#raph koster

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zincchump Linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DOYLESTOWN TODAY (Mar 1), and in BALTIMORE TOMORROW (Mar 2). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I've got a really good excuse for finishing this week with a folder full of links that didn't make it into the newsletter – I'm on a crazy book tour and I've been in four cities this week alone. Time for another linkdump! Here's the previous 28 'dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I like to start these 'dumps off on an upbeat note, and this week, I've got something gratifyingly cool and wondrous. Stars Reach is a "living galaxy sandbox MMORPG" led by Raph Koster, the legendary designer of games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxy. It's kickstarting right now:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach

Here's the pitch:

Whether it’s water turning dirt to mud or forests growing back after a devastating fire, every action leaves a mark. This isn’t a static world built by developers – it’s a living, breathing galaxy shaped by you. Resculpt landscapes, build entire cities, and yeah, ruin more planets just like humanity ruined their original eight homeworlds. That’s okay – there are always more worlds in our endless galaxy.

I've seen demos of this coming together for years and it is mind-boggling. You can play it like a galactic trade-empire builder, a shoot 'em up, a first person shooter, a resource management game, a MUD, and more. There are thousands of procedurally generated planets with realistic geology, geography and ecosystems. It's like something out of a Neal Stephenson novel. They're mostly done and just raising money to finish and launch. I gave 'em $100. They're projecting delivery in January. I can't wait!

It's pretty wonderful to see accomplished creators like Koster, who have gone from strength to strength, making a series of ever-cooler things as technological advancements let him realize the vision he'd been chasing since the 8-bit days. It's quite a contrast with HP, a company that was once world-renowned for making the highest quality, most reliable instruments and machines, and is now synonymous with the scuzzy inkjet rip-off.

I love a good dig at HP. This week, The Register's Paul Kunert scored a direct hit with a short news squib about the executive compensation package announced for HP CEO Enrique Lores: "261,658 toner cartridges" (that is, $19.36m):

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/hp_ceo_pay_for_2024/

I would like to live in a world in which all unreasonable expenses were denominated in HP printer cartridges (much as the BBC compares ever extremely large or massy thing to a London double-decker bus). Anything to make it easier to grasp the vast forces that shape our world and bring them into focus so we can understand them – and destroy or change them.

One economic school that does this extraordinarily well is "Capital as Power," which concerns itself with the "social power of capital" – that is, how capital shapes our behavior and outcomes. It's a complicated but extraordinarily clear and useful framework for making sense of the world. This week, Naked Capitalism published a long colloquoy on Capital as Power, featuring Michael Hudson (a great economist and historian of debt), political economist Tim Di Muzio, and two of CasP's top proponents, Jonathan Nitzan and Blair Fix (whose work I have featured in this newsletter many times). It's a long, fascinating discussion – just the thing to relax with over a weekend:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/capital-as-power-in-the-21st-century-a-conversation.html

Capital as Power grapples with power, the force that neoclassical economists could never figure out how to fit into a neat mathematical model and thus decided to discard. Refusing to think about power gets you into all kinds of trouble, from deciding that markets for human kidneys are "voluntary" to the denaturing of political parties into institutionalist weaklings like the Democrats, who are completely overwhelmed by the power-focused MAGA GOP as it dismantles the nation.

Writing for The American Prospect, Nick Tagliaferro rounds up "Ten Democrats Who Need to Be Primaried":

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-02-27-these-ten-democrats-need-to-be-primaried/

For years, Tagliaferro was the loudest voice on the Primary School newsletter, which covered primary races. In this guillotine-inspiring listicle, he presents such swamp creatures as Levi Strauss failson Dan Goldman (NY-10), who spent $5m of his inherited wealth to win his seat, from which perch he has done everything he can to undermine his more militant anti-Trump colleagues in the House. More familiar names like Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05) – whom Tagliaferro calls "single most needlessly antagonistic centrist in Congress" – and the ardent homophobe Stephen Lynch (MA-08).

OK, I've got to get into my rental car now and make the 3h drive from State College, PA, where I just did a talk at Penn State, to Doylestown, PA, where I'm speaking this afternoon:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1146230880419

From there, I'm going to Baltimore (tomorrow):

https://redemmas.org/events/

and then I'll be in DC on Tuesday:

https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

You can catch the whole tour schedule here:

http://martinhench.com

New dates that I'll be adding soon include Pittsburgh:

https://us.pycon.org/2025/about/keynote-speakers/#cory-doctorow

As well as Wellington and Auckland, NZ; and Manchester and London, UK.

