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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   35487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Morning Chestnut Problem

After two delays Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the latest installment in Ubisoft’s hit and award-winning series, has been released.

Several months ago when the latest installment in Assassin’s Creed video game franchise was announced to have a person named “Yasuke” as a protagonist, it was in the English-speaking discourse to proclaim he is a beloved in Japan and considered an important historical figure by the Japanese and that any negative opinion of this peculiar choice was coming from gaijin. It wasn’t only the English-speaking internet masses who promoted this conjecture, a powerful member of this community and even New York Times (although as this article contained no information that wasn’t known at the time, it may have been written just to launder the Hirayama’s tweet that Yasuke was a samurai, into something citable on wikipedia) did too. Introducing one “Kazuma Hashimoto”, whose knowledge of the Japanese language is unknown, who in his twitter bio used to identify as half-Japanese, as “a Japanese consultant”, despite the fact that he belongs to the California geographical and cultural milieu, thus a very non-central example of a Japanese person! After his deception was discovered he laid low, until surfacing after the release to peddle the same distortions, speaking over a native people.—

I suspect the reason why such a person was cited, is that even gaijin working on matters related to Japan, think that the knowledge of English language is sufficient to obtain all necessary information and as “Kazuma Hashimoto” has chosen a Japanese name, but has the knowledge of English of the American he is, he is the perfect source to lend credibility to conjectures about Japan some journalist might have. If one wants a starting point for researching some topic related to Japanese people, searching for it on X, Google, or YouTube by its Japanese, not English name: “弥助” not “Yasuke”, “アサクリ” or “アサシン クリード” not “Assassin’s Creed”, “問題” not “controversy”. Doing so, one finds some comprehensive overviews of issues some Japanese have with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Even if you do not know Japanese, using Google Translate and Deepl on a Japanese text written by a Japanese person will get you closer to their perspective, than asking a monolingual American who got his opinion from a monolingual American who got his opinion from a monolingual American who misunderstood a bilingual westernized Japanese.—

But he is just one man. His influence would in the English-speaking be negligible, if he didn’t have fellows (1) working towards the same goal of minimizing Japanese perspectives, and interpreting them to suit their agenda, combined with the general attitude that whatever is created in Japanese, must first pass through a native English speaker in order to gain value or credibility.—

This incident makes it clear that anyone unaffected by Gell-Mann Amnesia should be wary of foreign authors writing about Japan. No matter how minor the topic, many non-Japanese writers seem to consistently prefer English sources over foreign-language ones. For example, the English Wikipedia page on Yasuke uses citations from historical fiction, non-peer-reviewed articles written by tendentious gaijin, and recent news. The reliance on news is especially strange-why should a journalist's opinion, who doesn’t have any specific expertise, be considered more important than anyone else's? One might draw a parallel to the hypothetical situation where mathematical wikipedia articles would be based not on rigorous academic papers but upon the distorted misinterpretations, such as those presented in popular science journalism. The reality is that these English-language texts, simply by virtue of being written in a familiar language, are favored over more authoritative sources. The authentic primary sources and meticulous research conducted by Japanese historians is overlooked in favor of easily accessible, yet not rigorous, English sources.— (2)

EoPs set the null hypothesis about foreign countries. Given the affinity that Americans feel towards Blacks, this naturally leads them to imagine every Black person as much greater and more important than they really were. So they write, picking and choosing among the already scant sources available in English, to craft a narrative. As it is written in English, it is considered the default, and the native experts have to prove a negative. In English, of course, you can’t expect EoP historians of other countries to learn another language.—

Now, you could say this is what people say online; maybe that is a biased sample, and perhaps only the 'antis' are vocal, while the majority loves it. A not absurd objection; one should search for objective sources. Luckily, in the case of Japan and video games, we have that: every week it is published how many physical sales of games and consoles were made there. One would expect that if, in a long-running franchise, an entry would be released this time set in Japan, it would sell better in Japan than previous entries set in foreign locales. People are narcissistic; they like being talked about and are interested in what others think of them. Ghost of Tsushima, an AC game in all but name, which was set in Japan, sold more copies in Japan than any AC game. With the added bonus of featuring the allegedly popular-in-Japan protagonist Yasuke, sales would surely increase compared to previous installments.—

Data:

Opening week physical sales in Japan for AC games and GoT, ordered chronologically:

name [platform of the best selling version] release date, opening week sales on that platform (opening week sales across all platforms)

Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 17701

Mirage [PS5] R5-10-06, 20407 (28436)

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 13745 (23969)

Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 45055 (49282)

Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 212915

Odyssey [PS4] H30-10-05, 50173

Origins [PS4] H29-10-27, 53716

Syndicate [PS4] H27-11-12, 39858

Rogue [PS3] H26-12-11, 19496

Unity [PS4] H26-11-20, 43838

IV: Black Flag [PS3] H25-11-28, 50032 (65910)

III [PS3] H24-11-15, 85918 (97991)

III: Liberation [PSV] H24-11-15, 22110

Revelations [PS3] H23-12-01, 40440 (47602)

Brotherhood [PS3] H22-12-09, 39198 (50964)

Bloodlines [PSP] H21-12-23, 16221

II [PS3] H21-12-03, 55789 (83874)

I [PS3] H20-01-31, 36898 (70952)

Week 2, ordered chronologically:

Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 5565

Mirage [PS5] R5-10-05, 3402

Mirage [PS4] R5-10-05, 1890

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS4] R3-08-20, 4154

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 3526

Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 6918

Valhalla [PS5] R2-11-10, <2265

Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 53387

Sales totals after two weeks, ordered by sales totals:

Ghost of Tsushima [PS4] R2-07-17, 266302

Valhalla [PS4] R2-11-10, 51973

Mirage [PS5] R5-10-05, 23809

Shadows [PS5] R7-03-20, 23266

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS5] R3-08-20, 17271

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut [PS4] R3-08-20, 14378

Mirage [PS4] R5-10-05, 9919

Valhalla [PS5] R2-11-10, >=4227&<=6491

Interpretation: It has been almost a year since details about Assassin’s Creed: Red were announced, and only slightly less since English-language game journalists started lying about the reception the game had in Japan to their English-speaking audience. The latter is blameless, for it is too much to ask the masses to actively research an issue which is at best tangential to their lives. The former is blameworthy, as a journalist which leaves the reader with a worse model of the world than he started with is worse than a monkey with a typewriter. At least chimp’s writings won’t worsen the reader’s perception of the world.—

Shadows had the second worst first week sales out of all non-re-releases of Assassin’s Creed games. Only Bloodlines on the PSP sold worse, and even that only slightly.—

This can be said to be the end of a significant phase of a scandal. Unsurprisingly, gaijin Assassin’s Creed fans who considered it big news that Shadows was for a brief moment in the top 5 games by revenue on Steam in Japan, or in the top 10 best-selling games on Amazon Japan, either ignored these Famitsu numbers from ignorance or embarrassment, or downplayed them saying gaijin games don’t sell in Japan. A statement disproven by the success of Ghost of Tsushima and Shadows‘ sales being even lower than of previous entries.—

In the interest of intellectual honesty I must also be open about evidence I discovered which goes against my thesis. There exists a website which scrapes Steam reviews by language. For Odyssey, .32% of reviews are in Japanese, Valhalla, .53% of reviews are in Japanese, Mirage, .31% of reviews are in Japanese, Shadows, .71% of reviews are in Japanese. This could imply the Assassin’s Creed audience in Japan moved to Steam, thus consumer sales do not tell the whole story.—

(1)Such as one Jeffrey J. Hall.(1.1) Unlike other gaijin who report on Japan, he cannot plead ignorance about. For you see one aspect of the Morning Chestnut Problem which reached even the PM of Japan was ingame destruction of shrines. Politically it started with one member of the prefectural assembly conducting an interview with the head priest of the shrine depicted in the viral video showing the African protagonist marauding through it. I noticed this interview early on, but so did Jeffrey. Ever willing to discredit indigenous people(1.2), the man who holds a position equivalent to a state senator. The next day the local politician uploaded another video, showing he brought the issue to a member of Japan's Upper House, conveniently adding English subtitles. It was the latter man who spoke a day before the games release in Japan’s Diet about this issue and to whom Ishiba, Japan’s PM replied. The attention shrine vandalism was too great to ignore and Ubisoft issued a silent Day 1 patch, which only partially limited it but continues to refence the real shrine by name, but has yet to issue a formal response to protests from the Hyougo Shrine Association.(1.3)—

(1.1)To put it in terms Americans would better understand, Jeffrey (and Kazuma, if he didn’t also pretend to be Japanese) is to Japan what people like Claas Relotius, are to the US. In that both distort the countries they proclaim to be experts about, in order to reinforce the pre-existing perpectives of their audiences.—

(1.2)This wasn’t the first time this game caught the attention of a Japanese politician. Before the events I describe above, a member of the Party to Protect the People from NHK, had asked the National Diet Library for all materials it possessed that pertain to Yasuke. Jeffrey made hay of the fact this party is a minor, non-coalition one. The politicians I describe above belong to the perpetually-in-power Jimin-tou.—

(2)The wikipedia editor most responsible for the current sorry state of the English wikipedia article on Yasuke, ‘Symphony Regalia’, was on R6-11-13 topic-banned from Yasuke for a year on English wikipedia. This sanction follows a permanent suspension of that editor on Japanese wikipedia for sockpuppeting which occured on R6-08-31. The vandalism he inflicted was fixed in the Japanese, but not in the English language article. I think this is because I think wikipedia works by establishing a consensus. Early on, before this happens, one can slant and selectively interpret and pick sources to push a POV, without restrictions. Then one can use this history as evidence that a consensus is clear. And if one is successful, this POV is determined to be the truth, indisputable unless a great number of Reliable Sources, in English of course, disagree plainly.—

Sources: https://sites.google.com/site/gamedatalibrary/, sales for week of R2-07-20 to R2-07-26, sales for week of R2-11-16 to R2-11-22, sales for week of R3-08-23 to R3-08-29, sales for week of R5-10-09 to R5-10-15, sales for week of R7-03-24 to R7-03-30

This is either really badly translated from about two different languages into a form of English, or it's written by AI.

I was aware of the controversy around the latest Assassin's Creed game with the so-called black samurai and whether this was historically accurate or not. I never heard of a "Morning Chestnut Problem" and if you could have bothered to explain what that was, then this comment would be marginally clearer (this is one thing that sounds like 'translated from Japanese into German or Finnish or some other tongue, then translated from that into English').

There's a ton of extraneous data but no point that I can see: are you trying to argue that this guy never existed? did exist but was not as important as the game makes out? the influence of wokeness and the demand for representation on games and how this is a bad thing? cultural appropriation? white liberals in the USA making a big deal out of things native Japanese don't find offensive? something in the game that really is offensive to native Japanese? what?

And again, what the hell is the Morning Chestnut Problem?

It is entirely true that native Japanese discussion of most issues, including Assassin's Creed, is different to what you can get by reading English language media. This is true for pretty much every country in the world. English language media by itself will give you a distorted picture of pretty much anything, but Japan is especially bad. For gaming in particular, I'm fortunate enough to know a couple of native Japanese people who pass me gossip so I have a slight inkling of the scope of the misrepresentation.

That said, the top level post here is very strange. Very strange indeed.

or it's written by AI.

Say what you want about AI writing, it would almost certainly be better structured and less awkwardly worded than this, and leaving the title unexplained isn't the sort of error they'd typically make.

The state of video games in the year of our lord 2025 continues to astound me. I continue to wonder when the inflection point was, between the ascending art form, and it's degenerate form we see today. Insane stories nobody wants to hear, ugly unlikable worlds, artless current year lampshading, technical issues out the wazoo, "gameplay" that seems to revolve around trying to hook into as many addiction centers as possible and draping casual-tier game mechanics over top of it as a fig leaf. it's a disgrace.

An obvious flashpoint was Gamergate, and that's been beat to death. But before Gamergate, Bioshock Infinite killed the AAA title as it was understood up until that point.

Arguably, Bioshock Infinite was the perfect game. Gamers loved it, reviewers loved it, it was philosophical with something for everyone (except a few wokies who got upset that it depicted both sides as capable of great evil), and most importantly it sold gangbusters. And it still couldn't earn it's money back (allegedly1), the developers basically closed down, reducing in size to a mere skeleton crew that never released another game. I'm struggling to find good sources for it, but I recall this sent shockwaves through the industry. I remember panicked headlines on Gamasutra which I had been reading at the time for some fucking reason. Suddenly everyone was shitting their pants afraid that they'd been shoveling money into a business model (big budget AAA singleplayer games) that would lose them money. And to my memory, this is when the changes began.

Publishers were desperate to do anything but a AAA singleplayer game which would lose money even if it succeeded because it cost so damned much. You saw more games as a service, more DLC, more online requirements, more courting of controversy to make up for obvious lack of quality. Or maybe the woke shit was just a convenient hack to get free publicity and better reviews from a gaming press that Ziff Davis had centralized in San Francisco and then abandoned. Who's to say.

I'm obsessive. I keep a spreadsheet of all the retrogames I aspire to play again, the year they came out, the issue of Computer Gaming World they got reviewed in, which of my stable of retro PCs I should play them on, etc. Around 2015 the list stops. The last game on it is Rebel Galaxy. The last big budget AAA game on it is Borderlands 2 from 2012. I didn't stop at that date because the games weren't retro enough. I stopped because as I was perusing lists of top reviewed or most popular games year by year, that was roughly the time upwards of 80% of them became Games as a Service. Either always online DRM, a multiplayer focus, or even 10 years of perpetual updates chasing "engagement" made them unsuitable for a list oriented towards posterity and nostalgia. Which once again, is more or less right around the time Bioshock Infinite and it's disastrous aftermath was rippling through the industry.

Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games. Which really only leaves woke-baiting as a tactic to try to punch above their weight. Alas.

