A new design post went up last week about Stars Reach seemingly tailored to the question being asked in the comments of past posts; Who is this game for?  I know Bhagpuss has put that very response in more than one comment so far.

Stars Reach Continues

However, if you were expecting a simple answer, something like Smed saying H1Z1 was dedicated to Star Wars Galaxies players, you are going to be disappointed.  SWG isn’t even mentioned, so as much as Bree at Massively OP has declared Stars Reach to be a remake of exactly that, that is not a specified goal.

Also, this is another philosophical post with a byline from Raph, so it is his sort of soft and/or more nuanced approach to these sorts of question.

But, I’ve been here for the philosophy so far, why not carry on.  My own posts in the area so far:

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe
• Part IV – Stars Reach Promises to let a Thousand Homeowners Associations Blossom
• Part V – Stars Reach – What if a guild could own a planet?

So what are we looking at as far as answers go?  Well, there is, in a big headline font, in all caps, the following:

THIS IS A SANDBOX GAME

I tried to reproduce the color, in case that was important, but they’re using a different color palette on their site, so it may not be a 100% match.

I think we knew this, but in case there were any questions, there it is.

Sandbox tends to mean game play that is not based on linear advancement, that there is no “winning” state like hitting the level cap, maxing out all your skills, or defeating the final raid boss and getting that epic gear drop that completes the set.  It is the journey and not the destination for Stars Reach, which has declared against anything like end-game raiding.

Which, as always, sounds great, but then I have been playing EVE Online for coming up on 18 years and the biggest problem there isn’t PvP or the cash shop or CCP messing up the economy through self-defeating attempts to make us play they way they want us to play or the difficulty of the UI or the lack of a decent map or the oft repeated, yet never substantiated tales of new players being ganked on their first undock.

No, the absolute, number one, no question about it problem is “So what do I do now?”

This is the problem, the reason you cannot have a pure sandbox game… because it wouldn’t even be a game.  It would be Garry’s Mod which, while it can be fun, is hard to classify as a game.  And it is an outlier in many way, the key one being its level of success.  You are unlikely to be able to duplicate that.

Raph has directly said that there needs to be a game, something to give players some sense of purpose out of the gate.  Likewise, EVE Online provides some sense of structure to help new players along, which are missions.  Only, then people get stuck in the missions, advance through them, get to the point where they have a nice battleship that can face roll level 4 missions… and they’re done and they leave, never to return, having solo’d themself through a few months of game play and ended up finding the game boring.

New Player Trajectory – 2014 edition

I can attest to that track as I did that myself, along with a few of the other obvious paths forward, like mining, manufacturing, and market tycoon.  They all end up feeling pretty empty once you achieve the level of success you were aiming for.  And CCP has spent some time trying to address this problem, which the spoke about nearly a decade back, though they ended up fixated on the tutorial for way too long… the main problem crops up AFTER the tutorial people… but have made some progress.  But it is still probably the #1 issue the game faces today, 21 years into its being.

in EVE Online the way out of that mission experience is to find a purpose beyond the mechanics of the game.  I am invested in the soap opera of null sec empires.  This has kept me playing for at least a decade and the roller coaster ride of it has pulled me back from a few points of thinking maybe it was time to move on.

But that, and the New Eden economy, rests on PvP and destruction and Raph is put combat on the optional list for Stars Reach.  No PvP save for the esoteric economic competition sense of the term.

So Stars Reach wants to give you some things to do.  No, wait, let me phrase that correctly.

