I turned 60 last week. The "round" birthdays always have a bigger psychological impact, and at the age of 60 one has to stop pretending that one is still middle-aged, and accept the fact that one is old now. Even the eternal optimists that say that you are only as young as you feel would have to admit that at least the perception of others is that I am old now. My employer certainly thinks I am old, so they offered me over two years ago an early retirement plan. In this new year that plan is going to end, and I will officially retire and receive a state pension. Which, admittedly, at 60 is relatively early, compared to the official retirement age. That results in me receiving a lower state pension than if I had worked until that official retirement age, but years of savings from me and my wife make that financially possible without hardship. Of course, retirement is always a financial risk, as nobody knows how long he will live, nor how much health care he will need. But the most likely scenario is me looking forward to 20+ years of comfortable retirement before I keel over. As they say, old age isn't so bad, if you consider the alternative.

I can afford retirement because I had a job for several decades that was both interesting and well-paid. It was also stressful. Many people want to make a career, but there is a vague and totally wrong impression that making a career means getting paid better for no sacrifice. In general, making a career means your employer paying you better in exchange for you taking on more responsibility. Some people are able to laugh off that responsibility, but I was raised to take responsibilities very seriously. You can't be responsible for a multi-million dollar budget and for people working for you, without your decisions affecting people's lives. And there were other responsibilities in my job, like having to speak publicly, and traveling a lot, which came with their own contributions to stress.

You might remember that about 5 years ago, a pandemic broke out. For me, that resulted in a weird timing effect: Working from home, and no more business travel, made my job less stressful to me in a first step, and before the end of the pandemic fully reversed that, the early retirement further reduced my level of stress in a second step. Today, I am significantly more relaxed than I was 5 or 10 years ago. I still have in the back of a drawer a bunch of both actual pills and food supplements that are supposed to help with anxiety and similar problems, but I don't need those anymore. I would say that my mental health has improved, even if my problems were never really serious. I believe a lot of people suffer from some degree of stress, anxiety, and depression in their daily lives, and often that is simply a consequence of their circumstances and problems, rather than a purely medical problem.

On this New Year's Day 2025, my outlook for the year is relaxed. Maybe age does bring some wisdom, or it is simply a growing resistance to both panic and hype, the twin fuels of the internet. Among the people on the internet that are interested in similar games than I am, there is for example a strong hype for the upcoming Civilization VII game. I don't feel that hype. It is extremely likely that I will play this game, and I might even buy it at launch because the price is unlikely to go down fast. But I have enough experience with 4X games and the gaming industry in general to consider the possibility that Civilization VII will probably have some problems at launch, and that years from now people will consider Civ7 unplayable without the DLCs that released only later. With hype being so overused in the marketing of triple-A games (not to mention the "quadruple-A" game of last year), disappointment at launch is basically baked into the system. On the positive side, I am also not subscribing to the various predictions of doom for 2025, be it in politics, economics, or gaming. All I see is pendulums slowly swinging, and even if I don't necessarily like the direction in which some of them are swinging now, I am certain that they'll swing back the other way come time.

I wish all of my readers an equally relaxed 2025. I'm sure it isn't going to be as bad as some people might want to make you think. Just realize that much of the doom is clickbait, created for financial advantage. And even if 2025 is also not going to be as good as some people might want to make you think, for exactly the same reasons, I am certain that there will be a lot of good stuff happening in 2025.

While useful to explain the point he wants to make, the graph has one major flaw: If you consider that the circular axis describes all fields of human knowledge, the knowledge you pick up at school or with any other education never makes a circle. No school curriculum covers the totality of human knowledge, and different students retain different amounts of knowledge, even if they visited the same class. If somebody actually could map his knowledge as it relates to all human knowledge, there would necessarily be peaks and valleys. Even outside a Ph.D. or job specialization, we know more about for example about the areas where our hobbies lie, and less of areas that don't interest us. A person with a bird watching hobby knows more than the average person about birds. But then he maybe isn't interested in sports at all, and knows less than average on that. That not only applies to knowledge, but also to skills, which are often related to knowledge. A car mechanic might be very skilled at fixing your car, but be bad at customer relations, or accounting.

Now if we look at large language model AI and map it on the same graph, we get a circle that is a lot smoother. AI aggregates the knowledge of many people, and thus the peaks and valleys cancel each other out, to some degree. But we also observe that the border is somewhat fuzzy: The AI lacks self-awareness of what it knows and what it doesn't know. The further you get away from the center, the more complex and specialized a question becomes, the more likely it becomes that the answer the AI gives is unreliable, up to the point of being completely hallucinated. But AI is really good at answering questions "everybody knows", which is helpful if you have a knowledge deficit is some area.

