The Legend of Zelda: whose colonialism, again?

Someone is wrong on the Internet! But on a subject that it's interesting to write about.

If Stokes of OverthinkingIt is to be believed, the Legend of Zelda series is a celebration of European colonialism, depicting "exploration, mapping, and domination of the other’s territory" and "exploitation and consumption of the other’s strategic reserves of Triforce. ... All that’s missing is some way to process the Triforce into opium and sell it back to the Oktoroks at a markup."

I'm left wondering whether the writer has actually played the Zelda games -- by which I mean the original-style games which he's describing, The Legend of Zelda through Link's Awakening -- and if so, whether he got to the end of them. You will control-F in vain for a certain proper noun in the above article.

In The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, Ganon and his minions are Middle Eastern-flavored invaders who have overwhelmed an isolated Western-style kingdom. This is much more visible in A Link to the Past (Japanese title Triforce of the Gods, which gets into a different but related story), which is the most developed version of the original Zelda narrative. Ganon's backstory in this is the following, reprinted from the manual here:

One day, quite by accident, a gate to the Golden Land of the Triforce was opened by a gang of thieves skilled in the black arts. This land was like no other. In the gathering twilight, the Triforce shone from its resting place high above the world. In a long running battle, the leader of the thieves fought his way past his followers in a lust for the Golden Power. After vanquishing his own followers, the leader stood triumphant over the Triforce and grasped it with his blood- stained hands. He heard a whispered voice: "If thou has a strong desire or dream, wish for it..." And in reply, the roaring laughter of the brigand leader echoed across time and space and even reached the far-off land of Hyrule. The name of this king of thieves is Ganondorf Dragmire, but he is known by his alias, Mandrag Ganon, which means Ganon of the Enchanted Thieves.

Just in case this wasn't clear enough, in his initial appearance in Hyrule, he shows up dressed like this. Turban, long open robe, big sleeves, upturned Turkish shoes... Even the single-eye motif that Agathnim uses is a very close copy of the Hand of Fatima.

So, has someone who might have dressed like this ever come at the head of a conquoring army into the Western world? Not just that: the Western world has been seriously attacked by somebody who frequented the same tailor. In Suleiman the Magnificent's reign, the Ottomans conquored Hungary and almost took Vienna; note that Hungary is a traditional setting for fantasy about Europe, with Disney's adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty" being another example.

Alas, King Louis II didn't have enough Heart Containers.

The geography of Sons

Part of the appeal of Pearl Buck's style is that she's vague about names and personages, and flat-out doesn't provide dates -- intentionally giving an air of timelessness and making it difficult to correlate her events with those in the real world. (That's when she sticks to real-world chronology at all. In the novel Peony, she puts Tzu Hsi in the 1820s.) This makes for detective work when you want to line up her events with history, but once in a while, there's an event so distinctive that all her vagueness can't conceal it.

For the chronology of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided, that event is the April 12th Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek entered Shanghai and massacred the Communists of the city, who were deep in the Kuomintang and expecting him to arrive with a Communist revolution. That event occurs early in A House Divided, and is the cause of Wang the Gormless (Wang Yuan) departing for the United States; he's perhaps 20 years old at the time, perhaps older.

Wang the Tiger is an old man at that time. He began his campaign late in life; I'd guess he was 40 years old, although he might have been as young as his mid-30s. (Chinese warlords remained vigorous for a pretty long while.) It was about 5 years after the beginning of his conquests before Wang Yuan was born, so he was probably 65 as of the April 12th Incident -- aged more by his sense of failure, due to inactivity after his early conquests, than by the march of time.

The "weak and unready" man in the seat of the central government early in Wang the Tiger's career must have been Yuan Shikai, carrying on Yuan Shao's 1,700-year-old family tradition. (Pu-yi is spoken of very differently by Buck's characters and narrator, with a level of contempt and hatred that's startling for a writer whose attitude towards rape and torture is basically "boys will be boys." Then again, her genial, forgiving attitude is reserved for Chinese atrocities, and she calls down the thunder of Heaven on the Japanese in Dragon Seed -- despite the fact that Japanese crimes were no worse than Chinese, and often less bad. So her hatred for Pu-yi is because of who he worked for, not what he did.)

Wang the Tiger was born around 1882. Pearl Buck mentions that Anhui is Wang Lung's home province in the passage about the fire-wagon in The Good Earth. (The city that they take the firewagon to is Shanghai, almost the only city in China in the 1860s-70s where you could find Westerners, railroads, and so on.) We know that Wang the Tiger's conquests were just over the border from his home province, and they were to the north; this means either Shandong or Jiansu.

But there was a disastrous flood late in Sons, where the river burst its embankments and drowned the countryside. Most of Shandong is very flat, and the Yellow River flows through it in embankments, while it doesn't flow through northern Jiansu at all; this means southwest Shandong must have been the scene of Wang the Tiger's early conquests.

The only city in southwest Jiansu which is directly on the Yellow River, near a substantial chain of mountains, just over the border from Anhui, and a long but doable march from a port city is Jining. The port Wang the Tiger later took was Rizhao; he marched through a secondary city to get there, and this would have been Linyi. (Pearl Buck also used the name Linyi for a character in Pavilion of Women -- a philosophical novel, not a licentious one, but and/or and strongly recommended -- further collaborating this theory.)

I can't guarantee that Double Dragon Mountain is not imaginary, but if it was historical, I'm pretty sure that it's the pair of peaks just east of the Moting Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.

The "lords of the north" to whom Wang the Tiger pledged alliegance were the Beiyang Government, specifically the Zhili Clique. The revolutionaries in the south, opposed to all warlords, were the Kuomintang. Wang the Tiger was among the numerous warlords left in place as administrators after the KMT victory in the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, which destroyed the Beiyang Government, shifting the alliegances of the various remaining warlords over to the KMT.

Wang the Tiger probably died in 1932, the year in which Japan siezed Manchuria, FDR began his first term in office, and Hitler and the social-conservative parties got 40% each of the vote in the Wiemar election of '32, with the Communists (with 20%) as tie-breakers.

