Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 32
September 12, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 348
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September 7, 2022
Metagaming: An Interview With Andrew Ringlein
In today’s standalone episode I’m going to talk about some new gaming ideas I’ve not seen anywhere else, and have their creator, Andrew Ringlein, come on and talk about them. Andrew was also on a previous episode where we talked about crypto and how it changes incentives in business.
So I’ve been a steady, casual gamer since junior high school, and Andrew actually introduced me to Role Playing Games way back then. Andrew is a die-hard gamer, a super close friend, and quite simply the smartest game designer I’ve ever met. And now he’s actually built a game studio and is in the middle of launching two games.
But before I bring him on I want to talk about why I thought these ideas warranted a UL episode. He’s a close friend, but I have lots of friends, and I only create UL content around ideas that I think will be interesting to the audience.
What I personally find most interesting in the gaming space is not really the games, but new things happening in the games. The engagement mechanisms. How the content is being created. How people are incentivized to create their own content. And how changing rules change incentives and then change behavior.
Basically, I’m excited about how new games change gaming itself.
I have talked to Andrew throughout the creation of his new games, and had a bit of input and knew the general direction, but the other day I spent over an hour doing a brain dump of everything he thinks is unique about the game he’s releasing, which is called Rifters.
And I’ve broken these new mechanics into 5 Rifter Mechanics (Update With Full List Number)
1: Core Gaming Concepts, and
First, and just to get it out of the way, NFTs are a big part of the game. He came up with this during the NFT climax earlier in 2022. But luckily for the game and its legacy, it’s not about hyping some sort of NFT (which is the worst part about the whole space). Rather it’s a mechanism for getting NFT-united groups to come play in the game. So the NFT thing is ever-present, but it’s just a mechanic, not the entire point.
So, here are the mechanics.
The first core concept is what he’s calling Reactive Reality. This is where things happening within the game itself, as well as adjacent to the game in other mediums, all affect the nature of reality inside the game. So think of the physics engine. The strength of items. The relative power of different magic types. They’re all dynamically modifiable based on player activity! Imagine pacts with Gods where you make deals and promises, and in return something you desire actually happens.The second concept is highly tied to the first and deals with the existence of Simultaneous Realities for the game. That means the main game is happening within the game itself, within the browser, but dialogue and activity is taking place simultaneously on Discord, on Twitter, and even in meatspace! And tying in with the first major concept, those actions in Discord or Twitter—or live on Earth—can directly and significantly affect the rules and outcomes of the game!The third concept is Gamification of Pro-Community Behaviors, which he calls Crossover Incentives. In other words, this is a Discord-adjacent game that wraps community-desirable actions—such as talking about the community on social media, or looking for people who trash-talking the community–and incentivizes them through in-game activities.This is the first game ever made, to my knowledge, where an action on Discord, or Twitter, or in front of the Oakland Coliseum, can materially alter a game’s fundamental reality.
Not as a hack or a trick, but built directly into the game engine from the beginning. Tons of the game’s underlying variables are adjustable from external inputs, giving players across multiple mediums (Discord, Twitter, Physical, etc.) more control than ever over a game.
So the Core Concepts are:
Reactive RealitySimultaneous RealitiesCrossover IncentivesWhen you combine these you end up with a completely new type of game that merges game, community, and reality into one, which he’s referred to as Metagaming (think meta in RPGs combined with mixing worlds). So you have the game itself that has adjustment and change built right into its core (Reactive Reality). Then you have gaming activity happening across multiple dimensions simultaneously, including in-game, on Twitter, in Discord, and in physical reality (Simultaneous Realities). And then you have in-game activities affecting real-world communities and vice-versa (Crossover Incentives).
Here are a couple of examples:
The UL Newsletter: See the ideas, patterns, and models that will keep you ahead…Sign up to get a concise summary of what's happening (and why) every Monday morning.Let’s say you just had a major player die in your clan within Rifters, and you really wish you could resurrect them. You can speak with a game avatar and forge an agreement that says if you can get 10 influencers of X amount of power to take the following action, that will create enough power outside of the game to cross the Rift into the game!
Or let’s say you create some amazing item in the game and you want to give it ungodly powers. You can can go to an avatar and make a deal in which you bring X number of new viewers into a given location, and that attention will result in the Avatar being pleased with you in-game, giving you the ability to forge a +5 weapon instead of a +2 weapon. And it’s up to you to negotiate that pact, including what you have to do and how it will affect the game.
Crucially—this isn’t a change that happens for just you, in your own instance. No. These are game-wide changes. You are literally able to leverage your community, your network, and—most importantly your creativity—to forge pacts that affect the underlying rules of the game for everyone in it.
So those are the main elements, but here are some additional mechanisms that add to vitality.
