Self-Referential

A couple of recent comments about games, and being immersed in them, really got me thinking. Firstly - in this comment on LinkedIn, Vikki McCall of the Socialudo social enterprise was commenting on my post about using fictional scenarios for serious games. She said “when the fictional scenarios are driven by research and real lived experience that can add some real impact”. This is absolutely true. I think a benefit of an imagined scenario is that it removes a lot of the baggage people might bring to a game, so players can concentrate on the issues and decisions abstractly, without being caught up in either an historical context, or their own personal experience. ...

A prediction of what will be underwater when the sea rises two metres. Water Water Everywhere I helped run this session as part of the CLWG design conference; CLWG being the Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group. I believe the organisation is around forty years old, and is much more focused on the design of new games rather than playing existing ones. Well, I say “helped run” the session, I mainly took notes while my co-designer, Terry Martin, asked the questions. ...

A review of the book “Leading the Rebellion” by Jason Kingsley.

Suggestions on when you should use randomness in your life.

A review of the book “Billion Dollar Lessons” by Carroll and Mui.

A summary of URLs for figuring out if your old mobile phone is supported by an alternative operating system.

Seahawks versus Vikings, and what it was like to watch it on DAZN as an NFL GamePass subscriber

A thoughtful listicle of the wide variety of things I read or watched this week, from March to August, from time-travel to sports.

Problem Discord I have sound issues on Discord, an occasional background humming or similar noise - that I can’t hear, and that doesn’t manifest when I’m using Discord’s “mic check”. But others have notified me about it, and then I notice my picture in meetings showing a green border, as though I’m talking, when I’m clearly not saying anything. So that means I’m making an online meeting just a little bit harder for everyone else. ...

I was working through The Handbook of Cyber Wargames, that I co-wrote with John Curry, and came across this section on why dice should be used in professional games: From the book. “The use of dice here represents the influence of many unknown variables on the success or failure of a particular attack. In the real world, sometimes it is just chance that allows an attack to succeed or get stopped. For example, did the phishing attack target a particularly susceptible member of staff who was having a ‘bad day’, did the attackers choose the one server the System Administrators were troubleshooting, and they immediately noticed the unusual activity? This will help illustrate to the players that cyber security is risk-based, and that they must account for the different possible outcomes from an attack. Dice are a simple way of modelling the role of chance in cyber security.” ...