Tobold's Blog
Thursday, January 16, 2025
 
Kingdom Legacy

Now this is a first for me: I bought a legacy solo card game (legacy in this case meaning that cards get altered or destroyed), played the game, and then bought the same game again to be able to play it again. The game is Kingdom Legacy, and the link goes directly to the webshop of the game company, as this game tends to be quickly sold out everywhere. They produced 5,000 copies in time for the Spiel Essen 2024, and sold out before the Spiel even opened.

Yes, I could have done some sorts of tricks, for example with card sleeves, to not alter the cards, and be able to play repeatedly with the same deck. But there is a certain fun to legacy game elements in board games, and I have enjoyed playing by the legacy rules in games like Charterstone or Clank! Legacy. My previous experience with legacy games was that by the time you are through with them, you don't want to restart anyway. Kingdom Legacy is special, in that it has both great replayability and those legacy elements, and that clashes somewhat. On the positive side, the base deck Feudal Kingdoms is only €12. And I'll think of some way to preserve my second copy for repeated play, now that I know the game.

You can also buy expansions for Kingdom Legacy, and a large expansion (Distant Lands) is available since recently, as well as two small expansions (Merchants and Adventures). Expansions are interesting here, because you don't modify your game from the start. Instead, you play the base game until the end, and then the expansion allows you to keep playing for longer with the kingdom you created up to then. You can use the expansions in any order, but I'll try the Merchants one first, due to the way the "purge" mechanic works when adding an expansion. The website of the game talks about other starter decks, called Northern Kingdoms and Desert Kingdoms, and I'm looking forward to trying those too. But according to what the dev said on BGG, those alternative starter decks won't come out before 2026, as 2025 is still dedicated to making expansions.

The basic idea of Kingdom Legacy is that a playing card has 4 possible orientations, and thus if you use both sides and print the upper and lower half in opposite direction, a single card can represent 4 different things. In many cases in Kingdom Legacy you get a basic version of a card, and then you can upgrade it up to 3 times by turning it either upside down, or backside to front. You start with a small deck, 10 cards, and in each turn you draw 4 cards, and you can use the resources on some of those cards to upgrade one of those cards. You can also draw more cards, 2 at a time. But as your turn ends when you do an upgrade, and your round ends when you run out of cards, your goal is to be as efficient as possible, and do as many upgrades as possible in each round. At the end of every round, you add 2 more cards to your deck, and the game ends when there are no more cards to add (thus the expansions allowing you to continue playing).

From this basic gameplay, a very interesting development of your deck, your "kingdom", evolves. Some cards have different upgrade paths. You can have choices to make: For example when bandits turn up in your kingdom, you could either destroy them with a sword resource, or in a more complicated way convert them into useful workers with a missionary. Permanent cards turn up, giving you goals to achieve, and victory points to gain, which you can then compare online. You tend to have fewer upgrades available in one round than there are cards you could upgrade, so depending on which cards you prioritize, your kingdom will look differently than the next one.

Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom is great fun. I might actually try to play this with my wife, even if it is a solo game. This also definitively is a game I might want to take with me when traveling, as it doesn't require a big playing surface. I do hope that the success of the game leads to it being reprinted in sufficient quantities for it to become easily available. That would make the legacy elements of the game less annoying.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025
 
Deconstructing narrative board games

I have two different gaming groups with which I am playing narrative campaign board games. Both are near the end of their respective campaigns. But one was more of a success than the other: Agemonia turned out to be the best narrative campaign board game that I have played yet. With the other group we were playing Familiar Tales, which has a very nice story, characters, and voice acting, but was a bit too simple, and lacking variety in its cards; that is understandable, as Familiar Tales only has one third of the price of Agemonia, but nevertheless annoying when you can't buy any new skills or items simply because you ran out of cards. But what exactly makes a narrative board game good, and how do I choose the next games for my two groups? Time for some deconstruction of the elements of narrative board games.