While companies have invested billions in AI, the business case for specialized AI software is a lot clearer than that for the more general large language model AIs. But I think that the awareness that people might have deficits in certain skills or knowledge, while AI is good at base level knowledge in general, might point us to a number of possible applications. I've seen in one video about AI a short demonstration of an AI software that helps managers give feedback in the context of a performance review to people who work for them. That won't help anybody who is already a great manager, but it could well provide a good baseline, where those managers who maybe got to their position for their technical skills and are a bit short on people skills receive help from that sort of software, and thus the people working for them get at least some basically helpful performance feedback.

I don't think that large language models will ever be able to work at the edges of human knowledge, to do Ph.D.-like research. But I do think they could be quite helpful at providing basic help and advice to set some sort of minimum standard. The AI knows "what everybody knows", and thus can be used to help people with skill deficits or gaps in their knowledge to bring them up to standard.

Now one could argue that this isn’t the influencers’ fault: They didn’t know that what they were promoting was a scam or otherwise dubious. On the other hand, the influencers apparently don’t very often engage in a process of due dilligence. Instead they often just get the pitch from the company, and then promote that pitch as if it was the truth. The consideration of “how much am I getting paid to promote this?” outweighs the consideration of “what exactly am I promoting here, and is it any good?”. Thus another point of view would be that the influencers have at least a partial responsibility for their viewers getting scammed. To the best of my knowledge, only the FTX collapse caused several influencers to actually apologize, while they mostly kept silent on other scams, and just stopped promoting them further.

Thus there is some irony, others might call it karmic justice, to the latest influencer marketing scam being uncovered only now, although it has gone on for years. Because this one has a special twist: Company with dubious business practices pays influencers to promote their product, the viewers become customers of the company, but instead of scamming those customers, the company now scams the influencers. The company and product are called Honey, and it promises to be a browser extension that searches the best promo codes for everything you buy online, with a popup when you are on the buy page of an online shop. Honey is free, it sometimes actually manages to find a promo code making your purchases cheaper, and while by no means perfect nor necessarily able to find the best promo codes, the product doesn’t cause any financial loss to the customers that installed it.

Instead, it causes a financial loss to anyone involved in affiliate marketing, including many of those social media influencers that promoted Honey in the first place. Affiliate marketing is when somebody promotes a product with a link to where to buy it. That link contains information to the company selling the product which tells the seller which affiliate caused this particular sale, so that the company can then give a kickback to the promoter. Honey simply replaces that information. If you click on a link provided by an influencer to buy a product, and then interact with the Honey popup while on the purchasing webpage (even if it just to close the popup telling you that Honey didn’t find a promo code for you), the browser extension changes the affiliate link to point to Honey as the source of the sale, not the influencer who actually influenced you. So the company making the sale gives the kickback to Honey, and the influencer gets robbed of that kickback money, without being even aware of it.

Of course influencers have a variety of income streams, and some rely very little or not at all on affiliate marketing. But there are certainly some cases where an influencer lost more affiliate marketing revenue to Honey than he received from Honey to get his viewers to install their browser extension. They simply promoted another product without posing the relevant questions of what that product actually does, but this time it hurt them instead of their viewers. We can only hope that this story makes influencers more aware of the necessity of due dilligence before promoting a product.

I wish you and your families all a merry Christmas. May all the games you play in 2025 be great!

Cheers,

Tobold

My boardgame of the year is Agemonia. We played roughly 20 sessions of that, and are now a few sessions away from finishing the campaign, which took much of this year. As a campaign game, Agemonia for me hit the sweet spot between gameplay and narrative, with the gameplay being interesting, without becoming too long or grindy. In contrast, I gave up on Tainted Grail for the gameplay being too grindy; and while I will finish our campaign of Familiar Tales next year, the gameplay of that one felt a bit too easy and trivial for me. Outside of campaign games, I discovered the joys of playing some of the crunchier single-session board games, with my favorite there in 2024 being Dune: Imperium. I also played an implementation of that as a computer game.

On the PC, my game of the year 2024 was Millennia, which I played for 138 hours. I wouldn't say it is as good a 4X game as Age of Wonders 4, but AOW4 came out in 2023, and I played it less in 2024 (although the Steam Replay still says it came second place). The main problem that Millennia has, is that it is ugly, but one gets used to that after some playing. Underneath the ugly hood, it is a very solid 4X game, with a good amount of replayability, improved further by the DLCs. An honorable mention goes to Drova: Forsaken Kin, an indie RPG which took me just under 30 hours to play through, but I enjoyed it.