In the 2000's I think it was, Nintendo announced they were no longer going to devalue their games by reducing their prices. It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot. Nintendo argued this created a race to the bottom, and quit doing it. People were upset, accused them of being greedy. Gamer entitlement is quite the sight to see. But in the meantime, I think Nintendo was largely vindicated. The first party games that released for the Switch were all 1000% worth the money, especially when compared to the GaaS titles Xbox or Sony were pushing. One again Nintendo is pissing gamers off raising prices. Switch 2 games look to cost $70 or $80, and the console itself is priced at $450. This could be greed. Or like in the early 00's it's Nintendo insisting on being paid what they are worth. Unless you want them to start whoring it up on the corner of Woke & GaaS.

  1. It's possible in time, 2K recouped the cost of Bioshock Infinite. We don't directly know. They posted losses in their quarterly statement when it came out. Somehow it got cited that the game cost $200m to develop and market, but Ken Levine laughed that off without providing a real number. I do see people remarking that the game went on sale "quickly" whatever that means in 2014, I can't exactly recall. It's supposed to have lifetime sales of 11m, but those are always inflated with giveaways, bundles, massive sales, etc. Were I to guess from smatterings of numbers I see floating around, I'd guess 4-5m at full price in the release window? Which could be 240m in total revenue, minus whatever the retailers took as their cut. So it's not inconceivable that it didn't recoup it's alleged $200m investment inside a reasonable time window.

Just a suggestion for a post 2015 game: xenoblade 2. I’d consider it the peak of aaa jrpgs. The art, music, story, themes are all 10/10 for me. Don’t believe the haters. And you could easily play it on an emulator. I play it every 2 years.

Yes indeed, whoever can look at this glorious scene and conclude that this is the greatest achievement humanity can offer? It's weeb cringe for weebs, let them hang in their zoo areas, but don't touch.

The comedy is indeed one of the the best part of the game. I’d reccomend the Jp voice settings though.

Yeah, I generally carve out an exception for first party Nintendo games. I've adored almost every one I've played in recent years, Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Tears of the Kingdom less so), Mario Odyssey, Xenoblade 1-3, and more that are slipping my mind. I still mean to give Pikmin 4 a go since my wife got it for me for Christmas.

Arguably, Bioshock Infinite was the perfect game.

It was already slop. I still can't understand to this day how they managed to spend this much money on what was essentially a less interesting Bioshock at every level. Especially after they managed to make 2 so good.

Those admittedly pretty graphics must have really been the bee's knees, because the gameplay was shite (it could neither commit to being an immersive sim or a proper FPS so you get bulletsponges and exploration that amounts to fiddling in trashcans), the story was shite (multiverse time travel is hard to write about: railroading character development edition) and even the philosophical underpinnings are shite (we went from a legit interesting deconstruction of objectivism to facile decolonial criticism of american exceptionalism whose only reedeeming quality is admitting that communism is bloodthirsty).

Fuck that game. It's the poster child of watering down everything interesting about a videogame franchise. The fact that its only notable contribution to art entirely revolves around pornography is a fitting end.

Wasn't it similar to the recent Disney thing of making a movie and then essentially remaking it in post? That way you can spend essentially any amount of money and come out with something lackluster at the end.

Well, looking at this early trailer you can see that almost none of what is presented to you ended up in the final product. I believe there were also a few early in-game footages with events that apparently also got cut down, so rewrites happened during production. On one hand you can say "eeh, it's created for commercial purpose no big deal" but on the other side it is still funny that Cyberpunk got crucified for "lying in the promotion material" according to very online gamers.

Yeah it was way worse than BioShock 2. I don't think it's a good high water mark for the video game industry.

IMO Oblivion was the last truly great game.

I would say Arkham Asylum.

I would have said Witcher 3. But you can already see the bland creeping in by that point. Oblivion's own horse armor DLC is a good "beginning of the end" moment.

Hah. I knew people had some strong opinions around it. Interesting to encounter them in the wild.

I remember loving it and being totally along for it's ride when I first played it. Second time I tried to play it years later, I found it profoundly boring. But I also felt that way about Bioshock as well. Never tried Bioshock 2. One thing that always amused me about criticism I saw of Bioshock Infinite, was that it was a worse Bioshock. But, IMHO, Bioshock was just a "worse" System Shock 2. But that all depends on what you were trying to get out of those games. I thought Bioshock had more imaginative world building than System Shock 2, even if the RPG systems were largely removed. It also had a lot better action. Infinite leaned even harder into action and narrative. There were trade offs.

Maybe it is just me (I rarely ever replay games), but the Bioshock games do genuinely seem like they're the least-replayable ImSims ever.

Bioshock Infinite has to be the first video game I ever played where the story kept getting in way of the actual game.

I consider Bioshock 2 superior.

I'm an immersive sim aficionado so I feel strongly about these in particular. Especially since infinite killed the genre for years so I've had to scrounge up indie jank like EYE and Cruelty Squad to scratch that itch ever since.

Bioshock was a definite step up from System Shock 2.

One can quibble about the writing, most people prefer Rapture, but I always thought SS2 had underrated worldbuilding.

The gameplay is just strictly superior. SS2 suffered from this old adventure game syndrome of softlocking you if you made reasonable but wrong choices. You could end up having to start a new save if you didn't upgrade the right skills and there's no obvious logic to what you need. Compare Bioshock which actually lets you engage in different playstyles without punishing you if you don't do it the intended way, and you can tell that there was a Deus Ex in between.

Pacing is also vastly improved. Bioshock is one of the best written video games I know in terms of pace, you're always engaged in the story from the beginning to the end, whereas people tend to forget that the last chapters of SS2 were a slog.

If you've never played Bioshock 2, I recommend it. It's probably the best in the franchise, the story is surprisingly nuanced and the gameplay is a more mature version of the first one in a way that makes Infinite's level design feel amateur in comparison.

Yeah, I can't disagree too strongly with any of that. But I think it's relative to where you put your high water mark. For you it's Bioshock 2, for it's writing and gameplay. For others it's System Shock 2 for climbing to the top of the hill Ultima Underworld discovered, with it's inventory management, statistics, skills and all. I think by the time we get to Bioshock Infinite, it's bifurcated, it's a distinctly different genre than what Ultima Underworld and System Shock were. But circa Bioshock 1, that wasn't clear yet, they were just beginning to go their own ways. So people might look at one or the other and say "Clearly this one is better" depending on whether they wanted a narrative action game or a first person RPG.

Fair enough, but I always thought of immersive sims as their own genre where the exact blend of RPG and action has to serve the context.

For instance, Deus Ex's aiming mechanics, despite being a bit weird in hindsight actually made logical sense, guns don't hit harder if you're more skilled, they're just easier to aim. And so forth.

But there's definitely a point where RPG and action game touch and on either side is something different. I personally believe that point is Morrowind.

Deus ex guns did do far more damage with skill btw

From untrained to master: +0, +20%, +50%, and +100%

Shit you're right! Can't believe I never noticed that.

I guess the location modifiers just overwhelm it so much I never felt like I couldn't kill something with a low skill weapon. I guess I'll have to look for it next playthrough.

More comments

It was already slop. I still can't understand to this day how they managed to spend this much money on what was essentially a less interesting Bioshock at every level. Especially after they managed to make 2 so good.

It was endlessly rewritten during production, with ideas being constantly implemented only to be scrapped because Ken Levine kept changing his mind. I'm pretty sure it's been talked about extensively, but I don't remember where.

You can even tell from the finished product, how the story doesn't make much sense in many points and how even the powers of Elizabeth are inconsistent (the first time you meet her she's opening a portal to another town but later she's only able to open portals to alternate dimensions of the place she's in).

Pretty common failure mode.

The perfect bioshock infinite was called Prey ... and nobody played it.

The death of the golden age of gaming came with the death of the speed part of moore's law in 2006-sh. I am trying to assemble history of how and why.

But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3. It was the game that showed me that something is starting to get wrong in the industry.

Writingwise Warcraft 3 was not great compared to WC2 and Starcraft 1, but gameplaywise it was solid. And yhe writing was definitely better than the garbage we got in Starcraft 2. Warcraft 3's greatest sin was that it was so popular it was able to kickstart World of Warcraft's popularity which in turned sucked all of the oxygen out of the MMO genre and also got a ton of studios to waste mountains of cash trying to imitate it.

Was it really that popular? From my memories people played it like for a month, then went back to brood war. And after one year people were only playing tower defense and dota maps in WCIII

I only played Wings of Liberty and I think the writing was ok there - but now reading the plot of the next two - damn it really had gone downhill and fast.

But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3.

If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change, why WC3 and not C&C: Tiberian Sun? That game infamously launched in quite the state, and contra WhiningCoil's above post about auteur studio leads, I doubt that TibSun was supposed to be a magnum opus kind of game. It was an ambitious title, sure, but it was otherwise a bigger-and-better sequel that, as far as the popular narrative goes, was unfairly rushed out the door by EA and never really fixed into what it should have been.

If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change

I am not citing RTS, I am saying warcraft 3 - there are bad games and there are wrong games. Tiberium sun was kinda bad, Warcraft 3 for me was wrong. In the way that Diablo 3 was wrong. They kinda fixed the feel of the world to be better in Diablo 4 though.

Tiberian Sun was broken as hell, but I have to say it was a very fun type of broken. My friends and I played that game so much, just doing stupid shit, that the first thing I thought on reading your post was "We need shooooes!"

I think you're thinking of Generals for that voice line, but yeah.

Lol I am, how embarrassing. And yet it's tiberian sun I remember for sure, because our game loop was we'd all ally with each other then try to betray our ally and suicide bomb them with blue tiberium before they could do it to us. Oh yeah, it was because we were suicide bombing each other and generals was the breadth of our exposure to middle eastern culture at the time. A different kind of embarrassing.

I'd love to hear that thesis about Warcraft 3. I remember from early previews it felt far more RPGish than it turned out and had far more races and campaigns that got cut (they planned 6 didn't they?). But ambitious design documents getting cut back isn't anything new.

I love Warcraft 3! Was amazing for me.

It was technically amazing, the custom maps scene was probably where custom maps peaked (the success of DotA inspired at least three spin-off games, and probably put dollar signs in Blizzard's eyes for the SC2 arcade), and I never played the native RTS in serious multiplayer but it seemed good.

But I also think the campaign was pretty... ehhh, and the expansion campaign was similar. Not like Wings of Liberty (which has great mission design and structure, but bad writing) or the SC1 campaigns (which still have "Blizzard writing" but are a lot better, and discussed upthread).

The whole feel was wrong. The previous blizzard games were rooted in some dark and gritty and I wouldn't say realistic, but logical graphics and feel - you had ships, oil spilled around them. Starcraft had actually good story in which the characters were acting believable. And they showed their sides. When Raynor was forced to leave Kerrigan to die you felt it - both as a player (the doomed mission) but in the characters and the world.

In Warcraft III the story - the best I can tell about it was that it was manufactured. I don't think that anyone felt any kind of connection to any of the characters. It felt that the story was trying to tell you what to feel about the characters and not make you (btw - problem of the woke movies too) feel it. The graphics were off - they were too cartoonish, the gameplay itself was totally meh, the camera and the field of view that was available was absurdly tiny - so you couldn't S in your RTS.

It also started the trend of Blizzard pushing characters on the players. No one liked arthas - and yet they made him the big bad. His story arc was supposed to be epic, but on every front they only delivered cringe. That also continued in World of Warcraft. The stompeaks story line of Thorim totally overshadowed Icecrown. And once again they showed that they had no idea what actually makes their successes successful. Because they suddenly decided with the Ulduar patch to replace the big blue battered vrykul both with something shiny and polished that no played had connection to - both in the raid and in the outside world. But talking about Icecrown - did anyone actually like the stupid way the storyline ended. It felt so forced, so tryhard.

I think that this is what was Warcraft III problem - it was tryhard all the way, and that is why it felt fake. So for me that was the canary in the coal mine - the try hardiness of the people in the gaming companies that tried to make people that were not the buyers of the games view them as REAL ARTISTS

This is why we got the terrible terrible surreal God Of War 3 ending (kratos is hope he is chasing a little girl to the light), terrible Mass Effect 3 ending( little girl and the light) and the whole gears of war.

After that the tryhardiness conitued to infect more and more. rockstar tryhard with GTA4, the way the brilliant prince of persia games mutated into Assassin's Creed game (although there were problems with two thrones)

Once again - this is not a coherent post because the whole thing is not yet coherent in my head. But the decline proper started with XBOX360 and some signs were visible slightly before that.

No one liked arthas - and yet they made him the big bad. His story arc was supposed to be epic, but on every front they only delivered cringe

I mean, the cutscene where he commits Regicide/Patricide was pretty awesome. I'll give them that.

If watched in isolation yes. But the buildup to it was somewhat of a meh, and the very next mission he is level 1 death knight running for his life. So he killed his father just to be edgy, not even for the lulz

I would say that the only really good character blizzard created after SC1 was Varok Saurfang. And they even didn't give him a proper death because of the Anime Waifu (d2 was also light on good characters, but eh no one even pretended it had story)

I think that's actually a good example of the general Blizzard problem, when it comes to storytelling. Blizzard make amazing cutscenes, but it's very obvious that what they do is create a couple of pre-set 'high points' for their stories, the dramatic moments that will have cutscenes, and then fill in everything between those moments - and the fillings are largely nonsense. Even in Warcraft III, all the cutscenes are amazing, but then you play the missions in between them and get to enjoy awful, wooden dialogue and endless plot contrivance. Very little in Warcraft III's story makes sense, and the dialogue is cringeworthy, and it has only gotten worse from there.

Thus with Starcraft II or Diablo III or World of Warcraft - the usual course is a farrago on nonsense leading up to a dramatic, technically excellent four or five minute film, and then back to nonsense, perhaps on the logic that people will only remember the cutscenes.