The distance from Jining to Rizhao is about 200 miles, which give a sense of just how much the automobile distorts our perception of distance: a 3-hour drive in modern terms is enough in real-world terms to allow the subordinate leader of the other place to operate pretty much as a governor.

To see these areas in Google Maps: the Shandong Peninsula is the peninsula of China that juts out into the East China Sea, facing Korea. Zoom in there and look a bit south; Rizhao is just southwest of the larger port of Qingdao. Jining is almost due west. The probable Double Dragon Mountain is east of Jining: zzom in until you can see the Yishan Scenic Areas (which are probably where Wang the Tiger made his camp when he first entered the Jining region), then go a bit east, and look just southeast of the Moting Reservoir, west of the Zaogou Reservoir and southwest of Zhangzhuangzhen.

Incomprehension of nice-guy rage

If Leigh Alexander really comprehends nice-guy rage as little as she appears to in this article, she should stop by the blog Alvanista sometime; its main product is bottled nice-guy-rage distillate. Not that I blame its author -- and you have to love anyone who picks the nom de keyboard Cless Alvein. (You are expected to know who that is.)

Let me also observe that there is something mildly contradictory about the author of the blog "Sexy Videogameland" lamenting compliments and catcalls she gets in the street. The blog title (counting the chibi avatar on the banner) and the resentment do not match.

Given the character of her complaint, I want to ask -- and I mean this in earnest as a hypothetical, and not as an insult -- why she doesn't wear an abaya or a burqa; both garments have the sole purpose of giving men less to stare at.

The obvious answer is that one who dresses in such a fashion is assumed to be a footsoldier of Islam, and is likely to have experiences at least as uncomfortable as catcalls in consequence. But if there were no danger of this, would she still object to wearing Arab or Pashtun hijab? If so, there's something else that she values more than freedom from catcalls.

Incidentally, this is well worth reading, for sanity's sake.

Just how necessary _are_ starfighters?

If people in the Star Wars setting go to the trouble of building things like this, starfighters must be genuinely good for something in the galaxy far, far away -- even though all we ever see them do on-camera is blow up...

What do games do, and what's wrong with Farmville?

Linked to by Hacker News: a defense of Farmville and similar casual games.

I see three problems with the author's analysis:

1. Market fundamentalism is incorrect. People are not omniscient and are not perfectly self-controlled (I seem to recall that Ayn Rand tried to deny Aristotle and accidentally claimed omniscience for everyone). Even if people were, we would not be the rational actors, the "homo economicus," of the economists; see Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for further discussion of purely economic motives, and consider the results of the Ultimatum Game.

John Stuart Mill understood perfectly well that "Homo economicus" is a simplification for theoretical modeling; later generations of economists have ignored him, and have Flanderized the concept into something that tries to predict real human behaviors.

2. Classical music is not "pure music" created for the sake of the art; it's 17th and 18th century popular music, which attracted some very talented individuals and has enjoyed the prestige they conferred on it ever since. Remember the story about Beethoven's setting of the "Ode to Joy" in the 9th Symphony -- the first violinist grasping the deaf composer's shoulder, and turning him around to see the thunderous applause of a packed concert hall? This is not something that happens in the rarefied, aristocratic world of art for art's sake; this indicates that this really was a popular idiom.

This goes double for opera; the culture of movies -- the glamor, the vain stars, the vainglorious directors -- was present in opera first. Richard Wagner was a tyrannical genius director on a scale that not even Hitchcock approached.

3. Entertainment is not just about entertainment. Aristotle pointed out the importance of catharsis, of the intensifying and purging of emotions; I would also add that well-done fiction gives the reader life experiences which it would be impractical, impossible, illegal, tedious, or dangerous for the reader to acquire on his own. This experience is acquired more keenly in games than in anything else -- only in games does the reader speak of the main character's actions as "what I did," rather than "what he did."

Games are also extremely educational -- you can't help but learn about a game's setting when playing it; so set the game in the real world (Rise of the Phoenix, Age of Empires 2, Dynasty Warriors) to give the reader a lot of specialist knowledge in a hurry.

So, the ideal game is one which provides catharsis, gives life experiences, and teaches about a subject; Farmville's clickfest style does none of these three, so we can call it an inferior game.

Backstroke of the West

I was very much amused by learning of Star War: The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West, but I also thought at the time that it had its strong points. (It remains a desire of mine to create a work in which an Anakin-equivalent says, "I was just made an elder in the Presbyterian Church," and means it.)

It turns out that it has more than just that moment. You can watch the movie using a subtitles kit here; this is better than looking for it online, as it ensures that you own the original movie's DVD. (Lucas looked on The Phantom Edit somewhat benignly, but I don't want to promote pirating his works, or anyone's, even unintentionally.)

So, to get to my main point: underneath the TranslationTrainWreck (for which this movie is the TropeCodifier) lurks a substantial improvement over the original script. (TVTropes doesn't have a trope for that, before you ask; AdaptationDecay is the closest. This is not a Woolseyism, since a Woolseyism is a comprehensive re-working of a product for a new audience, while this is an upgrade of the original on the original's terms.)

I've not watched much of the movie so far, but consider the difference in tone between the original's and Backstroke of the West's dialogue in the duel between Anakin and Obi-wan on the one hand and Count Chocula on the other.

Original script:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Chancellor."
ANAKIN: "You all right?"
PALPATINE: "Count Dooku."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "This time we will do it together."
OBI-WAN: "I was about to say that."

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "Get help, you're no match for him, he's a Sith Lord!"
OBI-WAN: "Chancellor Palpatine, Sith Lords are our specialty."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Your swords, please. We don't want to make a mess of things in front of the Chancellor."
OBI-WAN: "You won't get away this time, Dooku."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I've been looking forward to this."
ANAKIN: "My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count."
CHOCULA: "Good. Twice the pride, double the fall."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: [incomprehensible]

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "I sense great fear in you, Skywalker. You have hate; you have anger; but you don't use them."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Good, Anakin, good!" [Palpatine laughs.] "Kill him. ... (Whimsically:) Kill him now."
ANAKIN: "I shouldn't..."
PALPATINE: "Do it!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You did well, Anakin. He was too dangerous to be kept alive."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "Yes, but he was an unarmed prisoner. I shouldn't have done that; it's not the Jedi way."
PALPATINE: "It is only natural. He cut off your arm, and you wanted revenge. It wasn't the first time, Anakin. Remember what you told me about your mother, and the sand-people? ... Now we must leave, before more security droids arrive."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Anakin. There's no time. We must get off this ship before it's too late."
ANAKIN: "He seems to be all right."
PALPATINE: "Leave him, or we'll never make it."
ANAKIN: "His fate will be the same as ours."