I played very little on the console in 2024, but the about 100 hours of that this year were taken up by Unicorn Overlord, which thus by default becomes my console game of the year. For a tactical JRPG, it has a rather unique combat system, which turned out to be more fun than I would have thought. And like Drova, this was one of the games that didn't outstay its welcome, and I managed to actually finish it before running out of fun.

This is where a fundamental difference between Baldur's Gate 3 as a computer game and classic Dungeons & Dragons as a pen & paper game appears. I've been playing D&D for over 40 years, from first edition to fifth edition, and would say that D&D has infinite replayability. Some of my favorite campaigns, for example Ravenloft, I played several times as a DM with different groups, and even that didn't diminish the replayability. The core reason for that is that in D&D the campaign main story is only ever a background. The really interesting stuff is in the emergent stories and roleplaying of the individual characters.

Larian Studios put more effort than most other game studios into the stories of the characters in Baldur's Gate 3, including some range of choices and variations in interactions between them. But even they can only do so much. I can't replay Baldur's Gate 3 with a completely new set of companions whose story I don't know. For any given companion I might be able to make one major different choice, but I already know that this doesn't change anything in the main story, and just results in a minor variation of the epilogue you see at the end.

The most significant choice I can make about a companion is not picking him up. On replaying, I basically have the choice between going through a lot of same or similar dialogues with for example Gale again, or simply never letting him join the party. You can play with 4 custom characters, or get hirelings from Withers. The only Origin character you can't totally avoid is Shadowheart, as her story is so closely related to main events of the story that the game forces you at some point to add her at least to your camp. Thus one possible way I see to replay Baldur's Gate 3 for me would be playing Shadowheart as an Origin character, but then choose 3 custom characters to make up the rest of the party, and never let anybody else join. The obvious downside to that idea is that it would result in a much story-poorer game. There would be a lot fewer dialogues and cut scenes. And some parts of the story would simply still be there, but lack believable motivation to pursue: Why go after Cazador if you never met Astorion?

And that is where I am with my thoughts on further replayability of Baldur's Gate 3: A choice between playing through the same companion stories again with minor variations, or skipping those companion stories and playing a version of Baldur's Gate 3 that lacks much of what made the game such a success. That contrasts with the only other 5th edition D&D game I know, Solasta: Crown of the Magister. Solasta has several DLCs, one of which, Lost Valley, offers a completely new level 1 to 12 campaign. That is obviously only possible because Solasta had a much smaller budget and there weren't so many millions invested in NPC motion capture and voice acting. But the advantages for replayability are obvious. And Solasta 2 is coming out in 2025 already, while we will have to wait many more years for the next Larian game. Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the best computer role-playing game ever, but it is not as if that didn't come with a few downsides.

In the last three presidential elections, from 2016 to 2024, the pollsters whose job it is to predict election results from opinion polls noticed a trend: More people voted for Trump than had said that they would vote for Trump. In other words, a lot of people weren't comfortable saying to a stranger that they would vote for Trump, presumably because they knew that what Trump was saying was way out of the Overton window of acceptable public discourse, but then secretly agreed with him anyway and voted for him. Thus some pollsters giving Hillary Clinton a 99% chance of winning the 2016 election, which obviously went spectacularly wrong for the pollsters.

But elections are only one aspect of this. The gap between the public and the private window can appear wherever people have the opportunity to express their opinions secretly. One example is social media platforms that measure people's opinions by what they click on or which direction they swipe in. And while the public discourse has more or less eliminated sexism and has a promoted positive body image for people that don't have a perfect body, the results from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Tinder are just the opposite: With their clicks and swipes young people confirm a preference for a very traditional view of what is beautiful or attractive. And because the algorithm promotes what is actually popular, not what is politically correct, we end up with a bunch of female influencers all looking like porn stars. The result for men isn't any less sexist and outside the Overton window of public discourse: Muscles and expressions of wealth are popular, while soft and caring men are not. What people think and what they say they think is clearly different. And you can't even blame the boomers for that, they don't hang out these platforms.

In gaming the most visible example of this was the failed boycott of Hogwarts Legacy. The activists managed at least in part to dominate the public discourse and shout down anybody who argued against a boycott. But that clearly didn't influence the secret buying decisions of people very much. People felt that they weren't allowed to say that they thought the game wasn't transphobic, but had no qualms about buying it.