Let me take a specific example - Battle for Azeroth is widely considered a terrible expansion, with a nonsensical plot that engaged in rampant character assassination, and where entire factions were derailed. Nonetheless, consider a few cutscenes. The BfA trailer is amazing. You need practically zero context for it, but if you enjoy random high fantasy people fighting each other in spectacular ways, wow, that trailer delivers. Now 'Old Soldiers'. That orc and that troll look fantastic, extremely human and emotional, and it's a powerful, quiet moment as they reflect on the loss and sacrifice of war, and it puts the BfA trailer in a new context. Now 'Warbringers: Jaina'. Obviously lower production values than the others, but a genuinely haunting moment, as a character once known for her empathy and pacifism, to the point of once siding with the orcs over her own father out of a desire for peace, realises she was wrong and embraces a militant mindset. This then led up to an in-game cutscene at the battle in the trailer where she appears with the ghost ship and, again, without context it's genuinely cool.

And look, those four cutscenes without much context all string together in a way that might seem excellent, right? The Horde and the Alliance are at war, we've got some complicated emotional journeys on both sides, real ambivalance around the necessity, even glory, but also the horror of war, and so on.

But trust me, if you have played Battle for Azeroth, you will know that all the connective tissue between those moments is horrible. There are potentially interesting moments here, like Jaina's or Saurfang's development, but the game constantly whiffs on the execution, or changes its mind and goes back on what the cutscenes seemed to imply, or even just forgets about what it was doing; and I haven't even mentioned Sylvanas yet.

Blizzard are very good at making "pretty awesome" cutscenes. But cutscenes alone do not a compelling story make.

I certainly felt attachment to the characters in Warcraft 3, and I liked Arthas. So your experience was not the one everyone had. In fact, I thought that the story in War3 was overall pretty good.

I think I pick up what you are putting down. There was a very weird nu-metal, Lincoln Park themed push in video games circa 2001-2003 ish that really fucked up a lot of games. I think the one that got it worst was Jak 2. But Prince of Persia: Two Thrones, WarCraft III and others didn't escape unscathed. It was all very mass market edginess. Like a fisher price razor blade.

Two Thrones? That game was a notable step back in numetal edge from Warrior Within. In WW, the time beast (Dahaka?) action music was literally Godsmack. Song was I Stand Alone. At least it was an instrumental. The gratuitous thonged ass near the start feels relevant to the early 2000s edge as well.

This is all based on memories of games I haven't played in a decade. I'm confident nonetheless.

I think your 20 year old memory is better than my 20 year old memory on this one. I was misremembering Warrior Within as Two Thrones.

Their great sin was not waiting for the visual fidelity to match up to the scale of epicness they wanted. Who can argue against the epicness of this.

I remember reading the Warcraft 2 game manual multiple times as a middle schooler. It was dark, gory, and realistic. There were heroes, but they weren't larger than life and sometimes they got died. It read like a chronicle of Aztecs invading England, it was badass. I especially enjoyed how each Orcish clan was essentially a separate tribe with it's own rituals and cultures, lovingly detailed. Shout-out to my homies from the Bonechewer and Laughing Skull. The human kingdoms also had interesting histories, I loved the stories of Lordaeron and Alterac. Even the heroes were cool. Aleria, Turalyon, and Uther were badass.

Warcraft 3 pushed all of this into the background to focus on goofy Arthas. The gameplay was good, but the SOVL was gone.

(Controversial take -- I feel very similarly about Final Fantasy VI and VII.)

I also enjoyed in Warcraft II how you weren't the hero. You were a commander doing his job. And got promotions along the way.

I forgot about that, but yes, completely agree. I played a recent Fire Emblem game (Engage, I think) and the MC is fanfic-tier overpowered dragon goddess who has a dark alter ego. In older FE games you were some guy who was good with a sword, or at best a noble who had fallen on hard times and had to play politics and win difficult military victories to regain power. I guess normies enjoy power fantasies.

Engage's story was godawful, but let's be real who plays FE:Engage for the story?

(I had a chuckle when the first autocomplete result when I tried to google "fire emblem engage* story" in Japanese was "fire emblem engage* story bad")

edit:aword

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This is a sentiment I've heard a number of people express. Borderlands 1 being preferable to 2 because in 1 you play as a nobody merc while 2 makes you the savior of the world and center of the narrative. Classic WoW being preferable to later expansions because you're a nobody adventurer as opposed to Azeroth's Greatest Champion. Half Life 1 vs 2. Seems there's a kind of gamer that doesn't like the conceit that the player is always the center of attention.

Single player video games almost always require the player character to be the Chosen One, because in a meta sense, they're the only one with free will, and they almost always follow a unique set of rules compared to NPCs. I think, as storytelling in video games took more prominence, too many devs saw this as an opportunity to be clever by making the in-universe story reflect this, leading to it being done so much that many players got bored of it. There's something to be said about the power fantasy of being the Chosen One, but that also can make the player feel like their success in the game is pre-planned rather than earned.

This is why I personally didn't like Commander Shepard filling such a special role in Mass Effect rather than being the right soldier in the right place at the right time to save the universe. Doomguy in 1993's Doom was more that, and I was disappointed in the narrative of the 2016 Doom making Doom Slayer the Chosen One. I think From Soft games tend to do a good job at finding a good balance between the 2, where the player character is usually a member of a class of characters with special abilities including resurrection, but they're not a particularly special one of those, other than that the player controls them to accomplish special things which earns them the status of a Great Chosen One by the end.

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Reading game manuals in middle school is such a unique time period. It think it was really only the mid 90's where the manuals had enough heft and fluff to make that an interesting exercise, and also they were still actually printed and shipped with games. I poured over the manuals for Diablo, WarCraft 1 & 2, StarCraft, etc in middleschool. It really built up the anticipation to run home from school off the bus and boot them up again.

I remember the manual for Red Baron was about 1/3 game , 2/3 history, planes, and pilot profiles. And that the BG1&2 manuals were basically the D&D rulebooks, but with some added character commentary.

I remember the manual for Red Baron was about 1/3 game and 2/3 history, planes, and pilot profiles.

See also the gigantic wirebound manual for Jane's Fighters Anthology.

I’d highlight the old Homeworld manual as another great strong point. The game’s mechanics were okay, if a little easily solved, but the universe it drew and the bounds of what it left to the imagination were fantastic.

In Warcraft III the story - the best I can tell about it was that it was manufactured. I don't think that anyone felt any kind of connection to any of the characters. It felt that the story was trying to tell you what to feel about the characters and not make you (btw - problem of the woke movies too) feel it.

Yeah, Blizzard's writing has always been more like a series of events that happen to occur chronologically rather than any kind of story with a plot. Sometimes you get the sense they expect something will have a big emotional payoff and give it a big cutscene, and it's just a character introduced 20 minutes ago randomly doing something for random reasons invented on the spot.

The Warcraft universe kind of feels like if you trained an LLM on Tolkien, D&D, and heavy metal lyrics, and then had it create a fantasy story. Everything is an exaggerated version of the shared consciousness about what a "dwarf" is or what an "elf" is or what medieval fantasy looks like. And sometimes is just an exaggerated version of the real world for some reason, so we get New Jersey gangster goblins and Jamaican Trolls who love the Loa, mon.

This is why we got the terrible terrible surreal God Of War 3 ending (kratos is hope he is chasing a little girl to the light), terrible Mass Effect 3 ending( little girl and the light) and the whole gears of war.

A lot of this stuff just feels like the 1990s-early 2010s. Anyone remember early Five Gum ads? Or heck, Bionicle. There was a trend towards hard-edged and tryhard atmospheres, everything had to be edgy and serious even if it didn't warrant it. People praise those Playstation 2 ads, but they seem like surrealist nonsense with no actual connection to video games. It really does feel like the "burgers?" meme.

Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?

I wouldn't say I'm into hard science fiction, but I think you need to be careful about inserting vague spiritualist nonsense in a story about technology. The spiritual and humanistic elements of a story about technology have to arise from the impact of technology on people and how it changes their perception of the world, not from spiritual powers imposed from the outside.

I enjoy stories about technology, but the problem with science fiction is that its authors have always been too Big Five Open for their own good and have squirted strange new ideas onto the page alongside the thoughtful reflections about the future of science and tech. I will say, for a cluster of people so committed to materialism and atheism, science fiction authors seem strangely compelled to write about beings of pure spirit and gods.

You can tell a compelling genre story about characters struggling against evil, but you have to think about characters and their motivations and have them act accordingly. I don't understand why game stories leaned so heavily into pseudo-mystical elements to add depth (poorly) instead of character motivations, which is the way in which deep stories actually stick with people. Your game will not be the source of a spiritual awakening, but it might inspire someone to strive for what is just and right, which is an important message that's easily possible.

Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?

In mild fairness, I think some of this was an outgrowth of The Matrix starting out as an homage to Ghost in the Shell, which is a rather cerebral and philosophical story which also happens to be bracketed by gorgeously-rendered cyborg carnage.

I increasingly think Carmack was right. Story in games is like story in porn. You need just enough to get the action going. Most of my memorable moments in games come from overcoming challenges, rarely story beats. I rarely want to replay a game with a good story, because it takes so much work to get through it. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. Increasingly just read a book these days.

The singular exception to this was ICO, who's environmental story telling was so masterful, which tied it's game mechanics into it so subtly, it blew me away with it's story in a way no other game has since. You were buying into it in ways you didn't even realize just playing the game normally. Raw genius.

Outside of that, I think I just want unpretentious serviceable game plots.

If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. Increasingly just read a book these days.

I'd rather play a game than watch a movie, personally, even with the same linearity of plot.

I disagree -- not because I think your preferences are invalid, I just have totally different ones. Story in games is hard to do right, but I do believe it can be compelling if the story is actually part of the interactive elements of the game and not just a framework for the gameplay. That's only the case if you're actively making choices that affect the outcomes for particular characters and having to make tradeoffs to accomplish an ending that satisfies your concern for the characters and their world. That's why people were so angry at the Mass Effect 3 endings -- all your choices and progress meant very little in terms of the conclusion, you just had to pick from a fixed set of options based on your progression in the third game rather than having your particular choices throughout the trilogy result in a unique ending.

So game stories only matter if participating in the story is part of the player's set of choices. Linear stories with no branching paths or player choice are to player-driven stories what walking simulators are to gameplay. Branching stories with mutually exclusive options are also deeply replayable, because you can make wildly different choices each time and see different parts of the game. Note how players keep replaying and replaying Fallout New Vegas, Witcher 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect, etc.

I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like. Mine doesn't really match up with any of their archetypes, I like the immersion and creativity motivations almost to the exclusion of the others. So I'll engage in gameplay if it rewards me with positive story outcomes or character immersion or a cosmetic that fits my character's style or something I can use to create a thing in the game world, but I don't find gameplay inherently compelling, except for racing games, for some reason. Games are for me an excuse to exercise imagination in an interactive fictional world, not to demonstrate competence or achievement except insofar as those drive the fantasy. (So I might think of my character's progression in terms of the obstacles they've overcome or the achievements they've made, but it's not all that important that I've overcome them.) I'm a game world enthusiast and I see a player-driven story as part of participating in the game world.

It looks interesting, but I refuse to sign up to another fucking site to take their gamer astrology quiz.

Maybe Carmack takes it a bit far, but I think story in gaming is load bearing. At best it lets a game punch above it's weight. Portal minus the writing and world building is rather bland. But by the same token, think about how sparse the "writing" in Portal really is. Do you think it cracks 15 minutes of spoken dialog? Would the scattered bits of text in the game fit on the front and back of a notecard?

From one perspective, Carmack's dismissiveness towards writing and story is proven wrong by Portal. From another perspective, Carmack is vindicated, as Portal truly does have just enough writing to get the action going.

"Just enough to get the action going" is hardly a scientific measure, and one could argue an RPG takes more to "get the action going" than a puzzle game. But I enjoy the laconic inspiration behind the ethos. Nothing kills me worse in a game, even a game I am ostensibly enjoying, even an exposition dump I am ostensibly invested in (like when Xenoblade 3 almost made me cry), than when I get the feeling like this is nice and all, but I kind of want to play too, so can we wrap up this going on 30 minute cutscene?

I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like.

I got Skirmisher and Slayer, huh.

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Your primary (dominant) player type is the Slayer.

Slayers want to be the heroic protagonists in a cinematic story. They are solo gamers who enjoy highly curated narratives and slower-paced gameplay. They see games as highly interactive action movies to be experienced.

Ich bin ein cashual.

Carmack definitely wasn't right. But he wasn't entirely wrong either. Not all games need a story, let alone an elaborate one. For example, Tetris would not benefit from the blocks having elaborate backstories. But some games do need a good story (gestures at the entire RPG genre). It's all about what you prefer and what kind of game you want to make. Carmack's error was in assuming that the kind of game he wanted to make (gameplay-heavy, story optional at best) was the only kind of game worth making.

Crying silently for poor "Fallout: New Vegas" and GTA:Vice City

A good game tells its story not in cutscenes, but with its world and interactions. To make psychonauts (and the milkman conspiracy work) you need a good worldbuilding and storytelling.

In classical doom fashion you don't need a story - why are you cutting demons witch chainsaws - because there are demons and I have chainsaw. Same with mortal kombat - why do you want to beat this guy to a pulp - because he is there. When the gameplay is pure enough - all your bases are belong to us is enough of a motivation to play.

But the first time you meet roman soldiers in full atire in mojave desert in postapocalyptic Nevada you are WTF - mind blown ... the fact that they make it work and make sense is even bigger WTF mind blown.

The problem with the story is that games have way to tried to tell you a story so you can clap the writers and not to make your experience better.

A great game that tells simple story for you is Icewind Dale - there the story was minimalistic, but extremely tight. But it did great things to make you care and feel the place - which made the quests more enjoyable.