Starting with the obvious, narrative campaign board games are to some degree driven by their story. One campaign game I disliked so much I immediately resold it was Bardsung, in which the story was extremely flimsy, and just barely enough to tell the players why they should go into a dungeon. In games with a longer and better story, the question remains how exactly that story is told to the players. Especially when playing with more than 2 players, having to read a lot of text aloud can become rather tiring quickly, and not every board gamer is actually good at reading text. What I do like in Agemonia and Familiar Tales is that they both have an app or website on which you can have the story read to you by professional voice actors. Some games have outsourced that voice acting to Forteller Games, and that likewise works quite well. For me it is always a plus on a crowdfunding campaign if Forteller or other voice acting is available.

The other side of the balance for a narrative board game is the gameplay: How complex is it? Does it offer enough choice and options? It was here where Agemonia turned out to be the better game than Familiar Tales, by being a lot more varied, and being reasonably interesting, without being too complex. A campaign game I tried several times with different groups and never got far is Tainted Grail, but even with the revised rules the gameplay is simply too heavy for what it does. You can get into a situation where 4 players decide that it would be a good idea to all go hunting, and then spend more than an hour to resolve those actions, without that advancing the story in any way. With food being quite important, that happens far too often, and food / resource gathering ends up feeling far too grindy. Every narrative board game needs some sort of resolution system for stuff like combat or skill checks. But the game needs to keep those either simple enough, with just a few dice rolls, or make a more complex combat system which then is only used like once per session for a major battle. There is a particular subgenre of narrative games, which is the boss battler; but the boss battle here is the climax of the game session, with any other systems for resource gathering or skill checks outside the boss battle being a lot simpler.

Another important part of campaign board games is related to bookkeeping. Most board games have systems to manage resources and the like, but only campaign games need ways to "save" the current state of the game and be able to start the next session with the items, counters, and resources you had at the end of the previous session. ISS Vanguard is a campaign game which literally has a book to keep, a three-ring binder with both pages of instructions and binder sheets into which cards are being sorted to show the state of the game. For example there is a page to put "research project" cards in, and rules how to complete those research projects and move the cards to the "production complex" page. Narrative games that offer some degree of choices and consequences of those choices also frequently need some way to keep score of those decisions, and ways to result in a different narrative as a function of choices made. In 7th Continent / 7th Citadel much of the game consists of several boxes of index cards, which serve both as map tiles, action cards, and a filing system that memorizes your decisions. One typical disadvantage of the more complex bookkeeping systems is that in a game with several players, it is hard to share that activity, and you often end with one guy being something like the designated accountant. That makes the bookkeeping part of the game a lot less interactive and interesting for the other players than the rest of the game. An alternative version is veering into the domain of pen & paper roleplaying games, and doing a lot of bookkeeping on character sheets; but one loses a lot of visibility to the other players, and the feel of playing a board game rather than a role-playing game.

The added narrative and accounting parts of campaign games frequently result in these games being recommended rather for lower player counts, like 1 to 2 players. For larger player counts one needs to find a way to split the various tasks, to keep everybody occupied and interested. For Agemonia that worked quite well for us, because there is so much game material that you can easily have different players manage different parts. But I actually have some campaign games, like The Isofarian Guard, that don't even allow for more than 2 players. Keeping everybody interested all the time in a 4-player game is a challenge, and these are games that I never play at my weekly board game night in the local shop, simply because the noisy environment wouldn't work for that.

With my Agemonia group, I might try Oathsworn, a boss battler. Or I could try Nova Aetas: Renaissance, also a very tactical game. Or we could try ISS Vanguard, which is in structure somewhat close to Agemonia, but with some distinctive differences and a science-fiction theme. For the other group, currently playing Familiar Tales, I might try Wonder Book, simply because it is rather short for a campaign game. Or we could try Kinfire Chronicles: Night Fall, but I'm not 100% sure how good that works for 4 players.

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Saturday, January 11, 2025
 
Why does everything on the internet seem to end up trying to exploit users in horrible ways?

My reply to a comment on the previous post got so long, I decided to turn it into a post. So mbp was asking, "Why does everything on the internet seem to end up trying to exploit users in horrible ways?". To which the short answer would be "Capitalism". But the long answer is considerably more complicated.

First of all, a small objection: This blog doesn't try to exploit users in horrible ways, or in any other way. And that is just one example of what is certainly a part of the internet: Amateurs, from the latin word "amare", to love; a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid rather than a professional basis, out of love for that activity. While the word "amateur" also has a connotation of somebody less competent than a professional, content creation on the internet frequently enough falls into the category where the amateur ends up creating the better product, because the gain in quality of having somebody "professional" create the same content is small, while the loss of quality due to monetization is large.

