Tobold's Blog

Sunday, December 08, 2024

Is morality absolute or relative?

A man was murdered in New York. As he was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, his company posted an obituary on Facebook. That obituary collected over 90,000 laughing emoji reactions compared to only 2,000 sad emojis, before the company limited who could comment on it. That isn't exactly a new thing; for example the death of Henry Kissinger in 2023 or the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 caused street celebrations. But whether you believe in heaven and hell, or in karmic justice, or in secular humanism, most people have a compass for what behavior is morally good or bad; and celebrating somebody else's death is generally considered bad. The moral justification for cheering at somebody's murder or death is not that it is good, but that it is "less bad" than whatever the dead person has done.

Anybody criticizing a morally bad behavior these days is being met with a "but what about ...?" response to deflect that criticism. This whataboutism is an exercise in relativisation. But what about a healthcare company denying coverage for somebody's chemotherapy? Surely cheering about a murder is less bad than that? Surely harassing a random Jewish student in the USA is less bad than what Israel does in Gaza? Surely sending bomb threats and swatting Trump cabinet picks is less bad than what those people will do to the country, or less bad than January 6th?

There are a couple of major flaws with the concept of relative morality. First of all there is no universal scale of what act is "more good" or "more bad" than another act. It is relatively easy to have a common understanding of what is good and what is bad, and even in that discussion you could have some disagreements about borderline cases. But it is nearly impossible to determine whether jaywalking is morally more or less bad than littering. Moral philosophy completely breaks down if you try to argue that Israel would have been good if they had killed one less Palestinian than Hamas had killed Israelis, everything would have been fine if they had killed the exact same number of people, and Israel is bad because they killed more. The other big problem about whataboutism is the idea of guilt by association, or inherited guilt. Everybody agrees that slavery in the USA was a morally bad thing, but how much does that justify doing morally bad things to white people a century and a half later?

It seems that if you are sufficiently creative with your arguments, with relative morality you can morally justify just about any act by linking it to some long past greater evil. Personally, I don't think that works. I believe that deep down the people who cheered the murder of the healthcare CEO know that it was a morally reprehensible thing to do. Does anybody really believe that companies will start to make more customer-friendly decisions if we just make murdering CEOs for bad company behavior common enough? If your value system tells you that you should strive to be good, you should strive to be good on an absolute scale, not just "less bad" than somebody else.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Saturday, December 07, 2024

Watching rather than playing

Gamespot tells of a research report that shows that gamers today spend more time watching streams and videos about games than they do actually playing those games. That rang particularly true for myself, because I am not only playing video games but also board games. Even in a good week I don't play more than 10 hours of board games, due to the difficulty of getting people around a table. I watch more than 10 hours of videos on board games per week. I'm not sure how my balance is exactly for video games, but it is possible that I watch at least as much in streams and videos than I play myself, depending on the week and the games I am currently interested in.

The report goes on to talk about the "untapped potential for game publishers to bring video content inside their own ecosystem". I do think that is a bad idea. I remember when I could watch all sorts of content from other companies on Netflix, but then all the other companies made their own streaming service and removed their content from Netflix. I refused to subscribe to a dozen different streaming services, while others simply weren't available internationally, and as a consequence simply stopped watching content from the companies I wasn't subscribed to. The last thing I want is an EAStream service where all streams and videos for EA games are, and an UbiStream service where all the Ubisoft content is, etc. ad infinitum for far too many game companies. Not only would it be very hard for game companies to get people to pay for such services, when YouTube and Twitch are "free" (with advertising). It would also make it much harder to find videos and streams; I don't see how the game companies could stop content creators to still make YouTube videos and Twitch streams, and content would be scattered over too many platforms.

I think a better conclusion from this report is for game companies to offer better integration of YouTube and Twitch. I have already seen a few smaller games with Twitch integration, where for example at a dialogue choice that choice can be transformed with the press of a button into a Twitch poll, with options of whether the streamer is obliged or not to abide by the poll results. Making it easier for content creators to stream your game ultimately promotes your game and increases sales.

My opinion on streams and videos about video games is in a way related to the kind of video games I like: For the 4X, or strategy and tactics games, or role-playing games, there is huge added value in the comments that the streamer makes while playing. A content creator just playing without talking for such a game has much less value to me, although I can understand why when streaming an action game there isn't much time for comments and detailed explanations of what the streamer is doing. I never watched a long video series with somebody playing Baldur's Gate 3, because I simply haven't found a content creator who intelligently describes his thoughts and tactics while playing. (If you know of such a video series, please let me know!) On Twitch and YouTube I often search for the content creator first, and see what my favorite streamers are playing, rather than searching for a game. Which is why a streaming service exclusive to a specific game company and their games wouldn't really work for me.