Strategy games peaked very early; Achron is about the only RTS I know since the new millennium that can truly be called groundbreaking, and the new millennium's about when UIs stopped being janky as well (though it took a few more years for every franchise to get an entry that was jank-free). I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games), but AIUI SMAC still has little competition for the Civ spot despite being pre-millennium.

On the other hand, VNs peaked quite late, I'd say early 2010s. Most other genres were somewhere in between.

A key point here is that games only require a certain amount of processing to be good, so House's law becomes irrelevant after a point. Yes, their GPU needs have continued to build, making games bigger and more expensive, but this was not really necessary or useful, just something that AAA developers continued doing in Molochian competition for the "ooh, shiny" demographic (even that eventually started to go indie, though much later).

I haven't played as many 4Xes (in particular I haven't played any Paradox games),

That would explain why you're completely wrong about strategy games. Paradox (and other indie publishers) continue to push the boundaries of what a strategy game can be. Victoria 3, for example, attempts to simulate literally the entirely population of earth over its timespan-- down to their professions, wealth, culture, religion, and political preferences.

To me, a big thing that gaming companies got wrong is that they essentially started chasing graphics over gameplay. This wasn’t obvious at the time, because graphics are a very obvious selling point when graphics capacity is growing fast. But it seems a dead end especially once you get to high levels of graphics that are photo realistic. Except this takes the place of doing other things: gameplay itself, storytelling, characters. There were a lot of games in the late 2000s that were beautiful to look at and so boring to play that it just wasn’t fun. This is something that Nintendo has always got right — they focused first and foremost on whether or not the player was having fun.

I continue to wonder when the inflection point was, between the ascending art form, and it's degenerate form we see today.

It was Mass Effect 3. Or the point between it and Andromeda.

You are welcome.

I would argue it was reached between Mass Effect 1 and 2 already. But certainly at Dragon Age 2, a year before Mass Effect 3.

Wow, somehow I thought DA:O happened after ME3. I suppose what you say makes sense.

I would second that. Mass Effect 2 was effectively Bioware changing from making an RPG to making a shooter because that would sell better. On top of that you have all the writing problems, which Shamus Young covered in great detail. I think that the only reason that ME2 gets remembered fondly is because of the large cast of characters who are by and large excellent. If not for that, I think it would be more widely recognized as the beginning of the downturn for Bioware.

ME2 is helped by the fact that the character quests are the majority of the game. So if you liked that writing and the gameplay, well, it's easy to look past that whole main plot writing thing. It's not the point/meat & potatoes of the game, after all.

And yes, Shamus did absolutely nail it on that one.

Mass Effect 2 was a massive side quest where Martin Sheen derails the plot for no reason. The character writing was interesting but I didn't like it as much as 1. I actually enjoyed ME3 more, despite the flaws, because it felt like the actual plot of the trilogy was relevant and we needed to make progress on it.

I will still prefer ME2 for leaning harder into the sci-fi angle with its characters; Legion, Mordin, and EDI (but mostly Legion, and the fact you don’t have him from the start of the game is unfortunate).

I think a lot of character writing in ME3 was actually wasted solely because, if you’re a standard RPG player and saved everyone in ME2, you miss a lot of additional writing.

It's more than the character writing that's good, it's how all the little tangents in the game end up contributing to the outcome of the final battle that made it interesting / satisfying. Though I agree they dropped the ball with the main storyline, and the fact that they had to make a DLC just to connect it to part 3 is proof positive that they screwed up.

That's a good point! Mass Effect 2 was absolutely what I thought about when I said stories could create compelling gameplay if your choices impact character outcomes. It's also a good example of what you said, that your character and story choices impact the mechanics you have available to you in major challenges. At their best, story-driven games have the mechanics and the gameplay feed into each other so that broad segments of the playerbase see both elements as compelling.

I'm rarely a "take notes so I can min/max" person, but I will absolutely admit to using guides to maximize my story choices for the final battle.

My dislike of ME2 was shaped by the fact that I never played the games when they were coming out, and I played them all in Legendary Edition for the first time. So a lot of the graphical and mechanical hard edges of ME1 were shaved off, so I enjoyed it more than a lot of people did, while ME2's tangential storyline stood out more as I was playing them in sequence and felt myself dragged away from the Reapers storyline in a way players who played them years apart might not have felt.

Some time around 2010 seems like the inflection point, yeah.

With BioWare in particular it's shocking how well that cut off-works. You have Baldur's Gate II (2000), Neverwinter Nights (2002), Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Jade Empire (2005), Mass Effect (2007), Dragon Age: Origins (2009), and Mass Effect 2 (2010), all of which are excellent. (I'd accept a quibble on NWN, but even so, the standard is very high.) But once you get past 2010, you have Dragon Age 2 (2011), The Old Republic (2011), Mass Effect 3 (2012), Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), Anthem (2019), and Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024). The decline in quality is both large and rapid.

Development runs mainly before vs after GFC + OWS being dismantled with identity politics... Is that pure coincidence?

Possible? It's difficult to date exactly when BioWare 'went woke', and it probably depends on how you define 'woke', but I'd say it's probably the early 2010s when they started to get aggressively preachy about it. KotOR and Jade Empire start to dip their toe into the idea of same-sex romance, but very little. DA:O and ME1 have some in the way of social commentary, with ME1 noticeably in favour of liberal humanitarian and cosmopolitan norms (the pretense that Renegade is not the evil path was never very convincing, even in 2007), but DA:O is surprisingly nuanced and fair.

I think DA2 and ME3 are probably where it gets bad, with DA2's ham-fisted approach to social strife, and ME3 was the one that, with Cortez, started directly preaching about marriage. (I note that ME2 and TOR were BioWare's last games to contain exclusively straight romances.) In general ME3 is noticeably more morally simplistic than its predecessors - where in ME2 the genophage was a complicated, ambivalent issue with Mordin making a persuasive defence of it, in ME3 Mordin has switched sides between games, so now all the good guys are on the one side and the pro-genophage camp is just evil. Likewise ME3 is just pro-geth in a way that strips out any kind of nuance from the issue. The writing has noticeably gotten worse. And then DA:I obviously has a couple of preaching scenes, and Veilguard is a dumpster fire.

I always thought the change in the genophage attitudes was strange. Here's a hyper expansionary, brutal race of beasts who previously wreaked havoc on all their neighboring planets. A solution was found. And suddenly the solution is evil just because they're killing each other instead of killing everyone else? And if they get a female leader they're supposed to become peaceful while multiplying like rabbits?

Sometime in the mid 2010s the cultural narrative trend went towards extensive 'these people did bad things because they were forced to and actually its the supposed good guys who are the evil ones that should be blamed for the bad actions of the bad guys.' Its a bit of a stretch, but not a very long one, to see that this was being forced into video games at the same time as all other media, particularly in order to capitalize on the 'current power order bad, bad things supposedly evil people do are just disagentic actions reacting autonomously against larger evil forces'. Put plainly, the analogy is that agency is reserved for the protaganists in-game race, and all enemies are actually victims that you are effectively mercy killing out of their tortured existence. Wait, thats slightly more fucked up the more I think about it.

Blizzard seems to be the only one that escaped most of that retardation, mainly because their writing was always trash to begin with. Look, there is ALWAYS a massively overwhelmingly evil external enemy that is responsible for everything, and its an eternally sliding scale so when this enemy gets some backstory and becomes sympathetic we immediately roll out the bigger BBEG to take the responsibility of all evil!

Outside of this, western game companies tended to have incredibly unimaginative narratives. This friendly white man turns out to be the actual evil bad guy all along! This orc is actually the poor oppressed woobie. Etc etc etc.

Outside of this, western game companies tended to have incredibly unimaginative narratives. This friendly white man turns out to be the actual evil bad guy all along! This orc is actually the poor oppressed woobie. Etc etc etc.

Also, evergreens like "The church is actually the bad guys!" and "The bad guys have no reedeming features whatsoever!".

It frustrated me a great deal because ME1 goes to some effort to show us the disaster of the genophage for the krogan through Wrex's eyes - we see what the effects of this were through a sympathetic, beloved character. Then ME2 shows us the other side of the story - we see the case for the genophage through the eyes of another sympathetic, beloved character. Mordin is obviously very humane and cherishes life, and argues for the necessity of the genophage out of what seems like genuine concern for the krogan. Without the genophage, the krogan would either overrun everyone else, or provoke such a brutal reaction that they would be exterminated.

That seems like it's setting up a confrontation between the two of them in ME3, where the player, after having investigated the genophage deeply in the first two games, now has to make a final call on it - and no matter which call you make, a character you probably like, trust, and want to help is going to feel profoundly betrayed. That's excellent.

But BioWare cop out at the last minute, Mordin changes sides, and oops, his old position is now evil. It's lazy and undermines all their previous work.

Tali and Legion are the same issue - two brilliantly sympathetic, beloved characters, each serving as the face of one side of a genuinely challenging conflict, and once again BioWare swerve at the last minute. I find ME3's writing pretty cowardly.

They really bungled the landing with ME3. :/ It could have been epic and could have become known as a work of art. The fan made indoctrination theory would have helped a lot.

Thinking about stuff I loved from the early 2010's, and then how my gaming consumption habits shifted after that, I think you're onto something, and that something is "the changeover from the 7th console generation to the 8th console generation." The 7th gen was already a huge shock for the industry, leading to multiple studios closing down (and there were still the odd casualties of studios and game franchises even into 2012-ish), and the 8th gen doubling down on high-fidelity probably didn't help keep the AAA side of the industry from becoming a total rat race.

It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot.

I haven't touched console gaming in a long time, but I kinda miss this practice. I kinda liked seeing all the "Platinum Hit" covers for Nintendo, EA, and Konami games from the 6th gen. And I think it made a degree of sense, in that for some games, most of the revenue value was extracted more upfront when the games came out, so slashing the price to keep milking the long tail wasn't completely a loss for the publishers. It probably also helped pump up those impressive lifetime sales numbers to lower the price so that the kids who missed out on the launch wave could still buy in.

Like, I'm pretty sure that, right now, on Steam, you can buy the original COD 4 for just 10 bucks. 10 buckaroonies! For a game that was $50-60 new! Activision doesn't give a shit, they have the modern COD-as-a-service as their vehicle of avarice. Valve has similarly slashed the prices on their back catalogue of non-F2P games, literally the most expensive game of theirs right now is Half-Life: Alyx (still at like $60 or so).

Similarly, GOG also just added a bunch of games to their store that made their way there from the GOG Dreamlist (a relaunched version of their long-standing wishlist where people could vote on which games GOG should add), and a good number of them were part of their GOG Preservation Program, intended to make old games playable even on modern machines. Probably the standout here is Silent Hill 4, where they also went and added back in some cut content. Now, this is a game that GOG has put work in, and even gone above the call of duty in making available to their customers (ETA: and this game never even had any PC versions before this!). What do you think the price of this pseudo-remaster is?

The answer: $10. And they also had a sale on these GPP titles that ended yesterday, so you probably could have gotten it for even cheaper. Old games should be cheaper, period.

Bioshock Infinite was a financial disaster because Ken Levine was completely unable to run an effective development team, it's really not any more complicated than that.

No publisher recoiled from failure; they were compelled to chase the live service riches all the way off a cliff.

Bioshock Infinite was a financial disaster because Ken Levine was completely unable to run an effective development team, it's really not any more complicated than that.

You know, yes, but also, this was the story of every studio left in the hands of creatives. They get a few workman efforts under their belt that put them in the black, and then they decide to go all in on their magnum opus. Happened to Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, John Romero, Peter Molyneux, and countless others. People criticize Electronic Arts for putting so many much beloved studios into the graveyard. But there is a story to EA where they were angel investors bailing out failing studios that were months away from bankruptcy anyways, and lending them some management expertise to boot. They can't help it that they were working for egotistical man children for whom money fell from the skies in their formative years. I think Ken Levine was the straw that broke publisher's backs when they decided no more attempted opuses, only slop.

If you look up some of the behind-the-scenes vids for Halo 3, the devs talk about what an absolute nightmare it was to move from Xbox to Xbox 360 because of the graphics.

The increase in amount of work required for everything was massive. Like, 10x. With all the knock on effects: inability to do lots of reworking, massively expanded middle management to handle all the newbies, massively expanded costs and therefore require to recoup revenue…

It marked the end of the point when you could make a world-class AAA with 60 people.

Let me highlight this part:

Arguably, Ubisoft has been fighting the good fight. I make fun of Ubislop titles, and their super generic, open world, casual action adventure mechanics. But they are still ostensibly offline big budget single player games.

I recently bought the remastered edition of Beyond Good and Evil, and the launcher doesn't allow me to play the game without creating a stupid Ubisoft account. Why the fuck would I need to create a Ubisoft account to play the single-player game I already bought and paid full price for? (Incidentally, I bought this game three times: once on PC, once the updated version on XBOX 360, and then again the remastered version.)

To be clear, this is a 100% offline exclusively single-player game with no online components whatsoever! There is absolutely no need for online accounts!

The only way to circumvent this asinine garbage was to put the console in offline mode, which is a hassle. And the only reason that works at all is that Microsoft put its foot down and didn't let hell-tier companies like Ubisoft block their games from running offline. Fucking Microsoft is the hero in this story! Let that sink in. MICROSOFT! I cannot emphasize this enough. How the hell do you fuck up so badly as a gaming company that a longtime gamer like me thanks Microsoft for not letting you ruin the gaming experience even worse for your paying customers?

This fucking shit make me hate Ubisoft with a fiery passion. A company that fucks its customers over this badly doesn't deserve to survive. I wish they went bankrupt yesterday, just to discourage this bullshit.

In fairness, even the original release had some bonus content that you could only access if you registered for an account online and downloaded a code to input into the game. Ubisoft might be the least bad of the big publishers, but does that make them good or just the least evil?

Just play indie games instead and ignore 95% of everything AAA.

