Maths and Morality in EU4

I play a lot of Europa Universalis IV. Like… 950 hours worth. (Admittedly, I have fallen asleep with it running once or twice, but still.)

The game’s all about conquest and expansion, and because it’s rooted in the real world, it’s impossible to avoid questions of morality. (They took away the Attack Natives button from EU3, but even still, no one’s fooling themselves that colonization is peaceful.) If you’re trying to justify the morality of it, you’ve got three real options: You’re out for your own greed, you’re trying to make the world better than real history, or you’re defending yourself or your cause.

(If you've got an empire this size, you probably can’t justify the next war as self-defense.)

I’ve been reading about Irish nationalism and thinking about the American Civil War; enforced unity’s been on my line lately. 

So I made maths.

--

Current Morality = Taxation + Production + (Gov. Type * total development) + (Humanism * total development) – (Unrest * potential damage) – [(Culture / Discrimination) * culture’s development] – (Religion * Negative Tolerance * religion’s development) – [Nation * nation’s development * (0.1 + Unrest)] – (% War * Damage)

Morality over Time = Taxation + Production + (Gov. Type * total development) + (Humanism * total development) – (Unrest * potential damage) – [(Culture / Discrimination) * culture’s development] – (Religion * Negative Tolerance * religion’s development) – [Nation * nation’s development * (0.1 + Unrest)] – (% War * Damage) - (Lives Lost *0.005454) – (War Damage₁ + War Damage₂ …) – (Forced Conversion * converted development) – (Displaced Natives * population)

(If you mouse over each variable, there’s a small explanation.)

--

Notes:

• This is still a gross simplification. It falls back on quantifiable economic indicators, rather than societal advancement.
• These equations tend to use EU4’s own internal logic. I don’t know whether a human life is worth 0.0054 ducats, but that’s the value EU4 uses. We’re also limited by conflated effects, like how unrest reduction can represent a police state as much as people being contented.
• I’ve tried to touch on struggles of humanism that don’t get much play in the actual game, like questions of how indigenous people and women are treated.
• Fine, yes, the header image was probably the result of a bug. I don't think there were actually three million artillerymen at that battle.

Passenger Snails and Dumb Fun

This is dumb, but I had fun making it. https://www.facebook.com/PassengerSnails/

(Passenger Snails: We're there for you. Eventually.)

Alt-Cat

I decided I was tired of alt-tabbing while trying to write... so I spent two hours writing a program to stop that. Efficiency! It registered when you control-T or alt-tab, and instead pops up a message box with an inspiration/berating quote.

Then I realized I could do this with kittens and dog gifs instead, and wrote the best six lines of code ever.


^t::
Run, http://theoldreader.com/kittens/600/400/
return

!TAB::
Run, http://omfgdogs.com/
return

--

If you want to use the code, feel free. I used AutoHotkey, which is a pretty simple coding language. We used it in QA for setting up console command macros, auto-clickers, etc. It's simple enough that even a liberal arts major like me, with only one semester of C++, could use it.

Notes:

• OMFGdogs was made by @eataudio.
• The random cats javascript was set by knyar (http://knyar.net/), with cat pics posted to Flickr under Creative Commons licenses.
• You can find the file as a .exe at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9ZXbwoBXipdekpVSjRXRkx5Q1U/view?usp=sharing

History is Complicated

("Marina Ginesta" by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Marina_Ginesta.jpg)

--

Look.

This is Marina Ginestà in 1936, a seventeen-year-old French expat in Barcelona, where she is a reporter for the Soviet Pravda.

Had I learned about her in high school, I would have been told that she was an example of how civilians and youths were pulled into the war in a variety of ways. I would have learned that everyday people were forced to choose sides, or had atrocities visited on them. The history of plain folk.

Had I learned about her in the past few years, I would have thought of her as a member of the International Brigade, part of a movement that was ill-prepared and ill-treated by the Soviet Union, a movement of romantics that believed in a cause so much that they were blinded to its crimes. A monolithic entity.

I think that I am growing wiser. Having seen this photograph this morning, I see a child half-grown and fighting with a pen; someone who must have dealt with the betrayal of the Soviet Union’s treaty with Nazi Germany, and the later betrayal of its totalitarian regime; who had seventy-eight years of life after the photo that defined her life for most who know of her. I see someone who fought with fear, and doubt, and pain, and courage, and hope, and pulled decisions from this cocktail that rebounded off other people’s decisions to gain speed and more speed until they smash into other decisions and the result is history.

--

Look.

This is what history is made of.

“History is the diary of a madman” only if you assume that just one person is writing it, with mood swings wrenching the world he writes between communism, fascism and social democracy.