Personalized Items — Items are created within Rifters that are named after specific individuals in real life. Like, “Will Wheaton’s Wand of Woe”. Anyone else can wield it, and it’ll be a fine weapon at +1 and the ability to fix any technical problem. But if Will Wheaton actually shows up and claims it, it becomes a +5 weapon, with its own custom art, and a whole list of additional buffs. Plus, the guild he joins with will get a ton of additional advantages both in the game as well as in their Discord community. Again: crossing the boundary between real and game worlds!
Tribal CTF — One of the primary dynamics is 8 factions that make up each game, and the fact that they are each NFT communities. Groan, I know, NFTs. Well, remember, it’s not the NFT bit that matters here: it’s the community bit. This allows things like a community’s Discord channel saying, “Hey, we’re going against BORED APES in Rifters, let’s go kick some ass!”
Importance Mapping — The more powerful a given item (in this model an NFT), the more powerful the item in game. This encourages people with powerful NFTs to bring their item into Rifters to see how powerful they can be.
So that brings the complete list to:
Reactive RealitySimultaneous RealitiesCrossover IncentivesPersonalized ItemsTribal CTFImportance MappingOk, so those are some of the core ideas, with a few examples. To hear more, listen to the included podcast.
September 6, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 347
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August 29, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 346
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August 22, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 345
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August 21, 2022
Battle of The AI Art Engines: Midjourney vs. DALL-E
Created by Midjourney
We’ve all been marveling at DALL-E 2 for the last few months. For good reason. It’s stunning.
Well, now there are multiple competitors. I just spent some time messing with the latest one that has a ton of hype, called Midjourney.
Midjourney is macOS and DALL-E is the Linux CLI.
The obvious question for both beginners and experts is, “What’s the difference?”
The easiest way to answer that is to say that Midjourney is like using a Mac. And DALL-E is like using the Linux command line. This is true in three main dimensions:
Ease of Use: Midjourney does better with simpler prompts.Weaker But Safer: Midjourney is less powerful, but does better if you are lazy.A Bias Towards Beauty: Midjourney produces better-looking output with very little effort
Some samples from the Midjourney Showcase
ExamplesI just wrote another post for the site about censorship vs. company autonomy, and I wanted to use Midjourney to make the blog header image. I used the prompt:
An art piece showing the violence between internet censorship vs. free speech.
Here’s what DALL-E gave me:
Interesting but not immediately compelling
And after only a few minutes from research to creating, I got this from Midjourney:
Midjourney’s attempts at the same prompt
I have tried some other queries where I went from basic to extremely nuanced DALL-E queries (vs. Midjourney), and I was able to get DALL-E to win. But it took a lot of time. A lot of trial and error. Midjourney gets to something very cool with very little prompt engineering.
It’s like DALL-E was trained off of all art, and Midjourney was trained off of Deviant Art.
It’s almost like Midjourney was trained off of images that people already love, whereas DALL-E can generate much more, but with a correspondingly larger Margin for Meh. To say that another way, I’ve made a million DALL-E images that were total throwaway misses. With Midjourney, almost everything you make is at least a little bit cool.
Interface differencesThe other big difference is that DALL-E is run from a full website or via API. Midjourney on the other hand is run via Discord bot. It’s an interesting choice, and likely a brilliant one. It’s basically taken over the mindshare within the gaming world very quickly, with so many people there being 1) inclined towards pretty looking DeviantArt-like images, 2) not super interested in reading a 75-page prompt engineering book, and 3) already highly familiar with Discord.
Bottom line: you have to go play with this thing. So:
If you’re a hardcore AI and/or Art person, you should be messing with DALL-E first and Midjourney second.If you’re light on the AI stuff and more interested in gaming or NFTs or just having cool art for various purposes, start with Midjourney.Supporting Sam Harris on Company Autonomy
The internet’s gone a bit crazy about Sam Harris supposedly supporting censorship. As in most cases, a careful review of the source material reveals this not to be true.
I can’t say for sure if we perfectly align on the grey areas.
Because it appears I almost perfectly align with Sam on this, I’m going to give and defend my own perspective on this topic. The source material in question seems to have been the Triggernometry Podcast where Sam appeared recently.
The pivotal quote was something like, “There was a liberal conspiracy to keep Trump out of office and that was ok.” This melted the minds of the hosts, and Sam quickly explained the meaning of his comment. Note: he didn’t retract it; he explained it.
He said it all depends on what you mean by conspiracy, which is completely valid. He said if it means a bunch of people sitting around in a room plotting how to keep him from being elected again, then that qualifies, and it definitely happened.
Again, completely logical.
His analogy was a conspiracy to stop an asteroid from hitting the earth. Are there people sitting around plotting against the asteroid? Damn straight. Same with Trump. Of course we can disagree on whether or not he’s an asteroid, but once it’s granted that some people do belive that, his point stands.
He then went on to clarify that he didn’t mean stuffing ballots or doing anything illegal to keep him out of office. It can be a conspiracy and be completely legally carried out.