I'm not sure if you needed an account for that, but at least that was optional, and you didn't miss much if you ignored it.

What was dumb about it was that Ubisoft couldn't even be arsed to keep their site up and running, making that part of the game technically unfinishable in recent years, if it wasn't for fans reverse-engineering the encryption algorithm (luckily, they used a symmetric algorithm instead of something harder to crack). And of course, the fan-maintained websites are still up and running: https://darkroom.bgemyth.net/, because apparently fans can do what billion dollar multinational companies cannot.

apparently fans can do what billion dollar multinational companies cannot.

Credit to ArenaNet on this one: GW1 is still up and running, and I believe they really will keep it so as long as ANet lasts.

I finally put my foot down three or four years ago and now categorically refuse to play any game that requires me to sign up for an account or set up a proprietary launcher. If that means I never get to play a AAA title again, so be it.

What is your overall point? What is the "Morning Chestnut Problem"? What do Japanese sources say about Yasuke that differs from English ones, specifically? How did his depiction go over in Japan?

After all those words, on a topic I do have some interest in, I feel only marginally closer to understanding any of these things. Almost all your explanations feel incomplete, and the lack of structure or things like clear thesis statements doesn't do you any favours either. Impose some structure and make sure all your thoughts actually resolve, and I could overlook the awkward prose.

Your thoughts on Wikipedia are certainly familiar ones here. What most strikes me about your first (English-language) Wikipedia link is the hypocrisy of the principles expressed there when contrasted with how they actually handle any topic relevant to the US culture war.

What do Japanese sources say about Yasuke that differs from English ones, specifically?

A short summation of what actual historical primary sources say about Yasuke:

  1. He was brought to Japan by Portuguese Jesuits. They gifted him to Oda Nobunaga because he was fascinated by his dark skin

  2. He was present at the Honno-Ji temple incident when Nobunaga was killed

  3. He got returned back to the Jesuits

There are a couple of very minor other details (like Nobunaga ordering him to bathe to prove that his skin was really dark) but that's about it. In total there are maybe 20 sentences about him in primary sources. Compare this to William Adams a few decades later. Adams has far more written about him, and we even have his own diaries from his time in Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu.

The Japanese sources are a bit ambiguous but they point to Yasuke being a retainer for Odo Nobunaga (basically a court hanger-on). Given that he doesn’t seem to have had any combat training prior to his association with Nobunaga and the fact that he was only with Nobunaga for like 8 months means he was probably never in the field kicking ass anyway.

Then in 2019, historian and college professor Thomas Lockley wrote a book about Yasuke. Lockley, who is fluent in Japanese and teaches at a college in Japan, was able to get ahold of a lot of the original Japanese sources for his book. Lockley revealed that the original portrayal of Yasuke was inaccurate and that he really was a man at arms and a very notable Samurai of the era. This lead to a historical reevaluation of Yaskue in the west and made Lockley somewhat famous. Ubisoft hired Lockley as a historical advisor for their game, and for publicity.

Except it turns out that Lockley’s book was mostly bullshit. He had written two versions of the book, one in Japanese and one in English. The Japanese edition mostly adhered to the version of the Yasuke narrative in my first paragraph, the one that is actually supported by the historical record. The English version throws that all out, intentionally misrepresents the sources, and presents basically a made up narrative. Lockley was relying on the language barrier to ensure that no one would ever check his homework. Which they didn’t, until the controversy over the game blew everything wide open. Lockley is now under investigation by Japanese academics for what is basically academic fraud, he deleted all his socials, the Japanese parliament has even gotten involved, and Ubisoft has a hot mess on its hands.

Thanks, that gives me a fair bit of the missing context, though I'm still no closer to understanding (among other things) the title!

For those curious, the Japanese abbreviation of Assassin's Creed, アサクリ (asakuri) can be parsed as asa ("morning") + kuri ("chestnut"). "Morning Chestnut Problem" is presumably a cheeky way to refer the problematic aspects of Assassin's Creed: Shadows, viewed from a Japanese perspective.

I find it quite funny how some westerners are super insistent on Yasuke being samurai. Because to my knowledge, even if someone successfully argues that he was, the position ought to be treated similarly to how Nils Olav is the baron of Bouvet Island, or how Incitatus was really a priest and a consul -- for all intents and purposes he had the position of an exotic pet gifted to Oda.

If it was handled better I think Yasuke would have been actually a reasonable fit (the odious woke erasure of Japanese history and appropriation of culture aside) -- he is a historical character of which we know very little, as such the game can practically make him do anything behind the scenes and it still wouldn't contradict written history since there's basically nothing to contradict!

(But of course they didn't handle it better, and it was as stupid as it sounded at first.)

How are the sales of the game doing in Brazil?

I ask because Ubisoft Brasil had a very different marketing strategy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=89bztUO2JuE

wtf I love yasuke now

I would watch this

It's amazing - it's the sheer, corny sincerity of it, I think?

You can tell it was made by people who love the genre. Respect.

Yeah, nearly all English language reporting about Japan is awful and written by progressive midwits (at best) who are also often weeaboos or some other form of nerd. Names to watch out for include Jake Adelstein, a "Yakuza expert;" David Aldwinkle ("Debito Arudou"), a gaijin-rights activist, and the editors of the Japan Times, whose reporting on Japanese culture and politics usually seems to boil down to "Shame on Japan for not being more like San Francisco." English NHK or Japanese Twitter is way better.

fwiw, I was on the fence about whether this post should be approved. First-time poster with a rather dry summary of a 2014, very academic book. Huh.

My first thought was that this was generated by an LLM, probably by someone establishing a new alt with innocuous posts. I realize that's somewhat uncharitable to you, @radar, but experience makes me suspicious of someone who appears out of nowhere to drop a post like this, with no introduction. There is nothing rule-breaking about the post itself (unless it was written by ChatGPT, and I'd be surprised if you admit it), but while we're going to leave the post up, if you keep posting things like this that tell us nothing about you and seem like an LLM could have written them, I will shadowban you.

This is one of the things I hate about the dawn of AI. This post could have been written by a human. It could have been written by an LLM. We can't know for sure. From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.

they deleted this post now

It probably was not written by ChatGPT, in my opinion. Maybe some other LLM. But it shows none of the usual signs of a non-very-specifically-prompted ChatGPT's output. ChatGPT, by default, writes like an annoying, overly eager-to-please teacher's pet high school student. It's a style that is very easy to spot once one is used to it.

Also, why would anyone need to establish an alt here? After all, this isn't Reddit, where unless you have a certain amount of karma, you literally are unable to post.

Remember that moron who kept posting not-quite-bait and then deleting his posts?

and now this post is deleted

Also, why would anyone need to establish an alt here?

Ban evasion I'm guessing.

From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.

Giving a takehome essay should be given up on for sure at this point. Graded essay writing should be something that happens entirely under supervision at this point, if the goal is to measure learning in the area of creating coherent, written point of view.

Were I a teacher, I'd do this:

  1. Give a generalized form of the prompt or subject. Students can then use AI to help them create notes, do primary research etc.
  2. Students can bring some limited selection of reference material to class to turn in. On the day they turn it in they have to write an ad-hoc explainer of what they've coallated and why.
  3. The coalation is reviewed before the day of the essay. On the day of the essay, each student is given back their packet (less unjustified material), and the true prompt is given (Therefore preventing what's turned in to be a straight draft).
  4. The student writes their essay during the test period, ala blue books.
  5. Bonus: Another assignment could be letting the student use AI to refine and turn in a final, more comprehensive draft of the essay at a later date

You would have to rejigger the entire education system.

Bring back handwriting lessons in lower grades, to start with.

Bring back handwriting lessons in lower grades, to start with.

It seems like they should do that regardless. Computers should be a tool to aid you in being more effective at things you could do anyway, not something with which you can't get by. Kids should be learning how to write by hand even though they can write on a computer, just like they learn how to do math even though they can do it with a computer.

Mostly, change an enormous number of IEPs and 504s

Just bring back the school laptop cart, and turn off the wifi.

Laptop cart? Is this literally just a cart with laptops piled onto it, and the teacher goes and hands them out to the students at the start of class?

Yup. My school had these back in 2008

Huh, where was this?

Boring suburban school district in upstate ny

Were I a (post-elementary) teacher , I would give every single student an A, and let anyone who wanted to goof off all year do so. Meanwhile, I'd offer in-class tutoring, and offer study materials and optional homework to any student that actually wanted to learn. Out of an (overpacked) 30 kid english class, I think I'd get 2-5 kids with an actual, serious interest in writing and another 15-25 willing to discuss the occasional book and study exactly what they need to learn for standardized tests. The rest of the kids were a lost cause from the start. Credential inflation is a race to the bottom and there no sense wasting everyone's time trying to win it.

...well that's the power fantasy I have, at least. In practice you and I would be bound by whatever the school administration and the district parents wanted, actual learning outcomes be damned.

If the administration manages to nuke the DOE, maybe we can go back to the days when individual teachers were allowed to set their own curricula.

Stranger things have happened.

First, nuking the DofEd would still leave curricula set by state and local Boards of Education. Second, individual teachers aren't better, having all been suckled at the teat of the educator education system run by those who follow the maxim "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, teach teachers".

I had a college history class (ancient near eastern history from the earliest written history up to about the time of Alexander the Great) where all our exams were essays that had to be written in the school's testing center within a time limit. Sucked majorly but I learned more in that class than any other. For the essay we were given a prompt as well as a list of historical ideas, people, events, etc. that we had to tie into our essay in an intelligible way (or rather we had to tie a significant amount of them, something like 80%, into our essay).

I knew I had truly learned/internalized the course material when I was walking through the school library and saw some ancient Egyptian papyrus framed on the wall. My brain looked at the person depicted and how they were presented on the papyrus and said "that's Amenophis the First" despite not knowing a lick of Hieroglyphics.

My brain looked at the person depicted and how they were presented on the papyrus and said "that's Amenophis the First" despite not knowing a lick of Hieroglyphics.

Please explain. What led you to the conclusion?

There was a Nubian making obeisance to him and some other details I can't recall now. I looked at the description under the frame and it confirmed what I thought.

At first I thought there was no way that this is slop, because the writing is so mid. In fact I felt like it was almost similar to my own writing in its medicority. But only the first paragraph was so deceptive.

After delving into the details, it's absolutely, definitely, 100% slop. This line is what sealed the deal:

By applying a 10% national strategic tariff alongside the scaled tariffs, the administration aimed to address trade imbalances effectively. This approach aligns closely with the Richmans' recommendations, suggesting that the administration's trade policies were heavily influenced by their work.

This is exactly the kind of slop that I criticized Dase's slop for when he posted his original controversy sparking post. The slop, when it engages in motivated reasoning, hallucinates connections that don't exist in the source or need more preintroduction. Irregardless of if the rest of the formula aligns with Richman's idea, the connection with 10% is nonexistent and nonsensical. This masterfullty written non-sequitur is exceptionally inhuman. The rest of his "discussion" writing is similarly inhumanly retarded.

the administration aimed to address trade imbalances effectively

We don't know the administration's actual aim, and the entire purpose of this discussion is to speculate on the possibility. This hallucination and detachment from reality is not the result of human thought.

It seems that while aislop is good at summarizing, it is quite bad at argumentation. This probably stems from its training, with the lack of debate and persuasive writing in its pretraining set, as well as posttraining that optimizes for authoritative output (with CYA) and listicles.

Fwiw, several gpt detectors agree strongly that this is slop.

Conclusion: mercilessly nuke this ban evading bastard with impunity and be on the lookout for more of his underhanded tricks.

The slop, when it engages in motivated reasoning, hallucinates connections that don't exist in the source or need more preintroduction.

Interesting! Seems like a good marker beside of a certain style.

Aren't we in a time when it's hard to tell the difference between the Trump administration's actual, real, policies and AI-generated slop? These days actual politicians, too, use LLMs.

There's a difference between an idea generated by a bot, and writing slop. A simple idea can't itself be slop, as it is simply an idea. Argument, reasoning, and prose can be slop.

So unless the politician or his aides copypasted slop into the policy document, ideating with chatgpt does not pollute the downstream. A bot incepting an idea into a human does not make any thoughts that stem from that idea into inhuman garbage.

So unless the politician or his aides copypasted slop into the policy document

A certain recent tariff policy does come to mind.

You haven't even read it

It speaks to the modern social attention meta that all we have to do is ctrl + f the more egregious AI tells, and add an introductory paragraph to frame the following text blocks as a first person rather than depersonalized voice.

Also, can I just point out that the actual text block is just... inane? It just looks at the percentage differences as a be all and end all effect, with zero consideration for salient factors like composition or even scale. While fine tuning is a frictional exercise, its certainly not so onerous that you need to slap this cursed golem stitched together out of wishful outcomes and deliberate ignorance onto the market.

(lets see AI slop generate THAT)

delving

Well, the ironic thing is that's another perfectly cromulent word somewhat tarnished by Nigerian data annotators ChatGPT.

If we are banning for AI posts can we also ban for "irregardless"? The latter is much more offensive to me!

Unless it is used to mean the opposite of "regardless", as it clearly should?

Moving forward, everyone should pepper into their posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech. Embrace the skibidi toilet of authenticity!

Yeah unironically this. Sprinkle some typos, call someone a fag, etc. AIs will never be at this level 😄

TayGPT begs to differ.

Aren't we supposed to be convincing the upcoming ASI that we're worth keeping alive?

posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech.

Wanna bet?

Meanwhile, you’ve got the blue-haired commie fag brigade whining about “muh consumer prices” like a bunch of NPCs who can’t handle a little economic heat. Bro, wake up—those low prices came at the cost of your neighbor’s job and your country’s soul. Tariffs are the ultimate redpill: they expose how addicted we got to foreign handouts and force us to rebuild what we lost. Sure, your Walmart trash might cost an extra buck, but that’s a small price to pay for sticking it to the CCP and watching soyboys seethe. Trump’s playing 4D chess while the haters are stuck on checkers, crying into their avocado toast. This is peak kino—raw, unfiltered, and gloriously chaotic. Tariffs aren’t just policy; they’re a vibe, and that vibe is winning.

