Goodbye, Bowie.

Admittedly, there is a bit of hypocrisy between channel-surfing past Bowie one day, and mourning him the next. Nonetheless, stars and idols draw mental associations to them like glitter, and when they die, it pulls a piece away with them. Bowie took with him one of my first rock albums, a little piece of the Guns 'N' Roses story, dating advice from the early days of college, and rocking out with Guitar Hero.

Also, public mourning is one of the few mass activities we do that's uncomplicated and purely positive. A moment of shared humanity is a good legacy for the man who caught and wore lightning.

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(Written after reading someone on Facebook, complaining about how there'd be posts all day from people who couldn't name more than two Bowie songs.)

Top 10 EU4 Changes

I’ve spent over a thousand hours on Europa Universalis IV, and yesterday I deleted the game and hid it from my Steam library. As part of the grieving process, here are…

The top 10 changes needed for EU4 :

1. I’ve lost too many battles because my AI allies wouldn’t join in, even when they’re in the next province over. It’s always a crapshoot whether they’ll join in. Allow me to mark a battle, or an upcoming battle, as a priority for my allies. Also, this would be useful for dealing with rebellions, which allies sometimes help with, but not always.
2. Alliance webs: Nation A is allied with me; I’m allied with A, B, and C. If Nation Z attacks me, or I declare war on them, I’m in great shape, but if Z attacks A, then I’m screwed and outnumbered if I defend A. Allow me to suggest alliance webs to my AI allies, so A will also be allied to B and C.
3. When declaring a war/accepting a call to arms, show the number of men on each side. The game already calculates which nations will join the war, and I can get the armies’ sizes by going into the ledger. Including that data in the Declare War/Call to Arms windows would just save time.
4. In the latest update, if you’ve mothballed forts or reduced your army maintenance slider, it automatically re-ups it if you get into a war. This is great, and amazing, but if I’m having a bunch of colonial conquest wars and don’t need my forts in the homeland, that means I have to re-mothball forts every time. At a certain point, fort maintenance is expensive, so this is necessary. Add a third option: Not Mothballed, Un-Mothball at War, and Stay Mothballed.
5. The latest update added a bunch of notifications, which is great – being reminded that I’m at negative stability is a huge help. That said, especially in Ironman mode, there are some edge cases that I would love more pop-ups and notifications for. Can we get notifications when a battle is projected to occur, when an enemy army comes out of the fog of war, and when nations can convert to Protestant/Reformed?
6. AI allies are great, but they follow a different battle plan than me – I’d rather hold the line against the primary enemy and knock off a few of their satellites, but my allies charge right into the French meatgrinder without me to support them. Allow me to set rough battle plans: Aggressive vs Milan, Defensive vs France, etc. Otherwise, the best use of my armies is probably to support whatever the AI is going to do anyways, because at least then we’ll be working in concert.
7. I’ve played a lot of games as Austria; please add more notification for Electorships and Free Citydoms. It’s easy to miss that you don’t have eight Free Cities or seven Electorships, and I’d love to have a notification for that, like you get if you have negative Stability. (After all, these are about as impactful.) Also, I’d like to see a list of all states that would accept the offer of a Free City, as it’s normally hellish to find one, and who a state would back for Emperor if granted an Electorship.
8. When mousing over an enemy army, I’d like to see the average morale. It’s good to have the green percentage bar, but I’d rather see the flat amount as well – like if France has a base morale of 8, that’s pretty pertinent information before I attack. Same for Pretender armies, which I always forget have a morale boost, and I’d like to know the morale of more primitive nations’ armies.
9. There are plenty of effects and modifiers that get thrown around, but their effects are pretty unclear. Can we get results displayed alongside a modifier being granted? For instance, if an event gives +10% Trade Efficiency, also display the increased income that’s predicted to result from that.
10. We’ve got data that helps us predict when and where rebellions will happen, with a little work; can we see how big the rebellions will be? Other methods that spawn rebels, specifically events, tell you how large the rebel armies will be.

Note: These are changes needed from the perspective of a veteran of the game. There are a ton of changes that would help new players – a link to the wiki in every popup would be a start.

Star Wars - Meandering Thoughts

I just finished watching The Force Awakens. I’ve been a Star Wars nerd for almost twenty-two years now, and I was swept away by the hype machine for this move – I won’t pretend it’s perfect, but I thought it was really good. I’d like to meander through my thoughts on this.

Spoilers.

Musings - Sex & Love in Sci-Fi/Fantasy

I watched Back to the Future again over Thanksgiving, and I realized there were similarities to El Goonish Shive.

(Bear with me on this one.)

