
| evolve. General Game Playing competitions, where the goal is to
| write AIs that can compete at _any_ game, use a Datalog variant
| to declare their rules. Extensions of this enable modeling
| complex games like Dominion (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AII
| DE/article/view/12669/1251...).
|
| Pattern matching is another promising way to model and rapidly
| prototype games, with the most approachable version probably
| being PuzzleScript.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I look at the imperative programming model as the escape
| hatch, and I'm focusing first on data. My next step is to
| build UIs and look into AI.
|
| For instance, I've build the entire back-end for Battlestar
| Galactica (
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-
| galacti... ). I can't release a product around this as the IP
| is not mine, but it is a good foil. I play a bunch of games,
| and it's hard to boil down every game into a concrete set of
| rules.
|
| So, my strategy relies first on getting (1) data
| synchronization, (2) privacy, (3) multi-user transaction flow
| , and (4) durability of state on solid ground. Once the
| foundation is good, and the foundation can grow into other
| domains (like converting Excel worksheets into web apps) then
| I can ask what models, idioms, and ideas do I want to layer
| on top of it.
|
| The hard part, it turns out, after the back-end works is
| getting a usable UI. This is my current focus, and I hope to
| have results sometime this year with my silly approach.
| yoz-y wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
| mcv wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| > 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.
| morelisp wrote:
| 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.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| 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...
| yoz-y wrote:
| > 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.
| solipsism wrote:
| You'd think after so many decades he'd have made some
| progress on the problem himself.
| morelisp wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| blueblob wrote:
| 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.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > 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?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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.
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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?
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| 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!
| yoz-y wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > 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.
| smolder wrote:
| 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. :)
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| Communication takes effort from both sides. Every rule or tip
| should really be considered in 2 fold. Like so: Of course, if
| the goal is to explain an idea, you shouldn't present yourself
| as the genius you so clearly are in your own opinion. At the
| same time you should never dismiss an idea for its lack of
| proper presentation. The later is a much more frequent mistake.
| One should judge an idea for what it is. One should actively
| suppress ones intention to praise an idea for who presented it
| or how it was presented. If you do something like: This persons
| expertise is worth 1000 points therefore his ideas are worth
| 1000 points it begs to question how the person got to 1000
| points as you've eliminated the mechanism that should have
| rated him. IOW if someone came up with a fantastic idea it
| means you should examine his other ideas but do so as
| objectively as you would the village idiots.
| epicide wrote:
| Well said! Communication is a two-way street. Effective
| communication is the hardest problem I'm aware of and there is
| no universal solution.
|
| Alan Alda's book _If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look
| on My Face?_ does a great job of outlining exactly this problem
| that a lot of scientists seem to have with communication. He
| also personally narrates the Audible version, if that's your
| thing.
|
| > However, if you want people to call you genius, then all you
| have to do is be around people and then help them with their
| ideas.
|
| I believe that if your goal is to be called genius, you're
| already damning yourself.
|
| From Faust: Take children's, monkeys' gaze
| admiring, If such your taste, and be content; But
| ne'er from heart to heart you'll speak inspiring, Save
| your own heart is eloquent!
| breck wrote:
| > When people don't get it, is it their failing or mine?
|
| I've made dozens of languages and studied thousands more.
|
| One easy tip: show ~10 lines of code near the top of the page,
| above the fold.
|
| Without that, you'll probably never get a critical mass of
| discerning critics to care, because they're too busy.
|
| I'm very interested in your lang, both because I like langs and
| like creating board games, but gave up b/c I couldnt find code.
| svachalek wrote:
| For programming languages I can't upvote this enough! History
| and motivation and features and all that are interesting if I
| decide to learn about the language, but to decide _whether_ I
| want to learn about it, it 's really all about seeing a code
| sample that inspires me.
| dmuth wrote:
| Yes, I completely agree. I've seen so many cool ideas out
| there that are largely a failure of "marketing", which is
| basically the fist few lines of the README.md.
|
| I always encourage junior devs to include some lines of code
| to do a "hello world", or a screenshot if it's something
| graphical, or both, _as early as possible_ in the README, so
| as to show the casual reader what their project is all about.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| Will do, I have a large task on my hand, and I appreciate the
| feedback. I'll definitely do that both on the github and main
| site.