Both politicians and companies frequently adjust their policies to what they perceive the current Overton window of acceptability is. So the problem of a gap between a public Overton window and a secret window of actual acceptability isn't just the hypocrisy; it is the danger of politicians and companies misreading the public discourse and deciding on policies that aren't actually publicly acceptable. Anheuser-Busch InBev isn't "woke", their actual values are purely capitalistic; they just misjudged the Overton window of public acceptance and walked right into the Bud Light boycott disaster. On climate change and environmentalism, one study found that 88% of customers publicly expressed a preference for sustainable packaging and the like, while in reality only 25% of them let that affect their purchasing decisions; which explains the sales numbers of companies like Temu and Shein, which are everything but good for the planet. Many left of center parties in developed countries from Canada to Europe are currently waking up to the reality that they misread the public acceptance of migration and asylum policies. Far-right parties have been increasingly successful in elections in Europe, because they were simply better at understanding what people really thought about that.

In the end all of this results in a hollow victory for social justice and other left-wing causes. It doesn't help if you are in control of the public discourse, but have left behind the "hearts and minds" of the majority. According to The Atlantic, the illiberal political correctness and cancel culture is now in decline. The idea that if we eliminate sexism, racism, and whateverism from public discourse, the attitudes of people would follow, has been shown as wrong. Instead politicians from the Democrats have been heard to change their tune after the election on social justice issues like trans rights, trying to get more in touch with what voters are really thinking and saying things they wouldn't have said before. In my opinion it would be better if there was no gap between the two windows, because that gap has been shown to be unhelpful in actually changing people's behavior for the better. Shouting somebody down isn't the same thing as changing their mind.

This playthrough was with a bard as main character, and I have a strong impression that this might be optimal from a pure min-maxing perspective. Over the course of the game there are a huge number of of skill checks, but they are very unevenly distributed. Lockpicking and trap disarming on the dexterity side, and persuasion/deception/intimidation on the charisma side together are well over 80% of all skill checks. The bard being good at both of these sides is a good choice, also because you don't have to constantly switch which character is triggering the dialogues.

Over the whole game, what I liked most was the character progression and evolving tactical combat options that went with it. It isn't the fault of Larian if that breaks down a bit at the end, I feel exactly the same about any other Dungeons & Dragons campaign, digital or pen & paper. At level 12, the cap for BG3, your characters already have a number of "I win" buttons they can press in combat. I did a number of the final fights in Act III, which were supposed to be hard, hiding under a globe of invulnerability, which made these fights relatively easy. Also, within every level, after some experimentation one finds that some spells are strictly better than others, which leads to them being used repeatedly. I am kind of happy that the next Larian game will not be D&D-based, because it allows for a better balance of spells and hopefully a better end-game progression.

That there is some sort of anomaly here becomes obvious when you look at other things you could buy on credit: Buying a car or anything else on credit does not help you to accumulate wealth, just the opposite. What is remarkable about housing is that by the time you paid of your mortgage, you own *more* value than you paid in, despite having paid a good chunk of interest to a bank. Few people understand why that is so. There is a very simplistic and wrong explanation many people believe, which is that the mortgage rates are fundamentally paid by the rent saved when living in your own home. Well, buying a car on credit saves you from renting a car, but that still doesn't produce wealth. In reality, buying a house with a mortgage creates wealth for two reasons: It forces people to save more money than they would have done otherwise, and the value of the house rises faster than inflation.

The first factor, forced saving, is more psychological. If you look at information about the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement, you'll realize that a high saving rate accumulates wealth even without including a house or a mortgage. But most people find it very difficult to save let's say 30% of their income. It is psychologically a lot easier to take out a mortgage and be forced to pay 30% of your income as monthly mortgage payments.

The really weird factor is the fact that house prices rise faster than inflation, in the USA by 2.4 times since the 1960s, and by similar amounts elsewhere. So, not only did mortgages force people to save a lot of their income, those savings also went into a highly profitable asset class, "safe as houses". That is how wealth is created: Save a lot of money, and invest it into something with a good yield. This clearly worked for the two thirds of the population that now own their houses in many developed nations.

Pretty much all information you can find about wealth creation by housing ends here. A happy story that has worked remarkably well for a large chunk of population for 8 decades. Very few people ask the next questions: Where exactly does the created wealth come from, and is this sustainable?