In the early days of the internet, amateurs were the rule rather than the exception. The biggest negative force back then was considered anonymity, because some people under the guise of anonymity behaved pretty badly. Fast forward 30 years, and anonymity has become less of a problem, because everybody has created a personal "brand" now, and anonymity doesn't work well with monetization. Instead the monetization has become the problem: A large percentage of content creators these days does so not out of love, but for profit. "Influencer" has become a dream job many people aspire to, although the reality of that job for the average person is pretty dreary.

So now the next player arrives on the scene: The algorithm. It started with the algorithm of Google, which determined what pages you would see first if you searched for a term like "MMORPG blog". As content moved away from the written word to more photo and video content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, it was the algorithm of those platforms that determined how many people would see any given content, which then of course directly correlates to the amount of money that content makes. Thus we went from search engine optimization (SEO) to photo and video content optimized towards the algorithm.

There are actually people out there who believe that algorithms have a deliberate bias, programmed on purpose by people with such bias in order to spread their world view. They observe that for example on Instagram people who conform to certain beauty standards are much more successful and promoted by the algorithm than people who are, let's say "alternatively beautiful"; their conclusion is that some evil, heterosexual, white, male software engineer programmed the algorithm like that. The much sadder reality is that the algorithm is originally neutral, but learning, and reflects the clicking behavior, and by that the ingrained beauty standards of the collective of the users. Algorithms are biased because humans are biased, and any machine learning algorithm ends up reflecting the conventional beauty standards of the user base.

Many things that work to increase profit on social media platforms, like clickbait, is obviously bad. But because it works, the algorithm learns to promote it. And the content creators with a profit motive learn what makes the algorithm send users and thus money their way. That leads to a downward spiral, between the algorithm learning to promote bad stuff, and content creators learning that this bad stuff is what is "needed" to be successful.

And the story is similar for other areas of the internet, from gaming to virtual girlfriends. Game companies make horrible live service games not because of some underlying belief in a design philosophy, but because of trial and error over the years has resulted in data about what type of gaming content produces the best profit margins. If the collective user base of gamers would have refused to buy skins and similar cosmetic content, we wouldn't have so many games offering those now. And I am pretty certain that it was the demand from lonely young man to chat with models that led to this becoming so profitable.

The rest is industrialization. Private chat, unlike many other forms of content creation, doesn't scale well. While much has been said about social media platforms reducing content moderation out of political motivations, the people who took those decisions also certainly were aware that content moderation also doesn't scale well. Thus many of these badly scaling activities first get outsourced to third world countries, until that cheap labor still becomes too expensive, and the activity is moved to generative artificial intelligence software. While I don't know any details, I consider it likely that services like BetterHelp started out with the best of intentions, until scaling up the operation led to standards sliding, and customers started to perceive the platform as a scam.

I am old enough to remember a time before the internet existed. And the time where we all thought, "oh, wow, this internet thing looks really useful!". The combination of growth, an increasing profit motive, algorithms that reflect human imperfection, and enshittification has gotten us to the point where many people like mbp have a very different impression of the internet. It now appears a lot less helpful, and more like a dangerous source of various scams and exploitative methods to us. The question now is, how this will evolve further. The more wary we will become of internet services, the less likely we will become to use them. It is possible that the time of the internet as a source of endless business growth is coming to a close.

Friday, January 10, 2025
 
The weird future of internet porn

I was following a story about Fanvue, a small competitor to OnlyFans, which is trying to get a share of the rather large pie of internet porn revenue by allowing something that OnlyFans doesn't: AI-generated "models". And that story led me down a rabbit hole, at the bottom of which came a surprise revelation: There is already today a billion dollar AI internet porn business that nobody talks about.

OnlyFans in 2024 generated $6.3 billion in gross revenues. 80% of which was paid out to its 4.1 million creators from 305 million registered fans. The high percentage the models get of the gross revenue, compared to what they would earn elsewhere in the porn industry, is one of the key success factors of OnlyFans. However, obviously this revenue isn't evenly distributed. While the revenue distribution is a lot more equal than it is on YouTube, the top 10% of accounts collected 73% of revenues. So what is a less successful model on OnlyFans to do to increase revenue? That leads us to the shady world of an activity known as "OFM", or OnlyFans Management: Agencies that promise to increase an OnlyFans model revenue through better marketing, but who then take up to half of that revenue for themselves.

