#but i think there's a balance of awareness and nuance that very few people/players have been able to hit

[fortyfive-forty]

anyways. andy roddick everybody

Transcription:

[A: As you're saying the devil's in the details and homosexuality is illegal, but we have openly gay players. Uh...[Daria] Kasatkina, came out last year, now, if she goes there and play[s], are we just telling her to take a week off of her sexuality? I mean how do we even...how do we protect our own players who are, you know their—their life choices are viewed as criminal, when they enter this place? It's like, how do we protect those mechanisms, and, can whatever is said now be trusted when it's actually in practice?]

#there's a lot more to be said about this and actually i think the whole section where they talk about this is pretty good overall #better at least than some of what i've seen from other folks #but this part in particular i was grateful that someone said out loud #andy roddick #wta tennis #the whole saudi issue is complicated to me for a lot of reasons #i don't want to get into it too much because i think it's such a long conversation #but i think there's a balance of awareness and nuance that very few people/players have been able to hit #anyways. #maybe one day i'll talk about it in full

[davidmann95]

Superman & Lois Pilot Script Review

I’ve been reliably informed that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and indeed as my laptop and everything on it have been unusable for a couple months after a mishap, I went from ‘maybe I’ll write something on the pilot script for Superman & Lois’ to ‘as soon as I can get my hands back on that thing I’m writing something up’. I’m actually surprised none of you folks asked about it when I’ve mentioned several times that I read it; I was initially hesitant, but I’ve seen folks discussing plot details on Twitter and their reactions on here, so I guess WB isn’t making much of a thing out of it. Entire pilots have leaked before and they just rolled with it, so I suppose that isn’t surprising. Anyway, the show’s been pushed back to next year, and also the world is literally sick and metaphorically (and also a little literally) on fire, so I thought this might be fun if anyone needs a break from abject horror. 

(Speaking of the world being on fire: while trying to offer a diversion amidst said blaze, still gonna pause for the moment to add to the chorus that if opening your wallet is a thing you can do, now most especially is a time to do it. I chipped in myself to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and even a casual look around here or Twitter will show people listing plenty of other organizations that need support.)

What I saw floating around was, if not a first draft, certainly not the final one given Elizabeth Tulloch later shared a photo of the cover for the final script crediting Lee Toland Krieger as the director rather than a TBD, but the shape of things is clearly in place. I’m going for a relative minimum of spoilers, though I’ll discuss a bit of the basic status quo the show sets up and vaguely touch on a few plot points, but if you want a simple response without risk of any story details: it’s very, very good. Clunky in the way the CW DC shows typically are, and some aspects I’m not going to be able to judge until the story plays out further, but it’s engaging, satisfying, and moreover feels like it Gets It more broadly than any other mass-media Superman adaptation to date.

The Good

* The big one, the pillar on which all else rests: this understands Lois and it really understands Clark. Lois isn’t at the center of the pilot’s arc, but she’s everything you want to see that character be - incisive, caring, and refusing to operate at less than 110% intensity with whatever she’s dealing with at any given time, the objections of others be damned. Clark meanwhile is a good-natured, good-humored dude who you can see in both the cape and the glasses even as those identities remain distinct, who’s still wrestling with his feelings of alienation and duty and how those now reflect his relationships with his children. The title characters both feel fully-formed and true to what historically tends to work best with them from day one here in ways I can’t especially say for any other movie or show they’ve starred in.

* While the suit takes a back seat for this particular episode, when Superman does show up in the opening and climax it absolutely knows how to get us to cheer for him; there’s more than one ‘hell yeah, it’s SUPERMAN, that guy’s the best!’ moment, and they pop.

* While the superheroics aren’t the biggest focus here, when they do arrive, the plan seems to be that they’ll be operating on an entirely different scale than the rest of the Arrowverse lineup. Maybe they scripted the ideal and’ll be pared-down come time for actual filming and effects work, or maybe they’re going all-out for the pilot, but the initial vision involves a massive super-rescue and a widescreen brawl that goes way, way bigger in scope than any I’m aware of on the likes of Supergirl. I heard in passing on Twitter from someone claiming to be in the know that the plan for Superman & Lois is that it’ll be fewer episodes with a higher budget, more in line with the DC Universe stuff if not exactly HBO Max ‘prestige TV’, and whether it’s true or not (I think it’s plausible, the potential ratings here are exponentially higher than anything else on the network so they’d want to put their best foot forward) they seem to be writing it as if that’s the idea.

* This balances its tones and ambitions excellently: it’s a Kent-Lane family drama, it’s Lois digging in with some investigative reporting to set up a major subplot, it’s Superman saving Metropolis and battling a powerful high-concept villain, and none of it feels like it’s banging up at awkward angles with the rest. There are a pair of throwaway lines in here so grim I can’t believe they were put in a script for a Superman TV show even if they don’t make it to air, and they in no way undermine the exhilaration once he puts on the cape or the warmth that pervades much of it. This feels as if it’s laying the groundwork for a Superman show that can tackle just about any sort of story with the character rather than planing its feet in one corner and declaring a niche, and so far it looks like it has the juice to pull it off.

* While the pilot doesn’t focus on him in the same way as the new kid, Jonathan Kent fits well enough for my tastes with the broad strokes of his personality from the comics, albeit if he had made it to 14 rather than 10 without learning about his dad being Superman. A pleasant, kinda dopey, well-meaning Superman Jr. - the biggest deviation, one I approve of, is that he can also kinda be a gleeful little shit when dealing with his brother in ways that remind you that this is very much also Lois Lane’s boy.

* We don’t know much about the season villain as of yet, but it’s an incredibly cool idea that I’m shocked that they’re going for right away, and I absolutely want to see how they play out as a character and how they’ll bounce off all the other major players.

* The way this seems to be framing itself in relation to the Superman movies and shows before it feels inspired to me: there are homages and shout-outs to and bits of conceptual scaffolding from Lois & Clark, Smallville, Donner, and more, but they’re all shown in ways that make it clear that those stories are part of his past rather than indicators of the baseline he’s currently operating off of. We get a retrospective of his and Lois’s history right off the bat with most of what you’d expect, and combined with those references the message is clear: this is a Superman who’s been through all the vague memories that you, prospective casual viewer, have of the other stuff you saw him in once upon a time, but this series begins the next phase of his life after what that general cultural impression of him to date covers. It strikes me as a good way of carrying over the goodwill of that nostalgia and iconography, while building in that this is a show with room to grow him beyond that into something more nuanced (and for that matter true to the character as the comics at their best have depicted him) than they tended towards. Where Superman Returns attempted to recapture the lightning in a bottle of an earlier vision of him in full, and Man of Steel tried to turn its back on anything that smelled of Old and Busted and Uncool entirely, perhaps this splitting of the difference - engaging with his pop culture history and visibly taking what appealed from some of those well-known takes, while also drawing a clear line in the sand between those as the past and this as the future - is what will finally engage audiences.

The Bad

* This is the sort of thing you have to roll with for a CW superhero show, and that lives and dies by the performances, but: the dialogue varies heavily. There are some really poignant moments, but elsewhere this is where it shows its early-draftiness; a decent amount is typical Whedon-poisoned quippiness or achingly blunt, and some of the ‘hey, we’re down with the kids!’ material for Jon, Jor, and Lana’s kid Sarah is outright agonizing. I suspect a lot of it will be fixed in minor edits, actor delivery, and hopefully the younger performers taking a brutal red pen to some of their material - this was written last January and the show’s now not debuting until next January, they’ve got plenty of time for cleanup - but if this sort of the thing has been a barrier to entry for you in the past with the likes of The Flash, this probably won’t be what changes your mind.

* There are a few charming shout-outs to other shows, but much moreso, Superman & Lois actually builds in a big way out of Crisis. Which is a-okay with me, except that what exactly that was is rather poorly conveyed given that lots of people will be giving this a spin with no familiarity with that. Fixable with a line or two, but important enough to be worth noting.

Have to wait and see how it plays out

* The series’ new kid, Jordan Kent, is so far promising with potential to veer badly off-course. He’s explicitly dealing with mental illness, and not on great terms with Clark at the beginning in spite of the latter’s best efforts, the notion of which I’m sure will immediately put some off. Ultimately the commonalities between father and son become clear, and he’s not written as a caricature in this opening but as a kid with some problems who’s still visibly his parents’ boy, but obviously the ball could be fumbled here in the long term.

* Lois’s dad is portrayed almost completely differently here than in the past in spite of technically still being her military dad who has some disagreements with her husband. There are some nice moments and interesting new angles but it seems possible that the groudwork is being laid for him to be Clark’s guy in the chair, and not only does he not need that he most DEFINITELY doesn’t need that to be a member of the U.S. Military, especially when one of the first and best decisions Supergirl made when introducing him was to make clear he had stopped working with the government any more than necessary years ago. Maybe it can be stretched if his dad-in-law occasionally calls him up to let him know about a new threat he’s learned about, and maybe they’ll even do something really interesting with that push-and-pull, but if Superman’s going to be even tacitly functioning as an extension of the military that’s going to be a foundational sin.

* As I was nervous about, Superman & Lois has some political flavor, but much to my delighted surprise, there’s no grossly out of touch hedge-betting in the way I understand Supergirl has gone for at times. As of the pilot, this is an explicitly leftie show, with the overarching threat of the season as established for Lois and Clark as reporters being how corporate America has stripmined towns like Smallville and manipulated blue collar workers into selling out their own best interests. Could that go wrong? Totally, there’s already an effort to establish a particular prominent right-wing asshole as capable of decency - without as of yet downplaying that he’s a genuinely shitty dude - and vague hints that some of the towns’ woes might be rooted more in Superman-type problems than Lois and Clark problems. But that they’re going for it this directly in the first place leaves me hopeful that the show won’t completely chicken out even if there’ll probably be a monster in the mix pulling a string or two; Greg Pak and Aaron Kuder’s Action Comics may justify Superman punching a cop by having him turn out to be a shadow monster so as to get past editorial, but it’s still a story about how sometimes Superman’s gotta punch a cop, and hopefully this can carry on in that spirit of using what wiggle room it has to the best of its ability.

So, so far so good. Could it end up a show with severe problems carried on the backs of Hoechlin and Tulloch’s performances? Absolutely. But thus far, the ingredients are there for all its potential problems to be either fixed, subverted, or dodged alright, and even when it surely fumbles the ball at junctures, I earnestly believe this is setting itself up to be the most fleshed-out, nuanced, engaging live-action take on these characters to date. And god willing, if so, the first real stepping stone in decades to proper rehab on Superman’s image and place in pop culture.

#Superman & Lois #Superman #Lois Lane #DCTV #Opinion

[ardenttheories]

So I've been thinking alot ab mythological roles. In comic, theyr asigned to characters to represent their intended growth and who theyr suposed to become in the alpha timeline, and this is known due to the nature of paradox space and time shenanigans. So when we try to claspect ourselves, what are we suposed to base it on? We cant know who we will become, and atitle that represents all of ourself just isnt posible. Everyone has diferent tests but no one seems to be asking that question directly

The point of a Classpect is to challenge you. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to push you. You’re not meant to go into a Classpect and find it easy peasy; there’s always some form of difficulty, some block, that you have to overcome. So, I think, the first way you can help figure out your Classpect; if it sounds too easy, if it sounds like that form of growth would be a sinch for you - it’s wrong.

Classpects challenge you in order to make you the very best you you can be. It’s somewhere between the Ideal Self and the Perfect/Ultimate Self (though very much not the way Dirk explains or understands it). There is a specific path you can go down, a series of awarenesses that you can uncover, that help you realise who you’re really meant to be. So, some of Classpecting is also just trying to think ahead to who YOU want to be, but also what you think the BEST you could look like. 