Before I go, one last wonderful link to be getting on with. Framework – who make the repairable, modifiable laptop that I love more than any hardware I've ever owned – just announced a bunch of fantastic new machines, including a rugged new, 12" touchscreen laptop with a 180' hinge:

https://frame.work/laptop12

and a desktop PC (!) that has insanely high specs and a fully customizable chassis:

https://frame.work/fi/en/blog/introducing-the-framework-desktop

I spend so much time on the road, I have no conceivable use for a desktop PC, but man, this is tempting. What a sweet rig!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/01/menagerie/#stars-reach

[tagnoob]

The Stars Reach Kickstarter Campaign Ends, Secures Additional Funding for the Project, Keeps Taking Pledges

Our goal was to prove to the world that there was market appetite for this game, at a time when the industry financial landscape is challenging.  We turned to players to help us make it happen and to provide that proof.  And that approach worked: the success of the Kickstarter has already unlocked additional investment and set us on the road to Early Access later this year. -Raph Koster, CEO of…

[thejaymo]

Where Interests Take You

I've been thinking about how the longer I go from spending time on social media, the more wide open my media diet is becoming.

[toskarin]

it will never stop being funny to me how raph koster keeps pitching "I want to make a sandbox mmo like ultima again" with the livery swapped out to whichever buzzwords will land headlines

[mirror-lock]

2024 Reading List

In 2024 I finally read enough new books to make a worthwhile reading list. All of these books were in the service of researching and drafting The Worldbuilder's Almanac, so it's unclear whether this trend will continue into other years.

The main list does not include rereads (which usually make up the majority of my print reading) or internet articles (which usually make up the majority of my digital reading). It does not include TTRPGs or TTRPG play-adjacent material. It does include both print books and ebooks, and would also include audiobooks, because being a format purist in this day and age is silly.

The Main List

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction by Timothy Lim

Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn and Bill Tidy

Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Kelly

Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction by Adam J Silverstein

Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World by Adam J Silverstein

Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction by James Fulcher

History of Time: A Very Short Introduction by Leofranc Holford-Strevens

Fashion: A Very Short Introduction by Rebecca Arnold

A Study in Balkan Civilization by Traian Stoianovich

A Short History of the Railroad by Christian Wolmar

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire

A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

Books I Am Currently Partway Through Reading (in rough order of acquisition)

The Traffic Systems of Pompeii by Eric E. Poehler

Vikings: A Very Short Introduction by Julian D. Richards

The Maya: A Very Short Introduction by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari

Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton

Great Kingdoms of Africa by John Parker

A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies by Irving Finkel

(I do not expect to finish any of them in the remaining eight hours of 2024.)

Special Awards For Titles That Didn't Qualify For The Main List

Best Reread Experience of 2024: Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee. I went on a bit of a nostalgia reread spree in October and November. Seventh-grade Kaiya had great taste. Worst Reread Experience of 2024: Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. Third-grade Kaiya did not have good taste.

Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 That I Haven't Read: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui Best Fiction Book of 2024 That I Haven't Read: The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry

Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 In Which I'm Unexpectedly Namedropped: Inscapes: How The Worlds We Make Make Us Who We Are by Paul Czege

Best Educational Nonfiction Masquerading As A TTRPG: Scribe by Frederic Walker. The full title according to Itch is Scribe: Journaling the Bronze Age Collapse, which should hopefully answer some questions preemptively.

Best Video Game Experience of 2024: 13 Sentinels Best Experience with a Video Game Released in 2024: Unicorn Overlord

[cleverhottubmiracle]