So after stumbling about a story on Fanvue allowing AI models, I did some research, which very quickly led me to a bunch of YouTube "get rich quick" videos. The latest YouTube get rich quick scheme works by applying lessons learned about OFM to not OnlyFans but Fanvue, and using publicly available software to generate NSFW AI images to create an AI model and running a whole creator channel with "her". I was sceptical how that could work: Why would somebody pay a subscription on Fanvue to an AI model, when the images he can get that way are nothing but images he could get for free on various NSFW AI image creation sites?

After some more research it turned out that my error was that I had assumed that OnlyFans and Fanvue are in the business of selling pornographic images via subscriptions. But when looking at published breakdowns of OnlyFans revenue streams, it turns out that many creators make more money via paid-for messaging (sexting) than they make from selling images. The product that is being sold is a whole package of a parasocial relationship with a "girlfriend", with many customers being lonely young men, part of the WHO-recognized loneliness epidemic. But successful OnlyFans models have thousands of fans, how can they possibly keep up even a parasocial relationship with them? The answer is simple: While the models on OnlyFans are real, with a verification process keeping out AI models, the messaging / sexting is increasingly done by AI chatbots (replacing or aiding the model's "staff" that was previously doing that work of impersonating the model in chat). So already today, AI is earning billions of dollars on OnlyFans.

Through thousands of years of a culture teaching us the importance of hiding our nudity with clothes and keeping our sexuality private, humans tend to feel a degree of shame and vulnerability when being naked in public. Pornography at its core is a transaction in which somebody is overcoming that shame in exchange for money. An AI doesn't feel shame, and is thus very suited to sell pornographic images. The reason why today OnlyFans has real images and AI chat is because that is where AI technology is right now. AI images of humans can still sometimes fall in the uncanny valley, have the wrong number of fingers, or curves that aren't quite right. But AI image generation is rapidly advancing. How long until we can't actually tell AI images from real images anymore, pornographic or otherwise?

I never paid for sexting on OnlyFans, but I can only assume that it must involve a certain degree of suspension of disbelief. The buyer somewhere deep in his heart knows that he isn't sexting with his girlfriend. Many are probably even aware that they are talking to a chatbot, because while chatbots have become quite good, they aren't 100% at passing the Turing test yet. Will the buyers mind if the images aren't real anymore either? The advantage of an AI girlfriend is that the customer can make her look however he wants. He can also ask for and easily receive pornographic images that are exactly suited to his sexual preferences. Are we heading for a future in which an increasing part of the internet pornographic image content will be AI generated? Looking at Sora today, AI porn videos still seem to be a while off.

The current discussion about AI generated images is frequently revolving around those images being based on images "stolen" from actual artists, and the negative effect of putting real artists out of business. I feel that these arguments become a lot weaker when we talk about AI porn. Should we really be worried about putting real porn models out of business? Over my lifetime the moral discussion of porn has shifted from a religiously motivated "pornography is generally immoral" to being more of a feminist worry about women getting exploited. If a man based on a OFM get rich quick scheme is getting money from other men for AI generated images and text messages, it is hard to see where any woman is exploited in the process. To claim that AI porn is bad requires to say that real porn is comparatively morally better, and I don't think that society is at that point yet. Although personally I do believe that at least some of the current OnlyFans models (without male managers) are among the most empowered women on the planet. Overcoming cultural norms can be quite profitable. I'd actually be more worried that the current system is exploiting lonely young men, and is not actually helping against the loneliness epidemic.

Wednesday, January 08, 2025
 
Buying board games

Sometimes on this blog, I discuss my thoughts about buying video games: How video games get cheaper after release, or whether it is actually a good idea to buy cheap games at a Steam sale and then never getting around to playing them. Buying a board game is a lot more complicated than buying a video game, and so in this post I would like to discuss those complications and my recent experiences.