SOME THINGS TO DO

Some things like, possibly:

• THE ADVENTURER
  • Run across the geyser fields towards a crashed Old One ship, before the Cornucopia get there.
• THE TRANSLATOR
  • Observe aliens speaking in strange glyphs; match them up, and crack the code of what they are saying.
• THE EXPLORER
  • “Beep! Beep!” Audio signals help you find a soft spot in space to open a new wormhole.
• THE FARMER
  • Plant red wheat under a violet sky; crossbreed strains to get a valuable healing variant.
• THE MEDIC
  • One press of a button conjures a healing bubble around you as you call your party closer.
• THE XENOBIOLOGIST
  • Sneak up on house-sized carnivorous bunnies and draw their blood; gotta sample ‘em all.
• THE PILOT
  • Collect crystals fallen from shattered asteroids and drag them in bags behind your ship.
• THE MINER
  • Tunnel underground – the map is fully destructible. When the gold is gone, it’s GONE.

I am once again put in the mind of No Man’s Sky, which has some of those jobs as part of your experience as the traveler.

The Playable Worlds team has LOTS of ideas… and has gotten a lot of positive response… or so they say.  I suspect that much of that positive response, like much of the negative response, has been due to people overlaying their past experience on the vague philosophical underpinnings of the design that has been shared with us so far.

That is certainly the basis on which I have now spewed out half a dozen blog posts on the topic so far.  We get presented with something new and immediately assess how it is similar to past experiences and process accordingly.  Bree at MOP hears Raph talk about “sandbox” and believes we’re getting a new Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies.  I hear about sandboxes or infinite worlds or cloud computing and I apply my own personal and professional experience to interpret what is meant.

The thing is, the post from Playable Worlds… doesn’t answer the question posed in the title in any way.  The post is more about what they might do and they tap into some of the Nick Yee work from his Quantic Foundry research, literally borrowing a chart from it, to talk about all the things the possibly COULD do, but which they haven’t decided on yet.

The problem with every software project is that there are always many more things you could do than you actually have time, budget, or resources to implement.

So the actual message of the post is that they are on their way forward to test some of their theories.  This past weekend the first group of play testers were allowed in to try some of the initial work.

Who the actual game is for has yet to be determined beyond a theoretical estimate.  But they are trying to test their theories.  I heard that they had 47 people online at once and found some issue including a client memory leak.  However, these tests are very, very early in the process, so there is likely a long road ahead before the average schmoe like me gets a peek at what is going on.

I don’t think it will take until 2047.  But I would be surprised if there was a “there” there for any general user before, say, 2027.  That is just a little more than two years away.

Related:

• Stars Reach – Who is Stars Reach for?
• Massively OP –  Stars Reach begins testing this weekend as Raph Koster talks playstyle and the anti-endgame

Say what you will about the otherwise calorie-lite first fortnight of the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign, at least it eased for a moment the shrill catastrophizing that has marked Democratic messaging against former President Donald Trump over these past nine years.

"Gone are [President Joe] Biden's sober exhortations about the battle for the soul of the nation and a democracy under attack," The Washington Post observed earlier this month. "In its place are promises of 'freedom' and 'a brighter future' and, at times, audible giggles and laughter."

Well, the darkness came back with a vengeance in Chicago during Monday's opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Staged as a somewhat awkward and late-running "Thank you Joe" celebration, Day One demonstrated that the party remains in thrall both to the millenarian temptation and its flip side of messianic zeal.

"We're facing inflection point, one of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come," Biden barked, familiarly. "That's not hyperbole. I mean it literally. We're in a battle for the very soul of America."

As puzzling as it may seem to those scores of millions of us who never once voted for the man during his half-century in elected office, we heard serial testimonials during Biden's valedictory night about the president's soulcraft. "He has brought us together, and revived our country, and our country's soul," Convention Chair Minyon Moore claimed, improbably. Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) extolled the president's "determination to heal the soul of our nation." Daughter Ashley reassured us that "He never stops thinking about you."

If only these sentiments were merely the good-natured embellishments of retirement banquets. Democrats, as they did massively for former President Barack Obama and are already cranking up for Harris and Walz, positioned Biden as a benevolent, borderline omniscient parental figure, ennobling citizens with meaning through the munificence of their gaze.

