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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
otvgame

City Building Game

the-grey-tribe

@mitigatedchaos

I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.

Modelling The Interesting Stuff

In order to make your city-planning ideas work in a game you would either have to model incentives based on individual in-game agents, and thus give agents complex AI for long-term decisions like when to buy or rent or move or renovate or change jobs, how much money to save or to invest with some risk or to spend, how many children to have and so on. You would have to model trust and civic engagement and social cohesion. Or all these factors would just be variables in an abstract cellular automaton based on a system of differential equations, like the original SimCity. In that case, you would have to make simplifications and judgements that look like begging the question.

The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.

You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…

Communicating With The User

You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.

It is important for two reasons:

  1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
  2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair
otvgame

I like the idea of making a game based on your city planning prototype, however I don’t think your game will be a great vehicle for your city-planning ideas.

I agree, but in this case I can use some of those ideas as starting places to give more depth to the simulation, so there can be some simulation of those ideas that isn’t feasible in existing city builders, without the kind of in-depth total simulation we might do if this were a university research project.

Thus, the OTV Game can be differentiated by support for mixed-used buildings where the bottom is commercial and the upper portion is residential, zoning regulations with more potential control, rent bidding, etc.

The middle path would be putting agents into a grid-based world in which they make some decisions individually, but are influenced by grid-based environmental factors. On every grid update, grid cells are first updated based on the aggregate of agents living in the cell, then grid cells update based on surrounding cells. On every decision, an agent consults the values in the current cell it is in, or a weighted combination of the cells it was in most often over a period of time.

This is essentially my plan, along with a goal of 1,000,000 agents and 64km2 of area.  Decision trees can be manageable for each agent if they are very small, and various heuristics will be used to make the simulation feasible, including use of grids and hierarchical routing.

Initial simulation will be simpler and focus on the core economic elements, and more complexity will be added over time.  For instance, once basic markets are implemented and tested, more industries and specializations can be added and simulation load and difficulty observed.

You probably want to model trust, safety, length of commute, crime levels, civic engagement, savings, disposable income, taxes, rent and rent controls, property developers, landlords, homeowners, family…

Yes, some of that is definitely on the initial slab of what I want to develop, and how to rig up property developers will be one of the interesting questions, since I plan to track firms’ profits and accumulated capital.

However, I think sufficiently complex behavior can be obtained with fairly simple rules - for instance, that firms have a base cost and marginal cost, and scale up production when they make a profit and scale down production when they fail to make a profit, and that when they accumulate enough saved up capital and are profitable, they move to a bigger building to expand.

This pent-up capital accumulated for bigger buildings could then be part of the heuristic used by property developers.  (Which probably would skip being physically represented as owning offices in the city, unlike other businesses.)

You need a way to make the player see what the agents are thinking, when they are making important decisions, and why.

It is important for two reasons:

1. If things happen but you can’t see them, the game feels boring
2. If important things happen and you don’t know, the consequences feel unfair

Yes.  This will require combing the grid for issues and representing them as visual cues for the users.  The form that takes will have to depend on magnitude and kind.

The stylized aesthetic provides plenty of room to provide visual cues in addition to cues such as floating event bubbles above businesses going bankrupt.  It also provides room for some interesting overlays.

Ideally, we could also access individual citizens at their home or workplace and get more detailed information about them, but in practical terms this isn’t efficient for a city of 200,000, so there must be other ways to display this data.

mitigatedchaos

Preparations are now in motion.  I will be evaluating the difficulty of the development path I want to pursue, level of interest, and so on.

Source: the-grey-tribe one thousand villages otv game
rendakuenthusiast
argumate

the funny thing about that David Brooks piece is an uneducated lower class person having a crisis over deli food with fancy immigrant names like “baguette” and going to normal honest American food, like tacos and burritos instead

sadoeconomist

Honestly that never occurred to me, Mexican food is considered totally unadventurous comfort food, here on the west coast, at least

I just got back from having carne asada tacos for dinner in a taqueria that had mariachi music playing, and it still had a bunch of American flags up around it since the town had a 4th of July parade last week

I was thinking it’d be good if I could get my family to try something a little fancier and more exotic like Greek or Thai food instead of the old familiar standbys we’d all been eating since my older relations were kids, like Mexican, Chinese, and Italian…I guess that sounds odd if you think about it objectively

simonpenner

As far as I know, San Francisco claims to have invented the burrito. And, as much as they are loathe to admit it, they are still part of the United States

sadoeconomist

San Francisco invented the Mission burrito, in the ‘60s, the original burrito is older and probably actually from Mexico

simonpenner

I thought they were full of it. 

rendakuenthusiast

https://mobile.twitter.com/Ed_Realist/status/885227324597092353

mitigatedchaos

Interesting take, but the format is a good reminder why Tumblr is superior to Twitter for “manthreaders” with tales to tell.

