A Quote For The Week
“… the way I move through the world, my social interactions, my way of thinking about anything. It bleeds through you, no matter what.”
– Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta
Media and Musings on my Mind
On Martian Tactics and Strategy
I like Tactical RPGs. It’s probably in the top 3 genres for time spent. I’ve even more-than-half finished XCOM2 Long War, which I’d guess puts me well in the top 20% of “gamers dedicated to these types of games”.
As the Youtube Algorithm well guessed, when it decided to put a trailer for “Mars Tactics” with a pixel style art that probably promises tactical and strategic depth onto my feed, I put other things aside and clicked it.
The gameplay seemed fine and quickly became the sideshow. What caught my attention was the premise of the game itself:
> In 2042, a workers’ strike on Mars turns violent.
> As Labor stands against Capital, you must pick a side.
> How will you win the war for Mars?
> Build your rebel hideout / Build your corporate stronghold
> Master Collective Action / Master Corporate Strategy
> Fight Smart / Fight Dirty
> Fight for your Rights / Fight for your Shareholders
> Decide who Owns the Red Planet
I think it was around “Master Collective Action / Master Corporate Strategy” this statement, midway into this 1:30 trailer, that I was jolted out of “attention on gameplay promises” to the humorous and incredulous “I’m sorry what??”
To start, I want to make explicit some of the necessary assumptions that an alien (or any human who isn’t already familiar with certain premises of our civilization) would need to be clear on:
When “workers” convey/protest their desires, violence is a reasonable and/or expectable outcome.
Labor and Capital are popularly understood “sides” that are against each other. To properly dialogue in this domain, consider reading a good chunk of economic theory from the last 200 years before being considered a valid interlocutor.
Wars are meant to be won.
“Rebels” tend to have “hideouts”, because underdog. Corporations (at least the militaristic ones?) tend to have “strongholds”, because not-underdog. What if you are a “rebel corporation” like Facebook in the 2010s? Well I suppose feel free to play the narrative to your benefit, whoever you may be.
Collective Action, with lots of Marxist undertones, and Corporate Strategy, with lots of Corporate(??) undertones are types of skills that one can hone to mastery. This game supposedly expresses how that mastery can look like and plausibly help you gain such mastery.
Fighting smart and dirty are two styles you can choose from. Each style appeals to some types of people.
Rights OR Shareholders are to be fought for and they trade off directly against each other (I’m chuckling writing this out). What about shareholder rights damn it!
The Red Planet, our only realistic-for-settling planetary neighbor, a planet that plausibly once hosted Life, and has the potential to nurture more, carrying the spirit of humanity and life beyond our cradle, is a Thing to be Owned. There’s also a decision process for who owns it, and in this case, You are invited! If you buy this game that is.
Last, and certainly not least, there are only ever two sides to choose from, but really only one choice: the choice of choosing between two choices. You Must Pick A Side.123
In a similar vein exists 4X games like Civilization that I’ve always felt conflicted about playing. On the one hand, “One More Turn for my Epic Grand Strategy”. On the other hand, the underlying ontology implicating Civilization as a deterministic process, with pre-ordained tech trees and defined winning conditions seems profane to me. Apparently the goal of building a civilization is to Win? Surely “Civilization”, if it were a game, it’d be an Infinite Game?45
Doris Lessing has a wonderful book, titled Prisons We Choose To Live Inside (the prison is our own language/concepts, to make it immediately clear). It, and other works like George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By, captures well that we inform our language by using it, and our language informs us by the topologies that it implies in co-evolution.
As my point on the Red Planet may have already indicated, what “The Stars” represents for humanity and for life means a great deal to me. Listening to a bit of Carl Sagan has never failed to move me. When I “Hold” the prospects of “The Stars”, I feel a profound sense of Wonder.
Yet, when I “Consider” the prospect of interplanetary “settlement?/colonization?”, it’s less Wonder that is present, but more so Puzzlement. Puzzlement in the sense of “how do we manage long term radiation exposure” or “how do we build robust game-theoretic treaties”. As the prospect changes and the way of holding/considering changes, Wonder slips away. Something else is introduced instead, we might call that Realpolitik perhaps.
It’s “Realpolitik” that makes it so that, not only was I not jolted out for the first half of the Mars Tactics trailer, it was so normal that it was a matter of fact. Of course, there’d be war on Mars. It’s impossible for conflict not to evolve into wars with sufficient scale in an interplanetary civilization. Surely?
However, what kind of impossible is this? “it’s impossible not to have war in a sufficiently scaled civilization” does not seem the same as “it’s impossible to create free energy”. They sure can feel the same though. They both represent the same kind of insurmountable barrier that one ought to assume to work within.6
The former kind of impossible, the prison that Doris Lessing talks about, includes “We must build nukes because They are building nukes” to “We must build AGI first, or They will build AGI first”. Insofar as a Martian settlement is an extension of our present civilization, I’d honestly not like that extension to happen. The Stars are meant for more beautiful and sacred expressions. This probably means I may never see a reasonable Martian (or Lunar, or even just on Earth) expression in my lifetime though, and that has been hard to accept.