[ad_1] Stars Reach, the new sandbox sci-fi online game coming from Playable Worlds, aims to be the next big sci-fi massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It’s in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s going pretty well. Stars Reach hit its Kickstarter goal of $200,000 in one hour and it’s now crossed $518,000 with 22 days to go. Raph Koster, a veteran MMO developer, and seasoned game exec Eric Goldberg started this project in 2019. I interviewed them both about the progress they’ve made. The project has thousands of players kicking the tires now, but Playable Worlds isn’t disclosing the exact number. Koster, who has been making big online game worlds since 1994, wrote the vision doc for the game with dozens of pages, with the full simulation of virtual worlds. It was the dream for a game that Koster had wanted to make for 30 years, where gameplay would emerge from the way that the physics of the world worked. If you dug a hole into the ground without enough structural support, it would cave in. That’s what he meant by emergent physics. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0E30QyRDo8[/embed] He used that to raise money with cofounder Eric Goldberg. He hired engineers he had worked with before to make an Unreal engine-based prototype. Then they switched along the way to make the game on Unity. The principles of the game worked and the engineers made it faster. Then you could run around in a world, where you could set oil on fire, see water pour out from lakes. And that answered the technical question of making the physics-based world work at scale. The San Marcos, California-based company’s goal is to make “the most alive game world ever made,” where the “galaxy is yours to shape.” And the Kickstarter campaign is less about raising money and more about getting players excited about what’s coming and giving them a chance to directly support the game. The campaign is about getting help from players to finish the game and fully test it. Playable Worlds has been successful raising money, scooping up $10 million in June 2020 from Galaxy Interactive and others. And in the midst of the metaverse hype, the Playable Worlds raised $25 million in funding from Kakao and others in 2022. Raph Koster is CEO of Playable Worlds. He has wanted to make a game like Stars Reach for 30 years. Now, Playable Worlds can show through its prototypes what it means when it comes to physics. With rain, a patch of dirt will get muddy. A forest can grow back after a devastating fire. Lakes freeze in winter. Rivers can change course. Your actions leave a mark on the world. It’s a “living, breathing galaxy shaped by you,” Koster said. Freezing water in the living world of Stars Reach. The team has created tools so so that players can resculpt landscapes, build entire cities, and ruin more planets just like humanity ruined their original eight homeworlds (per the back story). Koster wants the galaxy to be endless, full of aliens where you will have to fight them for control of the habitat. After five-plus years of development, players are actively testing and exploring the game. The game is in its pre-alpha testing phase. The vision for the planets and the galaxy Eric Goldberg is cofounder of Playable Worlds. They won’t run out of planets to explore because the worlds are procedurally generated. Each has its own unique climate, gravity, and ecosystem. No two worlds are ever the same. Players can develop their own playstyles and progress through their own skills. They can be characters such as a ranger, miner, xenobiologist, weaponsmith, leader or politician, journalist, entertainer or pilot. Skills and professions are integrated into the player-driven economy. Combat is fast-paced and action-driven where movement, timing and physics play roles. Enemies react dynamically. Some flee when outmatched, others call for reinforcements. Environmental destruction matters. Blow a crater in the ground, and it stays there. Weapons are diverse, ranging from precision sniper rifles to devastating sci-fi melee weapons. You can terraform your world into a green planet or a barren wasteland. Your world has a health bar that tells you how it’s doing. In Stars Reach, every item is crafted, traded, or discovered by players. There are no loot boxes or random drops. If you want the best gear, you’ll either need to craft it yourself or trade for it. Weapons, ships, and tools break over time and must be repaired or replaced. Space is also alive and dangerous. Smugglers can transport illegal goods. Pirates can steal your stuff. You can govern entire planets and manage player-run civilizations. As for the galaxy’s backstory, long ago, a mighty alien civilization called the Old Ones terraformed the galaxy into a vast, cosmic garden. They carved wormhole highways across space like roads, exterminated civilizations and reshaped planets to suit their needs, and built marvels that still bend reality to this day. Then, without warning, they vanished, leaving behind only ruins and technology that might as well be magic. Now, humanity is leaving its homeworlds and exploring the galaxy. Kickstarter backers of the Reacher tier ($30) and above will be at the head of the line for the remainder of the closed testing phase. During the testing phase, the servers will not be open 24/7, and wipes will be frequent, but players will have daily access to the dev team. The team will eventually release an early access build, per haps this summer, with Kickstarter supporters getting admission. The goal is to be in beta in the late part of the year and officially launch in the first half of 2026. In addition to the Kickstarter, the company expects to continue to raise money from investors and publishers. The scope will change based on the money raised. A cloud-native game Stars Reach is a cloud-native game. Goldberg said that the industry has become so risk averse, as noted in Matthew Ball‘s 224-page slide deck about the state of gaming. One of the solutions for that, Koster said, is this game. Titles like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto VI are expected to be wildly popular because they can keep up in the graphics race. But some titles like Ubisoft’s recent games are falling off in terms of big audiences. The unusual step that Playable Worlds took was to make a “cloud-native game,” where new kinds of gameplay are possible and constant updates are available because the development happens in the cloud, where the game resides. You don’t have to constantly update the game’s local version. The cloud-native version scales more like the web at web speed, delivering assets the way the web does. “When you look at the moments where the games market has really expanded, historically, it’s usually been when new technologies and new platforms have come along that allow games to do things they couldn’t do before,” Koster said. “Otherwise what you get into is, ‘Let’s make what we already make only slightly nicer.’ Usually, that means it’s nicer and more complicated, and it gradually gets more complicated and actually caps out the audience.” Koster said that happened with flight simulators that grew too complex for many gamers, as well as war strategy games that also became less accessible thanks to too many features. That spirals into higher costs and fewer players. “When we see expansion, we often see it with new platforms. We see it with new controls. We see it with new distribution or technology benefits. That might be touch screens, it might be Flash, allowing distribution, web, embedded and so on. In our case, what we’re doing by going cloud native is bringing a lot of those benefits, actually similar to what Flash had, with the ability to have constant ongoing updates to far more malleable environments than what we can do.” He said the way the team builds the game is now is creating new forms of gameplay and more varieties of experience. That opens up new markets, he said. “All of those kinds of things are things that our tech is set up to do. We’re starting, obviously, with just one game,” Koster said. “The response from players in our testing has been, ‘Wow. I’ve never seen things like watching a forest grow around me, or draining a lake into a cavern, or things like that.'” Koster said everyone is saying the industry is in a tough spot. The answer, fundamentally, is that you can’t keep doing business as usual, Koster said. “You have to take some swings that are outside of the normal comfort zone. And that’s at the heart of what we are doing,” Koster said. “We are pushing technical boundaries in order to deliver experiences that you can’t get any other way. It is something that gets you out of the spiraling costs for diminishing returns trap that everybody is buzzing about in the industry now.” Goldberg said that the cloud tech means the company can make changes in the game while it’s operating in the cloud, often within minutes or hours. Programming changes can happen fast, while art changes are dependent on the artists to get something out fast. That means the pre-alpha keeps changing. “We’ve been adding features at a pretty breakneck pace since we’re able to literally change the game several times a month,” Goldberg said. “When it’s ready, we can just throw it in and you don’t have to recompile the game. The game runs in the cloud.” Discovery? An adventure in space in Stars Reach. And while it’s hard to get discovered now, especially for brand new intellectual properties, the good thing for Playable Worlds is that players can see that it’s different and they’re spreading the word. That’s why the Kickstarter is going well and the player count for testing is good. “For us, the answer has been let as many people as possible into our Kickstarter, into our testing,” Koster said. “Even though the game is still pre-alpha, we use standard business metrics like net promoter score and customer satisfaction index to measure what people think of what they’re playing.” Around 50 is good net promoter score, where people will recommend it to someone else. Playable Worlds’ Stars Reach has a net promoter score of 80. That means the players are the evangelists, Koster said. The business model Feeling a bit colonial? Burning trees in Stars Reach. The likely business model is for the game to be a mix of free to play and one-time payments for certain features. The company has been dropping new content into the game every couple of days. And the bild tells the players about new features when they login. A bunch of blog posts describe what’s new at the company’s web site as well, and there’s a narrative recap. The good response from the players is giving the team an energy boost, Koster said. The team is also being as transparent as it can be about the development process and its schedule, Goldberg said. As for the state of competition, it’s been hard for a lot of companies to run big online games. Sony shut down Concord as it couldn’t generate much of an audience. Koster, however, has been doing this for decades, starting with Ultima Online, and Goldberg has been in games for decades too. South Korean game companies have been doing well with free-to-play online games. The players so far Stars Reach is attracting MMO players and more. So far, the core early adopters of the game are sandbox MMORPG players, like those who have played Star Wars Galaxies or Runescape and so on. “We’re attracting a lot of MMO fans, but from there, it expands outwards. We’re starting to pull in folks from survival games, Minecraft and Trove, and games like Enshrouded and Valheim. We’re seeing the potential for a pretty sizable audience that goes beyond standard MMOs,” Koster said. The game is playable in short bursts, where players can login and do maintenance on their homes or shops and then hop out in five or ten minutes. You can play on your smartphone if you wish. If someone on your usual team doesn’t show, you can find another person, Goldberg said. You don’t have to play 40 hours a month to get enjoyment out of it, he said. “A lot of the beauty in games is that the control is in the hands of the players and not necessarily in the hands of designers,” Koster said. “That doesn’t take anything away from The Last of Us Part Two, of course. But it does speak to the idea that if you have ways to give players greater freedom, that is something that they respond to. It’s a thing that games can do uniquely. And we see that in the titles that have popped up in the indie scene.” Some players are peaceful, while others love player-versus-player combat. Many want to live in an alternate world where they live, explore, fight and so on. “It’s more about the people who dream of visiting another world, right, and adventuring and leveling up,” Koster said. “We’re also catching a chunk of the cozy game players because we have of all of the crafting adn we have the survival, sandbox game players too.” GB Daily Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured. [ad_2] Source link

