[HN Gopher] Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
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Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
Author : CTOSian
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-05-23 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| wiz21c wrote:
| The fourth picture (with the numbers is enlightening).
|
| So by that time, already, the top execs were looking the world
| through the lens of numbers.
|
| The operational costs dwarf all other, but they're represented as
| one line out of 4...
| gidorah wrote:
| I am interested in the business models behind the games. I did
| have a look some time ago, but couldn't really find anything.
|
| I played something similar at uni, and have been interested since
| then.
| libertine wrote:
| I played one of these simulations in one of my Marketing
| Operations class, I think it was Markstrat.
|
| It was quite fun and we because competitive about it.
| jdonaldson wrote:
| These exercises are always half BS and half valuable insight that
| you can't even get from years of experience. It gets very hard to
| tell which is which though.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Reminds me of the early stages of Universal Paperclips.
| animal531 wrote:
| These were probably before most of our times, but I definitely
| played a lot of other text based games during the 90-00's. For
| example the classic ship trading game where you are
| buying/selling cannons, food, men etc. and fighting while
| traveling to different ports (there were may variations of this
| game type).
|
| Also during the MUD era, I played a lot of actual MUD, then some
| Star Trek variations where you have a whole big crew piloting a
| ship, a Doom type arena shooter game, etc.
|
| For a short time there were a lot of different text games coming
| out.
| Jensson wrote:
| Utopia the online game was big for a while. Is still running
| but not a lot of people play it. You get a province in a
| country with random teammates and have to work together to
| expand, manage diplomacy with other countries, fight wars or
| decide when to surrender, vote for a ruler etc.
| ilaksh wrote:
| http://www.tradewars.com/default.html
| anthk wrote:
| I still play BSD games, Slashem and Trek,
|
| On the ship trading game, it was Taipei.
| jansan wrote:
| Elite on the C64 was famous for its then outstanding vector
| graphics, but it actually was quite a good (space) ship trading
| game.
| jhbadger wrote:
| In the early 1980s one of the "killer apps" for the Apple ][ in
| schools was a text game (with occasional 40x40 lowres graphics)
| called "Lemonade Stand" (itself based on an earlier mainframe
| game) in which competing lemonade stands would make decisions
| on how much lemonade to make, what to charge for it, and how
| much to spend in advertising. We used to play it in class with
| one computer for the class and the class broken up into groups
| of 3 or 4 students who each ran a stand.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_Stand
| dqft wrote:
| Played a internet flash version of this in a class 20 years
| or so later. Coolmathgames or something.
|
| Found it. It has been updatrd since.
| https://www.coolmathgames.com/0-lemonade-stand
| jhbadger wrote:
| >(Love how the upper management men are circling numbers and a
| competent operator is running the equipment.)
|
| That's just how things were. Until the 1980s and the rise of
| personal computers, it was considered unnecessary for executives
| to know how to type, for example. Instead they would either write
| things out longhand or dictate to a secretary or typist who would
| do the actual typing.
| roofone wrote:
| This article (and the concept of "business war games") brought me
| back to one of the first computer games I ever played: Lemonade
| Stand on the Apple II.[1]
|
| Sounds like Lemonade Stand was a simplified version of some of
| these games from the 50s.
|
| 40 years ago and I still remember the optimum price to charge for
| a drink ($0.11).
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_Stand
| munificent wrote:
| I also have fond memories of Lemonade Stand. I think it's one
| of the games that gave me an abiding love of simulations.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| Very fond memories of being a 3rd grader and playing a version
| of this on our classroom TRS-80. I'd get really excited when
| the weather turned "hot and dry' so I could jack the price and
| gouge my customers.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| And how are you enjoying your current job at Ticketmaster?
| :-)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Our class played a crude kind of game like this for a marketing
| class once. You had to choose how much to spend each quarter.
| After one quarter I observed no declining marginal impact of
| hiring sales people, and a tiny, tiny boost in price from
| improving the product.
|
| The next quarter my team released the shittiest product we could
| for the lowest price and spent 30x as much on salespeople as the
| next highest team.
|
| We won by two orders of magnitude in terms of total net income.
| The next quarter, everyone tried to do the same thing to an even
| crazier extent, but there was a predetermined market size which
| we had already hit in Q2. So we scaled down drastically and
| everyone else ended up deep in the red paying spending X00
| dollars in marketing to get a X0 gross margin on each customer.
|
| In Q4 we were the only team that had enough money to field pretty
| much any salesmen so we did even better than Q2.
|
| Greatly amusing.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Probably Markstrat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markstrat).
|
| My 1999 MBA class played it. I had no idea it was so
| widespread, since the author was one of the professors at my
| business school.
|
| From the Wikipedia article, it was originally developed in
| 1974-77. Which makes it nearly 50 years old.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I'd be interested if anyone was aware of an open source
| equivalent to Markstrat.
|
| I also played it in college, and eventually want to play
| against my kids when they reach high school.
| aconst wrote:
| I played a similar game in class, in our case we put a lot on
| both R&D and marketing, selling expensive high quality and well
| marketed products. We "won" the game but our teacher was not
| happy about the outcome and thought he would have to make some
| changes to the simulation. Mind you, it was only one or two
| years before seeing everyone buying Apple laptops :D
| ghaff wrote:
| Played one of those in school (MarkStrat or something like
| that). The TA was unhappy because we were doing very well
| based in no small part on a large sales force. But we elected
| to do a fast follower strategy on a new product--but no one
| else really had the money to do upfront R&D so we were sort
| of "expected" to take the hit to make the simulation proceed
| as planned.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Lol
|
| It was probably the same game. You're saying the product was
| laptops right?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I once had the idea that something like an erotic text-adventure
| could be a killer-app for AI powered NLP. Or at least it could
| produce hilarious results?
| anthk wrote:
| They are trash for IF. That's it. You would be better with
| Inform 7.
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