Backstroke of the West:

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN enter the EMPEROR'S THRONE ROOM. PALPATINE reprises his opening shot from Return of the Jedi, although with handcuffs. ANAKIN and OBI-WAN descend to speak with him.]

OBI-WAN: "Speaker."
ANAKIN: "Does you is all good?"
PALPATINE: "We are very good."

[COUNT CHOCULA enters with two WAR DROIDS.]

ANAKIN: "Is a time that we cooperated."
OBI-WAN: "I an individual beats not is all right." ["If I don't defeat him single-handed, it's all right"?]

[COUNT CHOCULA leaps down to the main floor of the throne room, and approaches them.]

PALPATINE: "You two careful, he is a big." [大 'dà', Japanese On 'dai', is a common element in the titles of rulers, generals, famous figures, elemental forces of evil, and those few -- like CHOCULA -- who are all of the above.]
OBI-WAN: "Mr. Speaker, we are for the big."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN remove their cloaks.]

CHOCULA: "Pull out your sword. Dedicate the body for your Speaker."
OBI-WAN: "You this time ran to do not drop."

[All three ignite their lightsabers and fight, CHOCULA backing off from the Jedi (see fight choreography). At a lull in the fighting:]

CHOCULA: "I always at wait for this day."
ANAKIN: "Even since the last time fights with you hereafter. My force has promoted two times."
CHOCULA: "Very good, give me surprised and pleased."

[ANAKIN and OBI-WAN resume the attack. (High points of the fight include a WAR DROID with an extremely fast-firing repeating blaster which it holds perfectly straight as OBI-WAN approaches it with his lightsaber exactly in the way.)]

PALPATINE: "Good!"

[CHOCULA is winning; he throws OBI-WAN under a gantry with the Force and brings the gantry down on what is obviously not a rather unconvincing OBI-WAN-shaped rag doll. ANAKIN resumes the attack and beats CHOCULA back.]

CHOCULA: "Even since you I separate. I has been hating you; you are a sacrifice article that I cut up rough now."

[ANAKIN drives CHOCULA back, then cuts off both of his hands with an angled blow from his lightsaber. CHOCULA falls to the ground, kneeling. ANAKIN seizes CHOCULA's lightsaber with the Force and puts the two lightsabers across each other against CHOCULA's neck.]

PALPATINE: "Very good, the ratio is prosperous, very good." [According to Wookiepedia, Obi-Wan is rendered 歐比瓦 ("Oubiwa," lit. "Ratio Tile") or 歐比旺 ("Oubiwang," lit. "The Ratio is Prosperous) in this translation. For reference, his official transliteration is 歐比王 "Oubiwang," which means, approximately, "King Ou of Belgium." Palpatine's praising Obi-wan here instead of Anakin is a typo.]

[Palpatine laughs.]

PALPATINE: "Killed him, now killed him."
ANAKIN: "I can't."
PALPATINE: "Hurry!"

[ANAKIN genuinely hesitates, then strikes off CHOCULA's head. What is obviously not an unconvincing CHOCULA-shaped ragdoll falls to the ground.]

PALPATINE: "You make out quite good. Make him on the hoof very dangerous."

[ANAKIN releases PALPATINE.]

ANAKIN: "To, but he is not just a prisoner. I should not kill him; this not agree with."
PALPATINE: "This very nature. He hewed away your hand; you also kill certainly he revenge. The business of the vengeance is very familiar. Remember you to have ever tolded me your mother's, still there are those pathetic people?" [One theory: the translator, making his initial transcription, heard "sad" for "sand."]
PALPATINE: "We must leave here now; otherwise they all at worry."

[ANAKIN and PALPATINE begin to leave. ANAKIN runs over to assist OBI-WAN.]

PALPAINE: "Gold." [The translation renders "Anakin" as "Gold," "Anakin Skywalker" as "Allah Gold."]
ANAKIN: "He big in nothing important in good elephant." ["Good elephant" is the character-by-character translation of the phrase "it looks like" or "it looks like".]
PALPATINE: "Do not take care of him otherwise and too late."
ANAKIN: "We can't throw down him."


Which of these two sounds like the characters know that they're in an action movie, and which of these sounds plausible for the warrior monks of a pagan civilization from a galaxy far, far away? Even Count Chocula can be taken seriously in Backstroke (and the previous scene, Anakin and Obi-wan approaching the Trade FederationMandalorian spaceship, is even more comprehensively improved.) Just let Ted Woolsey (in one of his rare serious moods) or Neil Gaiman at the script as it currently exists, and Backstroke of the West would come out extremely good.

Pronunciation note: In "Word-Processor Romanizations" of Japanese ("Wāpuro rōmaji"), a long vowel is often indicated by a "u" after the main vowel: so "ojou" for "ojō", "youkai" for "yōkai", etc. I think the same is in effect for all the "ou" syllables above.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with getting Windows, or especially C++, to handle macrons correctly will appreciate the merits of the less confrontational, although much more confusing, Wāpuro rōmaji approach...

Fourteen-Ni!-ty-One

I've been reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus recently; it's an endlessly fascinating book, and while it has its dry moments -- and while the overall picture it paints is a grim one, of the Indians devastated by disease not because of European malice, but because of sheer dumb evolutionary luck -- there are moments in the book that are nothing short of comedy.

The biggest one is the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It's not just that Plymouth was founded in a manner completely unlike the conventional narrative; it's that Plymouth was founded in a manner that reads like the Monty Python version of the conventional narrative.

To set the tone of all this, remember: France, Spain and Portugal approached the New World as a military enterprise; England approached it like the Dot-Com Boom. There were a couple of Amazons created in the process, but there are an awful lot of Pets.com ventures littering this period, which we never seem to hear about.

