GBS.

(unfortunately, not the GBS you were looking for.)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381278855_ChatGPT_is_bullshit

A research paper that articulates in long form what we know in short form already:

ChatGPT is bullshit. 

That is, it and everything like it generates endless amounts of bullshit that is cheerfully and thoroughly ignorant of and indifferent to truth, accuracy or even good style. It sounds to rushed and harried and often equally indifferent users like it might be right, or good enough for now… “bullshit baffles brains”, as we used to say in the Army.

Over time we will learn to write like LLMs, as they learn to write like us, and we will all move towards some form of GBS….

Great Bullshitter Singularity. 

 

Taken from the Journal of Ethics and Information Technology, (2024) 26:38

Abstract
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce humanlike text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.

SDHistcon Online 2024 Second Front: interviews on We Are Coming Nineveh! and just me.

This Saturday, June 8 from 0800 to 2400 GMT, will be the online convention SDHistcon Online 2024 Second Front.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/sdhistcon-online-2024-se…

Harold Buchanan will be hosting an interview with me and Rex Brynen on We Are Coming Nineveh.

I anticipate we will talk about the game at start, but it’s likely the conversation will veer off into representation of civilian casualties and collateral damage in games, the war in Gaza, modern urban combat, etc. etc.

Timing will be 0700 Pacific time, so 1000 on the East Coast, 1500 in the UK.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/sdhistcon-online-2024-se…

And a bit later, Andrew Buchholz will interview just me, in a broader sense… we will talk about the GMT COIN system games, but also about my less famous work, e.g. the District Commander series, Brief Border Wars and Land of the Free (gee, who remembers that one?).

https://tabletop.events/conventions/sdhistcon-online-2024-second-front/schedule/73

In both cases there will be an opportunity for viewers to submit questions, which we’d get to if I would just shut up for a moment….

A badge for the convention is $10.00 but tickets for all events are free.

There are a LOT of other events, it’s a full day of demonstrations, chats, panels and whatnot.

I plan on attending “Professional and Hobby Wargaming: the Nexus” and and will be on hand for the “GMT Games Seminar with Designers and Developers” later in the afternoon to give an update on China’s War 1937-41.

I will be on some time between 1330 and 1400 Pacific time.

https://tabletop.events/conventions/sdhistcon-online-2024-second-front/schedule/41

Hope to see you there!

And in case you missed it, here are the videos:

 

GF campaign: Operation Barclay, by Maurice Suckling

Today was the beginning of the crowdfunding campaign via Gamefound for Operation Barclay, Maurice Suckling’s new game on Allied deception operations in the Mediterranean 1942-43.

Very definitely a 2-player game, it includes a lot of bluffing and actual deception by players to move through an interesting deck of intelligence and counterintelligence cards and mechanisms.

I signed up as #231, the game will be over 100% funded in a few hours… [update: it was funded in less than two hours!]

Price for a single copy is 21 Euros and it is published by Salt and Pepper Games, who also published the very clever David Thompson game Resist! about guerrilla warfare in Spain after the end of the Civil War. Both games use the same artist, whose work is quite nice, and the component quality from this publisher is also good.

More on BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/404923/operation-barclay

Gamefound page (you can get a good look at the components and download the rulebook here): https://gamefound.com/en/projects/saltandpepper/operation-barclay

I’m looking forward to this, as it is a nice excursion into the background of my alt-hist game Balkan Gamble (see also the missing parts of my Strategy and Tactics article on deception operations in the Med here: Balkan Gambit… the rest of it)

New book: Wargames According to Mark

https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1113-wargames-according-to-mark.aspx

For the first time, GMT has offered a book on its P500 system. And what a book!

Mark Herman is one of the best known and prolific wargame designers out now, with a design career that stretches back to SPI days.

His first published design was Raid! Commando Operations in the 20th Century from 1977. I don’t like tactical games much, but not only was this one of my first SPI – S&T wargames it is still one of my favourites to play. After SPI, Mark created Victory Games but also became one of the few hobby gamers to make things pay on the professional side of the house. He joined Booz Allen Hamilton and as a senior partner there contributed massively to the US military’s efforts in wargaming, simulation, concept exploration and analysis. 

He is also a very pleasant and polite person, even extroverted for the wargamer stereotype… one of my fondest memories of the last Consimworld Expo I attended (in 2019, I’m going back this July after 5 years away) was talking with him and going to dinner with a gang of other folks (Bruce Geryk, me, Nick Karp, Harold Buchanan, Mark Herman). 