So yeah, that was the main lightning rod statement from the interview as far as I can tell. Now onto the bigger point of companies being able to self-sensor.
Sam’s point there was that it should be ok, in 2022, to have a podcast only for tall pretty people. So like Sam wouldn’t be allowed on there (his words, lol). He said he wouldn’t support such a thing a few decades ago, but he would now.
This is where the grey starts for me.
I’m with Sam on this. That’s where the free market, and the freedom of a company should come in. But here’s the problem: what happens when all identifying attributes can become the source of discrimination.
MenWomenNon-binaryNot funnyFunnyTallAthleticBeautifulBlack, White, Asian, HispanicComediansProfessionalsThere are infinite ways to slice things and people if you try. And people do try. So the question is if you try to go on the new TallnPretty Podcast network, but you are 6’3″ and you’re rejected, what does that mean?
And what if you’re also considered pretty, but the show has never had a gay person on it yet. Were you rejected because you were gay or because you weren’t pretty enough? Nobody on the outside will ever know the reason. And this would be theoretical if we didn’t have cake makers saying they don’t want to make cakes for gay couples.
That’s my cognitive dissonace right there. Here it is in steps.
Yes, companies should be able to choose who to have and not have as customers, or on a media showBut not if they’re discriminating based on something harmful and toxic to society, like race or genderOk, fine, but what about all the other things that aren’t as bad as race and gender, but are still very similar?That’s where it all turns grey and falls apart.
Oh, and then you have the public square issue.
The UL Newsletter: See the ideas, patterns, and models that will keep you ahead…Sign up to get a concise summary of what's happening (and why) every Monday morning.Twitter isn’t just one twitter among many. It’s the only one. Or one of very few anyway.
Censorship is supposed to only apply to the government disallowing things, but in our changing reality it’s starting to arguably become “that with overwhelming force”. That would still include government of course, but it would also encompass bigger things like “the media” or monopolistic media platforms, like Twitter.
So, what is one to do? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. This is hard.
Here are some guidelines though:
Companies should start with the ability to do whatever they want, except for as it pertains to discrimination based on historic and toxic discrimination like race and gender.If you want to only allow tall and beautiful people on your podcast, you should be allowed to do that. No organization should be able to compel you to invite and host short and less attractive people. That’s super gross and dysfunctional.In other words, any company should be able to publish a policy and follow it. Such as banning Jones and Trump. Ideally such a policy would be fair, but in the case of Twitter it seems to be highly biased against the right. But perhaps because the right is more often violating their policy. Again, that policy is up to them.However, once a company hits a certain size or influence (or lack of competition), perhaps it should lose some of these freedoms in the spirit of the government-aimed free speech laws? That seems logical. I do so Twitter as something like a Town Square. And it does seem clearly biased towards the left. But I don’t know what to do about that other than to start another company like Truth Social to counter it. And if Twitter were to try to stop that somehow in a gross way now we’re in monopoly conversations.So fundamentally the market should help us fight out of this problem by having a biased actor get penalized by the customer.The irony here, which Sam has brought up multiple times, is that this is normally the conservative argument. But now they’ve somehow forgotten it because they really want to be on Twitter. Too bad. Free market, remember?
And a bunch of liberals are somehow mad at Sam and others making similar arguments, as I am here. Sam and I have only voted for Democrats in our lives. No Republicans. Ever.
Yet somehow we’re making the free market argument against Conservatives, who want the government to force Twitter to go easy on the Right.
Strange world.
Bottom line here is that this is really hard, but the principles above are the somewhat lighted path.
Freedom by defaultExcept for historic discriminationAnd if the thing gets too big with no competition, maybe exert some kind of corrective force to fix thingsWhat am I missing?
August 17, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 344
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Creativity Comes from Idleness
Our creativity is like a daily pool of water within each of us.
When we use it, it depletes a bit. When we’re distracted it quickly drains. And when we’re alone with our thoughts it replenishes.
In an ideal world you’d wake up and have a full day of creativity ahead of you. You’d just sit down and create, and your reservoir would grow a thousand ideas.
But the modern world has tapped our daily reserves with continuous distraction. Most notably our phones. When we stare at a screen our ideas dry up like a cracked lakebed, and somehow it makes us want to eat more dust to quench our thirst.
Showers are an exception. In the shower we become an idea firehose. Why is that?
The reason you become creative in the shower is because it’s (mostly) impossible to be distracted. You’re just there—naked—with your own thoughts. And suddenly you become a genius.
This also works with solitary walks. No phone. No podcasts. No audiobooks. Just you and your surroundings. Like in the shower, the ideas will come spilling out of you.
So what’s the lesson here?
Being distracted dries out your creativity and results in mediocrity. If you value being inspired, spend time alone with nothing but your mind.
August 8, 2022
News & Analysis | NO. 343
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