Assorted links

• Nick Szabo's essay on the origins of money. See also this other one.
• A survey of player-NPC dialogue systems in games. See also Dialog System on Wikipedia.
• An interview with Lee Kuan Yew. See also Social Development Unit on Wikipedia.
• My favorite part of David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature".

Playtesting and Test Screenings

I wonder why playtesting is uniformly seen as a good thing in videogames, while in the world of film the analogous practice of performing test screenings is usually frowned upon, as a sign of a director willing to compromise his art, to sacrifice his vision to Moloch, and so on.

Aren't they basically the same thing, namely using the advanced feedback provided by group of consumers to retool a cultural product? So why then they are regarded differently?

Perhaps the reason is that videogames are inherently interactive, so requesting players' opinions during development seems more natural.

Roleplaying in the Dying Earth

In the essay "Rules to Mock Your Vain Ambitions", noted RPG designer Robin D. Laws describes what were his aims when adapting Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" setting to a Role-Playing Game.

I find fascinating the discussion of how the game mechanics were carefully tailored to achieve a proper "Dying Earth" feeling during play. Besides design artistry, it required a deep knowlege of Vance's stories: the identification of their recurring themes, motifs, an character archetypes, not to mention an ear for his use of language (the players are encouraged to speak in the rarefied dialogue peculiar to the series, and the rules themselves are written "in voice".) It's no wonder then that the essay doubles as an interesting commentary on Vance's work.

The bit about the different dice "personalities" is amusing:

Maybe I'm crazy, but I've always found that the different dice used in RPGs all carry different emotional temperatures. The d4 is primal, parsimonious, and, as anyone who has ever stepped on one knows, hostile. The d12 is your goofy uncle, the one who tells you stories aren't supposed to hear and asks you to pull his finger. The d20 is a serious-minded juggernaut of decimal regularity. The six-sider, on the other hand, is a Dying Earth die all the way. A cube, it is elegant, spare, and classical. As the die used by normal civilians, the d6 offers a kind of bridge out from the world of RPGs, just as the Dying Earth stories straddle the boundaries between genre fiction and literature.

Dwarf Fortress and the Great War

Dwarf Fortress seems to be a very interesting roguelike game about... dwarfs building a fortress. I can see how planning and slowly expanding your settlement while fending off external threats must be hugely compelling.

I would like to play a variation of this game, in which you don't build fortresses, but WWI-like trenches. In a way, it would be very similar: trenches in the Great War started simple but grew to become extremely complex and expansive constructions over vast areas, warring fortresses separated by half of a kilometer at most, pitted one against the other in a mutual siege.

This base building oriented approach seems to me the only viable way to make a "realistic" game about trench warfare. I don't think a game from the perspective of an individual soldier would work, much more than a game in which you play a lamb going to the slaughter.

I can't wait to watch the Christmas truce reenacted by dwarfs symbolized by ampersands.

Mad, Mendacious, or Misogynistic?

Weston's voice was speaking gently and continuously. [..] It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories [...] They were all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world's history and in quite different circumstances. [...] The heroines of the stories seemed all to have suffered a great deal-they had been oppressed by fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, happily: sometimes with honours and praises to a heroine still living, more often with tardy acknowledgment and unavailing tears after her death [...] At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise details were often not very easy to follow. Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches or perverts.

(C. S. Lewis: Perelandra)

Oh Mr. Lewis, you cad! I wonder what was his opinion on Sophocles' "Antigone".

Anyway, since the post is about Perelandra... I have always thought that a great idea for a christian CRPG would be a game where you play as some kind or Ransom (or Weston) figure that visits a series of prelapsarian worlds, the objective of the game being to help the primordial couple avoid temptation (if playing as Ransom) or to precipitate the Fall (if playing as Weston). That way you are unburdened with the fixed outcomes and necessarily rigid nature of Bible stories. (You failed to bring your people into the Promised Land! Game Over!)

It would be like Façade, only in the Garden of Eden, with a clear objective, and minus the suck.