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| I had a quick look around and I liked your website on Adama.
|
| I'm just getting my teeth into web programming but your
| interest fits in with what I'm looking at (its very early days
| so can't say more).
|
| Thanks for sharing
| [deleted]
| ssijak wrote:
| For somebody who calls himself a genius it is somehow funny to
| release a blog/website in 2014 and to till day have it so
| embarrassingly not responsive. I mean it could be not relevant at
| all but it is kind of funny.
| dgellow wrote:
| > In 1986, Microsoft Press invited me to write a book explaining
| how it worked, and again I agreed that this would be a good idea.
| We didn't publish source code, because it was too specific to the
| Macintosh, written in Pascal, using 16-bit integer arithmetic.
| Instead, I explained the geopolitical considerations behind the
| game in a series of chapters that broke it down by topic, and
| then provided the equations and algorithms, explaining in great
| detail exactly what each term meant. It was a manual on how to
| build a geopolitical game.
|
| Does one of you know the title of the book? That sounds
| fascinating.
|
| Edit: nevermind, I found it here:
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-power-...
| jpfr wrote:
| The situation the author describes is one of the reasons why we
| cannot (yet) get rid of Elsevier and the other scientific
| publishers. They are no longer needed for the dissemination of
| new research. But they are the keeper of the archive.
|
| We don't know which works are going to be important for future
| generations. And just putting out a ,,PDF on the net" will be
| gone in 20 years if there is no publishing house maintaining the
| original copy.
|
| Arxiv could also take on that role. But not for the last 300
| years of existing research in the publishers archives.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _Arxiv could also take on that role._
|
| Didn't they?
| tobr wrote:
| If anyone wants to learn more about Chris Crawford, the
| Zachtronics podcast[1] had a rather good interview[2] with him
| less than a year ago.
|
| 1: https://www.zachtronics.com/podcast/
|
| 2: https://www.zachtronics.com/podcast-files/Zachtronics-
| Podcas...
| alexashka wrote:
| I wonder about people who try at something for so long. I wonder
| if they haven't succeeded elsewhere in life, to learn the lesson
| that it's the journey, not the destination.
|
| I've given up anyone 'getting' me or appreciating what I do a
| while back, after I realized I don't really care to fully
| understand others, nor do I have the capacity it seems, and it
| doesn't matter! I don't even understand myself, and it's fine.
|
| The author strikes me as having a genuine childish emotion of not
| getting that toy he/she wanted. It's genuine, it's real, but my
| goodness, when are you going to grow up :)
| calahad wrote:
| I feel for this guy, I get that the post comes off as
| narcissistic and myopic but it seems that he genuinely put a lot
| of effort into something with good intentions and came away
| disappointed. Something just leaves me profoundly sad after
| reading it, and I'm actually going to seek out a copy of the
| 'balance of power' book.
| sholladay wrote:
| I relate to many of these points as inner thoughts, however it's
| important to play Devil's advocate and remember that the stars
| really have to align for your ideas or work to spread and gain
| recognition. It's not enough to make something great, you also
| have to communicate about it effectively and other people have to
| be personally interested in it, too, which is beyond your
| control. Your best ideas might be useful to you but seen as
| boring to others. And you shouldn't assume that the reason is
| that you are ahead of your time. The explanation is probably much
| simpler. I sometimes think to myself, "I've released a lot of
| open source code that's really simple and useful and better than
| any of the alternatives I could find. Why doesn't it get more
| traction?" In some cases, it very well might if I could get
| people to just look at the source code, but I struggle to write a
| compelling README that convinces people to even bother doing so.