There’s no 100% quickfire way to figure that out - because, you’re right, we’ve got no idea who we’re going to become, and thinking about our ideal/best selves isn’t exactly easy - but you can do it through a lot of self reflection. Figuring out what your flaws are, where you struggle as a person, what your strengths are; they can all be used to figure out what you at your absolute best would be. You can then reference that against the various Classpects, and especially how people analyse them - because a lot of us do include what the struggle point for any given Classpect would be; that thing you have to overcome - and see if that struggle would actually be difficult for you. Would that challenge make you rise up as a person? Would it benefit you?

You can also base it on what you already know about yourself and your current personal journey. You’ve been growing since you were a kid, changing who you are in little ways, being affected by different things; Classpects take into account all of this. 

I very much subscribe to the theory that Classpects affect your homelife and your upbringing. Your Classpect comes first - even before you’re born, your Classpect is there as an inevitable sort of thing. It details exactly what path you’ll go down as a person, be it to become a True, Realised, or Failed Player. You can pretty much always track these paths and the similarities between Players via joint experiences and joint struggles. 

This is the sort of thing we detail, too - or at least that I try to include in my analyses. This is what a Player will look like before their awareness; this is what a Player is likely to act like and struggle with. This is probably the easiest way to help figure out your Classpect, so long as you’re comfortable with the idea of self reflection; looking back over your life and seeing if it lines up with the explanation of a Classpect pre-awareness. 

To take myself as an example? I’m a Page of Heart. I know this because, throughout my life, I have had significant struggles with Heart (self identity, impulsivity, relationships), and I had a definite lack of it at one point in time (ending up doing a lot of the “trying to act caring/empathetic but often being overemotional” and “being passionate to the point of obsession” stuff). And I know for a fact that, still, in my attempts to be kind and caring, I can be... very overprotective and a little suffocating. 

On top of that? I’ve definitely been exploited via my emotions and empathy (something I only realised more recently through Classpect-based self reflection), and I have a tendecy to overshare with people who aren’t technically close enough for it. I know for a fact, too, that my emotions can get wildly out of hand. 

Therefore, a lot of my growth is about learning Heart until it becomes natural, and about an eventual sense of balance between the lack and the extreme. I already know I’m getting there. I’m getting much better at connecting to people emotionally, and I’ve got a knack these days for figuring out peoples’ identities (which can be something as small as guessing their favourite animal/colour first try and as large as working them through their Classpect journey). 

I know this is my Classpect because it fits not only what I’ve been through, what I know I’m going to struggle with, and the concept that it’s actively going to challenge me, but also because it hits this note of who I see and want my ideal self to be. 

This is why tests are great, but don’t always hit the mark. I’ve been asked a few times to make a test of my own, and as much as I’d love the idea and have put some thought towards it, a lot of Classpecting is self reflection and thought. It could help to narrow down the potentials, but it would never be perfect - especially since there are some Classpects (such as the destructive or lacking ones) that might appear on the surface as a completely different Classpect. I’m not sure how to accurately make a test that takes into account these little nuances. 

So! For a TL;DR:

We can still understand Classpects the same way they’re used in Homestuck, and I think in a way it’s better to view them like that. Your Classpect defines you, is you, and therefore you can use what you know about yourself, your struggles, and your best self to figure out which Classpect best aligns with you. If it seems like it’d challenge you, if it hits a lot of notes for things you’ve been through, and if you think your ideal self is what the Classpect’s end product is? Chances are, that’s your Classpect - and has been all along.

#ardenttheories #classpects #classpect analysis #long post// #pianissimoforestcat

[tomkail]

Designing BattleTabs

Hey! I’m Tom, game designer for BattleTabs! 

The design for Battletabs originated from Battleship, a fairly well known board game. One of the most interesting parts of the design process has been analysing the game to find how it ticks, and pushing it in a direction that suited our goals. I thought I’d take this opportunity to share how that process went down!

When I joined the team in January the gameplay for Battletabs was just about the same as Battleships. The goal was to rework the design so that the game would have longer appeal, could be updated to stay fresh, and simply to make it more fun!

The current version of BattleTabs!

Analysis

The first thing was to break down what made Battleships fun! I played lots of different versions of Battleships and noticed a few things:

Things I liked:

The most interesting part of Battleships is when you’ve got a grid with some hits and misses and know the shapes of the enemy ships. From that information can deduce several potential positions for the enemy, which you can whittle down further with strategic play. 

Some games added “combo” mechanic that I don’t believe exists in the classic game where on hitting the opponent you could play again. I quite liked this, since it meant you had a chance to take out a whole ship at once, giving a losing player a sense that they could always catch up if they had a bit of luck without feeling overpowered.

One of the advantages of Battleship is that it’s something of a folk game - most people have played it or are at least vaguely familiar with the rules (although as it turned out, not as many as I had guessed!). We could expand on the base design, but wanted to make sure it still felt like Battleships.

Most the Battleships games (especially commercial ones) I could find were identical or minor variations on the original design, which suggested there was an opportunity to expand on it to create something unique!

Things I didn’t like:

The early game isn’t very interesting. Until you’ve got some information on the board, the optimal strategy is pretty much to just take random guesses! (This is something that we’re keenly aware could be improved in the current design!)

Too much randomness! While luck is exciting, the sense (even when it’s a delusion!) that your skill at the game matters is important for a game to feel competitive and keep players happy.

Most turns are misses. In classic Battleship, the hit/miss ratio is about 0.33, and because misses don’t give the player much information the typical turn is quite unsatisfying. Obviously the player can’t hit every turn, so I was keen to find ways to make misses a little more rewarding.

Games are too similar! Although each game plays differently, opponents rarely played in dramatically different styles and the board and ship shapes are always the same.

A few versions gave special abilities to each ship, which I liked in principle but I found that in all cases they were massively overpowered and caused games to rarely last more than a few turns. In many cases the best abilities were earned by playing ads or spending money, which caused games to often feel nakedly unfair.

Update #1: “Sonar”

From this analysis I put together a list of ways we might improve the game

More interesting ship shapes would make finding spaces that might contain ships more nuanced

For similar reasons, maps could contain obstacles

A “Minesweeper” system where misses revealed the distance to the closest enemy ship would give the player more information from a miss, and also fed into the “find possible spaces for ships” gameplay

Ships with special abilities, where use of the abilities is restricted to prevent players using the same ship every turn and to prevent games devolving into blitzkriegs. Eventually we settled on a cooldown system, which can be balanced easily and provide a nice reward momentum in turn based games.

We considered lots of other ideas too, like increasing the number of ships, adding a wager system where players could bet on the likelihood of a tile containing an opponent, only allowing players to play adjacent to tiles they’d already hit, and a puzzle mode - some were discarded, others set aside for future updates! 

We were keen to start improving the game immediately and incrementally, so we focused first on the “Minesweeper” concept, which solved a good number of my issues with traditional Battleships at once.

Me and Brandon tested it on paper and were pleasantly surprised to find that for once, the theory neatly panned out in reality!

Mike implemented this design and put it live not long afterwards.

Some of the many, many scraps of paper used for playtesting!

Update #2: “Fleets”

At the same time, we were thinking about ways to give the game more lasting appeal. The keys were progression, depth, and community. We wanted to build a meta-game that enabled us to reward play with valuable in game commodities, and encourage players to form stronger social bonds.

Factions

One of the ideas considered was a “factions” system (common to a few multiplayer games, including Pokemon Go), where players of a faction could lay claims to territory on a world map by winning games. We eventually decided that such an expensive system might be too risky while the game still had a relatively low playerbase.

Ships and Fleets

The idea that eventually stuck was to expand on the “special abilities” concept we’d considered previously. The idea was that players could collect new ships by winning games, and use them to create their own fleets that helped them to gain an edge over their opponents. A levelling system would be employed to provide an extra reward and help matchmake players of similar skill and fleet power. 

We prototyped the concept as we had before - this time with the pandemic preventing real-life meetups, over Skype. We were pleasantly surprised how many interesting abilities we were able to think up, although to ensure we could implement and test the changes relatively quickly we decided to start with 4 predefined fleets with relatively basic ships, with the ships/XP economy as a future update.

Designing the 4 fleets

The goals for the 4 fleets we wanted to launch with were clear:

Reasonably low implementation complexity

Each fleet should have a clear and distinct role

Ships and fleets should attempt to resolve the flaws in the core Battleships design

Playtesting

Playtests went well, clearly increasing the variety and nuance of interesting situations, and making decisions over which ships to attack more interesting. One of the big advantages of the system was how easily tunable it was - if something was overpowered we could change the effectiveness of the ability, or if that wasn’t so easily possible, the cooldown. 

Ship size

Something that did surprise us was how unclear the effectiveness of physically larger ships was. On one hand larger ships were easier to find, but on the other they took longer to destroy. Smaller ships only really seemed more subject to randomness, rather than “better” or “worse”, with a lucky player destroying them in one hit, but an unlucky player unable to find them.

Increasing complexity

The biggest downside was the added complexity - players would now need to read the descriptions for each ship to understand how they functioned, and select a ship each time they wanted to use an ability - low complexity relative to most competitive games, but a large step up for us. Ultimately we decided that added complexity was necessary to increase depth, and it seems likely that any solution that increased depth would have the same issue.

A new role for Sonar 

In one way this update was a step back - the “sonar” update was popular and I was incredibly happy at how elegantly it resolved the “lack of skill” problem. It was an effective enough ability that we briefly considered keeping it as the default (with no ship selected) attack, but eventually decided to make it an ability in itself. As a rule of thumb, I still believe that fleets should always have one ship with some form of sonar, or at least some form of vision ability such as the new “reveal” ability, which is less interesting but also less powerful making it a useful tool for some ships!

Looking to the future!

The fleets update launched two weeks ago, and so far it’s been a success! We’ve been improving social aspects, allowing players to add friends, use emoji and invite rematches.

In the near term we’re looking at some minor design tweaks and contemplating a few new fleets, and in the longer term you can look forward to special events, progression systems, and more ships and fleets! To stay up to date, the Discord channel is the best place to get the latest news!

Thanks for reading!

Tom

#Battletabs #Game design

[jmsebastian]

The Mundane Fantasy: Persona 5's Appeal To Adults

I have a hard time figuring out who Persona 5 was made for exactly. The game, like all Persona games, is focused around misfit high school students who uncover dark secrets about the world and people (especially adults) around them. In this particular case, you are tasked with changing the hearts of adults who would do harm to others by invading their subconscious and kicking the crap out of their evil selves. You manage to put a stop to a teacher who subjects students to abuse and sexual harassment, reform a gangster, among others. The outright criminal nature of the game’s biggest problems are interestingly folded in with the smaller associated problems that go along with them. Teammates on the track team turn on each other, for instance, in order to spare themselves the wrath of their coach. Gossip is spread about some of the female characters out of jealousy and insecurity. At twice the age of an average high school student, it feels quite wrong that I can get sucked into the drama of youths the way I do. It isn’t even the overarching sinister plot points that have me so enthralled. The more power fantasy elements, such as donning a mask, having superb fighting skills and superpowers at the behest of supernatural beings, and being among a chosen few who can put a stop to evil doers isn’t exactly compelling to me the way it was when I was actually in high school. Those elements are fun, but the more I’ve played of the game, the more I’ve come to realize that it’s the more mundane activities that have captured my imagination.

Much of the game is comprised of doing everyday activities: going to school, answering questions in class, going to a part time job. You can wander around the streets of town and stop into a batting cage or arcade. You can chow down on a monster hamburger or go shopping for plant food. Sounds sort of amusing, but ultimately unfulfilling for a game, one might think. Of course, the game knows that having complete freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want would get pretty old after a while. To make everyday life more interesting, they brilliantly put limits on how long you have before each major event. Every story arc in the game has an end date. You know about it, everybody involved in the plot reminds you that it’s looming, a calendar appears each day and a dagger is stabbed into the current day. It’s a considerable threat. Suddenly, making some coffee or going down to the book shop feels much more important because it takes up what precious time you have left. Each action has weight and significance, no matter how small, because you choose to do it with the understanding that it all might end in the near future.