The fundamental difference between a board game and a video game is that the board game is a physical good, which needs to be produced, transported, and stocked. All of that has a cost of money and time. Buying a video game is easy, because my "copy" of the game is produced the moment I buy it, and all the transport needed is a download of a few minutes. Steam doesn't have "out of stock" signs, and the only thing that could prevent you from playing a freshly bought video game is if you bought an online multiplayer game on launch day and the login servers can't handle the load. Buying a board game is more complicated, because somebody needs to have made a correct guess of how many copies the game will sell, and produced enough physical copies of it. Thus the popularity of crowdfunding in the board game domain: While paying for a game a year or two before you receive it might look like a very bad deal, it actually enables the game company to produce the correct number of physical copies of the game, and guarantees you to receive one of them.

Board games are more of a niche than video games. Video games sometimes sell millions of copies; Frosthaven, one of the top funded board games on Kickstarter, had 83,193 backers. Crowdfunded board games with just a few thousand backers are the norm, not the exception. Of course, if you have 8,000 backers, you have enough money to produce let's say 10,000 games, and have some extra for sale later. But sometimes games become popular only after they have already been produced, and thus it can easily happen for a board game to sell out. Board games that aren't crowdfunded have to rely on the experience of the game company to predict how many copies of the game will sell, and sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes it is very hard to get hold of a game, and in other cases you'll see a game discounted in every shop you go to, because it has been produced in too large a print run. Popular retail games can reach print runs much larger than crowdfunded games, for example Wingspan sold over 1 million copies.

Board games thus don't always follow the declining price trajectory of video games. Yes, it can happen that you can get a game that didn't sell very well at a discount. But it can also happen that prices go up because of the rarity of a game, and even more frequently a board game can be sold out and impossible to get. Not every board game shop even trades in crowdfunded games, and it is totally possible that a game you hear a lot about online never shows up in your local store. For me that causes a bit of a moral dilemma, because I am playing at my local board game shop every Wednesday night, and would very much like to support them by buying my board games from them. But for many crowdfunding games I end up backing the game directly, because there is no way to tell whether I would ever be able to buy it locally.

If you can't get a game locally, there are websites like Board Game Oracle or TableTopFinder, which allow you to search for a game and see which online shops have that board game available, and at what price. It took me some time to realize that sometimes there is a better way: Most board game companies, even small ones, have their own web shop, and those aren't listed on the price comparison sites. If a game is hard to get, it can be both cheaper and faster to order it directly from the company that made the game.

Physical copies that need to be produced, small print runs, shipping cost, problems of availability, all of this results board games being a lot more expensive than video games. Triple A video games cost maybe €70 at most, with more expensive editions usually including future DLCs. I could spend €130 for the founders edition of Civilization VII, not that I wanted to. Big crowdfunding games easily have €100+ core game pledges, and €200+ all in pledges. And normally you get more hours of gameplay out of a video game, due to the difficulty of getting people around a table to play a board game. Ultimately buying board games, especially crowdfunded ones, has a lot more to do with building up a collection than with just the utility of being able to play a game.

Where the collector's hobby of buying board games again converges with video games is in the modern video game trend of in-game shops selling cosmetics. When I buy a board game, I often need to consider which version I want, because deluxified editions with upgraded game components exist. Of course the game plays the same with a cardboard standee or a plastic miniature, but the table presence isn't the same. And one could say exactly the same thing about buying a skin for your favorite video game character.

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Sunday, January 05, 2025
 
The regulatory advantage business model

Uber, AirBnB, Temu, and a lot of similar companies, are examples of market disruption by companies using internet platforms. If you listen to the official story these companies tell, they will claim that they disrupt the market by being more efficient than the incumbents. For example, the Uber app is more efficient than using a phone to call a taxi dispatch service. But if you scratch below the surface, the real business model is often based on something else: Regulatory advantage. The new companies work slightly differently than whatever old business they replace, and often aren't affected by exactly the same rules.