| You have to accept that you might be strong at one part of the
| process but weak in another. Sure you could be a genius that
| excels at everything and are so far ahead that no one understands
| you. But no, you've probably dropped the ball somewhere. Take a
| step back, examine people's perceptions of your work, and work
| backwards to fix the roadblocks of success. Love it or hate it,
| marketing plays a big role here. Even something as simple as
| having a good logo can double the number of people that pay
| attention. And don't try to convince people that your algorithms
| are amazing. Convince them that those algorithms solve their
| problems.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| He compares himself to the nearly-forgotten "hero" scientists.
| But he really belongs to the ranks of the unknown multitude of
| almost-successful "forgotten" - the people who spent their
| lives pursuing their ideas but those ideas were never received
| well, or popularised.
|
| I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything
| "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it
| didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right
| and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it.
| Or at least none that I can see.
|
| We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict
| that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it
| happens to us.
|
| There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every
| discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of
| them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The
| rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's
| nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual
| succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't
| care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the
| population over a large area and let the successful ones
| survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly
| regretting their failure in blog posts.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Here lie dragons of most of our ambitious plans once we turn 70.
| macspoofing wrote:
| He did blow it. He missed the last 30 years of evolution in game
| design. Every single game released, in one way or another, uses
| this idea of approximating complex human systems with simpler
| mathematical formulae and algorithms. Closer to home to his two
| hits ('Eastern Front', 'Balance of Power'), very sophisticated
| simulation war games have been releasing for years now that put
| his games to shame. With very little effort anyone can come up
| with a list of those.
|
| This is why it's so hard to innovate when you don't test your
| theories in the market of ideas. It's why you don't tend to see
| Lone-wolf Geniuses revolutionizing the relevant field (whether
| the field is physics, or game design). Even a genius like like
| Grigori Perelman, of Poincare conjecture fame, who comes close to
| embodying this 'lone-wolf' stoic ideal, needed to use techniques
| developed by others in order to prove the conjecture.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Well he does say:
|
| > Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have been
| on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred to me;
| none of them came close to Balance of Power in algorithmic
| sophistication.
|
| So it's not like he missed the simulation genre evolution, he
| just disagrees with the direction that evolution took. And he
| suggests it's because the time has not yet come for his ideas.
|
| An obvious retort is: maybe people don't (and won't) want to
| play games with sophisticated algorithmic simulation because
| they are boring. He doesn't seem to offer any good argument
| about why his ideas are "good but too early" as opposed to
| merely "bad". As such, I find his post not very persuasive.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So it's not like he missed the simulation genre evolution,
| he just disagrees with the direction that evolution took
|
| The problem is that his examples from his own work, his
| references to subsequent work and it shortcomings, and, well,
| everything else is either isolated atomic details (like the
| two formula references) or sweeping generalities with no
| specifics that it's hard to tell really what specifically he
| sees as missing, and whether or not it is actually missing,
| or he's overlooking something or judging unfairly.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Well he does say:
|
| >> Perhaps I missed something, but most of my friends have
| been on the lookout and I have had a number of games referred
| to me; none of them came close to Balance of Power in
| algorithmic sophistication.
|
| Isn't that indicative of his problem. For all his talk about
| caring about a particular game design philosophy so much so
| that he devoted decades to talking about it, he's not even
| aware of what's out there. Why are his friends suggesting
| games to him? Why isn't he referencing games like EU4 or
| Victoria II and breaking them apart and pointing out in which
| way they differ from his design philosophy? But he's not
| excited about the field or ideas that come from others
| because he figured out the right answer in the 1980s ... and
| it's on everyone else to acknowledge this.
| shawnz wrote:
| There are plenty of commercially successful strategy games
| with sophisticated algorithmic simulation, like Europa
| Universalis for example.
|
| I wonder if there is perhaps a bias here in that it is easy
| to overestimate the algorithmic complexity of the code you
| wrote, whereas it's easy to underestimate the complexity of
| code you can't see.