I love the way this manifests itself in the relationships you have with the other characters. Over the course of play, you meet and befriend various people in the community, mostly fellow classmates. Several of them join your cause to turn people from evil to good, either becoming playable characters in your party, or aiding you in other capacities, such as boosting your group’s public perception. To strengthen yourself and those who fight with you, you have to spend time with these people and grow your relationships. This has always been the most interesting part of Persona games to me, and 5 feels like a real pinnacle of this idea.

The types of relationships you have vary quite a bit when compared to previous entries in the series. There are your close knit group of friends, of course, but there are also numerous adult figures who play prominent roles. There is Sojiro Sakura, or Boss, a grumpy coffee shop owner who takes you in when no one else would. There is also Sadayo Kawakami, your home room teacher whom you accidentally discover moonlighting as a “maid” for a service of uncertain intentions. These “adult” relationships, for lack of a better term, come about due to unusual circumstances, and aren’t intended to be portrayed as typical for someone of high school age, nor for a high school aged player or even young adult. Their circumstances feel specifically targeted to garner sympathy from the player, rather than empathy.

Your relationship to Sojiro is particularly interesting, to the point where I saw myself more in him than in the main character.

So why, then, are the playable characters all high school students? Despite horrible things that happen and the overall bleak underpinning of the game, Persona 5 is a portrayal of an idealized high school world. When you start the game, you’re an outcast. No one wants you around, they spread rumors about your criminal record, they treat you like a burden and source of shame. The good news is that things only get better for you. Armed with quiet confidence, you have the agency to change people's’ minds by getting to know them, spending time with them, learning about them. Engagement helps everyone get beyond stereotypes and see each other for who they are. This is, unfortunately, not the way high school works for many.

The social pressures that we face as teens and young adults are difficult to solve over conversations and bowls of ramen. We hold fears about what others will think and we don’t yet have the maturity and self-awareness to deal with those fears appropriately. The power trip for Persona 5 isn’t that you can wield a cool sword and gun and fight a bunch of Shadows, it’s that you can talk to people, form bonds with them, understand them. You have the superpower of level-headedness and retrospect. Mechanically, the game rewards these behaviors by leveling up your relationships with the people you spend time with. Leveling up relationships gives you new abilities that make the dungeon exploration and combat easier. This is important, of course, because games have rules and a game’s mechanics should work together. The mechanics in Persona 5 are well balanced, but thanks to the strength of the writing, the convincing performances by the actors, and the social constructs built up within the game, the rewards for strengthening character relationships start to feel less and less vital. You eventually want to spend time with your friends not so much because you’ll get a power up or new ability, but because you have compassion for the characters and want to help them however you can.

The relationships you have with female characters can extend beyond friendship. The positive implications of this are a lot less clear than they are for your friendships in general. How this plays out largely depends on who the player is. It’s very easy to spin the friendships you have with the women in the game as extremely positive. You spend time with them as you would every character. Your bonds grow as you learn about them and help them navigate through complicated emotional situations. The fact that you can also attempt to date them can also be seen as very positive. A solid friendship is a wonderful base from which a romantic relationship can be built, but a few key aspects undermine this a bit.

You can date multiple women in the game. That, alone, is not so much the problem. The issue arises in that there is no way to gain the consent of said partners for the multiplicity of your coupling. It’s essentially all done on the down low, and it can become a bit tricky if you’re out on a date with one partner and happen to run into another. On the one hand, it’s nice that there are repercussions for behaving in this way, limited though they may be. Choosing to cheat means you’ll eventually be caught and your romances will be terminated. For the sake of the game’s story, this is fine, though it would have also been really interesting to be able to explore the interconnectedness of your relationships more fully. Each relationship is treated individually, which works from a mechanical perspective, but feels a bit disingenuous when human relationships are a lot more nuanced and complex than simple one on one interactions. There are implied trade-offs in the game, such as choosing to hang out with one person over another, but there are no real punishments for this other than losing time. Getting caught by one of your girlfriends is about as far as this is explored, and that’s a real shame. With how much the game emphasizes relationship growth, the series seems to be begging for expanded views on what kind of relationships are possible between and among the various characters. And this is completely ignoring the fact that women are the only possible romantic partners to begin with.

While the depth of the relationships can be a bit unfulfilling in some respects, it is important to remember that the player has choices. You can choose which friendships you want to strengthen, and more importantly, when. You can choose to pursue a romance with someone or not. Dating is not a requirement at all. That choice is what ultimately feeds into the power fantasy. High school students often don’t have the luxury of choice, or at least feel as if they do not have choices they can make. You, as the player, have choices all the time. You get to decide where to go, what to do, when to explore the distorted palaces of the game’s antagonists, and when to kick back with a friend and watch a movie. That is significant. It also helps when you get to voice your opinion with a little bit of sarcastic wit or humor. The ability to be comfortable in your own skin is all over this game, and that’s a really great thing.

You are always asked beforehand if you are sure you want to spend time with your friends, just in case you would like to spend time elsewhere.

Persona 5 is definitely a game made for adults, or at least, for certain types of adults: adults who might still struggle with navigating our social world with curiosity and confidence. It’s also for adults who did not feel they had much control over their lives at a younger time and are in search of a way to come to terms with that. It’s important to note that the characters around you are often in crisis. They get to act the way teenagers would act. They feel pride, insecurity, afraid, helpless. You are there to back them up, help them realize confidence within themselves, be a non-judgmental figure so they can have positive mental health. You get to be largely immune from all the chaos because this isn’t your life and and in your life you have probably already faced the emotional turmoil that goes along with teen age, even if you didn’t have to suffer problems as serious as an abusive coach or being framed for assaulting a woman on the street. Getting to play as the mediator of these terrible fictionalized problems can help put perspective on the real problems that we do face where we feel like the characters in crisis instead. I’m not sure younger players would necessarily be able to understand that. I hope they could, but as a 30 year old, it’s kind of incredible that a video game can remind me that there are ways to navigate our difficulties and they don’t require becoming a superhero so much as they require being emotionally available to ourselves and others.

#persona 5 #atlus games #shin megami tensei

[scripturehomosexuality]

Addendum To Aaron Hernandez Story

This post is intended as a followup to the post “Aaron Hernandez: A Case Study About What’s Wrong With Modern Society”, which was originally published on May 7th 2017. As such, a link to the content here will be added to that post as a post scriptum.

To understand what will follow, I strongly recommend that you read the abovementioned post first.

There have been many developments on the Aaron Hernandez story. As such, they confirm the blog’s main assertions:

The story of Mr. Hernandez poses a big risk to modern sexual philosophy and the “Straight”-”Gay” dichotomy, and threatens to completely collapse both

Numerous authorities within the dichotomy (“gay” and “straight” media, LGBT leadership, etc) are well aware of the first bullet point, and as such are trying to bury the story

Firstly, after the first Outsports article on Aaron Hernandez, all media did as the article asked, and basically stopped discussion on the matter. In doing so, they were expecting (and subtly ordering) their audiences to do the same.

This is a prime example of how modern sexual philosophy works to defend itself, and how a society facilitates that defense mechanism. In this case, the strategy went as follows:

”Gay” leadership and media signal that they don’t want to discuss the case

Within the dichotomy, the “gay” side is given total authority over discussion on same-sex activity. Thus, if the “gay” side doesn’t want to discuss it, the “straight” side has no reason to discuss it either. Thus, the Outsports article was used as a pretext to decrease coverage on the “straight” side.

Both sides keep completely mum on the case, and as a result, it’s kept somewhat in the dark

Similar strategies were used with the “g0y” movement and Man2Man Alliance, where the “gay” media castigated and ignored them, and the “straight” media followed their lead in not covering them. In this way, anything that threatens the status quo is neutralized.

Let me be clear, and you probably realize the following too: for a media that thrives on speculation, this is highly unusual. Both “gay” and “straight” media usually feast on speculation on whether some celebrity is “gay”. Yet, when so much suggests that Aaron Hernandez was into guys too, they leave all forward movement on the case to the family. In doing so, they claim that it’s out of sensitivity for the family, but that’s only a front. They’ve been far less merciful with celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo and Aaron Rodgers, who also have families.

The real reason is that, if the Aaron Hernandez case is explored enough, it would soon become evident that modern sexual philosophy is COMPLETELY WRONG. It would completely destroy a philosophy that so much of U.S. society hinges on. It would turn U.S. society upside-down in a way they don’t want.

As such, I hope my LGBT-identified readers are taking note of their leadership and media. They only care for sexual behavior that supports the fundamental message of modern sexual philosophy - that same-sex eroticism is inherently abnormal and aberrant. If the behavior doesn’t do that, the LGBT movement wants nothing to do with it.

Yet, their efforts have only been moderately successful so far. Public interest in the story is still so high, the media has had no choice but to report trickles of it, and acknowledge developments in the story.

For example, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez (Mr. Hernandez’ fiancee) did an interview on “Dr. Phil” during May 2017. During that interview, she flatly denied all rumors that he was “gay”, and said further that he was “very much a man”. It was revealed that she first became aware of the rumors during Mr. Hernandez’ trial, when his defense team let her know. She also revealed that Mr. Hernandez and herself spoke about the topic several times, and each time, he completely denied he was “gay”.

First of all, I wish to say that Mr. Hernandez was telling the truth. Remember what was said here about the word “gay” - that it’s a word that marries same-sex activity with a “gay” culture of anal play, drag, and gender-atypical behavior. Meanwhile, while it’s likely that Mr. Hernandez was bisexual in his behavior, it’s very clear that he also roundly rejected the LGBT identity. Given the complicated meaning the word “gay” has, he was perfectly justified in saying that he wasn’t “gay”.

However, there was also something conspicuously absent from the interview. It was something that would put all gossip to bed - the suicide letters. Where were the suicide letters? To prove her point, why didn’t Ms. Jenkins-Hernandez cite them as proof that he wasn’t “gay”? Especially since they’re now in her possession in their unredacted form, and since she has most likely read them by now? Those suicide letters were testimony from the man himself on who he was, yet during such a key moment, they’re nowhere in sight.

There’s only one reason why they were absent: they would somewhat undermine the statements of Ms. Jenkins-Hernandez, and she knows that. Don’t be fooled. It’s true that he wasn’t “gay”. However, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t sexually interact with other guys. Indeed, the sports world contains a highly homoerotic culture, where its players can eroticially interact with each other without any “gay” spectre. From all appearances, Mr. Hernandez immersed himself completely within that culture, and enjoyed it immensely.

Thus, and to the contrary, their unignorable absence actually confirms a conclusion made in the first post: the most problematic aspect of those letters are their content. Furthermore, it also confirms that such content is definitely homoerotic in nature, and would make clear that he sexually interacted with other guys. That’s the only way those suicide notes, the biggest “smoking guns” that would end all speculation at once, are absent when they’re most valuable.

In this, I don’t fault Ms. Jenkins-Hernandez. Modern sexual philosophy works to preserve itself, and will sacrifice anything to do so. Meanwhile, the Hernandez family is doing everything to save Mr. Hernandez from being painted as “gay”, or even having that suggested about him. Certain parties would use them as justification for calling him that, even if closer inspection would reveal a more nuanced story. Thus, I understand why they might still be sheepish about revealing the letters.

Other developments in the month of May further confirm this blog’s conclusions. To pacify public interest in the case, the Boston Globe filed a FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) request for other prison correspondence from Mr. Hernandez. Those letters were then circulated across the media world, and are available for your viewing in this link.

As a side note, the Globe could do this because all of Mr. Hernandez’ correspondence is now public record, including the suicide notes. This is because they are currently being held by local authorities, and by virtue of that, they now belong to the public. Any news organization can obtain them at any time through a FOIL request. Thus, the relative silence on the story isn’t for lack of resources; it’s because they don’t want to do the work. As said before, the coverage blackout is being done on purpose. But I digress.