While a game stream without the comments of a streamer is a lot less interesting to watch, adding a well-known content creator as streamer would be risky for game companies. The history of Twitch is full of streamers who at some point were so blinded by their glory that they started to behave inappropriately, and ended up being cancelled. On the other hand, I doubt many people would be interested in a EAStream service with a EA company employee as a commenter, toeing the company line on everything he says. The trust we have in content creators (rather than game journalists) is often because we know that through the revenue on the platform (especially Twitch) they earn a lot more than what a sponsorship deal is worth, and thus have the financial freedom to give their honest opinion about a game. But that trust also means that a sponsorship of a Twitch stream or YouTube video is a rather good deal for game companies, because it is cheaper than many other forms of advertising, while being more targeted and having a higher impact.

So, yeah, game companies should absolutely be aware of people watching a lot of game streams and use that to promote their games. But trying to compete with the existing platforms and capture subscription and advertising revenues isn't going to work.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Friday, December 06, 2024

Exiling myself

Today is early access release of Path of Exile 2. I would call it a Diablo-clone, if it wasn't so obvious that the clone has surpassed the original. The game is highly anticipated, because all we know indicates that PoE2 is a lot better game than Diablo 4. There is already a narrative out there asking why mid-sized studios these days make better games than the much bigger studios who are famous for a genre. But I won't be joining the party at this point in time.

I am no stranger to the idea that if you want to play a game at release, you often have to pay more than if you buy the same game a year later. But I feel that Path of Exile 2 pushes that concept over the top: If you want to play the early access version, which is missing half of the acts, you have to pay at least $30, and options to pay $60 or even up to $480 are also available. But if you wait for the finished game, the game is free to play. Do I want a half-finished game for $30, or do I prefer a finished game for $0? I think I'll just wait.

Of course the fans will tell me that all the supporter packs options come with various in-game currency and cosmetic goodies. I've certainly paid $30 and more for free to play games, so I understand that if you would be likely to do that anyway because this is your kind of game, you might as well get early access with that. But I am not the world's greatest fan for ARPGs. I only played Diablo IV as a free trial. I paid $5 for a battle pass in Diablo Immortal, but wasn't really convinced. I don't enjoy action combat as much as I enjoy turn-based combat, and not enjoying combat is a killer when the fundamentals of a game involve so much grinding. The developer studio is called Grinding Gear for a reason.

I don't think I would dislike Path of Exile 2. I can see me playing through the campaign once on full release, just for fun. But then I'd be playing acts 1 to 6, instead of playing acts 1 to 3 twice. And even then I don't see me participating in endgame activities. There is a reason I dropped the "MMORPG" from the title of my blog. I've been there, done that.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link (7) comments

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Greedflation, Cheapflation, and the Vibecession

What does it mean to say that an economy is "good" or "bad"? The problem here are that you can use different economic indicators, and come up with different results. Did you hear that the German economy is struggling? Well, yesterday the German main stock index, DAX, broke a record of 20,000 for the first time in history. Is that economy "good" or "bad"? And how about the US economy, where very different views of how good or bad the economy is had a massive impact on the election results?

Economies are large and complex systems. You can in various ways look at smaller parts of them, and for example divide an economy in different groups. It is obvious that a high on the stock market is good for people who own a lot of shares, but a lot less helpful for other people who don't own any shares. One big impact on economies over the last 4 years was inflation, and I would argue that it hit different groups in very different ways.

Imagine you own a company and in an environment of general inflation you need to set the prices for the goods you produce. You could raise prices by less than what the inflation of your input costs are, but then your profits would go down. You could try to keep exactly the same profit margin. Or you could say that if you are raising prices anyway, better to raise them by more than the cost, so your profits increase, and you have some more time before you need to raise prices again. The general observation over the last few years, visible by publicly traded companies having to state their profits, is that most companies went for increasing prices over costs, increasing their profit margins. Some people call that greedflation, although greed is probably only part of that business decision.

In any case, if a lot of companies increase their profit margins, these companies and the stock market can very well have a rather positive outlook on the economy. While for the other side, the consumers for who the wages rose more slowly than inflation, the economy in the very same situation looks rather bad. This time we also observed that cheaper goods had higher price increases than expensive goods, which obviously hits low- to medium-income households even harder. That has been called cheapflation, although others use the same term for the effect if a company lowers quality instead of raising prices.

There are also psychological factors at work. If you have both a 10% salary increase and a 10% increase in grocery prices, it still feels bad, although mathematically you aren't any worse off. Grocery prices are more visible, and while people feel they "deserved" that salary increase, rising prices in the supermarket feel more like a hardship, an external, unfair pressure. All of these factors together resulted in a vibecession, a situation where, real or imagined, people feel that the economy is bad, even if most economic indicators are saying it is good.