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kitchensink callithump linkdump

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn't squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it's time for my 21st linkdump – here's the other 20:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I'm going to start off this week's 'dump with a little bragging, because it's my newsletter, after all. First up: a book! Yes, I write a lot of books, but what I'm talking about here is a physical book, a limited edition of ten, that I commissioned from three brilliant craftspeople.

Back in March 2023, I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook of Red Team Blues, the first novel in my new Martin Hench series, about a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding tech bros' finance frauds:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

One of the rewards for that campaign was a very special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of Red Team Blues, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

Bound by the legendary book-artist John DeMerritt:

https://www.demerrittstudios.com/

And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:

https://www.jgraphicssf.com/

But this wasn't a merely beautiful, well made book – it had a gimmick. You see, I had already completed the first draft of The Bezzle, the second Hench novel, by the time I launched the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.

The reason that edition of The Bezzle had to be so small was that it was designed to slip into a hollow cavity in the hardcover, a cavity that John Berry had designed the type around, so that both books could be read and enjoyed.

I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything perfect. Last month, I took delivery of the books: three for my backers, one each for John DeMerritt and John Berry's personal archives, one for me, and a few more that I'm going to surprise some very special people with this Christmas.

Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are fucking astounding. Every time I handle mine, my heart races. These are beautiful things, and I just want to show them to everyone:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/

As it happens, the next thing I'm going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the third Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, which comes out in Feb 2025 (luckily, I had enough time to review the edits myself, then turn it over to my mom, who has proofed every book I've written and always catches typos that everyone else misses, including some real howlers – thanks Mom!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers – indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks. I love audiobooks and the audio editions of my books are very good, with narrators like Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman.

But here's the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren't locked to Audible's approved players – you can play my audiobooks with any audiobook player). Audible has a no-exceptions, iron-clad rule that every book they sell must be permanently locked into their platform, which means that Audible customers can't ditch their Audible software without losing their libraries – all the books they purchased:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income – after all, they're a monopolist with a 90% market share. That's why I'm so grateful for indie audiobook stores that carry my books on equitable terms that Audible denies – stores like Libro.fm, Downpour and even Google Books.

This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a 75% royalty on every sale:

https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/

Storyfair is a labor of love created by a married couple who were sickened and furious by the way that Audible screws authors and listeners and decided to do something about it. Naturally, I uploaded my whole catalog to the site so they could sell it:

https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any

These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks. You know how you can read all your books under the same lamp, sitting in the same chair, and then put them in the same bookcase when you're done with them? It's weird – outrageous even! – that tech companies think that buying a book from them means that they should have the legal right to force you to read or listen to it using their technology exclusively.

If you let your Storyfair audiobooks touch your Libro.fm audiobooks, they won't get cooties! Audible is like a toddler that won't let their broccoli touch their peas – only that toddler is also a rapacious monopolist that keeps 75% of every sale.

The fight for fair audiobooks is one of those places where the different parts of my professional life cross over: activism, digital media, art, writing the web, and breaking down complex technical subjects for a mass audience. I've just signed up to a six-year project to combine all those facets in a structured way, in collaboration with Cornell University.

Cornell just named me as their latest AD White Professor-at-Large. This is a six-year appointment that involves a series of week-long visits to Ithaca to lecture, run seminars, meet with colleagues, collaborate on research, and do community performances:

https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/

We've tentatively scheduled my first visit for early September 2025, to coincide with the Ithaca Book Festival, and we've got big plans, roping in multiple departments at Cornell, the local alternative school and local colleges, doing talks at the fair as well as at the university, and (we hope!) squeezing in a stop in NYC on the way home for a day at Cornell Tech. I'm so excited (and honored) to be working with Cornell (and getting a chance to visit Moosewood Restaurant, whose cookbooks taught me how to cook!). Watch this space.

Authorship has always been a political act, but never moreso than today, with waves of book-bans sweeping the country. One of the heroes of those bans is Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who made headlines when she publicly excoriated Scholastic for demanding that she remove references to racism from her kids' books in order to make them more palatable to reactionaries:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1169848627/scholastic-childrens-book-racism

Tokuda-Hall has stepped up the fight, co-founding Authors Against Book Bans, an org that provides training and support for author/activists so they can fight back against book bans at library board and city council meetings:

https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/

Authors Against Book bans is looking for members! I signed up last week, within seconds of having Tokuda-Hall give me the pitch when we ran into each other in Oakland at the Locus Awards. Are you an author? Sign up too! They're especially interested in branching out beyond YA and kids' authors (though they want those kinds of writers, too!).

Book bans affect us all. Even if you personally are never stymied when you visit your library and discover the book that you want to read has been removed by a swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic. The bans sweeping our country mean that our neighbors and loved ones are being denied literature by these cranks. There are people in your life who are losing out on the possibility of a life-changing literary adventure (which is why the far right hates these books – they want to be sure no one encounters the ideas between their covers).

The realization that you have to live in a society with people who are harmed by injustice, even if you personally escape that justice? It's the whole basis for solidarity.

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.

The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.

A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:

https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template

The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.

It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then returns from adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.

They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil

One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.

In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

But amidst all those gimmes to the rich and powerful, there was one notable exception: the SCOTUS ruling on the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy. Purdue was the family business of the Sacklers, a multigenerational dope-peddling dynasty that went from super-rich to stratospherically rich by kickstarting the opioid epidemic with their blockbuster drug Oxycontin.