The answers to these question are a less happy story. If you think of it, a house being worth much more now than when the owner bought it 30 years ago is not an actual creation of wealth. The house is still the same, and the intrinsic value of the house to its owner as providing shelter is also still the same. The only thing that has changed is the market value, which depends on supply and demand. The house is worth a lot, because all over the developed world there are too few houses, and the people who don't own one yet would like to have one. Ultimately a rising market value of housing is a redistribution of money from the people who will buy a house in the future to those who already own one. Which is exactly why you can read everywhere about a generational conflict between the house owning older generations and the not-yet-house-owning younger generation.

If the price of houses doubled next year, it would be called a housing crisis, because many people who now don't own a house would never be able to afford one. If the price of houses halved next year, it would be called a housing crisis, because so many people would feel poorer that they would reduce their spending and cause a recession. There is no "good" direction into which housing prices can evolve. There are two large populations, the housing haves and the housing have-nots, and a shift in market values redistributes wealth between these two populations, without actually creating new wealth. It's a zero sum game. And right now the balance is very much to the side of the house owners. Which is politically convenient, because they are the majority, so politicians aren't likely to want a crash of house prices.

Which brings us to our second question, sustainability. If the price of houses outpaced inflation by a factor of 2 or more over the last 60 years, can it do that again? The answer is clearly: No. We are talking 30% saving rates for a 30-year mortgage already for the past. There simply aren't many more years between the time somebody buys his house and the time he retires. And extreme savings rates would not only mean a very frugal lifestyle for those families, but also a lack of consumer spending for everything else other than housing, seriously hurting the wider economy. Prices are determined by the law of supply and demand, and for a mass market product like houses, the demand is limited by what the average family can possibly spend, it can't grow forever faster than household income. And political pressure is growing everywhere, at some point governments need to step in to increase the supply of affordable housing, and that will exert a downward pressure on house prices.

The best advice for the last 80 years on how to save for retirement and accumulate wealth was to take out a mortgage and buy a house. There is no guarantee that this advice is still valid. If something can't possibly grow forever, at some point it will stop. And if you buy a house now, and in 30 years when you have paid back the mortgage the house is worth the same or less than today, you won't have accumulated much wealth. The creation of wealth by housing was an illusion, and at some point that illusion must shatter.

Now part of this is certainly that I like turn-based games and fantasy more than real-time games and science-fiction. But the other effect is that Baldur's Gate 3 is such a good game, way above the quality of other games, that it becomes hard for other games to compete. It is the black hole of role-playing games, likely to suck you back in if you get too close.

Baldur's Gate 3 is currently at patch 7, and the improvements, especially to the third act are noticeable. Mod support is great, even if those mods currently just change rules of the game, and don't add completely new, player-written scenarios to the game. Patch 8 has been announced for next year, hopefully early next year, and I am looking forward to trying one of the new subclasses, the hexblade Warlock. So I am not really close to escaping the clutches of Baldur's Gate 3.

And I am not alone. 15 months after release, Baldur's Gate 3 still gets 90,000 concurrent players. There have been a number of triple-A game releases this year that didn't even get that many players on release. Larian's pre-tax profit for 2023 was €249 million, on €427 million of revenue, and I am pretty certain that their financial year 2024 wasn't bad either. Still, from what I hear the game industry is more in a "this is impossible to reproduce" mood, rather than "we should make a game like that". Which is a pity, because Larian Studios, even with all that money, will need years to make their next big role-playing game.

I am subscribed to the Epic Discord server for their free games, so every Thursday I get a message which game is free this week. Having paid full price for Return to Moria, it was of course slightly annoying to see that the game is free now. But on the other hand, I played Return to Moria for 55 hours, and enjoyed it. And that was at release, where there were still a few bugs, while now the game is at patch version 1.3.4. and probably in better technical shape.

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is a procedurally generated "open world" survival crafting game, in which the "open world" consists of the mines of Moria. You play a dwarf, and the game involves a lot of digging, rather than walking over an open landscape. But the theme is very well done, and if you like survival crafting games like Valheim, this is certainly worth checking out. Especially when you can get it for free.

So the dev stream came and went, and the only really good news was that the patch was released directly at the end of the stream, no more waiting. But personally I found the patch notes disappointing, as they basically changed nothing to gameplay. No NG+, no official 3rd person mode (which exists as a mod). Instead we get more cosmetic options for character creation, repainting cars, and an improved photo mode.

Well, I'll try the game out anyway, I doubt it will get much better. They fixed Cyberpunk 2077, but the redemption story still isn't as impressive as No Man's Sky. I just hope they improved the steering of cars enough that I can actually drive them, as I suck at driving games, especially when using a keyboard.