"They saw us, they fought for us, they heard us," Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said of Biden and Harris. The 2024 ticket, Harrison continued, "will invest in our hopes, and our dreams, and our futures." Hillary Clinton posited that "We're not just electing a president. We are uplifting our nation." California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis testified of the Democratic nominee that "She cares. She cares so much that if you are lucky enough to be her friend, she called you on her birthday, and sometimes she sings to you."

It was only the Democrats' miserable show-running organization that prevented Biden from being serenaded by James Taylor with a rendition of "You've Got a Friend," a song he also performed for Obama at the 2012 Democratic convention, and that Carole King dedicated to both Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. These politicians seeking access to the nuclear codes are not some distant, calculating power-seekers, but rather neighborly types who just want to lend a hand!

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.), a Baptist pastor, was the most effective at tying together the Democratic strands of millenarianism and messianism. After busting Trump's chops for hawking Bibles ("he should try reading it"), and alleging that the GOP nominee "is a clear and present threat to the precious covenant we share with one another," Warnock reached for the stars.

"I'm convinced tonight that we can lift the broken even as we climb," he said. "I'm convinced tonight that we can heal sick bodies. We can heal the wounds that divide us. We can heal a planet in peril, we can heal the land."

George Will produced a memorably relevant metaphor in the 2014 Ken Burns documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. "The presidency," Will mused, "is like a soft leather glove, and it takes the shape of the hand that's put into it. And when a very big hand is put into it and stretches the glove—stretches the office—the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was. So we are all living today with an office enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt."

So too goes the stretching of presidential speechcraft. Obama, with significantly more charisma than Biden or Harris could ever muster, expanded the modern rhetorical template with his 2008 convention speech, delivered against a backdrop of Greek columns in a 76,000-seat stadium, that climaxed with this rapturously hubristic close:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

Just prior to Obama's rise, Gene Healy warned us about executive branch omnipotence in his terrific book (and Reason cover story) The Cult of the Presidency. "The chief executive of the United States," Healy wrote, "is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He 'or she' is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America's shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He's also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth."

Obama's successor Trump, after having campaigned on a Great Man Theory of politics, continued the modern tradition of playing overpromiser in chief. "Dying industries will come roaring back to life," he predicted in his 2017 speech in front of a Joint Session of Congress. "Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land. Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and ultimately stop. And our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity." Or not.

As Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward remarked at the time, "This weirdly grandiose rhetoric is a reflection of a weirdly grandiose bipartisan conception of the powers of the president….Presidents do not make the earth move. They do not turn back tides. They do not heal the sick, or eliminate vice, or remake the nation. They are humans with human failings, and one of those failings is the inability to resist taking a big slurp of their own Kool-Aid in moments of triumph."

Investing our very souls into the fortunes of politicians is not the habit of a healthy civic culture. The people who compete for the right to control $7 trillion of money extracted from taxpayers upon threat of imprisonment are not your friends. The executives who sit atop the Justice Department, who have control over history's most powerful military, are not responsible for your hopes, your dreams, your healing. Imbuing elected officials with such spiritual potency is a recipe for self-infantilization, disappointment, and terrible executive-branch governance.

Presidential candidates will only stop promising to heal our souls when we stop asking them to. The long, slow climb out of our national sump hole requires not only that we treat pompous pols with the derision they deserve, but that we stop pouring our own aspirations into the career prospects of the politically ambitious.

Democrats will spend these next three days scaring voters both about Trump's legitimately scary behavior, and such Potemkin threats as Project 2025 (or as Sen. Jim Clyburn (D–S.C.) called it last night, "Jim Crow 2.0"). Such darkness is the regrettably typical stuff of politics, on both sides. It's when they imagineer a government headed by Kamala Harris to be an agent of spiritual healing that you should really reach for the gong.

The post Democrats Just Can't Quit Saving Our Souls appeared first on Reason.com.

Tactical Breach Wizards, the next game from Tom Francis (Gunpoint, Heat Signature), has everything you could want out of a game with such a name. There are 1) wizards, 2) tons of tactical breaching, 3) a huge conspiracy to unravel and 4) so many windows to throw people out of. What might not be apparent at first…

Read more...