| breck wrote:
| I could be wrong but I think he's saying the opposite:
| people are missing that his code is about _processes_
| happening over time, whereas the focus of most games
| nowadays is on the objects. Or, what you can see in his
| static code isn 't important, it's what happens during the
| running of the code that is.
|
| Now I know almost nothing about game development so have no
| dataset myself or ability to understand the arguments
| either way.
|
| I think we're seeing an increasing short term move to more
| complex, black box, DL trained models that will get
| behavior similar to the processes he seems to emphasize,
| and then we'll see a swing back to taking those gains but
| converting them into the type of readable algorithms like
| in his old games.
|
| But I have no idea. Just complete 2 second conjecturing on
| my part.
|
| Regardless, thoroughly enjoying reading his site and find
| his Object <=> Process gradient cycle to be crystal clear
| and fascinating and important idea.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| Look at Victoria II if you want a game that is _mainly_
| about processes not objects.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Games like EU4 are more process oriented than object
| oriented, actually. There is no black-box DL model, just
| a great many low-medium complexity processes that chain
| into a large story.
|
| These processes can almost always be reverse engineered,
| and they are actually quite understandable and readable.
|
| Unless there is something I'm missing with his
| process/object distinction, admittedly I don't think I've
| parsed it with a great deal of clarity.
| breck wrote:
| Well then I think the only thing for me to do is to get
| myself EU4 and do some "research" to figure this out. :)
| voidhorse wrote:
| This is kinda where I fall on this too. Lacking a lot of
| background on this and going off the post alone, it doesn't
| sound like the author was "ahead of his time" so much as he
| was in the wrong field.
|
| The point of a game is not algorithmic sophistication, it's
| fun (to simplify in the extreme). If the game isn't fun it
| doesn't matter how fancy or impressive the logic powering it
| is. If you want to blaze new trails in modeling and
| computation, games are the wrong field to do it in as any
| advancement will tend to be overshadowed by whether or not
| the game itself is a good game. Sure there are enthusiasts
| that will be interested in internals, but fame in the realm
| of games comes with great game design, not algorithmic
| sophistication.
|
| It's like an artist inventing a new shade of green and using
| it in his work in combination with other colors and
| complaining that no one acknowledges the sophisticated
| formulas he had to use to produce his special shade of green.
| bogwog wrote:
| The worst critic of your game is yourself. Even if your
| game is insanely boring, if you spend enough time toiling
| away on it, tweaking it, playing testing, critically
| thinking about the complexities of it, etc, you'll grow
| extremely attached to it very quickly.
|
| I am automatically skeptical of anyone that tries to defend
| their art by referencing science, but in this case, as an
| indie developer with my own fair share of failures and lots
| of experience in development, I'm not just skeptical; I'm
| pretty confident that I know why this person failed, and
| why they'll continue to fail unless they change their
| thinking.
|
| Although I will say, in fairness to the author, that I have
| not read any of his books, seen his lectures, or played his
| games. So maybe he really is a genius game designer with
| ideas too advanced for any of us to appreciate.
|
| EDIT: okay now after reading another comment with more
| background information about the author, I feel like a dick
| for the tone I used here. But I'll leave the comment up
| anyways because, well, I feel like it's still useful advice
| (at least the first paragraph)
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Speaking on my personal experience, I think it's like an ego
| thing when you think "I came up with something special" and
| don't check with others/externally if it's really unique. Same
| with business ideas... I had some dumb ones I was like "this
| will explode" ahh...
|
| edit: although I think the gist I see here is unneeded
| complexity
| Jetrel wrote:
| From my observation point as a gamer who plays a lot of
| strategy games, he did actually come up with something quite
| novel (when it was new). However, what he built is now
| extremely common in the strategy genre - practically every
| game out there is doing exactly what he's describing. They
| all independently invented similar solutions to the same
| problems.