Anyway, the letters reveal that Mr. Hernandez had very friendly relationships with his other cellmates. The first four contain Mr. Hernandez repeatedly asking (and at one point pleading) to be placed in a certain cell block. That cell block contained men that he knew previously, and at least one man who he considered a “brother” and his “heart”. The last letter in the link attached has Mr. Hernandez addressing “false gossip” that was circulating around the prison, while making the same request to be placed in that certain cell block.

In the letters, there are several redactions made. All of the names mentioned are redacted, which admittedly is common practice, and is firmly within the bounds of FOIL law in general. However, there is one redaction made which, in my opinion, is a little odd. The last letter listed contained the following sentences, as Mr. Hernandez is addressing false gossip: “I have been hearing from many or rather few thinking that I’m ‘[redacted]’. But that is false. People are always coming up with things that are incorrect.”

Given the developments of the past few weeks, and the immediate context of the other attached letters, the redacted word is most likely the word “gay”.

At this point, I’m wondering on what legal grounds this redaction was done. From what I can tell, the closest exception that would qualify would be on grounds of privacy. According to the Massachusetts FOIL law, certain personal details can be redacted “which may constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”. As such, the decision to redact “requires a balancing between the seriousness of any invasion of privacy and the public right to know”. As such, in practice enforcement leans toward non-disclosure.

However, I can’t see how disclosure of the described action - dismissing “gay” rumors - necessarily counts as an invasion of privacy. Within the context of the letter, it only confirms what we already know about Mr. Hernandez, and the rumors that consistently dogged him. The fact that a person is fighting “gay” rumors usually isn’t state secret.

In the end, I don’t know exactly which party influenced that particular redaction. All I know is that it was effective in further obscuring the Hernandez story. Within the letter that redacted word didn’t reveal much. However, in combination with the other released letters, along with the likely content of the unreleased suicide letters, it reveals so much more. All of that correspondence reveals a man who was shamelessly close to men - to the point of calling another man his “heart” - yet flatly denies identifying as “gay” or LGBT. From this, two conclusions present themselves that subvert modern sexual philosophy:

Same-sex activity and the LGBT identity and culture are not (and need not be) intrinsically linked

Same-sex activity is not an exclusively “gay” phenomenon

There’s one more factor to consider. Remember that Mr. Hernandez was one of the top football players in the NFL. This is very important because in U.S. culture, male athletes are considered the greatest fulfillments of masculinity. If these “alpha males” are revealed to be constantly having sex with other men (and each other), it completely undermines the fundamental message of modern sexual philosophy: that same-sex activity is inherently abnormal and aberrant.

As such, if the redacted word was released, I hardly think Mr. Hernandez’ privacy would be harmed. It would be much more harmful to modern sexual philosophy, the parties that rely on it for power, and the various social infrastructures that depend on it.

If this seems confusing to you, keep in mind that many parties directly depend on the “Straight”-”Gay” dichotomy (the highest fulfillment of modern sexual philosophy) for their power, including:

The Christian churches and their clergy, whose condemnation of homosexuality depends on most parishioners believing that they are truly “straight”.

Ex-”gay” ministries, for obvious reasons

Politicians who receive support from the clergy and devout Christian populations.

Various companies benefiting from messages that being “straight” (and thus being gender-conforming) requires purchase of certain commercial goods.

The “gay” leadership, whose authority depends on the idea that people attracted to the same sex are a small and easily identifiable minority, who need their guidance and supervision to survive.

Politicians who receive support from the “gay” leadership

Condom and lube manufacturers, whose bottom line is helped by the cultural practice of anal play

The medical-industrial complex, who sell drugs treating injuries and diseases caused by anal play

The parties involved constitute huge parts of U.S. society, which is why both “straight” and “gay” media are distinctly uninterested in covering the story. The story destabilizes modern sexual philosophy, and by extension, destabilizes their power and salaries.

Indeed, even with the relatively few developments in the case, the “straight” media is trying to keep itself far away from it. Meanwhile, following the edict of the Outsports article, the “gay” press has been almost silent on the matter. The only item they covered in the last month was the Dr. Phil interview, to convince people that there’s nothing to see here.

However, even with all this posturing and scrambling, they’re actually worse off than they were before. It seems Mr. Hernandez’ friends and family are less willing to cooperate with the coverup. On May 24th, Jonathan Hernandez (Aaron’s older brother) released a cryptic statement saying he wanted to reveal “Aaron’s truth”, to counter “many stories about my brother's life [that] have been shared with the public”. Furthermore, Kyle Kennedy (Mr. Hernandez’ supposed male lover in prison) hasn’t retracted his determination to reveal his side of the story. To that end, in May he renewed his demand that authorities give him the suicide note that was reportedly meant for him.

It’s clear that “the powers that be” of the dichotomy are in deep trouble. The Hernandez story is difficult, if not impossible, to frame in a way that supports modern sexual philosophy. Every move the media makes shows that they’re trying to hide something, and seems to arouse more interest in the story. More of Mr. Hernandez’ loved ones seem willing to blab.

Sooner or later, the dichotomy (and the philosophy it represents) will have to be revealed as a fraud, and completely untrue. At this point, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.

What’s unknown is what will happen after that. The outcome could go one of two ways.

After it is revealed to be a fraud, modern sexual philosophy is thrown out completely. U.S. society is turned completely upside down, as a more accurate way to describe sexuality is sought. This is the outcome I personally want.

After it is revealed to be a fraud, enforcement of modern sexual philosophy is made even more stringent. In sheer defiance, its authorities will insist upon people adhering to the dichotomy it produces, and will double down on enforcing its rules and labels.

Remember that for all its rigor, the dichotomy is still a rather informal system. There’s no law requiring people to identify as “straight”, “gay”, “queer”, etc. There’s no secular law requiring people to believe same-sex activity is inherently abnormal. It has power only because so many people believe it to be true. This is why so many societal institutions (like the U.S. education system) are designed to sustain that belief.

However, moves have been made to institutionalize modern sexual philosophy in recent years. Increasingly more college campuses are asking their students which labels they identify with. More governmental agencies are making tallies on how many people identify with which label. This is despite the fact that these labels are under increasing scrutiny by more parties. It should be noted however that such questions are still optional.

When modern sexual philosophy is revealed to be false, such efforts might only intensify in response. Adopting one of its sexual labels might become a mandatory feature of more surveys, but that might not be all. The principles of modern sexual philosophy might become codified in law, and its sexual labels might become as necessary as Social Security identification numbers. As a result, a person will be unable to socially function if they do not believe in modern sexual philosophy, and do not give it support by adopting the labels of its dichotomy. If that seems too totalitarian to be believable, remember that something like the Patriot Act was also once considered unimaginable.

Of course, if the majority don’t believe in it, even that scenario will be impossible.

Thus, if you’re here for the first time, know that there’s nothing tying you to modern sexual philosophy that’s unbreakable. Thus, I urge you to read “The ‘Straight’-’Gay’ Dichotomy: How It Works”, to fully understand how that system functions. I also urge any who read this to go to “For Straight People (though not exclusively)”, which will point to philosophies and forms of same-sex behavior that don’t hinge on demonstratively false concepts. Also read the page “History of the Concept of Homosexuality”, to see how this concept evolved into its modern day meaning. Don’t be afraid of talking about what you learn to others, because that’s the only way progress will be made. Thus, the fissure created by Mr. Hernandez can further grow.

There’s another move you can make that’s important: don’t stop following the Aaron Hernandez story. Don’t be fooled by the “gay” and “straight” press, with their insinuations that there’s nothing to see here. There IS something here, but they just don’t want you to see it, to preserve their own power. Insist on more coverage and analysis. Double down on asking more questions. They can only hide so much, and run so far.

As a last note, I hope that my LGBT-identified readers are noticing how LGBT media and leadership is treating them. There’s no other way to put it: you are being flimflammed and bamboozled by your own media. Your intelligence is being insulted by those who are supposed to be your advocates. They’ve made perfectly clear that they don’t support same-sex activity in all its forms, but only the kinds that support the homophobic message of modern sexual philosophy. This is my question to you - if they are so willing to lie to your face, do they really deserve your unquestioning support?

Make no mistake; this story is far from over. For your own good, stay tuned.

#Aaron Hernandez #straight #gay #lgbt #Bros being bros #Gay Christian #gay christianity #lgbt christian #lgbt christianity #bisexuality #Bisexual #bisexual pride

[jeroldlockettus]

Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet (Ep. 346)

Can technology solve the challenges of food, water, energy, and climate change that come with a growing global population? (Photo: Oast House Archive/geograph)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

The environmentalists say we’re doomed if we don’t drastically reduce consumption. The technologists say that human ingenuity can solve just about any problem. A debate that’s been around for decades has become a shouting match. Is anyone right?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Charles MANN: At one point I was going to call the book Toblerone For Ten Billion. That was vetoed by my editor, for some reason.

Charles C. Mann is a journalist who writes big books about the history of science. His current interest is:

MANN: The modern environmental movement, which I would argue is the only successful ideology to emerge from the 20th century.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, the global population is expected to reach 10 billion.

MANN: And the question is, are we going to be able to satisfy all their demands for food, water, energy.

Also: Toblerone.

MANN: Because in addition to food and water and the basics, they’re going to want occasional treats.

And there’s one more big concern.

MANN: How are we going to deal with climate change? Those are the big challenges.

The future of food, water, energy, and climate change — big challenges indeed. How will those challenges be met?

MANN: There have been two ways that have been suggested, overarching ways, that represent, if you like, poles on a continuum. And they’ve been fighting with each other for decades.

That fight, and those two worldviews, are the subject of Charles Mann’s latest book, which he wound up calling The Wizard and the Prophet. The prophet sounds the alarm and wants us all to cut back. The wizard urges us to charge forward, confident that technology will solve our problems. Surely you’ve heard these prophets and wizards, speaking to us — and usually speaking past each other.

Al GORE: The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking, “What were you thinking? Couldn’t you hear what the scientists were saying? Couldn’t you hear what mother nature was screaming at you?”

Nathan MYHRVOLD: The way to have a dramatic message is to say we’re all going to die.

The prophet encourages a return to nature.

Mary ROBINSON: We need to replant and save rainforests.

The wizard finds the prophet’s suggestions naïve.

MYHRVOLD: Well, that argument is so absurd on so many levels that the miracle is that there are people who can say it with a straight face.

The prophet sees grave danger in the immediate future:

ROBINSON: We’re going to be into tipping points. The Arctic is going to go. We’re going to see a sea-level rise that will wipe out islands.

The wizard is more optimistic:

MYHRVOLD: I think that if we put our heads together, we will come up with ways to cope. But that’s no fun compared to saying we’re all going to die next Thursday.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: are you more prophet or wizard? Why? And: is anyone right?

*     *     *

When Charles Mann was in college, there was a book that showed up on the reading list in several classes.

MANN: Ecology, you know, political science, demography.

So he had the chance to read it several times. It was called The Population Bomb. There was a warning on the cover. “While you are reading these words,” it said, “four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children.”

MANN: And it really hit home, and I thought, oh my gosh. The edition I read, which is the first edition, said there would be massive famines in the 1970’s. Basically, it said we are in deep, deep trouble.

And then, in the 1980’s:

MANN: In the 1980’s, I sort of noticed this hadn’t happened.

So were the famine predictions simply wrong? Or: was the doomsaying a calculated strategy, designed to shrink the Earth’s population before it was too late? Environmentalists were saying humankind was pushing the Earth’s limits; technologists, meanwhile, said those limits were nowhere in sight.