History is not the diary of a madman, history is a piece of binder paper getting passed around in a class. History is written by billions of humans writing over each other, scratching out what the last person said, scribbling questions before passing it on, and grabbing it back to change their mind. History is Franz Ferdinand passing Sarajevo a note saying “Do you like me?” and a classroom of 1.8 billion deciding how to react to the checked box.

History is a speech tournament with a nation’s worth of speakers debating, arguing, yelling over each other, bargaining, compromising, and throwing up their hands until the 19th Amendment passes – then it’s those same speakers going to the nearest Denny’s, and asking each other “What’s next? Was that enough? Did we fix the problem? Are we healed?”

History is complicated, and constant, and never quite finished.


--


Coda:

Y'know, I think I have a problem with being verbose... well, I already knew I had one, but today I ended up writing several hours to get most of a page in order to say "history is complicated, yo."

My gaming year in review

I decided I wanted to write something for the games that I played this year, but I didn’t want to do the vanilla blurbs for each game, or write a top 10. Instead, here they are, all the games I’ve played (for more than an hour or so), plus one thing that’s stuck with me from them, plus how you should play them.

Editing will happen some other time probably never, because I want to finish this and post it.

Also, I think only five of these games actually came out this year. Look, I'm behind the times.

Saints Row, 3 and IV:

·       This was the best gaming experience I had in all of 2015. I’ve laughed plenty at games, but this is the funniest a big-budget game has ever been for me, and the humor keeps up for tens of hours. The gameplay may not be challenging, but it feels great, especially in SRIV when the team really understood their systems.

·       Keep a notebook nearby to write down the best lines, and drink every time you do.

Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, and Hate Plus

·       The biggest drag of most visual novels is their interface, with character portraits slightly changing their expression as you click through a waterfall of chat boxes. Christine Love doesn’t fall into this trap: Digital is played out in a DOS interface, through BBS messages and console commands, and Analogue and Hate Plus are storytelling-via-Wikipedia. Digital especially brings its 90s setting bone-deep with the interface.

·       Put aside your cynicism and let yourself fall a little in love through your screen. Also, be prepared to look up info about 13^th-century Korean society.

Transistor:

·       If you aren’t playing with the Limiters, you aren’t playing right. The combat in Transistor was unexpectedly amazing, after we were all expecting it for the story. Playing with the Limiters – additional negative effects or events, like Halo’s skulls – forced me to engage with the millions of possible power combinations, instead of just finding favorites and using them exclusively.

·       Don’t play all the challenge rooms at once. Get through the entire game, start a Recursion (New Game +), then go through all the challenge rooms. They’re great puzzles, but you’ll get so sucked into them that you’ll lose track of the plot.

Europa Universalis IV:

·       Is there a better way to learn the mosome of tives of a historical culture than to face the same challenges? I never would’ve learned about Ming China’s problems with rebels and steppe tribes if it weren’t for EU4, and from there it’s easy to see some of the fears that haunt modern China.

·       There are two ways to play Europa Universalis: Either you play for eight hours at a time, for forty hours per game, with a TV show going on your second screen, or you don’t play Europa Universalis.

Risk of Rain:

·       One of my dream games to make is a roguelike platformer, and although my game would have more emphasis on personality, RoR plays brilliantly in that vein. I don’t think it has the randomness to be thought of as a true roguelike, but it’s another good entry following up on Rogue Legacy.

·       It’s less how you should play it, than how you don’t need to: You don’t need a wiki. In most roguelikes, new items have confusing functions, and you need a wiki to really understand their intricacies. This is just a personal evaluation, I admit, but I greatly prefer how simplified RoR is, with a limited list of abilities, specialization, and items.

Hotline Miami:

·       This is actually the first time I can claim indie cred: I was playing Cactus’ games back when they were shmups about shooting the rebellious, escaped eyeballs of humanity. It’s pretty easy to see the through-line of style in Hotline Miami, the eye-melting colors and pulsing music.

·       Don’t play this game drunk or high. Seriously. It might seem like a good idea, because whoooooaaaaaa maaaaaaaan the coooooolooooors, but this game is difficult and you will lose.

Beyond Earth:

·       There’s a line in an old Irrational Interviews podcast where Brian Reynolds says that Alpha Centauri was filled with all the political fever-dreams from his 20s. Beyond Earth, on the other hand, has… different colors? Minor mechanical differences? This was the most flavorless 4X I’ve played more than a few hours of, and as a result it helped me figure out my problems with 4X games. I could play Europa Unversalis for years because it lets me rewrite history, but there’s no story to be written in Beyond Earth.