Uber is a prime example: The competing system, the taxi, is very old, with the first horse-drawn hackney carriages going back to the 17th century. Thus already in 1635 the Hackney Carriage Act was passed by Parliament in the UK. Pretty much every country in the world has regulation on taxis, and quite often individual cities have addition rules and regulation. Regulations are usually designed to protect somebody: Either the customer, or the taxi driver, or the general public. Cities want some balance between transport being available, affordable prices for customers, living wages for taxi drivers, and minimization of nuisance from taxis taking up space on the roads and parking around tourist spots. In many cases, Uber was able at least for some time to be a lot cheaper than taxi services, by simply not having to follow all of those rules. That meant bigger profit for the company, which enabled them to offer lower fares to customers, thus winning market share. On the other side, the drivers were often worse off than regulated taxi drivers. Uber is an interesting example here, because they are already 15 years old: Uber disrupted many markets, but then over time the backlash appeared; both the competing taxi services and the exploited Uber drivers protested, and in many cases the regulatory authorities caught up with Uber and forced them to play by the same rules as taxis, wiping out their regulatory advantage. Due to there being so many different local markets, the fight is far from over, but the general direction is obvious: Regulatory advantage is temporary, and the long-term future of a service like Uber is looking more and more like any other driving service.

A slightly different case, and somewhat more worrying, is a different regulatory advantage: Deliberate non-compliance with rules and regulations. Usually that works like this: The big new tech company claims to be only a platform, handing over all legal responsibility to a huge number of sub-contractors. The subcontractors systematically break the law, but the platform claims it can't be held responsible for that. And because the law-breaking happens at such a huge scale, enabled by the platform, the authorities don't have the manpower to stop the law-breaking. A typical example is AirBnB. In many countries and cities there are rules in place that allow small-scale holiday rentals for a limited amount of days per year. On AirBnB there are a huge number of holiday rentals available that break this rule, and which are illegally available 365 days per year as holiday rentals. Also some people have many apartments on AirBnB, although in many places that is illegal too. The platform benefits from its subcontractors breaking the law, but claims they didn't know anything about their non-compliance. That makes it very hard for authorities to enforce the law, because they need to pursue many individuals instead of one big company.

The one big brewing storm where a platform is profiting from both regulatory advantage and subcontractor cheating are companies like Temu and Shein. On the one side, they have identified a legal loophole, the "de minimis" shipment exception: A parcel sent directly to a consumer is legally avoiding duties, as long as its value is below the local de minimis threshold value. Here in Belgium this threshold is €150, while in the USA the threshold is $800. On the other side, since this loophole is being widely exploited, there are now over 10 million of such parcels *per day* arriving in Europe, and similar numbers in the USA. It is extremely easy to either split up an order from a customer that is over the de minimis value into several parcels, or to simply lie about the value. Spot checks have revealed that two thirds of all parcels from China to Europe under-declared their value. The US has the world's largest customs and border protection agency with 60,000 employees, but even if they all worked all day to open every parcel arriving from China to the US and check its contents, they wouldn't be able to manage that task.

At first that sounds great for consumers: Cheap goods from China to survive the cost-of-living crisis, unaffected by tariffs, duties, or taxes. Unfortunately many of these parcels also contain goods that aren't compliant with a lot of safety rules. A Chinese producer of let's say electric goods can easily fake the US or EU markings on his goods that tell the customer that this product is safe, and then when the coffee machine or power strip melts down and causes a fire, it is impossible to get redress. There are tons of horror stories of all sorts of defective goods from China, for example children's toys containing harmful heavy metals in their paints. That is not to say that everything produced in China is garbage, but that this specific business-to-consumer direct shipping via platforms like Temu and Shein is extremely susceptible to all sorts of fraud.

Both regulatory advantage and downright fraud tend to be short-term business models. Authorities catch up. Especially when like in this case there are billions of dollars of evaded duties and taxes on the line. Both the US and Europe are already considering dropping the de minimis shipping exception. Trump would be furious if he ever found out that his beloved tariffs on the Chinese aren't actually paid in billions of cases.

In the end, Temu might simply be *too* successful. The charade that a platform is in no way legally responsible for the malfaisance of the thousands of subcontractors using the platform might not last forever. If US or European authorities today discover one case of fraud, they can contact Temu; Temu will gladly remove the subcontractor in question from their platform, and the very next day the exactly same item will reappear under a different company name on Temu again. Making the platform responsible instead of having to check each individual parcel is the only possible way. The main reason that lawmakers hesitate to change the rules is that it would not only affect Chinese companies. Amazon would hate it if they were responsible for the compliance of every item on their platform. And who knows how many other US tech companies succeed in creative destruction and disruption of markets only because they can legally avoid regulatory compliance.