Halo Reach, Bungie’s final “swan song” in the Halo universe, was a prequel that set up the entire Halo conflict through the eyes of a brave fireteam of Spartans named “Noble Team”. As members of the squad lived up to their name and paid the ultimate price to complete their mission, it slowly became clear that none of us were going to survive the events of Reach… but we WERE going to shape the future. As the game built to a powerful, inevitable crescendo, the pain in our journey all finally made sense… our sacrifice preserved the life of the one and only Master Chief, the Spartan who would one day go on to finish this fight. We didn’t win this battle, but our faithful obedience won the war. 

Our struggles in life serve purposes that aren’t immediately obvious while we’re going through them, and many will not reveal their full impact until after our race has reached its’ conclusion. But if we will obediently yield our lives to the unique challenges our Master has called us to, we’ll find the meaning behind our mission… we are part of a sacrificial relay race, carrying this baton as far as we can before passing it on to the next teammate until the race is finally won.

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. 1 Corinthians 9:24-26

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing. 2 Timothy 4:7-8

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The next set of PlayStation Plus games have been revealed by Sony and it’s a mixed bag of family friendly fun, horror. and dark fantasy. Let’s have a look at what you are getting.

LEGO Star Wars The Skywalker Saga (PS4/PS5)

It’s time to play through the entire Skywalker saga but you don’t have to always play as a Skywalker, why not play as a Sith lord instead? “Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is the most ambitious Lego game yet, and despite the occasional technical mishap it delivers a daring and often delightful romp through the most iconic film franchise of all time,” we said in our 8/10 review.

Five Nights at Freddy’s Security Breach (PS4/PS5)

An older game here from 2021 and we did not review it at the time, so here’s something from the PlayStation Blog. “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach is the latest installment of the family-friendly horror games from Steel Wool Games. Play as Gregory, a young boy trapped overnight in Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex. With the help of Freddy Fazbear himself, Gregory must survive the near-unstoppable hunt of reimagined Five Nights at Freddy’s characters – as well as new, horrific threats.”

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (PS4)

Another game from 2021 and another game we did not review, but we did have a look when it hit  Early Access. “When it comes to wowing its audience from the start, few early access titles have done quite as well as Ender Lilies. Sure, there are areas that could be improved, such as the addition of more cinematic cutscenes to aid the story, but even without those, this has the potential to be a masterpiece,” said Emma.

All three games will be available to PlayStation Plus members on August 6th until September 2nd. PlayStation Plus members have until August 6 to the add the July games – Borderlands 3, NHL 24 and Among Us – to their game libraries

Source: PS Blog

As another month draws to a close, PlayStation has announced the next slate of games coming to PS Plus Essential.

The three Essential games - which are available to all PlayStation Plus members - coming in August are:

This selection of games will arrive on 6th August, and be available to download until 2nd September.

Read more

So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to ran dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all… even themselves in the longer term.  But when does business think about the long term these days?

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every month, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

Well, here’s something unexpected. Apparently Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book coming out this week called “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.” And, one of the examples in the book is about the ridiculous criminal case against Aaron Swartz and his eventual tragic decision to take his own life while facing the possibility of decades in prison for the “crime” of downloading too many research papers while on a college campus that had an unlimited subscription to those research papers.

At the time, we wrote about the travesty of the case and the tragedy of how it all ended.

But it’s still somewhat surprising to find out that the case has been wedged in Gorsuch’s mind as an example of prosecutorial overreach and over-criminalization.

David French has an interview with Gorsuch about the book in the NY Times, and the Swartz case is the first example Gorsuch brings up:

French: This was an interesting element of the book to me and something that people who are not familiar with your jurisprudence might not know — it’s that you’ve long been a champion of the rights of criminal defendants. It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point. Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain. And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.

His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy. And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them. Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies. And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?

They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system. And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial. And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970. And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).