John Smith was indeed saved by Pocahontas (her name means "hell-raiser," but she was a priestess in training; it's probably a good thing for the Powhatan gods that she converted to Christianity and married John Rolfe) -- moreover, he was saved, from his point of view, twice, once in a mock-execution that everyone except Smith knew was mock-, and again when she tipped off Jamestown that one of the leaders of the Powhatan Confederacy was going to attack them _somewhat_ behind its leader's back. He later returned to England to recuperate from minor injuries -- not inflicted by the Indians, not inflicted by a fellow colonist, but inflicted when he blew up a bag of gunpowder that he was wearing around his neck.

While he was in England, he wrote a book, including maps, on his adventures in Jamestown. He offered his services to the Pilgrims, to get them to Jamestown too, but with classical Puritan thrift, they declined, thinking they could rely on the maps in his book. They ended up in Massachusetts and spent three months (in which half their expedition died) trying to figure out a safe place to land. Smith crowed about this perhaps more than he should have.

Every bit of this sounds hard to believe -- and Smith's earlier life was even crazier -- but this was Captain John Smith (whose rank was in the self-established Army of Smith); he was one of those historical figures who come along from time to time to remind us that fiction is less interesting than reality, because fiction at least has to be plausible.

Squanto, along with about twenty other Indians, had been kidnapped by English traders who intended to sell him as a slave back in Europe. They made the mistake of trying to sell them as slaves in Spain -- and sailed straight into the arms of the Inquisition, who had been charged with prohibiting precisely that for the past hundred and ten years. (Imagine some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley having the brilliant, never-before-seen idea of invading the Philippines.)

Some of the Indians had already been sold as slaves; hopefully the Inquisition managed to track them down and free them. They offered those who hadn't been sold, Squanto included, safe passage to any point of their choosing; having picked up English on the voyage (and I think having some connections there), Squanto decided to go to England. He spent several years as a walking conversation piece for a London aristocrat, and finally managed to get back to Massachusetts (by way of a series of misadventures, even involving one captain so incompetent that he basically wrapped a fishing barque around a tree), just in the nick of time to greet the Pilgrims.

He served as the translator for a formal embassy from the Massachusett tribe, who wanted the Pilgrims' help to oppose another tribal confederation to their west; while he was with the Pilgrims, he taught them the ancient indigenous farming technique of burying fish with their seeds to ensure a greater harvest, which was entirely unknown in Massachusetts but which he had picked up from the Spanish.

And I haven't even mentioned how the Inca Empire was really destroyed by a zombie apocalypse...

Ethics in Jade Empire

The first thing I want to mention here is the interesting direction Bioware is taking with the ethical system in Jade Empire. The game's ethical system is one-dimensional, between two alignments called the Way of the Open Hand and the Way of the Closed Fist. They are broadly like the Light and Dark Sides of the Force as back in KOTOR, right down to blue and red color schemes and similar-looking icons; but they represent something a little more complete than that, a little more like philosophies.

The Way of the Open Hand is distinctly Chaotic Good. It does not seem to have an answer to the question of whether the needs of the many genuinely outweigh the needs of the few; and having any answer to that question, regardless of which way one answers it, is a very Lawful kind of thing. It also seems to prefer polite lies over the unpleasant truth, at least if my getting unexpected Closed Fist points for revealing an awkward truth is any indication. Put it this way, the Open Hand values people's happiness, but I don't think it cares much about their self-improvement.

The Way of the Closed Fist is an evil alignment that is trying to be Objectivism. On the one hand, you get a lot of Bioware-traditional "I smash your village to pieces" activities if you're trying to collect Closed Fist points; on the other hand, there are attempts in the game to present the Closed Fist as not an inferior path to the Open Hand, but a good-faith alternative. There are at least two characters who self-identify as Closed Fist Masters and don't seem to trouble or be troubled by the authorities; and there are a number of situations where the Closed Fist path involves a little more instruction than it does just brutality.

Is the Closed Fist philosophy just evil and brutal, or is it extremely gormful -- "hypergormites," to use my hideously distorted Greek coinage for this type of behavior? I think Bioware tried and failed to make it the latter; and that creates some interesting overlaps with my own fiction. The Soltallines are nothing if not hypergormites, and the Honseli are close (though that, like everything else, came across very imperfectly in ASLOW); teaching the hapless how to protect themselves, and heading off dangers at the pass, seems to be what the Closed Fist is -- or was meant to be -- all about.

Speaking as someone with experience on Wikipedia, I kind of like it.

_Far Cry 2_ Among the Plebians

To start with, my apologies -- I'm currently brewing a Call of Duty 3 post to be titled War Among the Plebians, so punning on that title was natural for this post.

I discovered something tonight: yesterday and the day before, I stumbled into some very good games of Far Cry 2 multiplayer. The ordinary player, and the ordinary player-made map, is much less great. Tonight, I spent a substantial amount of time with a workable, if imbalanced, player group -- there were a number of players on the server, not inexperienced so much as, strangely enough, scrubs, who kept the all-players chat channel busy with complaining about weapons they didn't like (ironically by calling them "noob" ones). First grenade launchers, then the SAW, and finally they settled on griping, unanimously, about snipers (a misnomer, of course -- a sniper is someone who takes extreme-range aimed shots on his own, while a sharpshooter is one who takes such shots in support of other forces).

The thing is, they only complained about snipers because they play the game like Doom. I commented that I don't mind a lot of snipers at all, because hunting them is an enjoyable challenge (although there are user-made maps -- with no ground cover and only one path across the battlefield -- that make the task much harder than it really should be). I advised other players to use cover, by typing "try the grass," and the only responses I got were "I don't do drugs" and ensuing incomprehension when I tried to clarify, still wittily. A few players understood that Far Cry 2 is about stealth, not cartoonish-FPS frontal charges, but clearly not all of them by any means.