MANN: The world is finite, obviously, and the real question is not whether there are limits, but whether the limits are relevant. At some point, we do run out of planet. But what exactly that limit is and when we’re going to hit it — I think it’s much less well-known than either side says it is.

DUBNER: So did you come to feel then that both camps — rather than wizards and prophets, we can call them techno-optimists and environmentalists — do you feel that both camps to some degree intentionally misrepresent their strengths in order to engender support, when in fact the reality — and indeed, most solutions — is probably much more nuanced than that?

MANN: I think so. I’m not sure about intentionally, because people get convinced. I think that neither side truly appreciates how much of a leap in the dark jumping into the future is. They’re both overly confident that we know what we’re doing. Take energy for instance. The best solution for the prophets is this whole sort of neighborhood solar thing. But that depends on there being innovations in computer technology and innovations in energy storage, in energy transmission, that simply aren’t here yet. Maybe they can be done, but do we actually know how to do it? No.

Similarly, the wizards, they typically imagine very large numbers of next-generation nuclear plants. And they argue, totally rationally and totally correctly, that these have the smallest environmental footprint of any form of energy generation. They’re completely right about this. But I’m not actually seeing that happening. Nobody seems to be building these things. Next-generation nuclear plants have been around for 30 or 40 years, at least on the drawing board, and only a few of them have actually ever been tried. So you wonder, how is that going to happen? Both of these: how is this going to happen?

While wrestling with the best ways to move forward when it comes to energy, food, water, and climate change, Charles Mann found himself looking backward. Specifically, to two men — the wizard and the prophet who make up the title of his new book. Its subtitle is: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.

DUBNER: Let’s start with your prophet, William Vogt. So tell us briefly about him, and why he was the one who qualified to become the prophet in your book.

MANN: Well, he is, more than anyone else, the progenitor of the modern environmental movement. And the basic idea of it is one of limits. He called it carrying capacity. And this is that the Earth, the environment — another idea he invented, the environment — is governed by these ecological processes and we transgress them at our peril. And therefore we have to hunker down. We have to put on our cardigan sweaters and turn down the thermostat and eat lower in the food chain and all that sort of stuff. And he put this all together in a book. It’s now forgotten, but it was hugely influential, called Road to Survival. It was published in 1948, and it’s the first modern “we’re all going to hell” book, if you know what I mean.

DUBNER: As apocalyptic as his beliefs and predictions were, the title itself connotes at least survival, if not prosperity. Was the road to survival, basically, hope that a lot more people don’t get born and/or a lot of people die, and we have enough to go around, and we get small?

MANN: Much of the book is a passionate screed for population control, sometimes written in language that makes you cringe. Another big chunk of the book is about how we should do things in a way that fits better within nature, and that’s things like stop farming within marginal land. It’s paying attention to erosion. It’s not overusing fertilizer.

DUBNER: So when you say that his discussion about population growth makes you cringe, was it from a classist perspective, the cringing comes from, or racist — how would you describe it?

MANN: I would say yes, both. He was, basically, pretty misanthropic. And it’s hard to avoid noticing that although he was very, very hard on rich, white people and overconsumption and being wasteful and destructive and so forth, that the brunt of the population-reduction stuff he’s talking about are on poor, brown people in other parts of the world. And he sometimes described them in language that is really kind of appalling — he talks about Indians breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish, and so forth. In this he was very much a man of that time, unfortunately. And this is something that environmentalists today should be aware of and think about. Their movement has some pretty deep roots in some pretty bad places.

William Vogt’s work inspired the first best-selling environmental book: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. Here’s Carson:

Rachel CARSON : Can anyone believe that it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?

MANN: And books like The Population Bomb; Al Gore’s first book, Earth in the Balance; The Limits to Growth. All these great environmental classics all stem directly from his work. That’s why I picked him.

William Vogt was born in 1902 on Long Island, New York, back when it was largely bucolic.

MANN: And then it was just engulfed by suburbanization. So he tried to find nature, he ends up in a Brooklyn slum, and is plucked from that and goes to one of those schools they have in New York where the deserving poor are given special education.

He becomes the first college graduate in his family — with a degree in French literature.

MANN: And a degree in French literature was probably as useful in career building then as it is now. And he turned to ornithology. He was a passionate birdwatcher. I should mention that he had polio, as well, and he went all over the place despite finding great difficulty in walking and having canes and braces and having to be hauled around and so forth. He was a gutsy guy. And through a whole series of unlikely circumstances — he ends up becoming the official ornithologist of the Peruvian government on these guano islands off the coast of Peru. And these islands have had seabirds roosting on them for millennia upon millennia. And the seabirds do what they do, which is to eat fish nearby and excrete huge quantities of bird poop. I’m allowed to say that on your podcast?

DUBNER: Sure are. Absolutely.

MANN: You guys are just, you know, hang loose, right?

DUBNER: We’re very pro-poop.

MANN: Okay. And this, in the 1850’s, became the origin of today’s hugely important fertilizer industry, these vast heaps of bird poop that were on these islands off the coast of Peru. And they became very important to the Peruvian government. To maintain the supply of poop, you need to maintain the supply of birds. In the 1930’s, the supply of birds started declining, and they brought him in, as he said, “to augment the increment of excrement.” And he spent three years there, and he actually did a remarkable piece of ecological science, a foundational piece.

He realized that there is an oscillation of the currents there, it’s called today, El Niño, La Niña. And he argued that when the warm water came in, when the El Niño phase came in, the anchovetas, which were the fish that the birds ate on these islands, swam far out into the Pacific to avoid the warm water. They like cold water. And the birds couldn’t reach them. And this recurring phenomenon put a cap on the number of birds that you could have on these islands. And you could not augment the increment of excrement — that nature set these bounds. And if he did increase the bird supply, it would just mean that things would be worse when the next El Niño came in. And this was this powerful insight for him. This is the way nature worked. And he put it together.

And then he made two big steps, which I think are enormously important. One is that he said, this kind of phenomenon, which is called a carrying capacity — means that only so much can be produced because of these natural limits — could be stretched like taffy to cover the entire world. The world can be thought of as a single environment with a single carrying capacity. And the second, he said, is that we’re exceeding it. Or we’re about to exceed it, and that’s going to bring us into trouble.

DUBNER: William Vogt predicted, specifically, personally, he predicted famine, which as you write, hasn’t come true. So in the 1940’s, the global famine death rate was about 785 people per 100,000 — so, call 800 per 100,000. It’s now 3 per 100,000. So let me ask you this: as a prophet, do you need to be right? Or is it enough to sound the alarm? Because obviously on that dimension at least, a prediction of famine and population wipeout, Vogt was wildly wrong.

MANN: Now, I think there are two responses to it. The first is, “Okay, you’re right, it didn’t happen, but it will happen eventually. We just got the timing wrong.” And the second response, which, to my way of thinking at least, is more nuanced, is, “You’re right, we didn’t get that right, but a lot of the other things they predicted, we did get right.” And that is true. Nitrogen pollution is a huge issue. I mean, about 40 percent of the fertilizer that’s been used didn’t get absorbed by plants, and it got — either went up in the air, where it interferes with the ozone layer, not a good idea, or it becomes nitrous oxide, closer to the ground, in the air, which has caused all kinds of health problems. Or even worse, it goes into the streams, which goes into the rivers, which goes into the ocean, causes these enormous blooms of algae and other aquatic plants. These die, they fall down to the bottom. Microorganisms consume them, it’s sort of an orgy of breakfast, and they metabolize so quickly they suck all the oxygen out of the air and you get these huge dead zones in coastal areas around the world. And you can go on and on. All that stuff, if you point to that, they’re looking better.

At the same time as William Vogt, the prophet, was sounding the alarm on overpopulation and what he saw as the resultant famine, there was another scientist whose discoveries would lead to a dramatic growth of the global population. This is the wizard in Charles Mann’s book; his name: Norman Borlaug.

MANN: He was born in a very poor family in Iowa, poor soil, terrible, hardscrabble farm, worked like a dog. He was determined to get off of that, he really hated it, clearly. He thought his way to do it, because he didn’t think he was very smart, was athletics. To do that, he needed to go to college, which he was able to do, really, thanks to the fact that Henry Ford had invented the cheap tractor.

DUBNER: Which let his family free him up from the labor, yes?

MANN: Right, freed him up from the labor. And even more important, when you have horses, and oxen and so forth doing the labor for you, you have to grow food for them, and you have to tend to them. And they’re just huge time sinks, and they’re land sinks. And a typical small farmer in those days, about 40 percent of the family’s land was devoted to growing the food for the animals.

DUBNER: That was one of my favorite statistics in your book. I mean, it’s one of those things that, the minute you see it, it makes perfect sense. But I never would have imagined it.

MANN: Exactly. It’s almost like doubling your land. And of course your land becomes more productive. A tractor is a huge, huge deal.

DUBNER: On two dimensions at least, right? In terms of making more available land and, obviously, increasing the pace of the labor.

MANN: Right, and making people’s lives better, and also being able to accomplish more, just, — it’s vastly better.

Thanks to that tractor, Borlaug did go to college; he studied forestry and eventually got a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics. During World War II, he worked at DuPont, trying to make water-proof ration boxes and mold-proof condom wrappers. Then he got a job with the Rockefeller Foundation, trying to boost the production of wheat in Mexico.

MANN: And the remarkable thing is, he succeeded, despite not knowing Spanish, never having been out of the country, never having bred wheat before, hardly having worked with wheat before. And the wheat genome is terrifically complicated, it’s five times as many genes as there are human genes. And because plants can do weird things that mammals can’t, there’s three copies of each genome in every cell. There’s six different versions of each gene. It’s just a mess.

DUBNER: So his breakthrough came about from what you described as shuttle breeding. Can you describe A, why that was unusual, why more people didn’t try that; and B, why it worked?

MANN: More people didn’t try it because it was literally written in the textbooks that it wouldn’t work. And the thing is, he was so ignorant — very occasionally, ignorance is good. And what he thought to do was — plant breeding is very slow, because in most places there’s only one crop of wheat that you grow a year. It’s either called winter or spring wheat, and you have to wait an entire year to grow the next. And there had been a dogma that you have to breed the crop in the area in which it’s going to be grown. And he thought, “Wait a minute. What if I grow one crop in the south of Mexico and one crop in the north of Mexico, where it’s warmer? And that way, I can do two a year and make things go twice as fast.”

DUBNER: Well, Borlaug found a way through, as you said, grit and luck, and a handful of other things, to make wheat a much, much, much more productive and more flexible crop. And this gave way to what we came to call the Green Revolution, and Borlaug went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. So talk to me about the consequences of, really, this one man and what he helped produce, good and bad consequences.

MANN: Well, the good consequences are really striking. If you look at the data, shortly after the Green Revolution, wheat production in Mexico just soars. It basically quadruples. The same techniques come to the American middle west, and that’s when the American middle west becomes a huge agricultural powerhouse. Our yields just increase enormously. It goes to India and Pakistan. Same thing. Then, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations are excited by what they’re seeing in wheat, and they set up the International Rice Research Institute outside the Philippines, and they resolve to do the same thing with rice. And yields triple there. And the world just grows enormously more food. And sometime in the 1980’s, for the first time in recorded history, the average person on earth has enough food year-round. And famine — except for famine induced by war — basically ends. It’s a huge moment. And I sort of think this should be taught in all the schools. So that’s the good part, and it’s a huge good part.

DUBNER: Okay, so let’s talk about the downsides of the Green Revolution. One of them, you write, is that it essentially fueled income inequality. Land became more valuable. It just created a lot of leverage. On the other hand, the alternative would be that everyone gets to be poor and hungry, other than maybe, warlords and kings, right? So how much credence should we give inequality as a downside of the Green Revolution?