I disagree with Gorsuch on many, many things. On the two big internet cases from this last term, Gorsuch joined the Lalaland takes of Justices Alito and Thomas (in both the Moody and the Murthy case Gorsuch was a third vote besides Alito and Thomas towards nonsense). So, it seems a bit shocking for Gorsuch to be somewhat on the side of Swartz, who would have eviscerated Gorsuch’s position in both of those cases.

Of course, Gorsuch is also wrong that Swartz “probably shouldn’t have done that.” MIT had a site license that enabled anyone on campus to download as many articles from JSTOR as they wanted. It didn’t say “unless you download too many.”

But, at least he recognizes how ridiculous the criminal lawsuit that Swartz faced a dozen years ago is. For well over a decade, we’ve been highlighting how dangerous the CFAA is as a law. It is so easily abused by prosecutors that it’s been dubbed “the law that sticks.” It sticks because when there is no real criminal prosecution under other laws, prosecutors will often cook up a CFAA violation, as they did with Aaron. And it remains ridiculous that, to this day, nothing has ever been done to prevent another Aaron Swartz-type scenario from happening again.

Perhaps, with Gorsuch bringing it up again in his book and in this interview, it can renew some of the interest that showed up in the months following Aaron’s untimely death to make real changes to the laws that caused it. Having a Justice like Gorsuch calling out the terrible and ridiculous situation the CFAA caused seems like a good reason for Congress to revisit that law, rather than cooking up new nonsense like KOSA.

As another month draws to a close, PlayStation has announced the next slate of games coming to PS Plus Essential.

The three Essential games - which are available to all PlayStation Plus members - coming in August are:

This selection of games will arrive on 6th August, and be available to download until 2nd September.

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So yeah, Stars Reach is kind of a climate change metaphor. It’s a political metaphor. Remember, it’s about different sorts of people learning to get along, and to learn how to steward what we have.

-Stars Reach, What is Stars Reach About

Getting along is less the point for me than enjoying the benefits of an online game without being forced to get along at all.  But I am mildly grumpy most of the time anyway.  Also, I am sure somebody it going to get annoyed about politics in video games, like they were not always that way.

I wasn’t even going to write a post about the latest design vision posted over on the Stars Reach site.  After three rounds of pillars, I was feeling kind of done with a lot of promises and not much substance.

If you missed the pillars posts, you can find my thoughts here.

• Part I  – Stars Reach has Some Design Pillars for You to Get Invested In
• Part II – Stars Reach is Back with More Design Pillars about the Game Look and Feel
• Part III – Stars Reach is Back with a Final Set of Pillars, This Time About the Vibe

But yeah, I wasn’t going to bother.

Stars Reach Announced

And then Raph had to get in there and call the tragedy of the commons a lie and my brain exploded.  I mean, fuck subtlety or nuance or reasoned thought!  This is so incendiary in my head that I am half convinced it was a troll for attention.  I mean, it generated a lot of comments over at Massively OP when Bree decided to lead with that in the headline.  All of which put me in a mood, and the only therapy that works is words.

So op success if it was a troll!

I could write a whole post about why that statement is absolutely NOT the correct summary of the work of Dr. Ostrom, and how a better interpretation might be that people pretty reliably find some solution before it becomes the tragedy, even if those solutions are not always fair or equitable, because survival often depends on it.  Don’t make me go into the communal distribution of arable land in Czarist Russian agriculture.  I’ll post about village level plot allocations and archaic strip farming traditions if you push me!

Anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute, but first let me cover the other parts of the post from Raph and Playable Worlds… I’d like to think Raph gets input from the team before he posts these things, that it isn’t all just “Raph says” because he has Carneros on the team, who I know from EVE Online both as a fellow member of Reavers and as the former leader of a sizable in-game player group, which seems like useful experience, but these posts always framed as being exclusively from Raph so it is hard to tell… which goes through Raph’s four questions exercise.  Those questions are:

• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)
• WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)
• HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Seems a pretty reasonable set of questions, to the point I wish a few titles that went to Kickstarter for funding would have given them a shot.

