The Wargame, by Sky News and Tortoise A recent podcast made by Sky News, find it on your favourite player. It details the players’ actions during a one day wargame, representing a Russian attack against the UK, and the British response. Overall I liked the gentle introduction to the setting and the terms - that this is explicitly aimed at the general public as an introduction to the format and/or the situation, rather than to a set of wise elders nodding sagely at each other while they all tut about the same things in unison. As you’d expect from a journalist with her experience, Deborah Haynes gives clear and timely explanations from the start - and never long enough to distract a more experienced listener. I liked the scenario - as good as it could be when you’ve brought everyone together for a subject-specific wargame, so players know they’re probably reacting to intentional prompts rather than a misunderstanding of innocent events. ...

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay Regular readers will have noticed that the theme for this blog has changed. I was using Vitae but the requirements and developer for that have changed, so I thought I’d try something new. I’m now using the Awesome theme - I like the simplicity of it, and the Table of Contents functionality works really well, see this recent post. But tags and categories would be good without me trying to hack something together, and it handles the about pages weirdly. And I don’t need the multi-lingual functionality of course. ...

I’ve written a couple of pieces in another couple of places: On the Milmud blog I wrote up my recent experience of using an online LLM to help me research relevant facts quickly, you can read that here. On LinkedIn I’m running a poll-based game about how an invented organisation should handled a potential cyber security issue, if you’ve got an account on LinkedIn you can participate here. Otherwise my latest episode of weeknotes, covering the last couple of years, are due out any day now…

Coding Medieval Worlds, exactly that. I had the pleasure of attending Coding Medieval Worlds recently. The description from the event’s website is a great summary: “Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming.” ...

These are the weeknotes1 on the games I’ve played since I last wrote up my weeknotes…. about sixteen months ago I think. These are highlights of the games I’ve played that either were particularly notable, or are a strong recommendation for or against playing them. I’ve divided up the short reviews and thoughts into fairly arbitrary categories below: And yes, I really should get into the habit of writing up notes as I go along - which I’ve started doing with Chestnut Lodge Wargaming Group games, I’ve included links to games I played there below. ...

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. ...

If you mix all the vibrant paints together, everything becomes the same brown. As with Cory Doctorow’s enshittification it’s useful to attach specific names to specific aspects of what’s probably late stage capitalism. It just helps identify that aspect, and its characteristics. So what is smooshification? Smooshification is the drive for anything to have the features of everything in its “class”. Now “class” is a vague concept here, so without going into a discussion around taxonomies I’m unqualified to have, I’m using “class” in a vague way. To use the definition from wherever Microsoft Bing gets its definitions from: “a set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind, type, or quality”. ...

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. ...

The Traitors but concentrated. The Traitors TV show but so much faster Considering my interest in the recent series of The Traitors TV show in the UK, I recently looked at this similar show on YouTube from 2004. It’s a short series called “Traitor” - five programmes were aired on the BBC in the UK over one week. Much, much snappier than the current version, it has a couple of aspects in common with The Traitors, such as the way players are excluded. I assume the two formats and programmes are unrelated, just that the terms used are relatively obvious. ...

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