Now he’s retired (from Booz Allen, but not from games), and written a book on wargame design! Foreword is by Peter Perla, one of the last things he wrote before he died. Something like this is not to be missed, get it now for $35.00! (but UPS shipping to Canada is another $30, yowtch). There will be no problem for it to make its P500 point, I pre-ordered this morning and orders were up to nearly 400 already. Also, because it is a book, it’s very easy to produce so delay on this one will be minimal. 

New solo game: Dislocated

A few weeks ago I put together Dislocated, a simple and fast abstract game for one player about some of the problems posed for military, government and non-government organizations when they are tasked with assisting large numbers of people on the move. The people shown in this abstracted model are moving away from some kind of threat – a battle or invasion, a disaster, a violent mass movement, some kind of monster protected by copyright legislation, etc.. The United States Department of Defense calls these people Dislocated Civilians or DCs; the Department of State calls them Internally Displaced Persons, and other organizations variously call them refugees, evacuees or other descriptive terms.

The game is played in turns. In each turn cards representing groups of DCs will be drawn from a deck of ordinary playing cards and placed at the top of a notional grid of spaces arranged in rows and columns, while other card groups move downwards towards the bottom of the grid. The Player will move their unit counters representing organizations and services to place them with groups of cards, and then roll dice to obtain a score that will allow all, some or none of the cards in the groups to be removed from the game (signifying that their primary needs have been addressed, so that in the short term at least they may be considered safe or healthy or settled).

But the needs and demands to be satisfied are larger than the resources and services available, so some cards will exit off the bottom of the Field; these cards are “lost”. The game is over when all the cards have made their way through the Field, and the Player’s level of success depends on the total values of cards that were lost.

From the Designer’s Notes:

This game is of course a hideous abstraction and generalization of the activities of organizations that work in Humanitarian Action and Disaster Relief, and the elements of the military that work in Civil Affairs and Civilian-Military Cooperation (CIMIC). The designer’s hope is that it may give some insight to a player who does not have experience in these fields and gain appreciation for their efforts to help and protect people.

The game attempts to present the player with the following points or dilemmas:

• Dislocated Civilians are groups of vulnerable people who arrive in the area with a variety of needs.

• These needs normally vastly outweigh the services available but must be matched with those services as efficiently as possible.

• Through a combination of frictional events, swamped resources, and chaotic movement of people, some DCs will not be helped – “lost”, in game terms. You can’t catch ‘em all, but you need to try.

Components needed: the rules file, one deck of ordinary playing cards, 12 six-sided dice (player can make unit counters or use the face cards in the deck).

Rules file: Disloc rules 30 April 2024
Playing time less than 30 minutes.

After The Fall of Kabul

In the journal Rethinking History: Professor Thomas Ambrosio at North Dakota State University has published an article on the relevance and reception of A Distant Plain in the period during and after the collapse of the Afghan government in 2021.

Here is the abstract of the article:

Boardgaming after the fall of Kabul: player and designer (re)engagement with a distant plain
Thomas Ambrosio

Received 09 Feb 2022, Accepted 29 Mar 2024, Published online: 28 Apr 2024
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2024.2339120

ABSTRACT
During summer 2021, the world watched the swift and, for some, surprising collapse of Afghanistan’s government. However, a Taliban victory was always a possibility for players of A Distant Plain (ADP), a boardgame about insurgency and counterinsurgency in post-9/11 Afghanistan. These events inspired many ADP players, and its designers, to (re)engage with the game, thus providing scholars with a unique opportunity to investigate in real time how historical practice occurs within the popular culture space. Utilizing primary sources, this article demonstrates that contemporary history games – those which depict current events or open-ended, unresolved periods, rather than ones designed to model what is seen as ‘settled’ history – are uniquely subject to external, out-of-game interventions which may prompt reevaluations of their assumptions and models, since players and designers are repeatedly challenged by changing circumstances to integrate new data into how they perceive and consume the historical representations found therein. These games are therefore exceptionally suited to engendering genuine and ongoing historical practice, through the use of evidence, argumentation and debate, retrospective reassessments, and counterfactual analysis. The broader discipline will greatly benefit from taking a more inclusive view of popular history by paying greater attention to historical games of this type.

The journal and article are available through Taylor and Francis Online, a site I don’t have access to but if you are connected with a post-secondary educational institution or a good library you might be able to access it.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2024.2339120?src=

Thomas Ambrosio has written several other articles in the same vein, good to see this interpretation getting some air.

Social Movements and Board Game Design

Happy May Day!

To commemorate the event, Fred Serval held a panel on this topic with a great selection of people: Richard Barbrook, Joe Dewhurst, Alex Knight, and Yoni Goldstein.