This is the quality shitposting that really makes me "feel the AGI".

This is a response to both the above and @PyotrVerkhovensky's below comments on tariffs.

Some 30-odd years ago, economists had a proposition for the American people, and the West and the global economy at large, that went something like this:

Trade liberalisation is fantastic. It will bring massive economic growth, cheap consumer goods for all! Now, all these free trade agreements might have the negative impact of hollowing out America's (and the West's) industial base as all manufacturing and its associated blue collar jobs move overseas, but don't worry! Some of the massive economic gains from trade liberalisation can be captured and used to help blue collar communities 'adjust' to this economic change but helping them to reskill into other industries, such as ERROR:Undefined. Everybody wins! Plus, liberalising trade with China will help them liberalise politically as well. Pax Americana will live on!

Obviously, this didn't come to pass - at the very least, the claims that the negative repercussions of trade liberalisation will be offset by capturing some of the economic gain didn't happen, as Western deindustrialisation and the Rust Belt is testament to. What's more, economists rarely consider social impacts, especially second and third order effects. Deaths of despair and the social decline of middle America wasn't considered a possibility. A few economists may give lip service to social issues, but ultimately they can be resolved with economic solutions. Never mind that the wealth generated by trade liberalisation was highly concentrated by a minority of elites concentrated in financial centres and not widely distributed, cheap plasma TVs be damned.

I think the strongest argument in favour of tariffs (in the broad sense, not necessarily Trump's implementation) flips the free trade argument on its head - rather than middle American manufacturing being sacrificed for the good of abstract macroeconomic growth and GDP, abstract macroeconomic growth and GDP should be sacrificed for middle American manufacturing. Why were blue collar workers expected to sacrifice their livelihoods for the benefit of financial markets back in the 90s, but we shouldn't expect financial markets to sacrifice some of their growth for the well-being of blue collar workers now?

The question that is often forgotten in economic policy debates is who is the economy for? Too often do economists, policy makers and the media alike forget that the economy is a means, not an end, and that abstract GDP growth is not necessarily the goal that should be pursued, especially when that growth can come at the expense of the social well-being of the population, even if the insistence is that it will always benefit everyone.

Why were blue collar workers expected to sacrifice their livelihoods for the benefit of financial markets back in the 90s, but we shouldn't expect financial markets to sacrifice some of their growth for the well-being of blue collar workers now?

What do you actually think will happen to blue collar workers now? How many will be better off in June than they were in March?

I said I am not specifically defending Trump's implementation of tariffs - there's a lot to criticise even if you're someone who is generally in favour of protectionism.

Any large macroeconomic change is going to have short term economic shocks, basically regardless of what exactly they are.

The concern is not what the short term economic impacts will be on what remains of American industry, but (re)developing a long term industrial base. Whether the tariffs achieve that is up for debate and remains to be seen. The ship may have already sailed.

Some 30-odd years ago, economists had a proposition for the American people, and the West and the global economy at large, that went something like this:

Obviously, this didn't come to pass - at the very least, the claims that the negative repercussions of trade liberalisation will be offset by capturing some of the economic gain didn't happen, as Western deindustrialisation and the Rust Belt is testament to.

The Rust Belt is more than 30 years old. The term dates back the 1980s; the phenomenon further. If you're looking at de-industrialization and blaming free trade, you have the problem of ante hoc ergo non propter hoc.

The 80s aren't 30 years ago

Ah!

Regardless, while there were some indication of deindustrialisation earlier, the late 80s/early 90s were a critical inflection point - it's when economic relations with China began to normalise, allowing China grow explosive, and Chinese exports grew enormously during the 90s (and later other Asian nations such as Vietnam and India) In America specifically, NAFTA was signed in 1994.

Also, I find it funny all the grandstanding about free trade in the media - while free trade has been a principle since the end of WW2, in reality completely and absolute free trade has only really been a thing for the last 20-30 years. The 1950s-1990s had a moderate amount of tariffs and other trade restrictions. Short memories.

The 80s and 90s were not a critical inflection point in deindustrialization. They were well into the decline (the term "Rust Belt" is a riff of something Walter Mondale said). Your timeline is wrong and therefore you cannot come to correct conclusions.

Is your objection to my use of the term 'Rust Belt', or the argument that the 80s/90s weren't critical turning point? I don't care about the former, the latter is statistically true - deindustrialisation was much more significant after then, then had occured previously.

The 80s/90s clearly were not the critical turning point. The point of noting the term "Rust Belt" came from the '80s is to show that it was understood at the time that it had already largely happened.

Yes it was - US trade balance only begins to dramatically decline in the 80s, and then dramatically accelerates in the 90s (i.e. the same time NAFTA comes into effect and China's exports explode in growth). While there was decline and deindustrialisation in some areas and sectors before then, US manufaturing and exports was still relatively healthy in the up to the 80s.

Manufacturing remains healthy. Using balance of trade is assuming the conclusion.

More comments

It's quite clear that tariffs were introduced by Trump admin to address trade deficits rather than to reduce the other countries tariffs. This means that the biggest risk to US according to Trump administration is creation of a new reserve currency or rather a group of currencies(Like BRICS) that replaces the US dollar and triggers a balance of payment crisis in the US over both its trade and budget deficit. This also means that Trump Admin views creation of such entity as inevitable. US's earlier moves to consolidate dollar's position in international trade via threats also point to the same.

Now that has been said, what's the endgame? This is by any measure a ballsy move since the associated risks with these move. Inflation all over the world being one. Pushing Europe towards China being second. And a consolidation of anti-America alliances being third.

On the flip side, there is no guarantee that USA would lower its tariff just because you lower yours, especially for economies with higher spending power with protectionist measures like Europe. For the world the lesson remains the same as the one in cold war, being the enemy of US is dangerous and being an ally of US is fatal.

  1. The American working class is materially richer than the working class in every other developed country bar a handful of microstates (many of them beneficiaries of extreme commodity wealth coupled with a low population). Even those countries often have lower consumption per capita than the US. America is not poor, the average working American is not poor. The things that are expensive in America, like healthcare and education, are in substantial part expensive because of protectionism, regulation or extremely high domestic salaries.

  2. The problems America faces compared to those countries - a feral, mentally ill violent homeless population, disgusting and unusable public transport, high crime rates, a ridiculously inefficient and expensive healthcare system, mass illegal immigration across the southern border, and an inability to build almost anything - are not the consequence of a free-trade-based economic policy. Many countries trade relatively freely (certainly with lower tariffs on the entire world than those just implemented) without them. Many are very civilized places and have service-based economies.

  3. Downtown Philadelphia isn’t a dump because of trade policy. The Tenderloin in SF isn’t a dump because of trade policy. People don’t choose to avoid the LA subway because of trade policy. (In fact big coastal American cities are some of the most prosperous places in the entire world). New railroads aren’t not being built because of trade policy. Wokeness wasn’t imported to America but exported by it. The problem isn’t the policy, but the people and their incentives. People don’t overdose in tiny midwestern towns because the factory jobs went (in fact, speak to many factory owners still there and they’ll tell you they struggle to find workers who will show up, pass a drug test and work a normal 8 hour shift even for wages that are the envy of the world).

Let’s just be honest. This is happening because Donald Trump read or learned about trade deficits sometime in the 1970s and decided, personally, that any imbalance is a “bad deal”, and this is a man who sees everything in life in terms of deals. Over the last 8 years he went from outsider to king of the GOP and is now surrounded by advisors who know that the only consequence of disagreeing with him on this is getting replaced by someone who knows when to stay quiet. On abortion, on immigration, on tax, on trans rights, Trump is malleable. On trade, he’s not. This is what he really believes, and he will stake his presidency on it.

There is likely some level of economic damage that would cause Trump to rethink this, but it’s much worse than a lot of people think.

I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.

Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?

Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs

Given IQ differentials what could they do at these auto plants? Arent cars today way more advanced with a lot of automation already taken place?

I don't know about cars but if pharmaceuticals and medical devices (I used to work at a place in Ireland making drug eluding stents) are of similar complexity then no you don't need to have much brains to be a line worker even if the final product is complex.

You perform one or two sets of movements 800 times a day and need to remember if you saw anything strange in a batch from an hour ago. There's a hierarchy of inspectors, technicians, quality control workers and engineers who worry about the complicated stuff.

Sounds like something they automated awhile ago then (or will be automated soon)

Automation had already been going on for 30 years by the time I was working there, the workers just get moved to another part of the process where relying on fine motor skills is cheaper than designing and building a new machine. A few technician jobs are created too as they need manual maintenance multiple times per day.

This can't go on forever but it doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. Checking the local news they're still announcing new expansions and jobs (although that was before these recent tariffs).

AI might cause some disruption on the lower levels of the quality control side as a lot of that just involves looking through a microscope and identifying faults.

I have a degree, but in History. I'm completely self-taught in IT and software dev and am currently a senior dev at a highly dysfunctional megacorp (not a FAANG type, more of an old school megacorp but I guarantee every single poster here is familiar with the company). Simply having the degree (in an irrelevant , unrelated field) helped me immensely with getting through pointless application filters early on in my career. I'm sure it still does but now my experience counts for more.

I'm just annoyed because a lot of advancement for me seems to be blocked by my not having a degree in CS or a related field, even though the incompetent Pajeets that make up 90% of my coworkers have CS degrees from India but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. In fact the technical debt they've piled up over the last decade or so in my subdivision of the company finally came to a head last week. Performance and stability issues with our software finally pissed off enough of our large customers that all new development has been frozen and our sales teams are no longer selling our products (instead some similar software made by a separate recently-acquired-by-us company will be getting pushed by sales).

After we do some work to stabilize and improve performance is done in the next year or two I expect our products to be kept on life support with a skeleton crew for security updates etc. As a result I'm strongly considering getting my masters in CS because the job market (and all of the retarded filtering done by HR and hiring managers) makes it so much harder for someone like me without a relevant degree to even get considered.

Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.

Honestly the entire tech hiring process is fucked and looks at the entirely wrong things. If I were doing hiring, my interview process would involve things like:

"Take a look at this (terrible) database schema. What would you change about the design and why?" If the dev knows what third normal form is and why it matters (and when it doesn't) that puts them in the top 5-10% of devs already.

"You've been assigned to build [hypothetical product]. Explain the overall design/architecture choices you would go for and why. Also explain some alternatives you might choose and why. What are some potential difficulties (both immediate and long-term) you might run into with your choices, and why you feel your choices are worth it in spite of the potential problems." Being able to actually consider pros and cons, think about the future, etc. also put a potential hire in the top 5% of devs.

Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.

I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.

I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.

Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree?

Closer to 60%.

So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off.

Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.

Why is there so much homelessness?

There's so much visible homelessness because we no longer allow police or security guards to beat the homeless back to the margins. And because we spend so much effort trying to keep them alive.

The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.

This is less true than it once was. More true than directly before the big runup to the GFC, but note that was already well after free trade policies and even longer after the rust belt.

Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.

Does anyone know what ended up happening to the kids Peter Thiel paid off to not go to college?

They did very well. Many founders, people who work for Thiel, some VCs. But he wasn’t picking the median college student, he was picking very intelligent kids who were skipping Stanford or MIT comp sci. They would have done well regardless.

Right, but I think "they would have done well regardless" implies that whatever value lies in a degree comes from filtering, so there is something to the original claim "so off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off".

Though I suppose to get a proper answer to the question, he should have randomly denied, but kept track of, half of them.

The go-getter smooth-talking company-founder types with at least slightly better than average intelligence are always going to succeed. Sometimes they'll fail big time but unless in doing so they seriously piss off the government or organized crime or the wrong nerd they'll bounce back up. They're just a completely invalid sample because their success is overdetermined.

A more typical programmer type will, unless they start out in a massively successful startup, be handicapped throughout much of their career by the lack of a degree -- their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.

The people getting "I went to college" degrees will do even worse, either working at a much crappier category of job or being unemployed much more often.

Scientific types will of course be completely unable to get a job in their field without a degree, and probably an advanced degree; when I was in college it was said that a B.S. in chemistry qualified you to wash glassware.

I admit I don't have an RCT of any of this, however.

their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.

N=1, but it's not all that bad. I probably got stuck in some filters, but I was never unemployed, and if these "average salary stats" websites are to be trusted, I wasn't underpaid either.

More comments

But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree?

Because easy universal loans make it ‘free’ at the point of use and decades of culture make clear that college is (and let’s face it, it often is) 4 years of zero responsibility partying for free!

Even if you had a nice entry level manufacturing job in your small town paying $65k out of high school, what sounds more fun to a 17 year old: partying and getting laid and playing sports and hanging out with the boys all day at college for 4 years, or going to work in a factory?

America is so rich we basically pay for young people to party for four years. I’m not even ideologically opposed to it, but I think it’s a mistake not to admit that this is what it is.

Indeed. It’s moreso that than ever before - college professors complain they aren’t allowed to fail students anymore, and students know this, so they don’t show up to half their classes

Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs.

Except of course that crime in Detroit has fallen greatly since the 70s/80s.

Violent crime from 2700/100k @peak to 2000, not a big drop compared to falling national rates.
Actual number of murders has fallen sharply of course, because the population is almost a third of what it used to be.

Looking at the metropolitan area, which has a largely unchanged population, the murder rate per 100k is down from some 13-14 to 6.6.

The metropolitan area has also been experiencing a minor renaissance, with a new and different class of people replacing the previous residents. You’d need to somehow control for gentrification to get a true sense of the stats.

Crime has been falling steadily, well before (decades) the the renaissance. If anything it bottomed out before the renaissance.

On MAD, some is more MA than others

One detail about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that I was not really aware of until now is the relative asymmetry of it.