The fundamental problem is that much of this is a zero sum game: Consumers, and especially American consumers, tend to spend close to 100% of their income. There is very little saving, and while some people spend more than they earn, that reaches an obvious limit when your credit card is maxed out. If companies raise prices more than they raise wages, the wage-earners soon have to buy less. Thus, when corrected for inflation, GDP drops. To have GDP growth, wages need to rise faster than prices. Shifting money from the poor to the rich is bad for the economy, because rich people save more, and thus spend less of the money than the poor people would have.

Funnily enough, I live in the country which over the last 4 years had the fewest problems with people being unhappy about inflation: Belgium. In Belgium both salaries and pensions are automatically inflation-adjusted. That doesn't make employers very happy, because whenever they raise prices, the wages they have to pay automatically rise in tandem. But as a result the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, in Belgium is just 26, which is extremely low, while the USA has it at 41, on the high end of the scale. Belgium also is the 3rd highest country in median wealth per adult, beating the USA by $250,000 to $108,000. Low inequality over a long time leads to more people with money in the bank, and lower social unrest. You might not like living here if you are part of the population that actually profits from inequality, but for the rest of us it is rather nice here.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Board game evolution

In my previous post I talked about Brass: Birmingham, the most highly rated game on BGG. How did the game get there? Well, the original game Brass, published in 2007, was relatively ugly; a typical product of a game designer who had great gameplay ideas, but not the marketing experience or means to hire artists to make his game more attractive. Another company, Roxley Games, saw the potential and came to an agreement with the original author of the game, Martin Wallace. They launched a Kickstarter in 2017 which resulted in the 2018 release of two new versions of Brass: One being Brass: Lancashire, with only minor rule changes to the original Brass, but in a much prettier version. The other being Brass: Birmingham, which lists two more designers, and has the same core game rules with a number of changes and additions. It is that evolved version Birmingham which ranks considerably higher than the original game, with or without the Lancashire in the title.

This is the happy version of such an evolution of a board game. It doesn't always work out like that. I recently bought a game that was recommended by some content creators on YouTube called Joyride: Survival of the Fastest. And now there is a huge discussion about the game, because Joyride is an evolution of an older game called Powerboats. The listed designer of Joyride had contacted the designer of Powerboats years ago, and even got a copy of the game from him, but the two sides apparently had been unable to agree on contract terms. But as you can't actually copyright game concepts and rules, the new company was able to make their game with a new theme (car racing instead of boat racing) and some changes and additions to the rules without being legally in the wrong. Different people have different opinions about whether this is morally wrong.

Despite some review bombing by people who are upset about the game rules being "stolen", Joyride still ranks a lot higher than Powerboats on BGG. Powerboats wasn't a great success, and is basically unavailable today. The physical availability of older board games makes this issue somewhat different than for older video games: If somebody sees a more or less dead older board game and evolves it into something successful, isn't he doing the players a favor? The upset crowd on the internet speaks about the design being "stolen", but if the old game isn't even produced anymore, where is the financial loss to the original developers? They *could* have made an improved version of the game themselves, but chose not to (or in this case evolved the game into something else, equally unsuccessful). So, somebody else did. The reason why the copyright laws have been designed to allow this, and you can't protect gameplay concepts and rules, is exactly that: Lawmakers didn't want somebody owning an idea, not using it, but preventing others from evolving it. I understand the original designer making his upset post on BGG and kicking off a shitstorm. It would obviously have been better if the original designer and the guy with the ideas for improvements could have come to a financial agreement. But people tend to overvalue the "idea" and underestimate the impact of the execution on the success of such a project. If Joyride really was the same game as Powerboats, then why is Joyride so much more successful?

Another different case of board game evolution is a game that had its crowdfunding campaign started yesterday: Tales of the Arabian Nights 40th Anniversary Edition. I looked at it, because I still own the original game from 1985, and my wife and me quite liked to play that together, even if the game is a bit random and lacks player agency. Obviously the 2025 version is prettier than the 1985 version, but the "main" change to the rules listed on top of the "what's new" section is the removal of gender restrictions for romance. There have been some minor changes and additions, but with much of the game being about the stories in the Book of Tales, and those not having changed much, there is very little reason for me to buy the updated version. I also found the $100 price tag, which with VAT and shipping ends up being $150 for me, to be overpriced. $80 buys me Tales of Arthurian Knights, a game with the basically same rules, but stories that are totally new to me. If I compare other crowdfunding games with a $100 price tag, the "what's in the box" section of those other games looks a lot more impressive, e.g. Avalon: The Riven Veil, which I backed. I would have backed Tales of the Arabian Nights if it had offered modern features like Forteller voice narration, or much improved player agency in evolved rules, but for this price tag it seemed to me that there wasn't enough evolution here to justify me buying this again.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 9:49 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, December 03, 2024