There's another issue as well. Most of these people were playing to win. There was one player in particular, who was extremely good; I managed to catch him on the flank once and kill him -- once, you understand, and I think this was the first time he had come under attack in the entire map. I was just about to type in that while my team was clearly losing, I considered this a victory, because I'd managed to kill the best player on the server (I really hope that would have come across as a compliment rather than a taunt...) -- but I didn't have the chance, because he quit the game as soon as he died, 17 killed to 1 death score or not.

The host for this series of games had to quit, and I moved on to a different game (Far Cry 2 likes to select the game you join for you); but the rules on this server were very strange ones (no starting upgrades whatsoever? infinite ammunition?), and either different players were allowed to choose how much life they had, or most of the people on the server were cheating up the wazoo, because it took me 2-3 hits with one-hit-kill weapons (the compressed-air neurotoxin dart rifle and the M1905) to actually kill anyone. Now that I think of it, perhaps damage from scoped weapons had just been set very low on that server... but that doesn't explain why the same weapon took one shot to kill some players, two for others, and in one case three or four. (If you're wondering how I got four shots at him with a magazineless neurotoxin-dart rifle: he was standing at full height in the middle of a bridge, looking intensely down towards combat occurring underneath him, disregarding the tower that was at one end of the bridge. The first two times I shot him, he didn't even react. Somebody needs to be whacked over the head with The Tiger's Way until he absorbs a little of it by osmosis...)

I wish I could figure out how the heck to get PunkBuster working, so that I could join the rated games and be free of the cheating part. (One invincible enemy ruins your whole game.) Or better yet, I wish I could send every Far Cry 2 player the complete works of H. John Poole (apart from the one book that's only sold to soldiers), or at least the axioms that I mentioned in my previous post, with the message that they're supposed to play like this...

Update: Oh, I just needed to run the PunkBuster install that was on the Far Cry 2 CD, not the one I downloaded from the link on the PunkBuster website that said "install." How silly of me. On to yet testier and more hypercompetitive players, but at least there won't be cheaters this time...

Far Cry 2: Online Play

Paul Graham spoke of the dangers of energy without discipline -- that instead of determination and concomitantly good results, one would end up "on a local maximum like drug addiction." My latest local maximum has been Far Cry 2 online play... It's an extremely different style of game from the main version of it, and I find myself getting significantly better at it -- I've gotten the hang of it quickly, but then, I have completed the main game and the original Far Cry (though only on Normal difficulty)...

It plays hugely differently from the main game. You're part of a squad at long last (even if most of them are trying to fight cartoonishly, like this was Doom or Serious Sam, rather than fighting appropriately for the game); and you no longer automatically have the drop on your enemy. They know you're coming -- and they're coming as well, too.

Lurking in the shadows and the foilage works unrealistically well -- in particular, most foilage does not change at all when a player is moving through it; there are no trails of beaten grass, there's no movement of grass and leaves to catch a sharpshooter's eye, and thus it's relatively common for players to sneak all the way to the other side's starting location, through open areas with no overhead cover.

The players are weighted towards action, but I'm not sure the game is. It would be interesting to have a team, playing as a team, that concealed itself and waited for the enemy, perhaps throwing out a couple of high-skill players as infiltrators and/or flankers (flanking fire is devastating, especially against opponents foolish enough to stand out in the open when they shoot), rather than rushing the enemy as the enemy rushed them. The team that wins is the first that kills their enemies 50 times, regardless of how often they die, but I have a feeling that a team that relied on rear-facing fire (perhaps favoring the silent, flashless, bullet-track-less dart rifle instead of conventional sniper weapons) could fare pretty well. I hardly ever saw my teammates, but I achieved a lot most of the time. (Some environments, some maps, were just less friendly to this approach, though.)

Regardless, flanking fire is extremely useful in the game; an assault-rifle wielder can sometimes signal friendly snipers or other troops by his fire; coordinating artillery (Rebel class, plus the occasional emplaced mortar or mortar-equipped technical) with an infantry assault, preferably an assault from an unexpected location, would be great. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like an in-game pony. (Then again, maybe not. The only thing a vehicle is good for is making it obvious where you are...) One thing I can say is that it would play quite a bit more realistically if each player only had one life...

• Saboteur (infiltration and stealthy attacks -- silenced weapons or green-dot-sight AR-16, plus silenced pistol or unpatriotic, man-portable IEDs) is definitely my class -- I do a lot of infiltration, and the AR-16 is great for countersniper work -- it doesn't have the range of a sharpshooter's rifle, but it's more maneuverable, and it's an automatic, so there's less riding on single shots. It looks like the same dynamic as how bows beat musketry in the Total War games (and in the real world, if the musketeers are unarmored).


• Sharpshooter is always a useful specialty -- though I prefer hunting enemy sharpshooters over doing sniping of my own, and my preferred mode of action is infiltration and assault on an enemy's secure areas. I read a lot of Poole, after all... this is also why I find teamless Deathmatch games unplayable -- I never know where to sneak to! (Note, also, that you can't always predict which maps are going to favor a range of fighting styles, and which are going to be purely sniperfests; there was one, at least, that really caught me by surprise.)


• Commando, the standard infantry class, is also good at times. I'm not sure whether I prefer the AK-47 or the FN FAL -- the FAL has a longer range, but its sight is inconveniently large, and you're not really fighting at range with this class -- if you go up at long range against a sharpshooter, or a saboteur's AR-16, you'll lose. The M79 is great, though -- there was one level where I located two enemy snipers on an exposed, remote rock formation, and drove them off by shelling them, using my M79 as a mortar. I think I killed one, and the other (more skilled) one was beaten off (diving underwater). After that, and after we stopped the same more-skilled sniper when he was lurking in a treehouse (don't ask), the map ended in a sniper rush for our team, and victory in a combat that had started in our favor (with our storming their headquarters early in the game), but had turned in our enemies'.


• I haven't used the Gunner class (M249 or wire-guided Carl Gustav AT rifle, MAC-10) very much, but its loadout is great (most classes with a good main weapon have a terrible secondary -- the sniper gets his choice of the game's weakest pistol or a flare pistol for backup), and one player I was up against -- who was very good in general, in fairness -- dominated two maps with his M249 and movement at a crouch.