Friday, January 03, 2025
 
Puzzly games

I am currently playing two indie games on PC, both of which are somewhat puzzles. The first is The Rise of the Golden Idol, which I unnecessarily bought on Steam, not realizing that my Netflix subscription would have allowed me to play the game for free on my iPad. Well, if I want to play the previous game, The Case of the Golden Idol, I now know where to get it for free. The Rise of the Golden Idol is a sort of detective game, in which you need to gather various clues in a scene, thereby gathering words, and then fill in those words in a description of what happened. The puzzles aren't trivial, but with a bit of thinking and going back and forth between clues, I always managed to figure everything out.

The second game I'm playing is Terrascape, a "cozy City-puzzler". In this game, you buy boosters of random cards from decks you unlock over time. Each card corresponds to a building, and placing a building on the hex map gives you points. Placing certain buildings together in specific configurations results in merged buildings, which give you some bonus. Gaining more points from a deck unlocks further cards in that deck, and getting more points in general allows you to unlock new decks. Points are then also used to buy those boosters. The puzzle is to deal with the randomness of cards and place buildings in a way that gives you enough points to keep buying more cards. But personally I prefer to play this in scenario mode, where only some decks are unlocked, and you need to fulfill a series of tasks to finish the scenario successfully and unlock the next one.

I currently have 5 hours played of Golden Idol, and 6 of Terrascape. In Golden Idol I am already on chapter 4 out of 5, and in Terrascape I finished the first half of the currently available scenarios. So, these aren't terribly long games. I picked them up for cheap at the Steam Winter Sale, which unfortunately is over now, but even at full price they both are below $20. I'll probably finish both games over the weekend, and that is fine by me. Not every game has to be a lifestyle game.

Wednesday, January 01, 2025
 
Have a relaxed 2025!

Compared to content from other people on other platforms, this blog is rarely about me. That is to say, what I write is very much my opinion and my view on various issues and games. But I mention my personal situation relatively rarely and in passing. In fact, the birth of the "Tobold" identity was to a big part due to the necessity of having a "gaming identity" separate from my real name, professional identity. As that has become less of an issue now, I want to talk a bit about my personal situation in this blog post, as it relates to a point that I want to make.

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.

Sunday, December 29, 2024
 
Human knowledge map and AI

Some years ago, Matt Might, a US professor, published a graph with which he explains to his students what a Ph.D. means, by looking at where it lies on a graph of all human knowledge.
The circles in the middle are the knowledge a student has picked up from elementary school to a bachelor's degree, and the red part is pushing knowledge to the edge of human knowledge during a Ph.D.

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.

Friday, December 27, 2024
 
Influencer marketing scams and karma

People trust influencers on social media more than they trust other sources. Over the years, that has led to a long series of various scams and dubious businesses being peddled by influencers: The FTX crypto exchange that stole from account holders, Established Titles selling fake titles, or BetterHelp connecting customers with, let’s call them “people who self-indentified as therapists”, instead of actual therapists. The fundamental process of all these influencer marketing scams was always the same: The dubious company paid influencers to promote the company’s product to their viewers, the viewers became customers of the company, and the company then ripped off those customers to make back the money they had spent on the influencer marketing.

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.

Wednesday, December 25, 2024
 
Merry Christmas!

Dear Readers!

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

Cheers,
Tobold

Monday, December 23, 2024
 
My games of the year 2024

2024 was a weird year for me in gaming, as it came with a fundamental change: I played a lot more board games than in previous years. Which led to me being more occupied with board games, and spending less time on PC or console games. Of course, that change is relative: I would estimate that I had a total of around 80 board game sessions in 2024, with an overall duration of around 250 hours. I played 600 hours of games on Steam alone in 2024 (Steam doesn't actually tell you, you need to do a calculation based on hours played of one game divided by the Steam Replay 2024 played time percentage). The impression that I played a lot of board games and fewer video games comes from the board games being played with real people around a real table, which is obviously a lot harder to organize than playing a computer game, either single-player or online multiplayer. By joining a weekly board game night at a local store, I managed to play one board game session per week there, plus 2 to 3 sessions per month organized by myself or friends elsewhere.

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.

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