The best game in the world

According to BoardGameGeek, Brass: Birmingham is the best board game in the world. So when I was looking for a present for a board gamer friend, who happens to like complex Euro games, this seemed a pretty safe bet. Not that this was a totally selfless gift, it's best to give games that one would also like to play. So, tomorrow at our regular board game night, I should be able to play Brass: Birmingham for the very first time. And that is always a bit of a problem with game that has a weight score just under 4 on BGG: It is rather likely to feel completely lost in the first game. Not necessarily because the rules are hard to understand, but more like your first game of chess: Even if you know all the rules, the huge amount of possibilities is rather overwhelming.

So I watched a few videos on YouTube on how to play, and what the basic strategies are. And then I discovered that there was a version of Brass: Birmingham on Steam, albeit not highly rated. The Steam version is apparently abandoned, with the last update from April 2022. The multiplayer online component is said by the reviewers to be not working, while other reviewers say that the AI opponents are not very good. But for €16 and using it just to get comfortable with the rules and basic strategies, that seemed sufficient.

I'm glad I tried the computer version, because it quickly taught me one thing: Having read the rules *and* watched a rules video wasn't sufficient. I constantly wanted to do things, which the computer then told me I wasn't allowed to. Sometimes I hadn't looked closely enough, for example trying to build a canal boat on a connection that was rail only. In other cases I had overlooked a rule, e.g. not being able to build more than once per city in the canal era. And the rule I had the hardest time getting into my head is that to build anything with coal, you need a connection to a market, a condition that doesn't apply to iron and beer. It took me a game or two until I had really internalized all the rules of the game, and now I can look out during our physical board game evening that others don't fall into the same pitfalls and play it wrong.

Playing against a mediocre AI only gets you so far. But that is okay. My goal was only to be reasonably competent. I don't know who I will be playing with, and whether some of them already know the game; but many people at our board game nights are experienced Euro gamers, who are quick to learn and play well even on a first try. The plan is to not look stupid, and I think I will be able to manage that. I can see why the community on BoardGameGeek likes this game, the various possible strategies seem well balanced, and one needs to look at the cards and the board to make tactical decisions, beyond some basic strategy. "The best game of the world" for anyone obviously depends a lot on personal preferences and the circumstances of the game group. But for people who like complex Euro games, this appears to be a rather good choice.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 4:06 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Sunday, December 01, 2024

I don't know

I would ask my readers to mentally add "in my opinion" to every phrase I write on this blog. I don't do it myself, because it would wreak havoc with my writing style. But whether it is about video games, board games, social trends, economics, or politics, the fundamental truth is always that I do not know everything. There are things I believe that are true, like climate change. There are values that I think are important, like tolerance and honesty. And there are complex system relationships that I think I understood, like economies being "trickle up" rather than "trickle down". But for none of these beliefs I have absolute proof or absolute certainty. Which is great, because it enables me to openly discuss these things, and accept that other people might think differently.

Beyond the field of hard sciences, I have serious doubts whether absolute truths can even exist. As soon as you believe in more than one value, situations can arise where two values clash with each other. I used to live in a big city, near a quarter with a large Muslim population. And while I believe in religious freedom, it was hard for that not to clash with my feminists belief when seeing a woman in a burqa walking 3 steps behind her husband wearing jeans and T-shirt. Certain religious beliefs are simply not compatible with certain modern social beliefs.

On this blog I am constantly getting into trouble because I do not believe that it is possible for one political side to be 100% right, and the other side to be 100% wrong. One doesn't have to be a Trump supporter or be in favor of the bunch of bozos he is currently appointing to his cabinet to admit that left-wing governments have a tendency towards regulatory overreach, and that pruning some aspects of certain federal agencies is probably helpful (not that I think that the bozos will do a good job of it). Sometimes to a certain degree a part of the conflicting statements of both sides happen to be both true. For example the left claims that Trump committed a range of felonies and that the lawsuits against him are a consequence of that, while the right claims that the lawsuits are politically motivated. I think it is both, with the substance of the lawsuits being judicial, but much of the timing (from all the lawsuits starting in 2023 to the recent abandonments after the election) being political. That is not some strained attempt at balance through bothsideism, but the admission that the people on both sides are human, and thus fallible. If I had been able to vote, I would have voted Democrat, but that doesn't mean it is helpful to gloss over the failings of the left. I think the Democrats would have a much improved chance of winning elections if they would be more open to listening to criticism, and would be less certain of how specific demographics "must" vote for them.