MANN: I think you should give quite a bit of credence to it, because when we say, “inequality,” it sort of minimizes the actual experience, just as we are talking about, when a small holder’s farm is able to grow four times as much food, the land becomes four times as much valuable, and it becomes worth stealing. And in countries with very weak institutions, which is unfortunately most of the world, it was stolen, often with the active support of the elites in the government. And huge numbers of people were pushed off the farms and forced into slums, and communities were broken up.

DUBNER: And what about the environmental costs of the Green Revolution?

MANN: The big environmental costs of this are nitrogen pollution. What we talked about before.

DUBNER: So did Borlaug, later in life, acknowledge the costs of the growth that he helped produce?

MANN: Kind of. There’s a way that, when you’ve accomplished something, and somebody is carping, that you say, “Well yes, but,” and you acknowledge what they do and then you brush past it. He said, “Wait a minute, the work that we’ve done has saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation. That’s a big deal. And there’s no upside without a downside. So yeah, there’s a downside, but holy cow.” And I think that’s pretty easy to understand.

I should tell you that I talked briefly with Borlaug before his death. An article had just come out that was trying to estimate the impact of the Green Revolution, and said that Borlaug and his people, if you looked carefully, had saved 600 million lives. So I put this to him, and he was an exceptionally modest guy, a very personally attractive guy. And he said, “Oh, I think that number is exaggerated, and it was a whole bunch of people, and it wasn’t just me,” and all the things you’d expect him to say. And I said, “Look, suppose that they’re off by an order of magnitude, and you yourself are only responsible for saving 60 million lives. How does that feel?” There’s a long pause. “You know what? It feels pretty good.”

Norman Borlaug died in 2009. But the legacy of his wizardry lives on, in force — not only in the modern-day miracle of global agriculture, but in the belief that science and technology can save lives.

MYHRVOLD: You know, there was no golden age of mankind that was better than today. That’s the first point.

William Vogt died way back in 1968. His legacy also roars on, with countless prophets warning us of the coming dangers.

ROBINSON: How could we be mad enough, cruel enough, insane enough to have a world for our children and grandchildren which will be unlivable? And that is what we’re headed toward at the moment.

*      *      *

DUBNER: So, you called your book The Wizard and The Prophet, not The Wizard Versus The Prophet. But in some ways, it is asking us as readers to judge the two men and the movements that they helped create against each other. It strikes me a little bit as an unfair fight, in that wizards actually do stuff — they invent things and they push new ideas and systems and products, whereas prophets, it seems at least to me, primarily shake their fist against the sky and urge people to stop doing things.

MANN: Well, I failed if I have completely convinced you that the prophets don’t do anything, because I don’t think that’s really true. I think there is certainly a lot of decrying and fist-shaking going on. That’s absolutely right. But they are arguing for, really, a different way of life. And, if you like it, a different kind of technology. So there is this clash, but it really represents a preference for different kinds of technology — which need to be invented and supported — rather than an idea of a technology versus decrying technology. Although you’re absolutely right, there is that overtone.

It’s time now to hear from a modern-day prophet. One with impressive credentials:

ROBINSON: My name is Mary Robinson. I’m president now of the Mary Robinson Foundation: Climate Justice, former president of Ireland, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

DUBNER: Let’s talk for a moment about what you’ve been doing between the U.N. position and now you’ve just written a book called Climate Justice. I’d love to know about the road in politics that led you to this topic.

ROBINSON: Well, in a way I’m quite late coming to the importance of climate change in undermining and negating human rights. When I finished my seven years as president of Ireland in 1997, I became high commissioner for human rights. I don’t remember making any significant speech because another part of the U.N. was dealing with climate change. It was when I started work in Africa on behalf of a small N.G.O. and everywhere I went in Africa people kept saying, “things are so much worse.” And it was the unpredictability of the weather. People didn’t know when to sow and then their harvest would be destroyed, and the rainy seasons wouldn’t come. And I realized, my goodness, I missed this. This is a huge issue of human rights, and it’s so unjust, so unfair, and that’s why I don’t talk about climate change. I talk about climate justice.

DUBNER: You argue that our environmental problems are at heart human-rights injustices, largely committed by big rich countries like the U.S. against small and poor countries. And that’s an argument I’m sure resonates for many, many people. On the other hand, the technology and resources from rich countries also have a lot of benefits — food production, just to take one. How do you find the middle ground to have conversations that are not so accusatory toward the big, rich, polluting countries?

ROBINSON: I think that “climate justice” finds a very good balance in this, because we do acknowledge the injustice of the fact that the emissions have been caused, historically particularly, by the richer countries and now also by the emerging, the Chinas and the Indias and Russias, etc. And that has a big negative impact on food security, on life security, on health, on so many things for poorer developing countries who are not responsible for the emissions.

But we also say that we want — when we move to this renewable-energy world, which would be so much better for health, for jobs, etc. — that there is a fairness in ensuring that the poorer countries, and particularly the poorer people in those poorer countries, get the benefit. We need to get to those one billion people who never switch the switch for electricity. We’ve now got off-grid solutions. We need to get to the women, in particular, who cook on open fires with animal dung, coal, wood and ingest and die in very large numbers from that inhalation, and we need to make this an engagement of people in solidarity with other people.

DUBNER: It’s a really interesting — not a conflict, quite, you raise, but a two-headed problem, I guess. Technologists — and I guess you could include economists in there — they often advocate for a different set of solutions to problems, whether it’s famine or pollution or so on, than environmentalists do. And I think it mirrors political partisanship, whereby there’s very little middle ground and very little collaboration. Trying to convert people who are using animal dung as fuel — obviously that would require a technological solution that may require more energy from the grid. So can you talk about the two camps — if we consider it truly to be two camps, let’s say environmentalists on one side and real technologists on the other — what are some ways to accomplish a middle ground that you’ve seen in action, that you think are scalable?

ROBINSON: I’m not so sure, as you put the issue that way, that we have the kind of middle ground you’re talking about. We have to get out of coal rapidly, period. We have to get out of oil and gas pretty quickly, and be out of all three by 2050 to have that safe world. And what is happening and, I have to say this quite unequivocally, the fossil-fuel world is using the tactics of the tobacco industry. It’s using these tactics to muddy the science, delay things, and deny that there is a real problem. And unfortunately, as we know, President Trump has put in quite a number of climate deniers. How do we understand that the new economy is the renewable energy economy? Solar and wind are becoming so much cheaper. They’re very competitive, far more competitive than coal. We need to have that shift.

DUBNER: So you’re calling for the global community, however that can be created or defined, to come together to carry out climate justice. Talk to me about what you see as big previous successes in the global community coming together to solve problems.

ROBINSON: Well, one example is when we knew there was a threat to the ozone layer, we came together with the Montreal Convention to make sure that what was causing that problem with the ozone would be completely banned. We need to have exactly the same attitude to climate change. I mean, it has been said, and said very eloquently, we’re the first generation to really understand the dangers of climate change and that’s why we have the Paris commitment to stay well below 2 degrees of warming and work for 1.5 degrees and be carbon neutral by 2050, meaning out of greenhouse gases: coal, oil, gas, etc.

And we’re the first generation to understand all of this and the last generation with time and opportunity to make sure we do get out of it. We’re going to be into tipping points. The Arctic is going to go. We’re going to see a sea-level rise that will wipe out the islands. How could we be mad enough, cruel enough, insane enough to have a world for our children and grandchildren which would be unlivable? And that is what we’re headed toward at the moment.

MYHRVOLD: The way to have a dramatic message is to say we’re all going to die.

That’s Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft and now C.E.O. of an invention-and-technology firm called Intellectual Ventures.

MYHRVOLD: If you said, “Oh my God, the changes in the food system mean we’re all going to die,” is a lot worse than saying, “Changes in the food system mean we’re all going to be at least five pounds heavier than we would ideally like to be.” I mean, you don’t get any oomph out of that.

DUBNER: If you had to declare yourself, let’s say, x percent wizard and y percent prophet, with “prophet” representing environmentalist and concerned about population and the environment, and “wizard” representing technology and maybe techno-optimist, what are those numbers for you, Nathan Myhrvold?

MYHRVOLD: Oh, probably 90-10. And if you push me it might be 98-2. The part where I would differ from many environmentalists is I understand that technology is not just a bad thing that got us in this terrible situation. Technology is also our salvation. And the notion that we have caused problems in our society which we have to fix, in least in part through technology, that is the story of mankind.

DUBNER: So, The Economist has said that you have “an unshakeable belief that human ingenuity will sort everything out.” What’s that belief based on? Other than history?

MYHRVOLD: Well, historical experience. What do you mean, “other than history?” Our species has faced many, many great challenges. And when we face a great challenge, one of the things that we fall back on is technology. And frankly, that is what distinguishes us from other creatures. Most animals have to undergo biological evolution. They can’t learn and undergo a cultural evolution. When we went from being hunters and gatherers to being agriculturalists, that wasn’t because we evolved new kinds of limbs meant for agriculture. What it meant was we learned how to sow crops and harvest them and build a civilization that could stay in one place because we had a regular food supply.

Every time we have a really powerful technology that really changes the world, well of course there’s problems that come up. And you can blame technology, but I think the constant in that equation is humans. So, of course we will over-exploit things, of course we will do a set of things that is very much human nature, but for most problems, we wind up realizing it eventually and we fix it.

DUBNER: But a prophet might say, “Well, just because technology or technologies were the solution to one set of problems doesn’t mean it will be the solution to the next set of problems.” And, indeed, if one makes the argument, as many prophets do, that these problems are actually the result of technologies, then, indeed, the most natural solution would be the opposite of that, which is some kind of reversion, some kind of return to a more natural state, a smaller population. So what do you say to that argument?

MYHRVOLD: Well, that argument is so absurd on so many levels that the miracle is that there are people who can say it with a straight face. There was no golden age of mankind that was better than today. That’s the first point. There’s a lot of, “Oh, let’s hearken back to those wonderful old days. You know, when the feudal lord oppressed us, when the number-one killer of women was childbirth, when infant mortality was 50 percent.” Oh yeah, I really want those days back. In order to worship the past, you have to have a very bizarre filter on to filter out those aspects of the past that you don’t like.

Look, the single biggest thing that would help world population is to get a higher standard of living in the parts of the world where it’s still crushingly bad. If the bottom two billion people in the world had a better lifestyle, ironically, that’s what would lower their population and help them have a better lifestyle going forward.

This is a point on which Myhrvold and Mary Robinson, wizard and prophet, happen to agree.

ROBINSON: We know exactly what will reduce population. It’s educating girls and women, and it’s having a health system that works — universal access to good health care. And we’ve seen in countries all over the world that the population comes down very rapidly when you educate girls and women and have a health system that functions.

On the issue of carbon emissions and climate change, meanwhile? Not much agreement between wizard and prophet there.

MYHRVOLD: I am not saying that global warming is a solved problem, I think is an incredibly hard problem to solve. So, I’m not saying all of our problems are trivial. Far from it. I think that if we put our heads together we will come up with ways to cope and maybe eliminate. And that is a really important thing.

Myhrvold has spent some time thinking about technological solutions to the climate-change problem.

MYHRVOLD: So, climate change is a 1-percent effect. Now all we have to do is make the sun 1 percent dimmer. Now I don’t literally mean changing the sun. But there are a variety of things that bounce sunlight back into space. Clouds are one of those things: white clouds bounce white light back up into space. It turns out that volcanoes throw ash and particles, if it’s a big volcano, very high in the atmosphere. That reflects some of that light. And in fact this happened in 1991 when Mount Pinatubo went off. It cooled worldwide temperatures by a degree, degree-and-a-half-Fahrenheit for 12 to 18 months. Well, my company has come up with some very practical and cost-effective ways of deliberately putting particles into the upper atmosphere. And on paper, it works out that you could nullify all of global warming that way.

These geoengineering ideas are, in many quarters, quite poorly received.