• I used the Guerilla class (video-gamey, very-high-spread shotguns, and the MAC-10 or the saboteur's IEDs) early on, but I think it was a mistake. You hardly ever fight at distances small enough that a shotgun gives an advantage over an assault rifle, and even if you do get to such close quarters at times, there will still be other times where you need to engage at longer ranges.


• The Rebel class is man-portable artillery -- RPGs or semi-automatic grenade launchers, plus an Uzi and real grenades (all other classes but the sharpshooter have to use Molotov cocktails). I don't think my temperment is right for it -- though having someone else providing RPG or grenade fire is always a good thing.

Tactical lessons learned from this experience:

• Move behind optical cover as far as possible -- catching a glimpse of someone is almost as good as killing him.
  • Remember that movement attracts the eye.


• If you know that an enemy's in a room, grenade him if at all possible.


• If you're looking for a target for a long-ranged weapon while you're visible from actually or potentially hostile-occupied locations, you're the target. Do your target acquisition either behind cover, or from a position well above your enemy, since people tend to look out and down, not up.
  
  
  
  • When watching for hostile forces, look up.
  
  
  • And clear out as soon as you're done shooting. Once you've opened fire, it's only a matter of time until you're spotted.


• Wounding an enemy and waiting for another to arrive to help him is effective. In real-world combat, it would obviously not be something to use -- but it would be something to watch out for.


• The Persian "combined-arms squad" -- six riflemen, sharpshooter, and one or two RPG teams -- makes a lot of sense.


• Teams of troops can cover less ground, but are more survivable than individuals. It's harder to get cover from two lines of fire than from one.


• If you have a choice between fighting from behind sandbags and fighting concealed, fight concealed.


• One enemy in your rear is more dangerous than five or six coming from a direction you anticipate.
  
  • There is such a thing as initiative on the battlefield. Take it.


• Become comfortable with all weaponry, and use the tactics best for the environment rather than shoehorning your favorite weapon into all circumstances.
  
  • But there is such a thing as an environment best suited for jack-of-all-trades weapons.


• The enemy is harder to scare than he looks. Trying to scare him may just give away your position.
  
  • Giving away the wrong position works, and works best against skillful adversaries. Just don't get seen as you move away, and don't bet too much on the trick working.


• Small-arms fire on the other side of hard cover is about as scary as the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof.


• The good news about artillery fire is that it only works in massive quantities. The bad news is that that's how people use it.


• Fire the longest bursts you can.

The spooky thing about it: you can find every one of these lessons in H. John Poole's Phantom Soldier -- and in the hands of the armies he discusses there...

I need to avoid _The Escapist_...

Well, I happened to notice this fairly Escapist-standard theory article, and got irritated enough to rip it apart in detail. For the tl;dr version: professional human-factors engineers (the book to read is The Design of Everyday Things) understand that interfaces with a large number of inputs that do exactly one thing are much easier to use than interfaces in which one input does a large number of things. Smaller numbers of more modal inputs do not equal simplicity; remember those hotel telephones with just a keypad and a "Mode" button, where most people (myself included) couldn't even figure out how to put someone on Hold?

A game genre cannot exist without an adequate range of inputs. In the process of boiling Far Cry 2 down to the point of being playable on an Atari 2600 controller (input space: one joystick and one button), he changes its genre from "tactical FPS" to "cartoonish FPS" -- from something like Operation Flashpoint to something like Resistance: Fall of Man. Moreover, he doesn't even notice that he makes this change, which is probably what infuriated the Escapist commentariat and is certainly what infuriated me.

His proposals, to render Far Cry 2 playable on an Atari 2600 controller and thus, ostensibly, more accessible to new gamers, are as follows:

• Have the "Fire" button automatically fire, reload, and unjam a weapon. This makes some superficial sense, but it masks a bad idea -- in a game which doesn't track the capacity of individual magazines, you always want to reload to a full magazine after firing anything at all. On the other hand, it's not realistic to allow this behavior; it would make more sense to have different magazines with their remaining number of rounds tracked. It's embarrassing that Halo is more realistic this way than the Far Cry games... (Weapon jamming is another case where holding down the fire button -- heck, who holds down the fire button anyways, rather than firing in controllable bursts? -- is a bad idea; it's appropriate that the player as well as the character should have a couple of seconds of shocked realization before he sets out to clear the breech. Assuming he wants to do that at all, that is -- if a Far Cry 2 weapon has jammed, you should probably give up on it.)


• Climbing ladders and otherwise changing movement styles would be handled by walking forward against the feature in question. I wouldn't think this would be a good idea outside of the one-button constraint, but within that constraint I think it's defensible. (I'm left wondering whether he played Far Cry 2 at all, though, since he keeps mentioning ventilation shafts here.)


• Cut jumping entirely, apart from a contextual jump like Ocarina of Time. Far Cry 2 abounds in small terrain obstacles and in platforms that are inaccessible to the player except by jumping, but that's not how someone would get onto such a platform in the real world. I would propose adding an "auto-climb" -- which I know I've seen before. Possibly in Ocarina again? Or perhaps the game could just treat rock platforms in the same way it already treats ladders. ("Bunnyhopping" is a semi-viable strategy in Far Cry 2 online multiplayer; its removal would be a good thing... although Rex Applegate, Fairbairn's major protege and author of his own book on combatives, did recommend attacking a sentry by sneaking up to a few yards behind him and then leaping the rest of the distance to avoid triggering his sixth sense. Now that I think of it, adding a sixth sense to FPSes would be a good idea; the player is looking at the world through a game monitor, after all, while his enemies generally have slightly better awareness.)


• A Perfect Dark-style radial menu for relatively rare actions. Remember Perfect Dark and its nearly unusable radial menus? As a hint: if it confused me, it would probably confuse Grandma. (Actually, why would Grandma want to play Far Cry 2 in the first place?)


• Put all movement controls on one joystick, removing strafing and looking up and down. Speaking of Perfect Dark, remember that it and Goldeneye used the C-buttons to handle direction of looking, the central joystick to handle movement, and the right mouse button to switch to aimed-shot mode (about which more later). He claims, in defense of this, that Far Cry 2's " terrain tends to be pretty flat," and the game "isn't especially about verticality." He has apparently never sniped, never been sniped, and never taken on the southern airport with a start-of-game assault rifle from the top of the sniper tower to its east on Hard mode (an easy victory). He also thinks aimed shots are unimportant enough that replacing them with "automatically point at the enemy's torso" is adequate.