There is a well-known cognitive bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which leads to people being most confident in knowing something when they only have very little knowledge of the subject matter. Knowing more leads to the insight that things are complicated and not so black & white. One needs to be a real professional expert in a subject matter to reach the same level of confidence of somebody who knows very little. I get the impression that the high degree of certitude that people express their opinions with online is more likely to be due to the lower end of the spectrum, rather than them being world-class experts. And when discussing issues that are in the cultural, social, or political domain, many beliefs are based more on emotions rather than knowledge. Online there is a good amount of virtue signaling going on, which makes it even more difficult for people to admit that they aren't 100% certain of something. But without that admission, sensible discussion is impossible. Moral superiority posturing leads to discussions drifting ever further towards the extremes, rather than to compromises that could be actual solutions to a problem.

In a way I envy Americans for having only two political choices. I will have to vote in Germany in three months, and there are 6 political parties big enough to possibly reach the 5% minimum vote requirement to enter parliament. Just like in the USA, people vote based on a mix of what a party program actually says, how much sympathy they have for a candidate, and as how efficient a party was perceived when last in power. And these criteria can contradict each other, for example I do agree with many of the positions of the Green party program on the environment, but don't like the Green's candidate having launched 800 defamation lawsuits against people who called him an idiot on X, nor do I think the party was especially efficient at tackling climate change in a socially acceptable way when in government. Knowing that there probably won't be any party with an absolute majority, and having to consider how to vote strategically for a coalition that works doesn't make this vote any easier. The previous coalition was mostly famous for internal strife, and one of the parties just scored a huge own goal by basically confirming through a leaked internal document that this was mostly their doing. On the positive side, maybe there are now only 5 parties left that could get into parliament. Nils Bohr is quoted saying "prediction is difficult, especially about the future". Admitting that I don't know which of my voting options will result in the best outcome for me and my country unfortunately isn't helpful in making that choice.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:57 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Friday, November 29, 2024

PvP as easy mode for board games

I was playing Endeavor: Deep Sea this week at my board game night, one of the "hot" games at the Essen Spiel. When starting this game, you are given the option of whether you want to play it competitively or cooperatively. We played in cooperative mode, and that turned out to be a lot harder. You see, in the typical Euro board game in which you win by collecting the most victory points, there is no fail condition. Somebody always has the most points, even if he played badly, he just has to play relatively less badly than the others.

In cooperative mode in Endeavor you have 7 goals, and need to fulfill at least 4 of them for the most minor of victories. We barely just managed that. That made the game a lot more interesting. In cooperative mode there are goal cards and crisis cards that aren't even used in competitive play. The cooperative mode also leads to more player interaction, trying to coordinate to reach goals, which is absent in the competitive mode.

I think the addition of the cooperative mode to this board game was a really good idea. There are now far too many games in which every player collects points for himself in silence. Sometimes there is little interaction on the board, which turns the experience into a fully "multiplayer solo" game. But being with other people, in real life and around a table, in my opinion is one of attractions of playing a board game rather than a video game. It is good if the game somehow forces players to talk to each other.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 9:13 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

The future of search and Amazon

I had a pretty bad search experience on Amazon recently. I was trying to buy a PC monitor. I had studied various websites and videos with recommendations, and knew exactly the serial number of the monitor I wanted to buy. But when I entered even just the serial number, with no additional generic search term, Amazon showed me PC monitors of other brands. The one I wanted didn't even make it on the first page.

How does that happen? Well, companies can pay Amazon for specific search terms. If you are a company selling PC monitors, and you know that a lot of websites recommend a competitor's product, you can pay Amazon to redirect searches for that product towards your product. Amazon doesn't care whether the search term you paid them for actually describes your product, they only care how much money you give them. Theoretically Pepsi could pay Amazon so much money, that if somebody searches for Coca Cola, he would be shown Pepsi instead.

Paying companies like Amazon or Google for search terms makes them a lot of money, but of course destroys the quality of the search results even more than traditional search engine optimization does. People add "Reddit" to their Google searches, because without that, they'll only see paid-for results which don't actually correspond to what they were searching for.

The interesting question now is whether AI will make the situation even worse, or whether it will improve internet searches. The general trend of enshittification and need to recoup billions of investment in AI suggests that things could get even worse. But anybody who has ever used ChatGPT knows that an AI chatbot has a secret weapon that regular searches on Google or elsewhere don't have: Refining, which is asking a follow-up question that builds on the previous one. You ask a question, get an answer, and if there is something you don't like about the answer, you can add further specification. Like asking ChatGPT to write you a paragraph, and then telling it to rewrite it in a simpler style.