Raph’s short answers for the four above questions were:

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (THEMATICALLY?)

After ruining our homeworlds, we are given a second chance to learn to live in harmony with one another and with the natural world as we venture forth into the galaxy.

So we have messed up our home world and are being given another shot to do it again!  There is always an element of fantasy in science fiction I suppose.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (THEMATICALLY?)

Diverse groups of people with very different ways to play come together to build new societies, and grapple with the problems of building sustainable space settlements.

Sure, but how?  That is very nebulous.  I guess “how” is next, but this seems pretty light even for a thematic response.

WHAT IS THE GAME ABOUT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players work together to maximize their economic standing and in-game investment without destroying the resource pools they draw from as they build up their in-game investment and social groups.

Making the line go up.  Progression of some form or another along with resource management.

HOW DOES THE PLAYER DO THAT (MECHANICALLY?)

Players form economic dependencies on each other’s characters by advancing in diverse specializations and skills, all of which draw from the common exhaustible resource pools available in each zone, thereby creating a Tragedy of the Commons problem to navigate as a group.

And here we get to Raph setting up the strawman so he can knock it down and call it a lie.  Why even bring that up in the answer only to turn around and say it isn’t a thing?  I don’t know why.  It is an outcome that people work hard to avoid because their lives depend on it, yet we can find some examples in the real world all the same.

I would argue that the well water situation in the central valley of California, the state where both Raph and I live, where the law is that you can pump all you want, has led to a situation where large almond farming concerns have been motivated to drill deeper, plant more trees, and pump all the water they can before to irrigate them before the water runs out… to the point that during the last major drought the water table dropped enough that older wells to run dry and even caused some areas of land to collapse, might be somewhere in the zone of tragedy of the commons.  It has the classic hallmarks.  The water in the ground is the commons and the industrial almond farmers are abusing it to the detriment of all.

However, we don’t need to go to the real world because we are talking about a being online and virtual worlds.  One might be tempted to bring up Ultima Online and the whole natural spawning mechanics that were supposed to populate the wilderness so that if you killed too many prey animals then the predator population would drop off due to lack of food, a concept totally demolished by players harvesting resources in a way that pretty much clear cut anything in site.

But let’s go to a big obvious one.  Let’s talk about Usenet!

I wrote about Usenet earlier this year, so I have some links to hand.  Some old fart out there probably thinks I am going to bring up the September that never ended.  But that was just elitism, a bias against anybody new showing up and upsetting the established order.  That was practically a purity test… no, not that one… as to who deserved to be able to access Usenet.  Students and faculty of universities were good, AOL users were bad, simple as that.

Usenet dealt with that.  It was no big deal in the end.  What killed Usenet were the Green Card Lawyers, Canter and Siegel, who discovered it was extremely cheap to spam ads on Usenet, such that even getting one response after cross posting to thousands of groups was a complete financial victory.

And Usenet was then made unusable by spam bots.

This was facilitated by the fact that Usenet was designed to be a distributed system with no central authority who could do things like ban or block offenders.  Everything had to be done at the local level.  Your local sys admin had to care enough to subscribe your local serve to cancel channels that would remove know spammers, though there was always discussion as to who counted and what threshold had to be crossed to be worth of the list.

In the end people just left because unlike the real world, you can just walk away from any part of the internet you don’t find value in.

What else has been described as a distributed system with local authority setting the rules?  Why, Stars Reach!

To be fair to Raph and team, they know there is a potential problem and they at least acknowledge it in the post with this:

All that is needed is for the players to have the tools to collectively manage their space. We as a team definitely need to nail that aspect. And then, yeah, it gets hard, because trying to solve for everyone’s competing needs and desires means a lot of compromising and negotiation and tough choices.