I like sci-fi/fantasy elements that change love and sex. Think about how much sexuality changes if the body becomes an Eclipse Phase-style sleeve for the mind, and people can easily change their bodies. If the body is more like a phone case than core hardware, how does sex change? Do people start artificially heightening arousal with hormone injections?

Or the same deal in a magical setting – 2^nd edition D&D had the girdle of masculinity/femininity as a cursed item. You could make an entire campaign about finding one to help a queen transition.

Even though a bunch of stories have these elements, though, they don’t really explore them. Either they’re story-of-the-week innovations, to be forgotten by the next episode, or the writers don’t want to dive into the cultural implications of change. Sci-fi is historically used for allegories and exploring technology, but it usually doesn’t take a look at the small and personal.

Which is where El Goonish Shive comes in for me. Early on, the then-main protagonist was turned into a girl, and in trying to get changed back, the female persona was split into a separate character; that character has since been an integral part of the story, and the easy availability of shapeshifting and gender-changing for the protagonists has shaped their attitudes about sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

(Whoof, that was a long sentence.)

I love EGS because it does exactly what I want: It looks at how sci-fi and fantasy elements change love and sex. Looking at grand sociological or technological changes is interesting, but it doesn’t get more personal than seeing how sex changes.

Kinda the same for Back to the Future – even throwing out the incest angle, how much harder does it get to have a relationship with someone from thirty years ago, who you have to hide the future from? What’s the closest equivalent to sex with an AI that thinks at 33.86 * 10^15 operations per second? Whatever the equivalent of sex is, how mind-blowing would it have to be to completely occupy that AI’s mind, like a human’s during an orgasm?

And that brings me to superheroes.

Almost every superpower – telekinesis, precognition, super strength, duplication – could get used in sex. I guarantee it. (Rogue still has it rough, admittedly.) And given modern fetish culture, you’d probably have baseline humans looking for matches with their specific power fetish. There might even be a powers dating site.

I want to read about the people using that site. I want to know what makes Captain Supreme swipe left. I want to read about how Masked Marvel isn’t just her powers, and if you bring them up instead of her traveling or philanthropy when you message her, she’s not going to respond. I want to know how Valkyrie deals with the social stigma around online dating.

Hmm. Maybe I want to write about that.

Halo 5: Let's Talk

Halo 5 is about a conversation. 

(Spoiler warning. Also, note that these are hot takes, I’m still mulling this over.) 

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While I don’t think Halo 5 did very well at its dialog or bringing forth characterization, the structure of the story is spectacular. It’s longer than Halo 4 but more focused, to the point that I can even now recount the core beats of the entire plot (not common for me). And distilled down to the bones of the plot, it’s an extremely compelling narrative.

Halo 5’s raison d’être is a conversation. And, breaking my heart, it’s a conversation that doesn’t really happen. Talking with John about her plan, and trying to convince him to join her, means so much to Cortana that she can’t accept the outcome. So she puts it off, and off, until by the time John’s gotten there, the gulf between them is too wide. Both of them have their hands outstretched, but only to pull the other to their side.

This game exists for 26 sentences, when Cortana and Chief finally see each other again.

And that’s it! The rest of the game only exists to give context to those sentences, and to move us from that conversation into the next game. All of Fireteam Osiris’ story can be boiled down to “reach Chief” and “show the consequences of Cortana’s plan, and pace its reveal,” while Chief’s arc is just “talk to Cortana.”

Plus, in a first for the series – although it can’t last – the core conflict is never violent. At no point does Chief take up arms against Cortana, and even though Locke probably has orders to take out Cortana, it isn’t a focus. It feels morally significant that, even if they fight later, this game is reserved for grieving for the loss of her. Tomorrow, the battlefield; today, the goodbyes.



… Admittedly, though, that grief isn’t expressed very well. A lot of the emotional weight of this story only comes through when you fill in the gaps in the dialog and characterization. I love Halo 5’s story structure, but the moment-to-moment realization of it is very flat.

I’ll probably keep posting about Halo 5 for the next few days – I’m still chewing it over in my head – but when it struck me what this game was about, I needed to write about it. 

Quick postscript: Your mileage may vary. Personally, I considered Cortana’s ascension to be the culmination of two major plot threads in the Halo universe – Cortana’s own alienation from humanity and what it expects of her, and the way humanity has treated its Spartan and AI creations in general. I can absolutely see concerns about how this is the second Halo game in a row to troperifically handle Cortana, the series’ leading woman – first by ramping up her emotions, now by making her the dark goddess – but it rings honest and story-rich to me. Your mileage may vary, though.


(All screenshots taken from the in-game cinematics.)

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.

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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.)

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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.)