Source: argumate
the-grey-tribe
the-grey-tribe

I have seen exclamations like “I bet he does not even have one gay/black/jewish“ friend, used as some kind of bait, to make the target say the unfortunate words.

mitigatedchaos

That’s when to either go meta, attack along another vector of the same topic (“oh, so the only real gay people are the ones that already agree with you?”) or flip the switch and start shitposting about how you are friends with literally every Jew on Earth, including the questioner.

argumate
argumate

Younger brothers more likely to be gay right?

Birthrates have dropped; in the past it was not unusual to have 8+ kids.

Exactly how many people were gay in the past? Most of them?

the-selfie-ofdoriangray

I was given to understand that higher population density is correlated with a higher proportion of gay individuals, so presumably these two factors cancel out somewhat

argumate

we’ll figure this out one day.

mitigatedchaos

No one expected the arrival of what 4chan dubbed the “Fag Maximizer” AI.

(Or, as the beleagured sociology students that accidentally unleashed it onto the world called it, Kinsey Indexer.)

shtpost this is a joke do not actually maximize or minimize the number of gays augmented reality break
the-grey-tribe
wirehead-wannabe

Also, while we’re on the topic of annoying conservative rhetoric, let’s talk about Rotherham. I agree that it happened, and that it was bad, and that people covered it up for ideological reasons. The unspoken assumption that I don’t agree with and that people seem to keep trying to sneak in here is that it happened because Muslims are inherently more evil than the rest of us. Like, this fits the narrative of “social progressives sometimes behave like ideologues-in-the-pejorative-sense and cover up scandals to avoid making their side look bad just like other ideologues do” but not “social progressives are automatically wrong because of this.”

the-grey-tribe

Rotherham bubbled up periodically and was ignored again. People have not shut up about Rotherham because it’s not over! People were still tried convicted in 2017! And some people are still trying to look away!

But the ideology and the cover-up betray something deeper: The progressives *knew* that the facts of these cases went contrary to their narrative. CPS and police *expected* these cases to be viewed as evidence against a happy multicultural narrative. That’s why they covered them up! These people were not high on their own ideology, they acted either under pressure from above, or out of self-interest, but they made the correct inferences from the situation!

mitigatedchaos

Meanwhile, the Right are turning all the Progressive Left platitudes about Multiculturalism into a dark joke.

“Culturally Enriched” - Harmed or even killed.

“Diverse” - Non-white.  (And this almost never comes up with some ethnicities, while it comes up a lot more with others.)

“Religion of Peace” - Religion of violence.

“Truck of Peace” - Ramming attack against unarmed civilians.  It was even used to describe the ethnic revenge killing by a white man against Muslims.

The actual Progressive Left response we’re going to get is to clamp down on these uses, denounce those using them, and create a new set of platitudes or euphemisms.  

Apparently in a video of a religious van and knife attack, some people could be heard saying that they thought the government had got a handle on this whole terrorism thing.  And there are a pair of tweets going around of someone who had previously attended a “refugees welcome” event, after the Ariana Grande concert, saying they were scared and wanted to leave the country.  (But I can’t confirm it because the account has since been suspended.)

It is important to realize that these practices of suppressing the news of the problem in the name of upholding multiculturalism actually undermine the multicultural project.  One can potentially do this multiculturalism thing, but one can’t be an idiot about it and just hope for the best, and one can’t be cultureblind, just like we were told colorblindness isn’t good enough anymore.  

Source: wirehead-wannabe politics
mutant-aesthetic

Anonymous asked:

Id be more into "race realism" if it wasn't wishful thinking for retards who don't study genetics

mutant-aesthetic answered:

This is what lovecraft thought of hitler

mitigatedchaos

“What I’m saying is that there are some genetic differences in lactase persistence that are correlated with ancestral populations.”

“So you’re saying we should kill all the unmilkdrinkers? I think we should kill the unmilkdrinkers.”

“No, don’t be ridic-”

“Raise up an army and push them all off the continent.”

“It isn’t even a 1:1 correlation!”

“Hah, that’s what the unmilkdrinkers want you to think!”

racepol don't kill the unmilkdrinker unmilkdrinker
argumate

Anonymous asked:

contra yourself+anons, you make/reblog a bunch of good posts, indeed it would be difficult to imagine you not doing so given the volume of content you spew forth

argumate answered:

“your original posts are not good, and your good posts are not original”

reblogging the shoulders of giants, etc.

mitigatedchaos

According to my theory of evolutionary psychology, which I created just now, this shows that Argumate is a Forager-Male.

shtpost
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