It is my long time policy to dismiss as garbage anything that starts with a phrase like “All that is needed…” which is then, in the style of the underpants gnomes, is followed by a vague proposed fix to a tough and possibly insoluble problem, but at least they admit they have a problem.  First steps and all that.

The problem is, how much power do player groups running planets need?  Too little and then Usenet is your destination.  But too much power and it becomes petty tyrants and and in-groups and tribalism as those who show up first impose their system on the late comers.

Imagine if you will all those indignant Usenet denizens in 1993 if they had the power available so that they did not need to merely whine at you that you needed to read the group FAQ that is published on the first of every mont, before you post because your question is off topic or already answered but could, instead, set up rules to make you adhere to the arbitrary group rules that a few zealots and try hards came up with back when the group was created automatically?

Well, Usenet might have been saved, but at the price of it becoming the domain of a host of online exclusionary clubs unwilling to welcome anybody who wouldn’t toe the line.

Likewise, Stars Reach will face problems if there is too little control given the free ranging ability to modify just about everything on a planet.  Sure, “we’ll spawn more planets” is a possible answer, but given enough latitude some will seek to tear things up just to annoy other players.  Griefing runs deep in some gamer’s DNA.

While on the other side of the equation is the homeowners association view of the world, which ideally keeps chaos at bay through common sense rules agreed upon by the community… but which can often turn into an irresistible attraction to those who seek petty authority and love to tell people what to do.

Do I even need to expand upon homeowner’s associations?  They’re not all bad, but when they’re bad they can be really bad.  I recall a guy on the association board in the for the condo development we lived in way back when my wife and I first got together.  He would dig through people’s garbage can’s and send nasty notes with threats of fines if he found anything that was possibly recyclable in the trash.  He would literally staple things like grocery store receipts pulled from deep in the trash to his notes.  We used to call him the garbage nazi.  That is the sort of person often attracted to such positions.

“We‘re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford. “And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t.  They win.”

Ford Prefect – Life, The Universe, and Everything

I am more Arthur Dent than anything.  I don’t want to run the homeowners association, I just want them to leave me alone.  Likewise, in online games I don’t want to run the guild, fellowship, or corporation, except occasionally as an administrative function with some friends.  Usually so I can spend my own in-game currency to expand the guild bank or hand out medals to corp mates.

It is those who do want to run things, those who are obsessed with a level of control, that send me packing online.  I see the need for a homeowners association in real life and in the vision that Stars Reach is pitching.  But I can see it going wrong.

There is almost a dichotomy of Raph where, on the one hand, he can promote ideas like “the client is in the hands of the enemy” on his rules for online world design while also espousing an vision where players… the people who are “the enemy” in that scenario… can be given responsibility to run an online game, to be the literal governing body that dictates how you will be allowed to play in a given space.

We’ll see what happens… but nothing will be happening for quite a while yet.

Related:

• Stars Reach – WHAT IS STARS REACH ABOUT?
• Massively OP – Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach

Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.

Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.

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Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.

Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.

Read more

This piece contains spoilers for Halo: Reach.

In the pantheon of platform exclusives, few loom so large as Halo. Since it was launched by Bungie in 2001, Microsoft's first-person shooter series has spawned no less than 15 games, alongside endless volumes of novels, comics, art books and a TV adaptation. It's also provided the world with one of the most iconic characters in science fiction: John-117, aka the Master Chief. To many people, the Chief is Halo. But what happens when you leave him out?

To put this another way: typically you'd expect that the first entry would be the best place to start when looking to dive into the series, and Halo: Combat Evolved remains a fantastic jumping off point. But I'd argue that it's the sixth mainline game, and Bungie's swansong, 2010's Halo: Reach, that provides one of the most complete and rewarding gaming experiences in all of Halo - and all without the Master Chief himself.

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If you’ve played an MMO, you’re likely very familiar with the feeling of looking at a queue, waiting for the game to tell you it’s your turn to jump into the action. Multiplayer games have server setups designed to avoid scenarios like this, but high-profile MMO expansions typically draw in returning fans as well as…

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