Excellent discussion on games, organizing, and getting organized with and through games.

Connections Online 2024 video playlist

The collected videos of the panels and events from the recent Connections-Online 2024 conference are now public and available to all!

Link to the panel on urban warfare above, the other videos are found here:

• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Introduction & Distributed Wargaming: Some opening thoughts
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Distributed Wargaming Best Practices
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Peter Perla and the Art and Science of Professional Gaming
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Zenobia Awards Panel Presentation
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory-Wargaming Division
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Using Discord to Provide the Kriegsspiel Experience
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ CNN Academy- Building Future Journalists (Rex Brynen!)
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Analytical Wargaming with SWIFT-G
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Human Factors and Cognitive Ergonomics
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Challenges with Online Multiplayer Events
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Your Successful Professional Wargaming Career
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Alternative Military Technologies at Gettysburg
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Teaching History with Wargames

I was not able to attend any of the other events due to time zone differences and work schedule. But anyone who wasn’t there, can now see and hear what it was like.

Gack, I hate my recorded voice….

“Resurrected to be killed (then maybe born again)”

(this space left blank)

OK, I admit I thought of the phrase first then found it in a song by a metal group called Protest the Hero.

But this has nothing to do with music, it’s about Boardgamegeek (BGG) shenanigans and it’s bothering me more than perhaps it should.

Some time last November, someone on Boardgamegeek.com started a thread called “The Israel-Hamas war as a wargame” or words to that effect. The OP (original poster) was not posting a trivial or sensationalistic question, their enquiry was how one would seriously explore the problem, and after the initial fluffing and clucking about designing on a current conflict there was actually some sensible back and forth about the merits of trying to address it, then the thread went dormant the following month.

This weekend, after four months of being buried the thread was resurrected (or “necroed” if you prefer) by a one-liner post saying this topic was a travesty and this thread should not exist… this post brought it up on the subdomain where it attracted a melodramatic post by someone else agreeing with the first poster, and stating that if the BGG admins did not delete it then they would delete themselves from BGG. Cue several posts in response by me and others who were on the original thread explaining in what I thought was non-confrontational language what the thread was originally supposed to address, professional gamer relevancy, game-based journalism, etc. and comment on how the war has in the last 4 months moved away from being worthy of ludic consideration like this. I went out to lunch and returned to find that the thread had been entirely deleted.

As I understand it, this is something that I believe only the BGG administrators themselves can do. Moderators on BGG lock threads, usually after one or more warnings. Even if an OP deletes their original question or post the replies to it remain. I’ve been on BGG for 20 years and one week and this is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen to a discussion, as I said normally threads are simply locked when the conversation gets ugly.

This is a pretty minor thing, in the great scheme of things. I’m not going to formally complain to the admins (it wasn’t my thread) nor am I going to engage with the drivers-by. But it bothers me that a drive-by posting on a serious discussion that quietened itself four months ago will get it not just shut down but removed from existence entirely… to assert, in this negative way, that no serious consideration can be, should be, or will be given to the topic. I wonder what was said to the admins?

Anyway, unlike the song the thread won’t be born again. Waste of time and too many keystrokes already.

Urban wargaming panel 17 April

(It may look like just rubble to you…)

The Connections-Online panel on urban warfare wargaming went very well, except that none of the military “end users” who were invited were able to make it… so it was three designers yakking at each other, moderated by Aaron Danis, who is an academic end user of our products.

Mike Markowitz spoke about the nature of urban combat and how that has been reflected in wargames graphically, I spoke about the 7 or 8 urban designs I had been working on the last couple of years, and David Burden spoke on his concepts of urban warfare and how they were reflected in his designs. David is far more sophisticated and technological in his approach than I am: he was showing his work and experiments in gaming in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, meanwhile here I am figuratively playing in the mud with decks of ordinary playing cards and some wooden cubes!

The Youtube of the panel will be up in a few weeks and I will post a link to that in due course.

Oh, before that happens though, I want to alert you to three things of David’s:

• His database of urban warfare games, with well over 250 entries in it, sortable and searchable by many different indicators. https://airtable.com/appHv9yJCjX7nqL1W/shreVPHaoJBpxGzFj/tblusKhwNCNcXmShS
• A wiki about his PhD in urban wargaming: http://taunoyen.com/wiki/doku.php?id=phd
• And a Geeklist on BGG for his list of commercial urban wargames: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/296982/urban-wargames

Meanwhile, here are my slides (PDF) and script (ODT, open from within your word processing program if you need to):

urban ppf 17 apr 24

urban pastpresentfuture 17 april 24