This hard-to-accept-ness has been something I’ve been wondering about for some years. How does one work towards what one cares about, while not being able to fully trust the means (or prisons) by which we do so? The direction of an answer probably sounds something like: “we do it mindfully together, with many perspectives, and many channels of feedback”. It’s a premise relatively easy to agree with, but the actuality exists in the nooks and crannies of real, complex relationships. It can be more enticing to pursue the ideal dialogue via The Academy qua Plato than talking with my mother about why I feel conflicted about having children in the immediate future.
All the while, where did the Wonder go? It should still be around, as invisible as the glass when looking through a window. How do you keep Wonder present knowing Realpolitik is also real and present?
Did you know I was on TV?
While searching through some files, I found an old interview I did back in 2014(!) while at the startup I was working at. The first 3:45 or so is the segment on the app/company/me.
While I remember cringing a lot when I looked at the video again a few years after, this time the strangeness of beholding a David, a week past his 20th birthday, made far more different things salient than before. If the cringe was a psychic immune response to push away things I did not like, this time, I found it comfortable to reach into his experience, while also being in my present experience, which affords a nice parallax.
At this point, I had only formally dropped out of college for two months (and also three or four months out of a massive burnout), on my first work trip to Los Angeles as a 19 year old to VidCon in Anaheim (of all things). 7 This makes me realize, I must have had my 20th birthday by myself in LA! I wonder what that was like for me.
I recall fairly vividly the park where the interview was done, and a complex feeling of not-quite-trepidation as I was getting mic’ed up.8 I remember interacting with the interviewer with the same kind of barely-hidden-Asian-STEM-teenager-awkwardness that I had when meeting a popular beauty Youtuber earlier that week. I landed in the (peripheral of the) entertainment industry and it sure was foreign.
Some mannerisms also becomes more clear cut and identifiable, when cringe is removed. For example, at 2:04, I say “An active lifestyle isn’t about hitting the gym every day”. The way I said “hitting the gym every day”, from the cadence, tone, expression, and even the way I tilted my head, reflected sharply my practice of emulating my mentor/boss at the time. I was still deeply trying to figure out what qualities like confidence, intelligence, ambition should look like, and my mentor at the time represented all of those to me. To this day, there are still traces of these behaviorisms that I can identify, though broadly, it feels more packaged into a “mode” that I call on, rather than my primary and only style. If you had met David when he was age 20-23, this style would have been 90% of his personality. Additional instances of this I observe include: “Being more positive (2:29)”, the posture at 3:00, “… physical change, it’s the mentality… (3:13)”.
Finally, a kind of observation that past versions of me would feel quite surprised to have – my voice/speech sounds different to me. Historically I would notice differences in confidence/poise, but this time it’s something that seems quite somatic/physiological. To me, I sounded very cotton-mouthed in the interview, in a way I retrospectively recognize in past recordings of my speech (i.e. it’s not just because I was being interviewed and nervous). I was surprised enough that I compared my voice in more recent recordings and it does appear to me that the “cotton mouth” quality doesn’t seem as present. Historically, I would default attribute the change to influences around how, through meditation, therapy, relational practices, I’ve cultivated a more relaxed body that is less likely to exhibit cotton-mouth type phenomenon. However, a new hypothesis formed that attributes influence from another dimension too. That is, aside from psychological development, my physical body has changed due to the type of body-work (e.g. physiological type like Mewing or therapeutic somatic practices) that I have tried over the years. Since these practices usually have longer feedback loops, precisely because I get the benefit of a 10-year look back, I found the difference more stark. In other words, I’ve influenced the development of my skeletal structure and musculature around the throat, mouth, and jaw which changed how my sound gets produced. That’s pretty cool!
Apparently What Humors Me
Chinese person watching a Japanese review of black people playing a Japanese card game (Yugioh)
In great cosmic amusement. Right after I wrote this section, the great Youtube Gods put at the top of my feed the trailer for Diplomacy Is Not An Option. Also amusingly, I thought the trailer was very well executed and the game also looks great lmao.
Except! Check out Don’t Kill Them All Youtube then brought up, a remarkable take on the tactical RPG genre, precisely with the twist/imagination that I’m trying to describe – how could some form of “non-violence” be creatively expressed via the mediums we are familiar with?
Anddd my feed is now pumped with video game trailers :/
To be clear, I think Civilization (the game) is more like a Celebration of civilization, taking you through a tour of the wonders of where humanity has arrived at in modernity. Though crucially, it’s not just celebrating any civilization, it’s celebrating This Civilization. Lots worth celebrating of course, but mistaking what we are celebrating can imply some semantic insanity.
Difficultly, so long as we are programming logic into a substrate, we are embedding presuppositions into the substrate, so considering a Civ-like game that can match this “feels impossible”. In this respect, Improv is probably a better Civilization game than Civilization, insofar as it’s actually an example of an infinite game, and so at least categorically more appropriate.
Interestingly though, I think they often don’t actually feel the same. It’s easier and “more fun” for me (raised on Sci-Fi, reasonably equipped with an engineer-y disposition) to fantasize (innovative) about creating free energy than fantasize (idealistic) about a society that engages conflict via means other than war.
My work experience in PumpUp includes stories I realize I would love to tell more. Stories that I feel like I might have never told and plausibly forgotten, which would be unfortunate.
I had driven there in a rental car. A car I had damaged while parking and was too ashamed to report the expenses to the company. That was an uncomfortable spend of ~$500.