|
| He genuinely just seems to be unaware that these other games
| exist, which really doesn't surprise me because there's so
| much stuff out there, and because the strategy genre's become
| (with a few high-profile exceptions) a sort of under-the-
| radar AA-grade experience, where people are putting out solid
| games with good presentation value, but they're not carpet-
| bombing the world with marketing, or trying to sell them at
| Walmart. I'm an avid gamer and there are entire genres, with
| multi-million dollar titles in them that I'm mostly (or
| completely) oblivious to.
|
| There are just a lot of games that, despite having production
| quality that beats the pants off a lot of 90s/00s games, no
| longer bother doing "push" advertising that intrudes into
| your life, because it's just no longer economical to do.
| trestenhortz wrote:
| "Make something people want".
| morelisp wrote:
| This is good advice if you want to make money or be popular,
| but - admittedly, this may be too foreign to the current
| startup / indie game climate to understand - he didn't really
| want either.
|
| This is bad advice for Crawford in the same way it would be bad
| advice for a mathematician or physicist. On the other hand they
| do need to be _right, productive, and persuasive_ , and he
| wasn't the first two, and hasn't been the third for many years.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Yes, I probably am a genius--but the issue is meaningless.
|
| So a _humble_ genius then. Got it.
| nickyvanurk wrote:
| "I was a smart kid, but once I boasted to my dad about how smart
| I was, and he came down hard on me. "Don't you ever think that
| you're smarter than other people!" he snapped. I took that lesson
| to heart, and all my life I have reined in my assessment of my
| own intelligence. But of late I have tired of this pose; at
| seventy years of age, I shouldn't be posing. Dammit, I'm a
| genius, and it's time I admitted it to myself." -
| http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/seventy.html
| ggggtez wrote:
| >Casualties = 3 * (strength of attacker / strength of defender)
|
| Talk about out of touch. I can't imagine being so deep in your
| own head to think that this is the sort of thing that is
| comparable to Einstein's theory of relativity, or Mendel's
| genetics. " _Not in the same league, but at least in the same
| sport_ ". Unadulterated hubris, the whole article.
|
| And what is the frontier that he thinks he has carved out? Games
| as art? Mathematics as art? And he doesn't recognize _anyone_
| else as making strides in that area?
|
| If he has something to say, then yeah, he sure did blow it,
| because he is clearly incapable of explaining himself in a way
| that anyone cares to understand. More likely, he's just a guy who
| ran out of ideas 35 years ago and can't let it go.
| imgabe wrote:
| I don't want to make fun of this guy but it seems like his main
| insight is that you can use math to represent processes in the
| world. That's...what all of science and engineering do?
| onychomys wrote:
| For example, in this post [0] he argues that a pinecone was
| cushioned by the snow and that's why it didn't bounce off the
| rail. But he fails to notice that there's the same amount of
| snow on the rail and on top of the pinecone. Instead of his
| hypothesis, what I think probably happened was that the
| pinecone bounced on the deck and then up to the rail, where it
| was before the snow started falling. It's not a matter of
| looking at objects vs processes like he claims, it's a matter
| of looking at what objects (in this case, the snow on top of
| the pinecone) can tell us about processes.
|
| [0]http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/science/an-odd-
| discovery.h...
| username90 wrote:
| He is closer to Aristotle than modern scientists and engineers.
| That is create formulas to represent the world without checking
| how the world works at all.
| guerrilla wrote:
| More like Plato, Aristotle was quite the empircist
| (originally a biologist of sorts) for his time despite major
| blunders.
| zekrioca wrote:
| He does write at the Introduction of one of his books [1]
| about it:
|
| "While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated
| person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I
| think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of
| people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game.
|
| Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable
| about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the
| necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game
| designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to
| achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be
| extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of
| reality's richness."
|
| [1] http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/my-books/balance-of-
| power-...
| cumwolf wrote:
| computer are already a form of artistic expression. this is a
| strange article where I feel the author is too deep into his own
| head and too into his own work. I admire the passion he has, wish
| it wasn't about some game.
| aphroz wrote:
| If you want to read Balance Of Power
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070606202930/http://www.erasma...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-02-15 23:03 UTC)