I would love something like this on Amazon. Amazon has a range of filters you can apply to search results, but those are far from covering everything. If you search Amazon for a "box", you can't for example limit the results by the size of the box. It is easy to see how AI could solve this problem. The question is whether Amazon or anybody else *wants* to solve the problem and provide you with better search results. On the one side, you could imagine an AI company that provides better searches than Google, or makes it easier to find a product than Amazon, to be able to compete with Google or Amazon. But if you give the customer what they want, instead of stuffing the option that is most profitable for you down their throat, how do you make money?

The quality of search results on Amazon is bad because of Amazon FBA, "fulfillment by Amazon", which enables anyone to use Amazon for dropshipping. You buy some cheap product in China, then sell it for some markup on Amazon, having slapped some added invented "brand name" onto it. Because this has been widely touted on the internet as a get rich quick scheme, for any given product there can be dozens of those invented brands, all selling exactly the same item. And you can get the exact same item even cheaper if you leave Amazon, and buy it directly from China via Temu. This is all very bad for the customer, but also bad for the competing dropshippers, who have to lower their prices constantly, and pay Amazon for search terms in order to be the one of many identical products that finally gets bought. Amazon makes more money by selling the search terms than they would make by cleaning up their store, removing all the dropshippers, and selling the item themselves. Amazon sometimes even uses a commingled inventory system, where all the identical items sold by different dropship "brands" are piled up together, and the customer gets a random one from the pile, regardless from which dropshipper he ordered. Which gets very weird if somebody adds a fake scam product to the commingled inventory, and somebody else's dropship operation gets bad ratings for the scam, because even Amazon can't tell anymore whose product they shipped. The quality degradation of a search on Amazon isn't intended, but clearly Amazon is willing to accept this disadvantage in order to keep selling search terms to the dropshippers.

Thus it could be said that the monetary value of a search is in the price difference between the actually cheapest option for a product and the inflated price of the product that the search result shows. While search *could* be better, regardless of whether that is by use of AI or by other improvements, it is not in the interest of the people that offer the search engines to make it better, as their profit increases the worse the search result is for the customer.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:58 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

Monday, November 25, 2024

Brecht's Solution

In 1953 there was an uprising in East Germany, which was violently suppressed with the help of Soviet tanks. Bertolt Brecht wrote a satirical poem about it, The Solution. It suggested to "dissolve the people and elect another". We must be at Marx's second repetition of history as farce, as the last US election has led to widespread criticism of the electorate by the left. If the people don't vote Democrat, then the people must be wrong. But that sort of criticism isn't limited to politics. It is also very present in gaming.

For example a developer of the failed first-person shooter Concord called his customers "a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it". It has become increasingly common for triple A games to have an embargo on content creators, and even on user reviews, so that on launch day only glowing reviews from friendly press is available. Compare the following two recent role-playing games: Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an 82 critics score on Metacritic, but only a 38 on customer reviews; Drova - Forsaken Kin has as 79 critics score, but a 89 on customer reviews. Developers always claim bad customer reviews are from "trolls" or "haters", but the big gaps between critics reviews and customer reviews happen exclusively for games with huge marketing budgets. On Veilguard, IGN bridged the gap by first releasing a glowing 9 out of 10 review, and then posting a second article, not marked as a review and with no review score, that listed everything they thought was wrong with the game and wasn't mentioned in the "review". Sales numbers tend to reflect customer review scores, not because the "trolls and haters" have an outsized influence, but because that is how good a game really is.

I think what we are seeing here, both in politics and gaming, is an elite that created their own echo chamber bubble with the help of the internet. When an election or game release forces the issue out of the bubble and into the general population, the reception comes as a surprise, as the bubble previously protected the elite from any real feedback. The current trend on left-leaning social media communities is cancelling the part of their families who voted Republican for Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday celebrations. People want back into their comfortable bubble, where everybody agrees with them. Why would Democrats want to engage with the wider population, listen to what people really thought about the previous administration, and spend the next 4 years improving their program to be more attractive next time, when instead they could just retreat for 4 years into their echo chambers and mutually stroke their moral superiority? Why would game developers want to go through the hassle of open beta testing and listening to actual player feedback, when it is so much more comfortable to listen only to the handful of "games journalists" that they paid to tell them how great they are?