MYHRVOLD: People get extreme, some people anyway, get extremely angry, and they say, “Oh, technology got us in this problem, why are using technology to get us out?” And that’s where I come to think of saying, “Well, okay so are you sincere about worrying about global warming? Or are you using global warming as a stalking horse for your political agenda?” If you’re sincere about the harm of global warming, you say, “I don’t want my environment screwed up. I don’t want millions of people to die.” So, if you take that problem-oriented view, if we can stop that problem, that’s good right?

This is one characteristic of the wizard’s solution: a large-scale, top-down fix. Many prophets, meanwhile, think about small-scale, bottom-up.

ROBINSON: Well there’s a lovely story of this woman that I was very impressed by. She’s an anthropologist. Mrs. Tong, she was a professor who moved from Vietnam to Australia and could have had a very good living in Sydney, and came back to her country because she wanted to work with poor people in her region. She introduced me to the regional officer, she introduced me to the elders, she introduced me to the women, etc. They had broken down the level at which women could be involved comfortably. She said, “If we did it at the district level, women would feel disempowered.”

So we broke down to eight families coming together and forming a co-operative, and we now have a number of co-operatives who are in charge of a certain part of the forestry to maintain that forest. And the regional officer, at her persuasion, had given them the right to the fruits of the forest as they say. The first fruits were medicinal and actual fruits. And then they said, “Next year, we’ll be able to cull some of the trees, but we will plant new trees. We will maintain the forest.”

And this for me was a wonderful example, which I know is happening in indigenous communities all around the world. They actually save forests. And if we’d only listen to indigenous peoples, we would save far more forests. And we need to replant and save rainforests, and if we listen to those who really understand their neighborhood and their forests, we’ll do it much more quickly and more effectively.

DUBNER: A lot of the solutions that you praise and suggest that we scale up are reliant, to some degree at least, on behavior change, on people deciding to make a different kind of consumption decision or whatnot. And as most of us know, even if just from our own personal experience — whether it’s a diet or exercise or spending/saving money, and so on — behavior change and self-discipline can be very difficult. And I’m curious whether you truly believe that relying on humans to “do the right thing” on a large scale will be successful enough to have the kind of effect in the climate realm that you hope for.

ROBINSON: Well, I certainly think it is important that we change our behavior to a significant extent, and it is happening. People are recycling more. More young people are vegetarian or even vegan. There is a real acknowledgement that we need to do this, and actually women, in the home and in their community, are more likely to be leaders on changing behavior. That’s what we’re good at in the family.

You may not always be successful, and I’m not the best myself. I’m more vegetarian than I was, but I’m not pure vegetarian, yet. I aspire to be. I love some West Ireland lamb, that sort of thing. But the point really is that we need to understand the health and the economic benefits that come from a change in vision about where we want to see the world, and that’s the most important thing.

MYHRVOLD: I am skeptical that we will solve it by just doing the right thing. And I mean that somewhat facetiously. To give an example, there was a little book that was popular a few years ago called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. Well, those are 50 simple things that you can do to feel self-righteous and none of them are going to save the world. And I think that approach, and that attitude, fundamentally mistakes what the problem is, and it creates a situation where people can feel good about themselves. “Oh, I unplugged my iPhone charger while I was away today.” And yet, no matter, even if all of us did that, it would not materially change what’s going to happen to global warming. We have to make actually very painful cuts, which our society isn’t very good at doing.

ROBINSON: We need to be careful about how we will move rapidly to having renewable energy in developing countries. Developing countries have become very ambitious to get renewable energy. We’re learning that there are human-rights abuses occurring where clean energy is being put into a country in the wrong way. And the wrong way tends to be mega projects that don’t have any concern for land rights or water rights or indigenous people’s rights to consent locally.

An example that I’m aware of was a big wind farm in Kenya, and it was on pastoral land belonging to Maasai pastoralists. Nobody thought they had land rights, but they had always brought their animals on this land. And these big, 365 wind turbines were being built, and they wouldn’t have even benefited from the energy, from the clean energy, the electricity. So they took a case in court in Kenya and blocked the whole thing until their rights were being properly recognized.

MYHRVOLD: Well, then there’s nuclear power. So, nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source that absolutely works. The United States got scared of nuclear starting in the 1970’s and through the 1990’s. Then-Vice President Gore presided over the announcement of killing the last nuclear plant in the United States because we were going to build safe coal plants. Now we realize, inconveniently, that global warming is a threat.

ROBINSON: Well, I’m not an expert on the nuclear issue, I have to admit that. The way I see it, nuclear energy has its own problems. We saw that in Japan when the nuclear power plants were flooded. What incredible problems, and they’re lifelong problems for the Japanese. There are problems at the end of the lifecycle that make it very expensive. There are problems in building nuclear power stations that make it very expensive.

And meanwhile we have the much cheaper renewable energy coming on stream, and that I understand much better. So I’m not making a whole statement. I think it’s true that nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gas emissions and that’s important. France has nuclear energy and has benefited from it but also has the problems now of aging nuclear power stations and the cost to the economy of getting rid of those.

I went back to Charles Mann, author of The Wizard and the Prophet, about the nuclear-power conundrum.

DUBNER: Nuclear power is one of these things that a lot of environmentalists have come around to embrace as —

MANN: At least, some.

DUBNER: — and what’s interesting is that I look to that as an example of how the standoff between the wizards and the prophets can turn into inertia. Because if there had seen more collaboration and less grandstanding, rather than inventing a technology that then got old and got exported to Japan and France, we probably would have kept building a better technology that by now would be — whether universally accepted or not, who knows — but it seems that the environmentalist protest against nuclear was so strong that it really stymied invention or innovation. So that strikes me as one of the potentially worst paths of having wizards and prophets, or technologists and environmentalists, not sharing a language, sharing a middle ground. And I’m curious where you see this can go, or should go.

MANN: Well, the present that we have, as you say, I think quite accurately is the worst of the many worlds, right, in which people are at loggerheads. I suspect that one of the underlying issues is that much of these discussions, the debates, the arguments, are couched in, I think what the philosophers call “prudential terms.” So the people who don’t like nuclear power say, “Well, we don’t like it because it’s unsafe. We don’t like it because of the waste. We don’t like it because of proliferation and so forth.” And those are all true. But they’re mainly pretexts. They don’t like it because they don’t like the path that takes you down, which they see as giant centralized facilities under state control, and further and further away from democracy. They don’t like it for the same reason they just don’t like big corporations.

The fundamental arguments are really about values. And we typically argue them on the basis of practical things, as if that is actually what is fueling the debate. I’ve never seen, to my knowledge, a nuclear power person saying, “What if we built compact nukes with smaller scale and shorter life spans that can be used as a bridge fuel in the way that people talk about natural gas?” and say, “Okay, we’ll have this nuclear power plant for 30 years and that will buy us time so that the renewable stuff can kick in.”

DUBNER: Why do you think that conversation isn’t happening? Is that a failure of one camp, or is it this construct that has been set up by people like William Vogt, and maybe by Borlaug as well, that we can’t escape?

MANN: Well, there is a tendency for people to get really entrenched in their own walls. Our society is now so large that even advocacy groups have become an industry of their own. They have to protect their credibility and they start acting like the corporations that they decry. And it becomes more and more difficult for, not even it’s just a middle ground, but a creativity, to happen. And I think some of that is just a consequence of scale.

DUBNER: Let me ask you one last question, I want to know what you think is the prophet’s view and the wizard’s view on colonizing Mars. Right? So I can see that appealing, maybe not equally, but quite robustly to each camp. Obviously it requires a great deal of technology, but for the prophets it’s a chance to start anew with a planet we haven’t screwed up yet.

MANN: It’s interesting. I should say that I am — and ever, since I was a child, have been a space enthusiast. I think the kind of tradeoff there is — do you know the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy?

DUBNER: No.

MANN: It’s a fascinating look at exactly colonizing Mars, and, in a certain way it’s all about the clash between the wizards and the prophets, because it’s about how we should live on this new planet. And yes, we need all kinds of technological development. But what is the life that we’re going to have here? And also, how are we going to terraform it? How are we going to make it more habitable? And I think there’s a rich room for disagreement and argument there. You could put it inside a dome city, which would in a certain way be the most efficient way, or else you could really take the challenge of trying to transform the whole planet and make it breathable.

DUBNER: If you were going to bring one science adviser with you on that establishment of a human colony there, would it be William Vogt, or would it be Norman Borlaug?

MANN: Well, I hadn’t thought about this. What I’m thinking is, which person would I like to be locked up with a small vessel for several years? And Borlaug, I think had a better sense of humor.

DUBNER: Yeah, that seems an easy answer. But forget about being locked up. So let’s say that personal confinement was not the one metric that you had to choose your scientist on, but would you rather have the guy who figured out a new dimension of botany? Or a guy who understood that resources are finite and carrying capacity is a concept that should be applied to the environment, and so on?

MANN: You know, it’s funny. I think I would choose Vogt. And here’s the reason: that is a hostile environment. Mistakes will kill you. I’m starting out. I want somebody who’s hyper-aware of potential mistakes. I think I would probably have a chance of coming up with some of the innovations and so forth, I’d really want somebody who would point out how I might be on a path to killing myself. So if I could have Borlaug on the way over and transform him to Vogt when I’m there.

Charles Mann’s book is called The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Thanks to him, and also to Mary Robinson and Nathan Myhrvold.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Zack Lapinski, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Charles C. Mann, journalist and author.

Mary Robinson, president of the Mary Robinson Foundation: Climate Justice, former president of Ireland, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and co-host of the podcast Mothers of Invention.

Nathan Myhrvold, co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, former chief technology officer at Microsoft.

RESOURCES

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (Knopf 2018).

Climate Justice by Mary Robinson (Bloomsbury Publishing 2018).

EXTRA

Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (Spectra 1992, 1993, and 1996).

“Nathen Myhrvold, Myth Buster” Alex Renton, The Economist 1843 (January/February 2015 Issue).

The post Two (Totally Opposite) Ways to Save the Planet (Ep. 346) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-the-planet/

[camplight-tales]

Are you a product owner? Do it like you play StarCraft!

I’ve been a gamer almost my entire life. Also I’m a former game designer: worked on titles with millions of players and dealt with the nuances of excel balance sheets/game design documents. When I had enough I co-founded my own company doing the same for others :D I’m not doing that anymore in order to focus my expertise solely on Camplight but I have a few game related habits left in my toolbelt.

As I’m part of the outsourcing initiative in Camplight for the past ~6 years I’ve seen all kinds of IT projects. I’ve been a follower and a leader, practiced rapid software development and even faster business downfalls. I’ve worked with clients all around the globe on big VC funded projects and small bootstrapped dreams. Meanwhile played a lot of StarCraft® :)

That’s why I’m perplexed how digital products are executed. I’ve read hundred blog articles, absorbed dozens of books, practiced numerous methodologies and I must admit it’s really hard to find some knowledge and wisdom which can inspire, provoke epiphany or just be uniquely amusing. Please tweet me what’s your best resource about being a product owner. I’m hungry for enlightenment ;)

Lately I’ve been reading “Host Leadership” by Mark McKergow and I’m experiencing the power of metaphors. So I want to propose a very simple and intuitive explanation to people who are like me: gamers, digital product owners, project managers, team leaders and good followers.

”Reality is an agreement, today is always today.”

~ said no medic ever. Actually it’s a Zen proverb.

Let’s try to redefine reality then. The easiest way is to ask “what if”. What if project management is not stressful? What if product ownership is joyful? What if deadlines are not so harsh “dead” sentences? What if leadership does not lead to burnout and being a single bus factor? What if developing is a breeze? What if communication is flowing with best intentions? What if crafting a digital experience is like a narcotic game-like craze? What if practicing your art of delivering quality projects is a fractal of happiness? What if your work is actually gameplay and you don’t seek rest and retreat from it… What if work/life balance is not about quantity but quality?

Welcome to StarCraft!