The Sacklers sold mountains of Oxy the old fashioned way: by lying. The lied about its efficacy and they lied about its safety, and they helped kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Eventually, this caught up with them, and Purdue lost a bunch of court cases and was forced into bankruptcy.

That's where things get gnarly: the Sacklers took the already-sleazy world of elite bankruptcy to a whole new level, with a set of breathtakingly sleazy maneuvers that ensured that their case would be heard by the one judge in America who would let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

That judge was Robert Drain and the Sacklers were the blow-off to a long and shameful career in public "service." The Sacklers incorporated a subsidiary in White Plains, NY (in Drain's turf) precisely 181 days before filing for bankruptcy, then claimed that this empty small-town office had been the company HQ for more than six months. Then they hid machine-readable metadata in their filing that tricked the court's database into assigning the case to Drain:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

The reason the Sacklers were so horny for Drain? He was a notoriously generous source of "nonconsensual third-party releases." These would allow the Sacklers to permanently end every lawsuit against them without having to declare bankruptcy. Instead, they could take their (ruined, hollow) company through bankruptcy, throw a small fraction of their personal fortunes into the pot, representing fractional pennies on the dollar of what they owed to their victims, and walk away with tens of billions and eternal protection from any future suits.

In other words, they could stiff their creditors and keep the loot. Which is exactly what Robert Drain gave them – before retiring from the bench to get a two-orders-of-magnitude pay raise at a white-shoe firm that specializes in representing corporate mass-murderers like the Sacklers.

That's where it would have ended, but for a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court, which threw out the nonconsensual third-party release deal and put the Sacklers back on the hook to pay the victims of their many, many crimes.

As ever, the best source of analysis and explanation for elite bankruptcy shenanigans is Adam Levitin of the Credit Slips blog:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2024/06/purdue-pharma-decision-a-big-win-for-mass-tort-victims.html

Levitin has a prediction for what's going to happen next. He rejects the predictions of Sackler apologists, who say that this is going to add years or decades to the already too-long wait for compensation that the Sacklers' victims have endured. Instead, Levitin says that the Sacklers will almost certainly transfer billions more from their personal fortunes to the settlement pot and beg for consensual releases from their victims. In other words, they'll go from dictating terms to asking for them.

So the settlement will stand, but it will be larger, and victims who don't want to take it won't have to – they'll be able to sue. In other words, this ruling "does not prevent deals in bankruptcy. It just changes the terms of what those deals."

This has implications for other mass-murderers and corporate criminals, like Johnson and Johnson (who tricked women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

And the Boy Scouts of America, who let pedophiles abuse children for decades:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue

Both J&J and BSA carved out nonconsensual third-party releases in the mold of the Sacklers' deal, and both briefed the Supreme Court, warning that if the Sacklers were forced to pay what they owed, J&J and BSA's victims would also be entitled to far larger sums. Go ahead and threaten us with a good time, why doncha?

The Sackler decision is a real bright spot at a dark time for corporate impunity. It's always nice to see big corporate bullies getting a bit of a comeuppance. Another one of those comeuppances was just delivered thanks to a classic fatfinger error.

A Microsoft engineer accidentally released the sourcecode to Playready, the company's flagship DRM product:

https://borncity.com/win/2024/06/26/microsoft-employee-accidentally-publishes-playready-code/

Microsoft's DRM doesn't do anything to protect the interests of creative workers or even the companies that employ them. As a Microsoft rep admitted on stage at a presentation in 2006, the purpose of Microsoft DRM is to prevent small startups from entering the market, ensuring that Microsoft and its "rivals" can safely divide up the world without worrying about disruptive competitors:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/30/msft-our-drm-licensing-is-there-to-eliminate-hobbyists-and-little-guys/

I was there that day and reported on the remarks, prompting both Microsoft and its rep to furiously deny that they'd ever said this, despite multiple witnesses who heard it. This was just a couple years after I gave a viral talk at Microsoft about why the company shouldn't use DRM:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

By 2006, it was clear that the company was all in on DRM, and today, DRM is the centerpiece of Microsoft's anticompetitive strategy, and Playready is the centerpiece of Microsoft's DRM. The source-code leak is doubtless going to give rise to lots of grey-market tools for stripping DRM from all kinds of media:

https://security-explorations.com/microsoft-playready.html

You love to see it! Now I'm doubly looking forward to this summer's security conferences, including Defcon, where, for the first time, I'll be emceeing the charity poker tournament to benefit EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32

This should be very fun – and funny – especially given how little I know about poker (I have been specifically selected on that basis, for the comedy value). Every player gets a custom EFF poker-deck, and the winner gets a treasure chest filled by EFF board member Tarah Wheeler, including "emeralds, black pearls, amethysts, diamonds, and more."