The electorate is never wrong. The customer is never wrong. Dear Elite: If your intimate conviction that your political program is superior, that your game is superior, doesn't survive the contact with reality when stepping out of the bubble, you can't change reality. You don't get to dissolve the electorate or customer base. You should have stepped out of your bubble earlier, and seeked honest feedback, to change your product before it was too late.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:18 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

Friday, November 22, 2024

Avowing my price sensitivity

I was watching a preview video of Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's next big role-playing game, to be released in February 2025. Now I am not the biggest fan of Obsidian; I own both Pillars of Eternity games on Steam, but only played the first one for 16 hours, and the second one not at all. Pillars of Eternity II : Deadfire is on my list of games I want to play only since patch 5.0 added a turn-based mode. I simply never was a fan of the previous real-time combat of the series, and seeing Avowed being even more action-combat centric made it look not very interesting to me. Saw the first half of the video, and thought that this was a game that I would skip.

And then the content creator said a single phrase that changed my mind: Avowed will be on Game Pass on day one. Suddenly I was thinking, "Oh, I am going to play this!". While Game Pass isn't free, and has increased in price this year, I still consider it very good value for money in general, and have an ongoing subscription to it; so it kind of feels like playing Avowed for free, "no added cost", as opposed to buying the game for $70 on Steam.

I am not poor, and can afford buying $70 games. But this event still shows that I am somewhat price sensitive. Paying $70 for a game and then not liking it just feels bad, even if that $70 is not missing for rent money. On Game Pass, I can try out a game for free, and if I don't like it, it doesn't feel as bad as if I had bought it. It just feels a lot safer. That makes games that I am only borderline interested in a lot more attractive. I felt the same thing about Ara: History Untold, nice enough to play for free, but would have hated to have paid $60 for it.

Of course there is something like circular logic operating here. It feels as if I am playing the Game Pass games for free, while simultaneously me playing a lot of games that would cost $60-$70 on Game Pass justifies me paying €144 per year for the subscription. In the end, I am still paying $10 to $20 per game, depending on how many I try in a year. But the one thing it does for certain is removing that "should I buy this game?" decision process, and the possible regret connected to it.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Monday, November 18, 2024

News craziness

Through the miracle of the internet, I can follow US news media. In the past, I tended to avoid US media with a declared right-wing bias, like Fox News, because they were mostly spouting nonsense, as well as the most extreme left-wing sources, like MSNBC. As it is really hard to find a completely non-partisan news source in the USA, that left me mostly with moderately left-leaning news outlets and very few moderately right-leaning ones. Which, for many years, was okay. Yes, there was some bias, but I could filter that out. And at least these sources weren't outright making stuff up, like Fox News, OAN, or Newsmax. Unfortunately I find that even the moderately left-wing news channels are going increasingly crazy since the re-election of Trump. There are two main subjects that I find particularly galling: Disdain for voters, and crazy predictions of the doom to come.

Since the industrial revolution started in the early 19th century, most countries have a large population of people who make their living mostly from working for an employer. Whether you call them proletariat, working class, or middle class varies with time, country, and the person speaking. But there are some observations we can make about this class of people that mostly hold true both globally and over two centuries: There are a lot of them, they are leaning to the left in economic issues, but they are mostly conservative in social issues.

The US left strongly believes in identity politics, which pretty much completely replaced the older ideas of class politics. Thus Democrats believed that for example Latinos, or as they like to call them LatinX, would vote for them, based on their identity. That turned out to be not the case. In reality, working class hispanics acted more like any other working class population, rather than basing their vote on their hispanic identity. Especially Latino men flocked to Trump in large numbers. They didn't particularly like being called LatinX, and they didn't like illegal immigration, even if many of those new arrivals are also from Latin America. But even more importantly, they were more upset about the price of groceries than they were moved by the social arguments of the Democratic Party. Economic policies of the Biden administration, like student loan forgiveness, weren't very popular to people who didn't have a college degree in the first place, many of them from minorities.

While Democrats strongly appealed to women in their defence of abortion rights, they haven't been particularly nice or welcoming to men. Commenters from the left frequently use "cis hetero male" as a term of insult, and imply that all men are rapists and violent against women. It turns out that men generally don't like being insulted, and that a large majority of men is cis hetero. And that this holds true even for men who are Black, Latino, or from any other minority. The left-wing anti-men bias thus resulted in an estimated 10% gender gap, and 54% of men voting for Trump. I consider it possible that the Democrats got close to 100% of the transgender vote, but of course that doesn't amount to much, and several politicians of the Democratic Party are now back pedalling on transgender rights, realizing that it might have lost them more votes than won them.

All this to say that the US political left, and the Democrats, are increasingly a highly educated elite, detached from the working class population. They believed that because of their identity politics, minorities were somehow forced to vote for them. And now they frequently perceive the fact that the working class voted for Trump as a sort of betrayal. The disdain that many of these left-leaning media types feel towards the common man as a result of that "betrayal" is rather visible in the news commentaries. And I find that rather hard to watch. Some of the comments that left-leaning media made about minority groups that voted for Trump are actually racist, which is strange from the political side that says it wants to fight racism. And even more comments are anti-democratic, which is even stranger for the party that wanted to save democracy with this election. Note that the Republicans mostly fell for the same wrong assumptions of who would vote Democrat, and ended up making it harder for working class people to vote, which then ended up voting for them.