Replace “Star” with “Your” if you want to be more immersed :p

So you’re in a position of being a product owner of the next big quantum social network/uber-for-governments/some random complex digital project? You need to deal with tight budgets, insecurities, quality standards and ruthless milestones while constantly improving your flow with excellence. Sounds difficult and familiar, right? Remember you’ve been doing this countless times in your StarCraft sessions. You’ve been trained for this. You just need to see the patterns. No matter if you’re playing 1vs1, 2vs2, XvsNone the principles are the same ;)

Choose your heroes

On every adventure you embark you must wisely choose your companions. Some people write about it like forming a AAA team, inviting only people who have A+ skills, etc. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a self-organizing tribe or part of an ephemeral research division - you should be around people whom you trust, admire and love to play alongside with.

Each hero you bring with you has his traits and weaknesses. You must be always mindful because helping each other is the best way to achieve the grand scheme. Aligning towards a common goal, vision and mission are the basics. You must let others know you got their back. This builds strong relationships. The squad needs to have fun and that’s easy to achieve when everybody feels safe in the game and knows that no matter how hard one falls, there’s always a replay option ;)

Scouting

Business consultants from the Silicon Valley tell us we need to do customer development. They articulate that before building feature X we need to validate that Y customers need it. Before doing anything at scale we need to make sure that we have the correct product-market fit, good converting funnels, stable business model and so on. I say that this is common sense...

You don’t need a business consultant to tell you that. You already know that you need to scout first. Sending that SCV/probe/drone for scouting is a sure way to build confidence. What most people are missing out is that when they get to the scaling phase they still need to constantly do scouting otherwise they’re playing in the dark and their intelligence is dissolving because the world is moving at an ever-increasing pace.

Hunger for knowledge should be part of your culture.

Build order

Should you build the backend first or focus on that next hire? Should you make a demo to a new potential client vs. work with the lawyer on that T&C content? Should you be design-centric and work with prototypes or just deliver something ugly but functional. Your focus is scattered, your time is limited. Remember your build order!

Having a prolific project is all about the foundations. If you mess your build order by 1% this deviation can accumulate and after 2 years down the road result in targets missed by 50%.

Want to pivot? What’s your build order? Want to expand? What’s your build order? Want to make a fast comeback? What’s your build order? You get the drill.

Early/mid/end/meta game

Build orders are not like having a business plan and following it blindly. Build orders are all about the decisions! Knowing the price of them is essential, especially when you’re aware in what stage of the game you’re playing.

Joining a team in it’s early game with a project? -> Focus on bigger foundations. Or rush? e.g. consider do you really need the premature optimization which AWS can give you.

Moving from early to mid game?  -> Scale the execution. Or switch from bio to tech? e.g. reflect about your budget spendings on acquisition vs. hiring.

Transgressing from mid to end game? -> Focus on diverse army composition on only one “business vertical”. Or divide and conquer multiple “horizontals” with one squad setup. e.g. beware of feature creep and overloading the team 

There are numerous ways to play through these stages. “Pick your own adventure” and hustle but most importantly be mindful that what helped you in the early game is not the silver bullet that will move you towards end game. It’s easy for stuff to become irrelevant. That’s why adaptability is a priority, flexibility is the way, mindfulness is superiority. Your metagame defines your play style.

Micro and Macro management

Dealing with the intricacies of running a digital product on a daily basis can be really tiresome. You need to juggle between placement of structures, positioning of units, production & economy, gathering of resources and high yield expansions while fighting with legacy and technical debt.

Remember that bunker you placed as a quick fix for the rush? Now you need to tear it down...

Seems like you’re constantly multitasking but actually you’re just fast context switching. What’s your APM, by the way?

So you have an overall strategy but what are your tactics for achieving it? Here’re some tricks which helped me to win a lot of games:

Reduce the friction of context switching by automating. Remember your lovely shortcut for building a Supply Depot? You can use that style of thinking to build a system of highly effective shortcuts and triggers for answering emails, creating reminders, etc. hint: if you use trello and constantly linking your trello card <-> github PR, you can use a power up instead  

Don’t try to squash a mosquito with a sledgehammer. If you need to firefight on some front, do you really have to send all units in that direction? e.g. if one task is estimated for 9 hours, pouring 9 people so they can deliver it in 1 hour is a losing strategy. Always have in mind the communication overhead. Sometimes pair coding/delivering is enough to unstuck a team member. Swarming on a tiny problem is good for brainstorming.

STIM packs come at a price. Burning out team members is a sure way to risk the entire adventure. Always be sure to have a “medivac” of some sort: one week rest after one week of a hard sprint, team rotation to reinvigorate, coworking in the woods...

Having a new expansion? Focus is the most precious resource in our daily activities, so make sure to guard the team from distractions while they build the new structures which will soon deliver high yield. i.e. don’t make all hands meetings when just 3 people speak. Put only relevant people in the conference call.

Be aware of your resources. Minerals, gas, supply -> all of them are the vital signs of your team cooperation. If you can’t afford that shiny new upgrade then don’t save resources so you can buy it. Focus on gathering instead.

Quick fixes can be a false positive for velocity. When losing a game: watch the replay, reflect and comprehend. Don’t jump in again, adjusting slightly your initial strategy, trying to negate what put you down with a quick fix.

I bet you have awesome tips as well ;) Dare to share? Just drop us an email at [email protected] or find us in some social network.

#productivity #project #management #leadership #starcraft2 #ownership #product owner

[tomkail]

Irreducible Complexity

I had a play with the Knights project again yesterday, and it got me thinking about a practical design idea that I’ve not yet written down; the need for a game to have some kind of irreducible complexity, which sometimes goes by the names “depth” or “uncertainty”.

What do I mean by that? I mean that it presents a problem that the human brain cannot find the “best”, or “correct” solution for. It’s certainly been said before that a solved game isn’t interesting; I’d reframe the problem to ask: what can make a game unsolvable?

There are a few ways this can be done, and many games employ a few of them. Here are the methods I’m aware of:

Hidden information - not knowing the state of something forces you to make guesses about it. “Uncovering” and making predictions is enjoyable, but it can be frustrating when you’ve committed your resources to something which turns out to be wrong.

Inherent complexity - The more distinct things you can do in a game, the more difficult it becomes to evaluate every possible future state. This is called an information horizon. While effective as a test of brainpower, this form is tricky to balance; it’s very dependent on who is playing, and many games digital have such complex states that making a specific evaluation even a few turns ahead is impractical, whereas others (Knights) are simple enough that predicting the effect of an action can be reduced to some boring maths. 

Time constraints - If hidden information places a constraint on how far ahead you can reasonably see, a time constraint sets a limit on how long you have to do it. This is an incredibly effective way of preventing players from over-thinking and generally ensuring the pace of a game. It makes a game feel more action-orientated. In a pinch, it can make an otherwise dull game quite interesting.

Execution challenge - Where the act of executing a strategy is itself challenging. This involves the mastery of the human body and (in video games) the input device. This form requires a lot of practice and is typically designed to never be “solved”, even if players have been practising for years. This can create some unexpected but fair moments but is very hard to design without world-class player skill, often a product of biology as much as training.

Other brains (Donkey space/Yomi) - People are hard to predict, especially when they’re trying to be unpredictable. There are many variables here such as: the intelligence (and perceived intelligence) of the opponent, how well players understand the game, what mood they’re in, what style of play they’re experimenting with. While this is an incredibly natural form of complexity and playing against other humans is something we simply like to do, it’s quite a subtle form of complexity and tends not to be enough on its own. 

AI - So the gap between real people and AI is more pronounced in some games than others, but AI has far less nuance. You can try to code all the subtleties back in, but unless it’s taking a shot at the Turing test players will tend to treat it as part of the game, rather than an opponent. Designers tend to lean into this and instead make their AI play in ways which are interesting, rather than ways that are superior or life-like; but players will assume basic competence of an AI, or for it to match the personality of its owner. Note that in many games, “AI” is visibly predictable by design; we’re not talking about that here.

Randomness - To some degree, all of these forms introduce a form of perceived randomness; true randomness is something players have no control over, like a die roll. It exists over a sliding scale of “input” to “output” randomness, where input randomness defines the state of the game before you play, and output after you make your move. Input randomness tends to feel fairer, but output randomness can be good for gambling or matching otherwise skill-differentiated players (think a parent and child playing a game together), and generally feels more exciting.

Design application

One of the goals of a game designer is to produce a good “signal to noise” ratio. A game with too much signal is too easily solved, and adding noise makes this harder until you’re effectively just guessing and the player feels unable to make informed decisions. Each of these considerations effectively adds “noise” to your game. 

A key consideration is how the player learns to deal with each form as they play. Execution challenge, for example, can be designed to be overcome; you can learn how other people’s minds work, but the most you can do to overcome a die roll is to get good at probabilities.

The balance depends on the sort of game you’re looking to make, and who your audience is.

Some examples:

Street Fighter is a mix of complexity, time constraints, execution challenge, and other brains. Catan is mostly a mix of randomness and other brains Chess is complexity and other brains; speed chess adds a time constraint. League Of Legends is a mix of all of the above, although there is comparatively little true randomness. Mario Kart is execution, time constraint, and input randomness. Other players are present but tend to behave predictably. We might deem the effect of a red shell they throw at us as output randomness. Crash Bandicoot is execution and time constraint. Enemies are predictable and there is no human opponent. Hearts is input randomness and hidden information. Other people tend to play fairly predictably, but there’s definitely an element of other brains in there too.

Edit 03/03/2019

Since I wrote this I’ve come back to the topic again and again; I gave a talk at our local indie meetup not so long ago and got some really interesting comments, especially on the topic of ‘other brains’! I’ve been wondering if I should change the title from Irreducible Complexity to Irreducible Uncertainty, since that word comes up a lot.

While writing the powerpoint I got to wondering again how many of these categories might be, from a player perspective, reduced to either probability or randomness - what is sometimes called the signal-to-noise ratio.

I think that perhaps this is too reductive though. Even though they’re both unknowns, the way we intuit what we don’t know in a human opponent is completely different to guessing what’s hidden in fog on a map.

My belief today is that the game designer’s goal is to design games that rely on intuition rather than a calculation; something I’ve also heard Crawford, Burgun, and Koster (so it seems like the right track!). 

Edit 23/12/2019

Fabian Fischer writes along exactly the same lines in this excellent article, although with some slightly different terminology and categories making for some interesting comparison! 

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FabianFischer/20150105/233529/Sources_of_Uncertainty.php

MORE EDITS

I’m just going to keep a rolling list of posts with similar content. This seems to be a commonly-trod topic for formal game designers, and the range of perspectives might spark something for future readers!

https://elliotgeorge.net/2020/01/27/complexity-and-noise-in-games/

ANOTHER EDIT - Strategies

I wanted to briefly write about a related sub-topic, which I’ll call “strategies”. How can rules enable strategies that afford more for irreducible complexity? Parallel Axis - A game can offer a range of different routes to victory - we might call these “strategies”. When players choose strategies that mean they’re no longer in direct competition, we might call it a “parallel” strategy. A good example is the win conditions in Civ. They do overlap, a little, but I can largely pursue a culture victory without being impeded by my opponent’s science victory. A way of looking at this is adding sub-games inside your game, where each carries its own inherent complexity. And this gets even deeper when strategies overlap - how does a military victory strategy fare against a player pursuing culture?

Rock/Paper/Scissors - This train of thought takes us to strategies which are designed to counter each other. In it’s simplest form this is Rock/Paper/Scissors (or sword/lance/axe, or water/grass/fire), but you also find this in CCGs where one deck is a reliable counter for another (or champions in a MOBA/Fighter). 

Note that while enabling multiple strategies is a very common tool for adding irreducible complexity (especially in competitive games) it needs to be paired with something else to work - rock/paper/scissors only works when you don’t know what the other player is doing!

#game design #complexity