• Have the player automatically start running, if he keeps moving forward for three seconds at a time. This worked in Okami, but Amaterasu didn't throw many grenades, and she never had to worry about sniper fire.


• Remove crouching and iron sights. These two elements are, between them, everything that makes Far Cry 2 what it is -- unless you've only played it on Easy, solely using automatic weapons and having the auto-aim reticule (off on all higher difficulty levels) switched on. As to having all cover be man-high, I'm sure there are plenty of bulletproof retaining walls and traffic barriers in the wilderness and villages of Unspecified African Country.

His proposal to split the game's interface into three interaction modes of "in combat," "behind cover," and "not fighting" deserves to be discussed in greater depth.

In the in-combat mode, the following fundamental parts of the Far Cry 2 experience would be inaccessible:

• Changing weapons (for example, when a weapon has jammed or has degraded into unreliability; or when wanting to use the machete or a pistol for close-quarters fighting or for entering a building).


• Healing.


• Changing from grenades to Molotov cocktails, or back.


• Run-and-grenade attacks (sprint forward, look up, hurl grenade as far as it goes).


• Run-and-dive maneuvers (sprint forward, hit crouch to dive forward quickly).

In the behind-cover mode, the following fundamental part of the Far Cry 2 experience would be inaccessible:

• Shooting.

He seems not to understand that firing from behind partial or soft cover is an extremely valuable course of action (although he does propose that turning away from facing the cover would allow the player to go back to combat mode). He even has the audacity to say that "[i]n the real world, slinging your rifle over your shoulder and getting your shotgun out and ready isn't necessarily something you really want to do while running for your life, after all." In the real world, that isn't a realistic course of action, but only because you don't carry a shotgun. Switching to a pistol or a fighting knife may be distinctly useful, though... and besides, in the real world, you fight from behind cover, soft cover if no hard cover is available, and you don't fight standing up and ignoring your iron sights. Realism is dead with this input scheme and the constraints he specified above.

In the out-of-combat mode, once again, you can't shoot. This is completely un-Far Cry 2 -- apparently the player is expected to cozy up to knife-fighting range with his enemies before opening fire, completely ignoring the long ranges of his armaments. This, in a game where the biggest advantage you have is that you almost always have the drop on your enemies...

I'm left seriously wondering whether he has played Far Cry 2 at all. He admits that this game would handle very differently from Far Cry 2 as we know it, but he seems to think that all this streamlining and stylization would not degrade the core gameplay of the game. But it would -- Far Cry 2 is in the tradition of Operation Flashpoint, Ghost Recon, and the original Far Cry, the realistic, high-damage, stealthy, tactical-minded subgenre of FPS, as opposed to the cartoonish style of Halo, Resistance: Fall of Man, Prey, or Serious Sam -- the style where being in easy weapons range of fully alerted enemies is not necessarily instant death.

As to useful reforms of control space: I think that the "SNES controller plus analog sticks," or the "mouse plus left-hand keyboard inputs" model on the PC, is all we need; I had talked about the idea of a "latch controller" with buttons on the underside rather than on the surface, to allow the player to use both control sticks while taking actions more complex than firing, but I don't think these are necessary after all, and the learning curve would be formidable. What I would like to see, though, is a deliberate effort to standardize FPS inputs -- movement and firing are always the same, running is coming to be standardized on the Shift key, but reloading, firing, crouching, lying prone, etc. are much less predictable. At the very least, allow the remapping of keyboard inputs -- which Far Cry 2 doesn't do... (No, correction, it does. I was confusing it with Europa Universalis III, of all games...)

Someone in his defense, in the comments section, thinks that most commenters concerned about this are missing the point -- this kind of control style would develop as an alternative to the mainstream one, and no one's going to break into their houses at night and pry the buttons off the controllers. I agree completely; just as game developers followed through on their promise that with the development of 3D graphics, we would have both 3D and 2D games, they would be sure to follow through on a hypothetical promise that we would have both complex and simplified-inputs first-person shooters! I love having a game-development industry which sticks to proven technologies which make possible distinctive types of gameplay, as opposed to perpetually chasing after the latest fad or shiny thing!

(Speaking of which, Yahtzee -- who, in fairness, is the only author on The Escapist who is really worth one's time to read, or watch -- increasingly suspects that 3D graphics are going to prove to have been a long, expensive mistake. The article is worth reading in its entirity; I remember I pointed out once, though obviously not in print, that 2D games set their own standard of the realistic or the graphically acceptable, while 3D games are always going to be compared with the real world.)

Another commentor observes that this solution removes buttons, but not inputs -- again, meaning (per Design of Everyday Things) that the game is made more complex, not less -- and imagines the following conversation with the kind of new gamer that Tynes imagines this would attract:

Wife: "How do I throw grenades again?"
Me: "Oh, well you have to go find some cover and stand behind it for a second, then you hit the button for the menu and select grenades. Try that."
Wife: "Hey, he's climbing on the cover!"
Me: "I guess that wasn't cover, must have been a climbable thing. Try something else."
Wife: "Ok, this looks like cover. But the button is still firing the gun!"
Me: "Because you faced the cover for more than 1 second, you are now in 'combat while in cover mode'."
Wife: "How do I stop that?"
Me: "I don't know, walk out and back in?"
Wife: "Now I am dead! We took too long. Fuck this game, who designed this shit?"
Me: "Let's play something else."

Interesting discovery.

Lugaru, by an independent game developer who might or might not be unhealthily furry. Any game about rabbits, anthropomorphic or otherwise, is obviously moving in the long-eared shadow of Watership Down, but Lugaru handles it very gracefully. It's about the exploits of a lone hlessi avenging his mate and kit (not surprisingly, anthropomorphic rabbits don't have litters), rather than the activities of a full warren; but that's by no means a fault, and it has the best fighting-game engine that I know of (although the tutorial is a little overwhelming).