2024 was an election year in many countries, and it turns out that it was a terrible year for incumbents. Many working class people in rich countries were feeling that their government was handling immigration badly, with too many immigrants exerting economic pressure on the cost of affordable housing. It also turned out that regular people perceive the economy differently than economic indicators would suggest: Official core inflation numbers exclude volatile food and energy prices, as well as the cost of investment assets like housing; real people feel volatile food and energy prices more strongly, and also feel their increasing inability to buy a house very strongly. On the other hand, people have a tendency to believe that if they get a raise, it is due to having worked well, rather than just inflation. An economist would say that if you have 20% core inflation accumulated over the last few years, but your salary went up by 25%, you are better off than you were. Only, it doesn't feel like that to most people, which is why they often voted against the incumbents in elections this year.

There is of course a valid argument to be made that people who voted for Trump due to the inflation made a mistake. It is hard to predict how the coming years will play out, but at the very least it is obvious that an economic policy based on higher tariffs is more likely to push inflation up, rather than down. It remains to be seen in how far such a policy might increase working class jobs in America, rather than just shifting them away from China to other countries. But even this "error" of the electorate doesn't justify a left-leaning elite to treat working class voters like idiots. The Democrats could have explained the likely consequences of Trump's announced economic policies better.

Besides the disdain for voters who didn't vote as they "should have", I also find the general panic and doom mongering from the left difficult to watch. Weren't the crazies supposed to be on the right-wing channels? Now they are everywhere. Realistically speaking, people overestimate the power of government and the president, and they underestimate the power of the system, or what the right calls "the deep state". The deep state isn't a nefarious organization, directed by shadowy figures from the background. Rather it is a huge machine of administration that touches a large number of issues in people's lives. While in Scandinavian countries around 30% of the total workforce are public sector employees, in the USA the number is estimated to be around 15%, which is lower, but still around 24 million people. Running an organization of 25 million people is very difficult. Installing a layer of upper management for that organization which mostly consists of ideologically pure and loyal, but incompetent, clowns isn't going to help. The most likely prediction for the next 4 years is that the Trump administration will be shouting very loudly and not achieve very much at all. Bureaucrats everywhere have a fantastic super power to resist change, by simply not working or not prioritizing the change their superiors told them to implement.

Part of that is of course that Trump and other right-wing figures promised some stuff which is simply impossible. I had to laugh very hard when I saw that the one of the government agencies they propose to close down is the IRS. That could never happen. Since Reagan's "government is the problem" speech, many Republican administrations have claimed to want to diminish the state, while often engaging in policies that can only be described as "tax and spend". The US government has grown pretty much steadily over the last 4 decades, regardless of which party was in power, and even Reagan couldn't manage more than slow down that growth without reversing it. While it is possible that Trump manages to shut down the Department of Education, that would only result in the influence of the various states on education growing, resulting in more visibly "blue state schools" and "red state schools". The USA has 3.8 million teachers at elementary and secondary school level; most of them are progressive by nature, as you need to believe in community in order to accept a stressful and badly paid job like that. Firing every progressive teacher, replacing them by MAGA loyalists, and turning the whole US education system into a right-wing indoctrination machine is simply impossible. At most they can slightly diminish the left-wing indoctrination machine. Not that this machine was working all that well, 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, as well as 40% of women of that age. Which then resulted in Millennial Democrats insulting Gen Z on social media: “Gen Z gotta be the worst generation of all time. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t add, can’t fuck, can’t joke, can’t dance, can’t dress, can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t not elect a fascist conman.”. The left never realized how the viciousness resulting from their virtue signalling wasn't any better than the hate speech they accused the right of.

I don't want to give the impression that everything is fine. The incompetent flunkies of Trump will result in some damage to various institutions, and possibly trigger a global recession via a trade war. But both the hopes of the right wing and the fears of the left wing of change in America are mostly overblown. I wouldn't be surprised if even key policies, like Trump's "largest mass deportation plan" end up being fairly inefficient and small compared to the size of the illegal immigrant population. Just look at his previous term, where the "Trump wall" turned out to be mostly inefficient, and the Mexicans never paid for it. The biggest danger I see right now is that I will have to stop watching US news media, because half of them will spout lies about how efficient the administration is, while the other half will spout lies about how much of a danger the measures are.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:01 PM Permanent Link (11) comments

‹Older