I like to close these linkdumps with something fun and uplifting, and I'd planned to end things with the poker-tournament, but then my pal Raph Koster announced that his game studio Playable Worlds had dropped its first announcement of Stars Reach, an open-world MMO like no other:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/06/28/announcing-stars-reach/

Raph is a legend in MMO design circles, whose credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote the definitive text on how games work, A Theory of Fun, that's does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics:

https://www.theoryoffun.com/

Stars Reach is stupidly ambitious. It consists of truly open worlds, modeled to an absurd degree of fidelity:

We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

The game is fundamentally a climate story, whose lore has humanity seeded around the galaxy by a powerful alien race called the Old Ones, only to have humans bust through the planetary limits of every world they were given. Now the Old Ones are giving humans another chance to try smarter ways of sustaining ourselves on new worlds, with the aid of powerful robots call "Servitors."

Because this is a Raph Koster game, it's got a bunch of extremely satisfying play dynamics:

A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat

An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune

An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting

In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house

A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want

The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all

Stars Reach is not playable yet, but the company's looking for gamers to give them feedback and steer the development:

https://starsreach.com/

OK, that wraps up the week's links. I'm gonna get one more edition out on Monday, god willin' and the crick don't rise, and then I'll be off for a couple weeks. Enjoy your summer!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large

Image: James St John https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/40894047123

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[tagnoob]

The Stars Reach Kickstarter Campaign is in The Final Stretch

Will the impending end of the campaign draw in more backers?  Will there be a last minute rush?  Some excitement?  Something crazy to draw some attention?  Maybe? Stars Reach – The Campaign Continues I mentioned in a past post… or two… about the U-shaped nature these campaigns often adopt.  The true believers, they jump in right away, so if the company has done its work the first 48-hours are a…

[nddiaries]

I Believe and I Stand for It: My Personal Philosophy

Quote of the day: "Fun is just another word for learning" - Raph Koster

I believe the key to a productive yet fun and fulfilling student life is to study while having fun. Nothing is more stressful as a student than just studying all day and only thinking about academics 24/7. There are five important elements for a productive and fun-filled student life. (1) Listen and pay attention in class so you don’t have to relearn the topics from the beginning when there is a test to avoid cramming. (2) Entertain yourself with something else when no information is processing in your mind, taking a break is okay. (3) Studies and having fun should be balanced, time management should be used. (4) Never cheat, it is not fun to cheat on your achievements and learnings. It would not be of help in the long run. (5) Surround yourself with like-minded people, a good learning environment is vital.

[3dafmmodelling]

undertsanding player types can help designers create experiences that cater to different motivations

1.achievers who seek to accomplish goals and earn rewards

2.explorers who enjoy discovering new areas and lore within the game

3.socializers players who are motivated by interaction with others, often prioritizing social experiences over competition

4. killers players who play like a competition

designing levels with these types in mind create a more engaging experience

shape theory often associated with the work of designer raph koster suggests that certain shapes and forms in level design can evoke specific emotional responses

circles creates a sense of unity and safety triangle creates a sense of action, tension or conflict

square can evoke stability and order by utlizing these shapes thoughtfully designers can subconsciously influence player behaviour and emotional management

blockmesh

blockmesh is a technique often used in level design to create modular and flexible game enviorment. it involves using simple geometric shapes

blockmesh can help in rapid prototyping , testing gameplay mechanics , facilitating easy adjustments based on player feedback.

[bg3-game-analysis]

Game Play and Interaction 🎮

How do players play the game?

If we want to be very literal for a second, players can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC or using a console. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can look at the more abstract way players “play” BG3. The best way to describe the play that takes place within Baldur’s Gate 3 is by looking at it like a conversation. A lot of interaction takes place between the game itself and the player.

Players also play by using pattern recognition to learn controls and how to interact with the game. Koster describes it best, mind loves patterns, our brains eat patterns up (14). Finding new patterns, putting puzzles together, filling in missing pieces. An example of a pattern in Baldur’s Gate 3 is learning that when you talk to people you are more likely to get new quests or objectives within quests. Once you do that, you can decide whether you want to keep talking to people or maybe talk to them less, depending on how many goals you want to have at any given time.

Interactive elements and how the players interact with the game

The conversation of interactivity involving listening, thinking, and speaking is interesting to think about when applied to Baldur’s Gate 3. Both the players and the mechanics of the game make that interaction more fun. When the players are listening, thinking, and speaking well it can make for great interaction (Crawford 7), however sometimes it becomes imbalanced based off the game mechanics or the player’s own choices. Let’s take the listening aspect for example. It is entirely up to the player to make sure they are listening to what the other characters in the game. If they don’t listen, they might miss an important plot piece or not know how to respond next. This can then affect the game and how characters think of you. Speaking is also an interesting interactive element within the game because sometimes the player has no choice but to talk poorly. A lot of the dialogue that the player chooses must be met with a dice roll, whether that’s because they’re trying to be persuasive, deceptive, etc. If they roll poorly, they are probably going to come off the wrong way. This can upset the person you are talking to and might even result in a fight.

