The Games Behind Your Government's Next War

The YouTube channel People Make Games just released this piece presented by Quinn called, The Games Behind Your Government's Next War. I'm sharing because it is both entertaining, and educational.

My opinion, for what it's worth, know what you can control, and know what you can't.

It's fine to have ideals, hold oneself to a moral standard, or examine the ethics of what we do, but without an understanding of human nature, the evolutionary pressures that drive our behaviours. Arguably, everything we do is determined by a combination nature and nurture.

So, my take away... a renewal of enthusiasm to work on my wargame.

Big Little Wars Update

Me relaxing.

Well, by skin of my teeth I managed to get the first draft out to my play-test/reader group on Christmas Eve. Of course that night I dreamed of a couple of things that I missed. Yeah, I have oddly specific dreams at times.

I realized that I had failed to write explanations for blast grenades.

For that matter what I meant by blast and the effects in general. The two are very different, so one has probably got to be renamed.

Blast grenades stun. Inflicting shock. Simple as that.

The blast attribute is the radius of the weapon attack. I have in mind that a roll to hit that misses uses the miss die value for determining where it hits and what might happen. But, I'll have to give it some more thought.

As I was writing the scenarios I wrote that one objective as capturing people.

I had not mentioned this as a possible action anywhere else in the rules. I have some thoughts that involve grading the ease or not of successfully capturing people.

I can excuse myself for this, because it only became apparent when I finished writing the two scenarios. Also, I wanted to write more scenarios, but I ran out of time.

However, I have ideas for more, and no doubt my play-testers will make suggestions too. But, one of my play-testers has already told me he got what I intended from the introduction:

Command and Control
Integrating a range of technologies
Asymmetry between forces

So more later. Always more later. But now I must focus on writing my next novel, which is long overdue.

NB: Added; forgot to mention, solo play

Big Little Wars

Big Little Wars is a set of rules to play games in the Gate Walker universe. It has become the main focus of my working day since I started being able to string two words together.

While this is not directly related to the next novel I'm writing, it has set me the task of working out what the everyday world is like for the average person living on Earth, circa 2071.

Clearly the world is large enough for the adage, the future will not be evenly distributed, to apply.

From a miniature gaming perspective this makes for interesting conflicts. For someone living circa 2071 it sucks. Because living in the middle of a world of proxy wars while shopping is the very definition of suck.

So I use tech levels to differentiate the disparities that arise from asymmetrical access to technology.

Anyway, my document tells me that the current word total is: 19,677 words; though the project counter only says 19,401 words. No doubt there are good reasons for this, but I haven't a clue why they differ.

Arguably, I don't have much of a clue about anything these days.

So while doing this project has completely sidetracked work on my next novel, the upside from all the work is that it has got me thinking about a lot of stuff that counts as world building stuff I will need to know for later stories.

I'll take that as a win.