In a nuclear exchange, MAD deterrence depends on both sides being able and wiling to destroy the other if they detect a first strike.

In the case of NATO vs Russia, MAD is not even! If Russia decides to first strike NATO, it's possible they could wipe out Europe before it has time to respond, in perhaps 10 minutes. But the US part of NATO is another story, and could take up to 30 minutes to wipe out. That's considerably more time for the US to order and launch a counterstrike that wipes out Russia.

The inverse does not hold, however. NATO can launch a first strike on Russia that ends them entirely in 10 minutes, cutting off options to respond. To be clear here some response would happen, like a few cities within the NATO bloc get nuked, but it's quite probable Russia could be wiped out entirely with only a minor amount of apocalyptic damage done to NATO.

What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes. That's not even enough time to notice, get positive confirmation and wake people up: Russian leadership would just sleep through Armageddon.

If you take Russia at face value, and that they invaded Ukraine because it would not commit to neutrality, it would seem to be a strategic blunder on the side of the US to not consider this more seriously. The logic of launching a first strike against Russia seems crazy to us, but that's almost certainly playing half-court basketball. If you think like a Russian, people who have endured centuries of extremely cruel militaristic and fuck-you-got-mine rule, a cold blooded NATO first strike that sacrificed a mere tens of millions in deaths in Europe might be a real fear. Especially if Russia senses its own competence wrt nuclear war is weakening. Also it's not like the US is not capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty when it comes to geopolitics. Regime change is a thing we've gleefully engaged in.

Anyway, learning about this asymmetry in nuclear MAD makes me more sympathetic to Russia's POV. The war with Ukraine was not inevitable and the possibility of allying Ukraine with NATO has, in hindsight, high cost with relatively little upside?

Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation? I understand there exist planes and subs that can deliver nuclear warheads but I don't see Russia's force projection capabilities being able to fulfill the retaliatory threat. For example, I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.

Carrying a big stick sounds important for global stability, but probably also avoiding scaring the shit out of failing and desperate nuclear armed powers is key.

Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.

But I digress.

Russia’s actions don’t generally look like existential terror. Pushing Finland into NATO? Withdrawing from the INF treaty? (Possibly Trump’s fault, I guess.) Threatening tactical nukes?! That’s not how you deescalate the situation.

Keeping NATO missiles out of Ukraine is a tiny benefit compared to the other consequences.

Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.

Does it help to say I still think Putin is a huge bitch, like tinpot-dictator paranoid, and I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and if I had my choice we'd hit Putin with a nuke while he's hiding in his giant palace and only kill his most devoted sycophants? On a moral level, why the fuck can't Ukraine join NATO? Like they have every reason to distrust Russia and should be allowed to side with NATO.

Like somewhere in the above I wonder if we could actually be cold and logical enough to just first strike nuke Russia and totally wipe out their ability to retaliate and rid ourselves of this problem. Sure it's ghoulish, but think of it: a world without any threat from Russia ever again. The best time to have nuked Russia was in 1945. The second best time is now. Sorry we ever doubted you, John von Neumann (PBUH!)

How's that for finding alpha?

Pushing Finland into NATO?

As I said somewhere in a related descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.

As I said somewhere a the descendant of this thread, I think Putin was expecting Ukraine to cave immediately and demonstrate why you should not gesture in the direction of NATO. This isn't going how they planned and all of their actions afterwards have been bad.

All the Russian moves seemed to have assumed a more-or-less immediate collapse of the Ukrainian government and its armed forces. Everything about the first two weeks of the war, and Russia's grand strategy in general, seems to have been predicated on that. It will be really interesting to see if we ever get a behind-the-scenes history of the decision making involved because I would bet a lot of crazy things were being said behind closed doors immediately before and after the start of the war.

Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.

This is natural, isn't it? The 'Putin is a huge bitch' narrative was pushed so heavily right from the start that any new information is likely to update in favour of Russia simply by virtue of regression to the mean.

Not for people who were already pointedly ignoring that narrative, no.

I would just like to underscore what a huge bitch I still think Putin is.

I've heard commodities traders say Gazprom would be the world's most valuable company if it wasn't inside of Putin's oligarchy, for example.

He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.

He has made the world strictly worse, especially for Russians.

That last part is a pretty difficult argument to take seriously given the absolute state Russia was in when he got the job.

Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen I don't see that as a huge credit to him. There was an oil boom, forgiveness of debts, invitation to the WTO, and even talks of having them join NATO and he squandered all of it. It was like a once in a civilization offer.

Given that the US very much wanted Russia to join the capitalist democratic world order and get rich and fat and bent over backwards to try to make it happen

That’s what the US said meanwhile they were pillaging the Russian economy, sponsoring Chechen terrorist groups, and muttering darkly about how it would be better if Russia just collapsed.

Before Summer 2022, though, before the Kharkiv/Kherson offensives, even the mainstream pro-Ukrainian narrative was basically committed to the idea that Kherson and the areas taken in the north by AFU during that time were basically lost for good and any advance in those regions would only be the sort of small-scale grind that we've seen after that, from both sides. Only the more hysterically out-there pro-Ukrainians were saying that Ukraine could actually take large areas of territory back.

The narrative "right at the start" was that the near-certain outcome was a quick Russian victory leading to a messy insurgency.

There was a major shift in favour of Ukraine when the Russian blitzkrieg failed, and another one when the Ukrainians started fighting back. The narrative has shifted back in favour of Russia following modest Russian successes on the battlefield.

Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and have modernized their platforms. There is not much Soviet hardware left in the Russian arsenal.

Russia has a solution to the first strike problem, decentralization. If it takes 30 min for a nuke to reach Russia, then Russia can have the setup where two of the three following must vote yes for a strike: the president, the commander of the Russian military, the chief of the Russian military staff.

With 10 minutes flight time there isn't enough time to have that system. Russia won't give up on mad, instead they will start handing out launch codes to lower level people. These people have an absolutely awful incentive structure. If one of their peers fire they are better off if they fire asap. Most nukes are aimed at enemy nukes. If you think one of your peers will fire and a nuclear strike in imminent, your best option is to fire away at enemy nukes. Giving more people ability to push the button, giving them less time to verify the attack and giving them an incentive to react fast is absolutely awful.

Pulling out of the INF treaty and expanding NATO eastward could be the start of the worst chain of events in 65 million years.

For Russia this war is worth it if they think the risk of a nuclear exchange is reduced by even 1% over the next century which is 1/10000 per year.

With 10 minutes flight time there isn't enough time to have that system. Russia won't give up on mad, instead they will start handing out launch codes to lower level people.

they did it in soviet times already (though not permanently, mediated by Dead Hand system)

In a nuclear exchange, MAD deterrence depends on both sides being able and wiling to destroy the other if they detect a first strike.

no, retaliatory strike may also use weapons that survived initial strike (or second strike)

MAD is not limited to launch on warning

for example all kinds of real or theoretical systems are possible. See Perimeter AKA Dead Hand, fail-deadly system that would release ability to launch missiles to low-ranking personnel in a case of decapitation strike*

*sometimes described as being able to launch nuclear weapons completely autonomously, without any human oversight at all, but that is fairly dubious. And even more exotic systems are possible.

Though in practice, boomer launching missiles hours or months after first strike is perfectly sufficient.

In the case of NATO vs Russia, MAD is not even! If Russia decides to first strike NATO, it's possible they could wipe out Europe before it has time to respond, in perhaps 10 minutes. But the US part of NATO is another story, and could take up to 30 minutes to wipe out. That's considerably more time for the US to order and launch a counterstrike that wipes out Russia.

this is mostly irrelevant due to second strike capabilities, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike

For start USA, UK and France have boomers. One of main roles of ballistic missile submarine is to be not destroyed in first strike and to retaliate. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine

Which is why Russia putting nukes on hypersonic missiles is not changing much here.

What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes.

Also irrelevant as you can launch nuclear strike from ballistic missile submarines (they are also useful for attack!) or Finland. Or planes. Adding ability to launch nuclear strike from Ukrainian soil adds little to nothing here.

If you take Russia at face value

why I would do so? this is mistake in general in politics, but in case of Russia this is especially stupid

Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation? I understand there exist planes and subs that can deliver nuclear warheads but I don't see Russia's force projection capabilities being able to fulfill the retaliatory threat.

Maybe for Russia these are not helping. But potential attackers have them so ability to launch nukes from Ukrainian soil does not meaningfully increases risk. And for Russia their war eaten enormous resources, including ones that would fund nuclear deterrent. What they did is in fact indicator that they are not scared by NATO or China invading Russia.

actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.

even assuming this: what about road mobile launchers and hardened siloses?

probably also avoiding scaring the shit out of failing and desperate nuclear armed powers is key.

being infinitely scared by Russian nuclear arsenal is (in addition to Libya vs North Korea) something that will greatly encourage nuclear proliferation. South Korea is serious enough to get official USA reaction ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-designated-south-korea-sensitive-country-amid-talk-nuclear-weapons-2025-03-15/ ) but there is potential for more.

being infinitely scared by Russian nuclear arsenal is (in addition to Libya vs North Korea) something that will greatly encourage nuclear proliferation.

You can probably also add Poland to that list in the future

To be clear here some response would happen, like a few cities within the NATO bloc get nuked, but it's quite probable Russia could be wiped out entirely with only a minor amount of apocalyptic damage done to NATO.

A single Russian SSBN has a complement of 20 ballistic missiles, each with 6 MIRV warheads on it. That's a more than "a few cities", that's the top 100 cities rendered uninhabitable.

For example, I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.

Russia is huge. "Near Russia" encompasses a huge area, much of it under the arctic ice where submarines can't be followed by planes or ships.

Moreover, this is a "get every single one or lose everything" scenario. The US would have to be confident that not a single SSBN would be able to launch before being destroyed. That's hardly plausible.

What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes.

The distance to Moscow from the northermost portions of Ukraine (500km) isn't that different from the eastern portions of Latvia (600km). The Baltics (and now Finland!) are also substantially closer to St. Petersburg, as are their bases in Kaliningrad and Murmansk. This also doesn't explain why Russia is specifically focusing on Donetsk and the east.

The idea that a western strike could "end them entirely" also seems pretty questionable: it's not like Russia is short on territory for its own equivalent of Minot AFB during the Cold War, or the fleet of ballistic missile submarines.

(and now Finland!)

Oh fugg... ebin Finland? :DDDDD

Isn't Ukraine the best positioning to nuke every major city in Russia and tons of military infrastructure in <5 minutes though?

(and now Finland!)

I expect they thought Ukraine would fold like a wet napkin and send a powerful signal to the remaining states not to align with NATO.

This also doesn't explain why Russia is specifically focusing on Donetsk and the east.

Those are probably the only places they can reasonably capture after realizing Ukraine would not be easy?

Isn't Ukraine the best positioning to nuke every major city in Russia and tons of military infrastructure in <5 minutes though?

Petrograd is on the Estonian border.

Ukraine's strategic value has more to do with regular forces, spy bases, sea access and trade routes than it does nuclear deterrence as far as I understand.

Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation?

Yes. Quite a bit, but it starts with forgetting that nukes are controlled by people, and the people in half of this context are elected leaders of democracies, and the other half are leaders of polities as well, not the polity itself.

Democratically-elected politicians and parties like to be re-elected. They also like the idea of having a successful historical legacy even if they can't be re-elected. They also like being popular with their supporter base. They also like not dying in second-strike scenarios, but more relevant is that people who enjoy being popular, and the political prestige/esteem that comes with being popular, take being popular seriously. Even a 'successful' genocide tends to put a scupper in their support base opinion polls amongst people who don't like genocide but do put a lot of value in thinking of themselves as good people. Even if the elected leader is neither good nor shares that genocidal objection, their interest is being shaped by the third party reactions.

Similarly, no one 'thinks like' a multi-hundred year polity. This is because individual people don't live hundreds of years old. There are no ethnic gestalt consciousnesses that dominate decision-making. Even ideologues act according to their specific ideas as they understand them. This divide between the appeal to the mass consideration to the actual decisionmaker gets wider the more the political power differential is between elites and masses. Peasants don't dictate how aristocrats decide their own future- that's why one is a peasant and the other is an aristocrat in the first place.

As a result, the actor characterization stumbles over the rather basic question of- 'why?'

Nukes don't fire themselves. They are fired by people. People have motives. 'If I fire first, I could wipe the other side out with little to no response!' is not a motive. It is a literal statement, but not a serious statement. To be serious, it would have to deal with the consequences that actually shape decisionmaker- specific humans- behavior. It has to address 'why' that makes sense, not why it is mechanically possible.

Your misreading is also taking MAD elements literally, but not seriously. And this includes MAD itself.

The Mutual in MAD has never necessarily been mutually-received damage in scale or proportion. A for Assurance is not an assurance of any particular level of retaliatory destruction, and hasn't for as long as second-strike capability entered nuclear triads. The D of Destruction has likewise been 'too much of my own destroyed to be worth it,' rather than literal destruction of everyone and everything in internationally recognized borders of the aggressor.

None of these extreme measures are actually required for nuclear deterrence. All deterrence requires from the defender is enough of a cost to the attacker for the cost to outweigh the benefit to the attacker. This is true regardless of the outcome to the defender if the conflict actually occurs, because attackers choose to attack over their own prospects of success, not the defender's prospects of defeat. The two are not the same, and total target destruction does not make for total victory.

This matters to leaders because Republican President Name-not-Trumps-Alot is deterred even if retaliatory nuclear missiles 'only' wipe out a half-dozen Democratic-party cities. This is because the costs to President NNTA is greater than the political gain. In serious consideration, 'genocider of the Russian nation' or 'razed the swamp with nuclear weapons' aren't exactly Republican base applause lines when the nuclear weapons are kind of hurting them too, even if not as much directly. This cost is even greater for a Democratic President NNTA. They'd kind of like to keep winning, and it's kind of hard if your political machines and voter base are nuclear ash. The decision and incentive structure for rewarding such a decision to be serious rather than literal considerations have to be so extreme the scenario is no longer some ad-hoc out-of-the-blue alpha-strike scenario.