Beyond-the-object-interactivity: Elevating the Baldur’s Gate 3 experience

Beyond-the-object-interactivity is a type of interactivity that spreads out beyond the game itself. It is essentially tackling the big G and not just the little G (Salen and Zimmerman 4). With the Baldur’s Gate 3 release, a fanbase was created. That fanbase has gone on to create new mods for the game, dedicate entire social media accounts to it (much like this one haha), make cosplays, and even write fan fiction for the different romance-able characters. You will find people having different debates and conversations about lore throughout the BG3 subreddit page. It is no longer just a video game, but a subculture.

(Image source)

Feedback within the game: Achievements, Rewards, and Death

Players receive feedback within Baldur’s Gate 3 in several ways. The gaming system you are using to play the game will give achievements for doing certain actions or going above and beyond. It will also reward you for doing things in more creative ways such as killing someone with another person’s body. Another system set up is within the game which is rewards. The game will often times give you rewards for completing bigger quests. These rewards often range from money to weapons to camp supplies. Lastly, a great way the game gives feedback to your playing is by having your character die. You heard that right! Uh oh you lost all your life and no one’s reviving you even though you also control your companions? Sorry you die now. Oh no you fell off a cliff because the jump command wasn’t working right? Whoops, I guess you died.

Works Cited

Crawford, Chris. The Art of Interactive Design. No Starch Press, Inc., 2003.

Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press, 2005.

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

[stupidcupid06]

every day when I came home from 6th grade I would tell my parents my classes were too easy

"I already know all of this" I'd say. "Why am I learning this again?"

what I didn't realize then - and struggle to, now - is that the solidification of an idea is much harder and takes much longer than learning it.

the subconscious is fickle, and slow. it requires a lot of practice to learn things. and it requires deliberate practice, as proposed by raph koster.

deliberate practice is the act of learning things on purpose, integrating them into your muscle memory and your visualspatial sketchpad and everything else that makes up your brain

it takes a lot longer than understanding something intellectually.

personally, if I was in a good mood and had enough free time, I could probably do pretty much anything halfway decently, using just my intellect. but to do something masterfully or to do it under anything less that optimally, the rest of the body and mind is required. and learning to function in less than optimal conditions is an extreme necessity in this capitalist reality.

[kennak]

古典的なゲーム デザイン入門書の 1 つ (Raph Koster 著『ゲーム デザインの楽しさの理論』[0]) は、楽しさとは何か、ゲームとは何かという問題に取り組もうとしています。 2ページごとにイラストがあり、さわやかな読み物です。 (特に、「さまざまな人々のためのさまざまな楽しみ」の章は、元の投稿の内容に非常に近いです。) いつ雑草に巻き込まれるかを定義するのは難しいです。 以下は本からの抜粋です。 > 多くの単純なことは、掘り下げていくと複雑になりますが、楽しむことは非常に基本的なものなので、もっと基本的な概念を見つけることができるのではないでしょうか? > 脳の仕組みについて読んだときに答えを見つけました。 私の読んだところによると、人間の脳はほとんどの場合、パターン、つまり概念の柔らかいずんぐりした灰色のパックマンを貪欲に消費しています。 ゲームというのは、食べてしまうのに非常においしいパターンばかりです。 Uplink には非常においしいパターンがいくつか含まれていると思います。これはまさに、ゲームを最初からやり直すときに自分がどれだけ上達したかに気づく感覚について作者が話しているときに話していることです。 もちろん、楽しさは二値的に分類できるものではありません。楽しさを高めるために「ジュース要素」などに重点を���いたゲームが数多くあることは間違いありません。 [0]: https://archive.org/details/theoryoffunforgamedesign2ndediti...

ビデオ ゲームの楽しい要素 Uplink | ハッカーニュース

[glitchpalantir]

Books for those who learn gamedesign

1.Raph Koster "Theory of fun for game design".

2. Jesse Schell " The art of game design : a book of lenses".

3.Steve Swink" Game feel: a game designer's guide to virtual sensation.

4. Scott Rogers " Level up! The guide to great video game design".

5. Tracy Fullerton " Game design workshop".

6.Katie Salen " Rules of play".

7.Ernest W. Adams " Fundamentals of game design".

[mitchipedia]

Congratulations to online gaming pioneer Raph Koster, whose company, Playable Worlds, raised $2.7 million. The company has a plan for a platform that combines building, gaming and socializing online. Koster and his team are veterans of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and other online games.