·       Play this as a raw strategy game. The mechanics are good, there’s lots of room for planning, so you’ll enjoy this if you pore over wikis and search out optimal strategies.

To The Moon:

·       I keep comparing it to Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. To The Moon is extremely beholden to the JRPG style, not just in the gameplay, but in its tone. The perspective characters (the scientists) emote just like you’d expect a JRPG protagonist to do, and they’re the weakest part of the game as a result. The lens through which we view the story is weak, but when we start looking past the lens, the story we see is spectacular. Except the ending. Still got problems with the ending.

·       

Play it in one sitting if possible, linger on the piano melody, and keep Kleenex nearby.

Halo 3 (again), ODST, Reach, and Halo 4:

·       Halo 4 is probably the best Halo game that’s ever been made. The encounter design feels as inspired as the original trilogy, but without stupid-frustrating enemies: No giant sacks of health like the Brutes in large groups, and barely any Hunters. The story retains the galactic implications of the original trilogy, but benefits hugely by keeping the operational area and list of characters very small. There isn’t a wasted inch of narrative in that game.

·       All of these are games to be played over a weekend, each taking two six-hour sessions. You won’t get rusty, the story won’t be stretched out over too many sessions, and you won’t be stuck on one encounter for the majority of your session.

Gone Home:

·       I played this on January 1^st of 2014, so it counts.

·       (Spoiler warning) I think I’ve had exactly one friend come out. I’ve known people who I assumed were gay, and I know friends who are gay or trans, but I’ve never watched someone go through the process of accepting themselves and re-identify themselves to their friends and family. This game is the closest I’ve come to seeing that.

·       Play this in one sitting, then sit on your hands checking the clock until Life Is Strange comes out.

The Wolf Among Us:

·       If a branching storyline lets you define the relationship between two characters, but that relationship is one of the linchpins of the story, how much does that hurt the narrative cohesion? Throughout The Wolf Among Us, I felt that the romance/partnership between Bigby and Snow was a key emotional beat, but player decisions could easily torpedo that relationship. I haven’t replayed the game with different choices, so I could be misinterpreting it, but having the ability to completely destroy a plot thread is strange. Possibly empowering, but without being sure of the breadth of possible outcomes, mostly just awkward.

·       Take it slow. Dig into the atmosphere. Click everything. The Telltale engine, from the pacing of its character animations to its cel-shading, will never be better used than in this jeu noir.

Star Trek Online (Disclaimer: This is one of my company’s games.)

·       

How much raiding and team content is needed before level cap? There are some queued team-ups available in the lead-up to the level cap, but it’s not until then that you pull the cotton balls out of your nose and WHOAH that’s where the Dyson spheres, the Borg hives, the dinosaurs with guns, that’s where all the new smexy is. I don’t have an answer for this, but it struck me as odd that all this content was just at endgame, after about twenty hours of leveling in solo content.

·       Play this with TNG on the other monitor. Duh.

FEZ:

·       I think this is the last of the indie darlings from the XBLA era that I hadn’t played. There’s an era of games I think of, and even though FEZ came out much later, I group it with Braid, Bastion, etc. That era is interesting to me because all these acclaimed games were coming out on XBLA, but I was locked in on the freeware; now most things except the art games and game jams have gone paid, and the indie movement is still going strong. The pricing structure changed, the art didn’t.

·       

Don’t read any spoilers. Seriously. Just keep playing until you think you’re done with the game, then give it another hour. You sunk fifteen hours into FFXIII because “it gets way better after that”, you can afford to spend an hour flailing blindly trying to figure out what’s next.

Tales from the Borderlands:

·       Is there a better example of conversational combat than the con in the first episode? Between this and the quasi-trial in The Wolf Among Us, this rode the line for conversation that gets ridden in the best stealth games: high tension, with the knowledge that you’ll have to live with the consequences if you slip up instead of instantly failing. All too often conversational games either have no consequences, or just restart you if you make the wrong choice.

·       Play with the barest idea of the plot of Borderlands 2. Only watched the trailers? No worries! Handsome Jack is bad, Vaults have cool tech, Pandora is a frontier madhouse of murder. You’re good to go.

Dungeons and Dragons and Secrets of Zir’An:

·       I ran a combat-heavy DnD campaign for my co-workers, and a series of heists in the Secrets of Zir’an world for my friends. I may have cross-pollinated some puzzles at certain points.

·       Don’t prep. If you’re spending more than an hour preparing your adventure, your players have to be 100% on board with following your narrative. If your group’s characters shine in Firefly-esque banter and seat-of-your-pants flying, you should be improv’ing as much as they are.

