Stuttgart

Successfully ensconced in a hotel room in a small town just outside Stuttgart. This post brought to you from DISTANCE by the power of THE FUTURE, viz, everywhere having free WiFi. Yay the future!

I also can't remember if I had dropbox on my phone last time I went abroad, but I love being able to go on using my regular TODO lists offline without a break. On the other hand, I do also love how relaxing it is being disconnected. I think I need to make that more of a regular thing.

In an airport, have you ever regretted sitting down while waiting for a gate to open? Have you ever regretted NOT sitting down? I know which ways the probabilities skew for me. Although I admit, if the airline really is going to serve the first 90% of the passengers and then turn away the last 10% it does make sense to crowd to the front. But I normally can't be bothered...

All the way through travel with no noticeable stress, clearing hurdles like minor ambiguities in speech, having hotel address written out in advance, paying for taxi, etc, etc. Yay go me! Thank you to my massive support group on FB and to Liv, you were so so helpful. Also to mum for being mum.

And the hotel clerks in Germany are so friendly and informal! Britain, I think we need to try harder to find a consistent middle ground between smarm and "tell you my whole life story and ask you about yours" :)

December Days: A game I enjoy

This wasn't what I originally intended, I originally intended to talk about
a game I'd like to recommend, but I happened to be thinking about Magic:TG
recently, so let me talk about that.

There's lots of talk about the things wrong with magic, and I basically
agree, but let me here talk about the things I like about it.

I like that it's a sort of microcosm of almost all possible games. Do you
like psychological games and outguessing your opponent like poker? Do you
like precise estimation of odds and best chances and how much to gamble
like poker? Do you like playing a game and just doing the obvious thing and
letting chance determine if it works? Do you like a social game where the
focus is on playing with friends and it's ok if you play the same game each
week? Do you like playing in tournaments where you can improve your chances
by iteratively optimising your strategy in advance over months? Do you like
adapting to an uncertain battlefield? Do you like modelling real-world
strategy with a mix of how much to allow for chance and unforseen problems
and how much to exploit advantages? Do you like massive group games with
massive swings and pile-ons? Do you like poking for edges cases? Do you
like succeeding under arbitrary constraints? Magic has all of those!

I like that there's always a new game a couple of times a year, all quite
well balanced in their own right.

I like that each world, even if the story is questionable, is rich in
worldbuilding.

I like the amount of art that's introduced, ranging from the hilarious to
beautiful.

I like vocabulary, the trickle of obscure words I never heard of, or never
expected to see in a mainstream product. (I meant to find examples but I'm
running out of time writing this post. Welkin, a word for the highest
celestial sphere or upper sky. Many, many group nouns for animals.
Occasional theological terms.)

I like the consistency of the ruleset. Many games have some moment where
you say "this card says this, but this other card says that, how do they
work together". Magic has 12,000+ unique cards, and ANY of them might be
played together. Including some that do very unique and quirky things with
the rules. But, despite some rocky history, the comprehensive rules since I
started playing have had essentially zero ambiguities. Sometimes it's
confusing what the right answer is if it's an unusual situation. Sometimes
it's difficult to say, if it deals with "what happens when a player makes a
mistake in a competition" not "what are these two cards SUPPOSED to do
together". Sometimes the rules are temporarily technically ambiguous but
it's clear what they should say, or are clear, but something is not quite
working as intended and they have to be fixed. But generally, you can just
assume that for any given interaction between cards, there is a single
unambiguous correct answer to what happens and it would be a major scandal
if there wasn't, since an unexpected interaction is often the source of a
new competition deck. Lots of actual computer programs in production are
less deterministic! :)

The previous paragraph isn't _quite_ true. We have found cases where IMO
the rules are ambiguous -- but you pretty much need someone with a
university-level-maths background bent on creating an infinite loop :) In
fact, that's something else which is interesting, that the rules are
open-ended enough that you can do things like Alex's turing machine and
random-magic-card-generator. In fact, it's quite a useful body of research
in making complicated but clear rules, many other games borrow ideas from
it.

I like that magic has -- very imperfectly, but ongoingly -- avoid the lure
of printing more and more powerful cards.

I like that, despite mistakes, in design, and in dealing with players,
magic has made an ongoing effort to do the right thing for the long term:
abandoning decisions that don't work, making changes that are good
long-term but may be controversial, admitting mistakes. They could do
better, there have been some awful decisions, but at least with the design
of the game, there's an ongoing commitment to try to repair mistakes and
avoid clinging to them out of pride.