This literally versus seriously division continues with your decision on adopting certain positions.

Taking Russian claims on any sort of security, let alone nuclear, issue at face value is, uh, a way. But it's a take of taking them literally over seriously, given their historical rhetorical shifts on the subject. Similarly, it may be literally true that the Americans are capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty. However, it's not a particularly serious belief system that any given unspeakable act of cruelty and hypocrisy is a reasonable fear. Sincere if the holder is irrationally considering reality, perhaps, but not serious.

If you want to be serious about avoiding nuclear war, then you want to prioritize mitigating nuclear use risk, not mutually assured destruction. MAD is the distraction. Nuclear use is where it matters, because pre-emptive nuclear genocide is less relevant than someone thinking that tactical nuclear weapons won't have nuclear responses that could escalate.

Nuclear risk, in turn, is not minimized if you minimize nuclear fears at all costs.

This is because minimizing nuclear fears at all costs leads to directly incentivizing nuclear bluffs. Nuclear bluffs work by raising nuclear fears and inviting the other side to provide concessions in return for lowering the rhetoric/actions used to generate nuclear flear. Successful nuclear bluffs encourage incentivize further nuclear bluffs. Eventually, bluffs get called, which creates credibility tensions that incentivize actually using nuclear weapons. Nuclear use is what leads to nuclear retaliation.

You certainly don't want to work from an invented assumption that the nuclear opposites are desperate and failing as the starting status quo... especially if you have to simultaneously introduce irrationality to accept that starting premise.

Edit: And apparently this is the post dr_analog blocks me for?

Okay. And weird.

There’s also the unstated but very real issue that the entire thing hangs on the idea that those deciding to push the button have reason to care about their own country or anyone else’s still exist, and be horrified at the thought of billions of dead humans. There are all kinds of reasons why someone might not: mental illness, a belief in the eminent end of the world, being dying themselves, or fear that losing the current conflict would be worse than all of that, or a strong belief in killing enemies of God. The default assumption was and still kinda is that the person making decisions is rational.

Pakistan has had the bomb for years and even they have managed to keep normal rational people- who are a much smaller percentage of population in Pakistan than in places like France or Britain- in charge enough of the warheads not to have actually used one.

The default assumption was and still kind of has to be that the other person making judgements off of you is also rational.

Nuclear deterrence modeling fundamentally does not work if either party is irrational. It's a common failure mode both of the madman theory and the precautionary-compromise-to-alleviate-fear paradigms. Neither actually works if the external observer is genuinely irrational, both are selective choies of 'but if we do this thing, then they will become rational actors.'

Submarines solved the first strike problem. During the cold war there were enough missiles in the water on both sides to guarantee severe retribution.

I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.

I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.

It doesn't really matter where the subs are if their missiles have worldwide reach, if you are just using them for second-strike.

I wouldn't necessarily bet that the US can flawlessly eliminate the entire deployed Russian SSBN fleet in their bastion behind the Russian ASW wall. I'm sure the US tries to track them but from what I understand Underwater Ain't Easy.

This might be true but failing in doing this is entirely possible.

It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.

Less of a gamble when you have missile defense that could stop the first X return shots. Then it's just a matter of degrading the enemy's second strike force by 1-(X/#)%

The bigger all the numbers, the less of a gamble it is.

And that is why Russia sinking enormous resources into Ukrainian war, rather into strategic rocketry forces proves that they are not really worried about USA first strike.

Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.

  • Dr. Strangelove (and you)

I'm saying that the US might feel like it can maneuver to make a first strike feasible.

Yep. Add in that we almost certainly can’t get all the mobile launch trucks before they fire.

That’s what second strike capability is for, to maintain the threat of MAD even if a stealth first strike successfully eliminates one of the parties. Russia maintains second strike capability in two ways: 12 nuclear submarines (nuclear here meaning armed with nuclear weapons, not just nuclear powered) and a system of road mobile ICBM launchers that would be dispersed out into the Siberian countryside in the likely event of a conflict. Both the submarines and the road launchers carry high-yield warheads that are designed for counter-value attacks, that is destroying enemy cities and economic targets, not just the enemy’s nuclear weapons. Each submarine carries sixteen missiles each carrying four half-megaton warheads. Meaning that just one surviving submarine could destroy most of the major US cities east of the Mississippi River, or all the capitols of Western Europe. And like @functor was saying, there are systems in place to allow for launch even if the political leadership is dead. The United States has similar capabilities, both in the launch infrastructure and backup launch authority.

That’s what second strike capability is for, to maintain the threat of MAD even if a stealth first strike successfully eliminates one of the parties. Russia maintains second strike capability in two ways: 12 nuclear submarines (nuclear here meaning armed with nuclear weapons, not just nuclear powered) and a system of road mobile ICBM launchers that would be dispersed out into the Siberian countryside in the likely event of a conflict.

Historically, the submarine commanders don't have the launch codes. The soldier's with the roadmobile ICBM launchers don't have the launch codes. A second strike has historically required authorization from the two of the three launch code holders. That system doesn't work with 10 minute launches.

Russia would have to go from 3 people having launch codes and two having to push the button and having 30 minutes of time to dozens of people individually having the power to do so.

That's definitely not true for tactical weapons – the Russians (allegedly) almost fired a nuclear torpedo off of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, a decision that was up to three naval officers onboard the ship.

I would not be tremendously surprised if modern nuclear submarines had the ability to launch strategic under their own recognizance, although almost certainly not on the initiative of merely one officer. Perhaps they don't have the codes, but it seems plausible that the message they are actually waiting for is not mechanically necessary to use the nuclear weapons, it is merely an authentication code.

Now, under this circumstance, if the entire C&C chain was wiped out instantly, their response would be delayed. But presumably they would still be able to come to a decision once the BBC announced which world cities had been destroyed, and by whom.

Don't the Russians operate a dead hand system (Perimeter) precisely to maintain second strike capacity in the event of a disruption of the chain of command?

Do they? Despite this being a plot device in Dr. Strangelove, I've only heard what functor said above.

AFAIK yes, but it it is neither fully automatic nor impossible to switch off.

For reasons that should be fairly obvious, see Dr. Strangelove.

The Russians claim it exists, anyway.

https://www.kp.ru/daily/25805/2785953/

Both sides have ways around this, they just aren’t well publicized because they are scary and unconstitutional. If President Reagan and his government had been eliminated in a first strike, retaliatory launch orders would be given out by an unelected triumvirate headed by Dick Cheney, hidden in a bunker in the Appalachian mountains. If the Soviet presidium had been wiped out launch codes would have been dispensed by a Soviet AI called Dead Hand, hidden in a bunker in the Urals. After the Cold War both sides of course scrambled to claim that neither of these systems were actually used, but I’m sure modern classified equivalents exist. Neither the American or Russian deep states are going to gamble the fate of the country on the President getting hustled out of bed in time.

Neither the American or Russian deep states are going to gamble the fate of the country on the President getting hustled out of bed in time.

Asuming we know where all of their nuclear weapon infrastructure is, ~5 minutes isn't enough time to confirm and launch before they're obliterated though, no?

Part of nuclear weapon infrastructure is engineered to move, specifically to not be easily located (boomers, road-mobile launchers)

Part of nuclear weapon infrastructure is engineered to be obnoxiously hard to destroy (nuclear silos), see term "nuclear sponge".

Second strike capability exists specifically to avoid need for launch on warning.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident and other why it is a good thing.

Even if the US President and most of his successors were to be taken out at once, there are a set of planes ("Nightwatch", also known as the "doomsday planes"), at least one of which is kept ready to launch at a moment's notice (and would likely be launched once a specific DEFCON level is reached) that is presumed to have the capability to relay launch codes to remaining nuclear assets.

Presumably the plane can't relay the codes on its own though.

Presumably the plane can't relay the codes on its own though.

For now.

Officially, indeed.

But since they have to be ready to launch at a moment's notice, probably aren't close enough at all time for the president or vice-president to be taken up in one within a couple of minutes, there's some guesses that can be made as for what purpose they are kept on a hair trigger to launch for.

The system as it's officially defined and depicted in public media, that only the President can authorize nuclear weapons using specifically the "football" that follows him, is nonsensical and does little to deter an adversary that believes it can do a decapitating strike on DC. It seems highly likely (although we probably won't have confirmation of such) that it is symbolic and that authority to launch is delegated. It has already been revealed that it has been delegated in the past. There's only three people in the line of succession being likely prepared and ready to act decisively within minutes (VP, SoS, SoD). Should the authority fall on another, getting a football to their location, codes, onboarding them, explaining their options, etc... is impractical, if a response is required within minutes.

I would not presume that.

Historically, the submarine commanders don't have the launch codes.

I believe public British doctrine is that their submarines sail with "Letters of Last Resort" from the Prime Minister in the event of war and contact is lost, which are acknowledged to (potentially) include instructions to retaliate. If the PM chose this option, they'd presumably have the launch codes.

Clod speculates that the letters could also say things like "In the event that the UK is vaporized, please put yourself under the command of an ally" or "there's no point in retaliation, simply ends more lives. Just live your life in peace the best you can". They're rewritten by each incoming PM, and the letters are ripped up when they leave. Imagine what Keir Starmer might have put in his!

Jeremy Corbyn remains the only (potential) Prime Minister ever to say publicly that he would instruct commanders never to fire nuclear weapons under any circumstances. It was hugely politically damaging for him.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/30/corbyn-i-would-never-use-nuclear-weapons-if-i-was-pm

If I were writing those letters, I very well might do that. But I would never disclose that I would do that.

Well, quite.

Corbyn's only redeeming feature is being honest about how terrible he is.

Britain also notoriously issues its submarine commanders launch codes when the other powers don’t because ‘it would be invidious to suggest that sworn personnel would act in defiance of orders’.

There are apocryphal (unconfirmed) reports that the US launch codes were set to something trivial (all zeroes?) for a long time under similar arguments.

Google says some serious people claim that was real.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm

I will caution that the DoD claims that it isn’t true (which they would) and more critically that the PAL was never used for the Minuteman, and the codes for the Minuteman never had eight digits

I can't read that article, but when I first heard the story it was six zeros.

NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.

Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit. They also have mobile ICBMs which can be ordered to drive around randomly and be safe from a first strike that way. The dead hand system could launch a second strike with zero human input.

In other words, Ukraine joining NATO would not have changed the MAD calculus for Russia, and the Soviet Union was aware of their position and built a robust retaliatory and second strike capability.

NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.

Curious. How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches? I assume if you want the first strike advantage you want to launch as much as possible and I'm guessing without much knowledge myself that the subs are more limited.

Additionally, this is a problem that Russia - or at least the USSR - was keenly aware of and had already solved. They knew that Moscow could be annihilated with, worst case, only five minutes warning and built their strategic deterrence accordingly. Their ICBM fields are located deep in the interior, each silo spaced far from the others and hardened against anything but a nuclear direct hit.

Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though? Who gives that order? Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?

Who gives that order?

Whoever survives. I have no first-hand knowledge here and there is a lot of dubious/confused claims (fully autonomous system that would launch full scale nuclear strike etc) but Dead Hand / Perimeter/ Система «Периметр» is as far as I know a real system.

It would release control over nuclear arsenal to lower ranking officers in case of successful decapitation strike.

How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches?

A lot. Say, 6 submarines times 20 missiles a sub times 8 re-entry vehicles a missile = nearly a thousand nukes. Not enough to totally cripple Russia in a first strike, but if your theory is that all you need to do is kill the leadership then more than enough to do that.

Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though?

5-10 minutes should be sufficient. But if for some reason it wasn't then regardless the answer is still yes.

Who gives that order?

The dead hand. Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.

Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?

Probably. But even if not, don't underestimate the survivability of this stuff. Don't overestimate the destructive power of nukes. Military hardware needs to be hit directly or it will likely survive. Those mobile ICBMs are gonna be hard to find. Part of the reason for the insane overbuild of the cold war by both sides was 'we only need a small percentage of this stuff to survive a first strike to totally obliterate the enemy'. Nukes miss, they fizzle, they burn up in orbit due to manufacturing defects, they fail to launch, they fail in flight, they are mis-targeted due to faulty Intel. And you don't know in advance which sites you will fail to destroy so you have to shoot and look. It's like a game of whack a mole with 5000 moles, and if you miss one you get your brains blown out. For these reasons and more, the US never really believed it could pull off an unanswered first strike.

Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.

"fully automated" part is AFAIK quite dubious. But it would release control to much much lower ranked personnel.

NATO does not, currently, have any nukes 'forward positioned'. If they wanted to do so, then placing nukes in the Baltic states would be the obvious first port of call, as they are just as close to Russian cities as Ukrainian nukes would be. But why bother moving the nukes when you can already achieve the same with subs? Boomer subs have been capable of operating within the Baltic and Barents sea for a very long time, with flight times to Moscow in the five minute range.

Historically the US has used NATO nuclear sharing to store "tactical" warheads in non-nuclear armed member countries that, in the case of war, would be released to those nations' armed forces. Ostensibly it was decentralize command-and-control in case of a hot war where a top-down strategy for using nukes might be impractical or impossible, but really it was a wink wink nudge nudge to the Soviets about not nuking Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, etc by extending the umbrella of nuclear deterrence to them with American weapons. It was not about the physical location of the warheads so much as that the control and delivery of them would be effectively released to those nations themselves in time of war.

The reason why the Baltic countries would want to be in on this is that they would hope it would provide extra deterrence to a Russian invasion. Poland has actually made some noise about it.

Belgium is around 1500km from Russia according to Google. If you don't think Russia has tactical nuclear weapons within 1500km from the borders of a NATO country, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.


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