League of Legends:

·       I have played probably over 700 hours of this game, and I still can’t transfer my knowledge into playing consistently better.

·       If you’re going to play this, make sure you eat food before you play, otherwise you’re going to look up hours later and realize that, maybe, your crappy play was because you were cripplingly hungry. Personally, I can’t afford to spend three hours a night playing LoL anymore, so I’m taking a break. 

Miles Prower

I grew up on Sonic.

I watched the syndicated cartoon at sleepovers, and lost my shit when I heard it was on regular TV. I read the comics from Issue #26 until I was a freshman in college, and I drowned myself in Ken Penders’ lore about the Floating Island and Tails as the Chosen One.

Sonic fanfic was the first fanfic I ever read, even before the excellent Mega Man: The Series. I was reading OC Do Not Steal characters in Sonic fanfic before I was old enough to know how self-serving they were for the authors.

My favorite game for years was the Sonic 3 and Knuckles collection, and I always played as Knuckles because I couldn’t figure out that holding up and down moved the platforms in the Carnival Night zone. I never managed to get all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic and Knuckles, but I could get them in my sleep in Sonic 3.

And it wasn’t until college that I got the “Miles Prower” = “Miles Per Hour” pun.

Sexuality, Wolverine, and Ice King

That title is why the Oxford comma matters, folks. No one wants to read that slash fic.

This is going to be a bit of a grab bag. I don’t really have in-depth thoughts on any of this – at least, not yet – but I want to at least signal boost these things.

Also, I decided to post this with basically no editing. Someday I will start integrating more images into the blog, and proofread the hell out of everything, but for now I just want to keep momentum going and keep posting.

Subtext Sexuality

Did you know that the first appearance of the Morlocks and Callisto was heavily influenced by the sex-positive sci-fi romp Barbarella?

There’s a lot going on in the margins of old comics, almost all of which I didn’t notice. The biggest example that I missed was the queer subtext of Storm and of Kitty Pryde in Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men – there’s an excellent essay touching on it, and the Miles and Rachel X-Plain the X-Men podcast has been pointing out specific instances of this.

It’s fascinating to me, like tilting a painting and finding it’s got a whole other dimension you never noticed. When I first read most of Claremont’s stuff, in early college, all of this flew right over (under?) my head – the only piece of sexuality that made me think was Kitty’s relationship with Colossus (which is its own can of worms). Now that I’m going back through, queer sexuality is another perspective to read it through for a better understanding, just like race relations and Professor X being completely awful.

Wolverine and Kitty?

“There’s a story that I’ve heard told more than once about the fact that Claremont had said that Kitty was Logan’s true love, that that’s where he was going with it.” – Greg Rucka. (23:40, source here,)

Ewwwwww.

Even setting aside the extreme morale problems, it would be a massive betrayal of both characters, unless Claremont changed a lot of both characters.

Logan’s well-written romantic relationships have always been either about running to something, or running from something. Mariko Yashida represented the honor he was running towards; Silver Fox represented the past he was running away from, when he was an assassin. The Jean/Logan relationship didn’t work because Jean was just The Unattainable, and pursuing her was at most the desire to have the humanizing love that Cyclops had.

Pursuing (adult) Kitty wouldn’t even be that, because while Kitty is a good person, it was always her age and innocence that made other people value her idealism. The other X-Men wanted to make the world safe for idealists like her – they didn’t believe in everyone living as idealists.

And so, I continue to maintain that authorial intent is bullshit, for reasons exactly like this. (So no, they aren’t “jiffs”.)

The Ice King

You know a creator that does handle creepy relationships well? Pendleton Ward.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this subject, but I’m consistently impressed by how nuanced the writing is for the Ice King in Adventure Time. After the first few episodes, it’d be easy to write him as just a bumbling villain with a heart of gold: “Aww, he kidnapped another princess, and is trying to force her into a non-consensual marriage. That’s our Ice King!”

Adventure Time doesn’t do that, and it’s to Ward’s credit. From the beginning, the show treats Ice King with a mix of pity, humor, and genuine acknowledgment of his creeper status. Even when the show pushes Finn and Jake to feel bad about hurting the Ice King, it never pretends that that pain is equal to the pain he causes with abductions.

I don’t really have anything to add beyond that. I just appreciate that Adventure Time doesn’t make light of abduction… like, er, that one song from The Fantasticks.

You know the one.

It pains me that that song is so (*%$in’ catchy.

[Note: I’m only three seasons in, so there’s still time for things to get screwed up, I suppose.]