boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26...

Same designer as Watergate.

It’s a hell of an afternoon. Or afternoon/evening if you’re lucky. Or unlucky.

Ha!

Have you played Weimar?

This is great!

Don’t know many people who know these games. I’ve played half, at a guess, and they are great - which is a pretty good recommendation for the other half.

Looking forward to Part 2!

… said Prof Karma of the Very Large Metaphor Tracking Station. “The only thing we can be sure of is that it represents something far greater than its mere physical properties or random trajectory through space”

What an incredible book that is. Someone called it “the Orange Bible”.

Once again - the best way to view monarchy is as a form of human sacrifice.

We select a family, almost at random, to live in luxury while they ‘represent’ our state but at the cost of any meaningful (rather than symbolic) life.

It’s a barbaric practice (it was literally practiced by ‘barbarians’).

Being distantly related to some conveniently Protestant Germans?

The Turing Test is a test of language behaviour - and has nothing to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise).

Perversely I wonder if that is actually the reason it is able to simulate language. It can ape the rhythms and responses we expect. It can’t convey meaning intentionally - because it has none.

Language is at least as much a ‘behaviour’ as it is a ‘tool’.

This is SO true.

And also the basis of my theory that most language philosophy is predicated on the wrong idea - ie that the purpose of language is solely to convey meaning.

Excellent distinction.

Although I’d be tempted to say a game is a system designed for us to create narrative and a toy is something we can use to create our own system.

Maybe good stories are harder to find than stars in a galaxy…

That’s true, although I wonder how much of it is us recognising and responding to the deep love he had for the world he created - in every detail vs our perception of a more cynical need to expand for the sake of expansion - and continuing return on investment.

Narrative vs Game, Destination vs Exploration, Discovery vs Reinforcement.

There’s a balance, or a tension, in all of us over how much we like of one vs the other.

Arguably Tolkien is the granddaddy of this trajectory. The Hobbit implies a much wider world and history. LOTR maps it out, in painstaking detail.

It doesn’t surprise me that some people like one - some the other.