Update: on encountering a guard named Fiver at the capitol, I think it's fairly safe to say which book inspired these people to put Jackie Chan in rabbit ears.

Garbage in...

Garbage out, but if you give it an actual disease, the semantic database actually works.

I'd love to play this game, if I had the time.

In one commenter's words, "My understanding of EVE is not perfect. But what I managed to piece together from years of coverage on Slashdot, it appears to be a virtual recreation of the country of Nigeria, with lasers."

In case you'd forgotten, a Slashdot link to this incident. Band of Brothers is now known as Kenzoku, and did I mention that they and Something Awful recently fought World War II?

The fantasy way of war, revisited.

I think it was Chesterton who said that the only fundamental difference between the magician and the scientist is the quality of their results. When the quality of a magician's results are as good as those of a scientist, then, as I mentioned in the previous post on this, you do not have fantasy; you have science fiction with rather strange-looking science. Perhaps I'm mistaken in thinking that fantasy would merely look like modern warfare; this thread suggests that the technology of, say, Dungeons and Dragons is far more advanced than our own:

1. There are no rules preventing any construct from using spells or magic items (besides the lack of class skills). In fact, the Shield Guardian in particular is designed to do just that.

2. There are no rules stating that a golem must be made solid; theoretically you could hollow one out and climb inside.

3. Anyone with the Exemplar prestige class can use the "Lend Talent" ability to help out an ally with their skill checks, even if that ally would normally not even be able to use the relevant skill at all.

So, in theory, if you built a hollow iron golem and put a wizard inside, and the iron golem was armed with a few wands/rods of lightning, fireball, magic missile, or other destructive spells, then the wizard would be able to use the Aid Another action from inside the golem to allow the golem to use the wands/rods, as well as issue it combat commands. The golem could blast and its way through anything as long as it had ammunition, and it would be as immune to magic and weapon damage as any other golem.

And that, my friends, is how you turn 3.x D&D into Mechwarrior.

New blog.

I have a new blog, Chesterton of the Valley of the Winds. Pete Takeshi suggested the title a few years ago, but had forgotten it when I mentioned it to him recently -- conveniently enough, so that he got to both propose the joke and enjoy it. I hope to get some suitably disturbing header art soon; it will focus on political, religious, sociological, etc. subjects, while The Critical Fan will be concerned with gaming.

The US in decline...

I remember how my father had once won an argument against the Confederacy by saying that had the South won its war, there would be two Americas, and the South would be the impoverished one. It wasn't until later -- not espirit d'escalier so much as espirit d'different conversation with someone I agree with (I tend to think better when I'm not also having to defend myself) -- that I thought of the refutation that it was better to be a pauper in the Confederacy than an aborted fetus in the Union; but it appears that that argument isn't necessary after all, and perhaps a Confederacy independent of the Union would have lived a little longer than the unified country is going to.

Look at this -- it's a description of decline pure and simple; the failure to comprehend what's going on here (not least among the Slashdot commentors) is staggering but familiar. I'm sure that excavators in Rome will eventually turn up a discussion from the 300s, posted on the famous nook of the Forum wall with the TCP (Tablet Collation Protocol) address of ptht://caesurapunctum.ord, that's similarly uncomprehending about the larger meaning of inviting barbarians to garrison the limes of Gaul.

Anyone who has read the Foundation Trilogy will remember that the heart of the civilization remains warm even after the extremities have fallen off with cold; and if this isn't civilizational frostbite, I'll buy a hat and eat it. I would say that the reader should be on guard -- but I'm not sure what to recommend.

I'm also not sure that I'd argue for the South again, if I had the chance. I had worked on the assumption -- very widely held -- that slavery was on its way out and would have been abolished in a couple of decades, at most, anyways; but more recent research reveals that slavery was becoming _more_ profitable, not less, in the 1840s-60s, with the increase in industrialization. I really should have seen that coming...

Not to mention that, as a columnist on MercatorNet pointed out, had slavery survived to around 1900, it would have gotten a colossal ideological boost from the scientific racism of that era. Now remember that scientific racism was only discredited by the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps; in other words, in this situation, the only thing that would end slavery in the 20th century would be victory in WWII. (If Germany won WWI, European civilization would probably have continued as it was -- slavery continuing, and no general renunciation of scientific racism, but at least also no irresponsible withdrawal from the colonies.)

The thing is, WWII was a nearer-run war than the United States' industrial production (as much in one month of 1943 as the Nazis and Japanese together produced in the entire war, IIRC) would have you believe; counterbalancing our ridiculous advantage in manpower was a ridiculous deficiency in tactics. Without the martial vigor lent to the country by the South, the US might not have succeeded in its objective of overwhelming the Axis Powers with shoddy tanks and inadequately-trained men; even as it was, it was a nearer-run thing than it looked, and ended with staggering casualties.

Perhaps Stalin could have picked up the slack, but I'm not entirely sure -- he conspired himself out of 85% of his ammunition capacity with the massive buildup of resources right on the German border, and had the US not been able to equip him during the war, he might have lost, too. Even had he won, a WWII that was purely a Soviet victory would have done little to discredit eugenics; Buchenwald had a higher rate of casualties among its inmates in Soviet times than when it was run by the Nazis themselves.

(Also, if you're wondering: protocollon transportandi hypertextes; caesura and punctum are the Latin terms for a slash and a period; et '.ord' est TLD ad ordinationibus. Salve!)

Follow-up on the Abrams

Gary Brecher reported -- in 2004, actually -- that the Abrams isn't quite invincible against an RPG: if you can hit it right on the joint between the turret and the hull -- the tank's "armpit" -- you can knock it out. However, as he says in more or less as many words in the column, boo hoo. His analogy that a tank is an internal-combustion knight is spot-on, at least as far as I can tell; and in fact, even the best knightly armor also had a weakness -- in three hundred years of trying, not even the best German engineers in the world ever found a really satisfactory way to armor a knight's armpit, either. The closest they got was a sort of dome over the front of the armpit that slid downwards as the knight raised his arm, while a plate fell down from the arm armor at the same time. It was still possible to bypass the armor if you were able to stab straight up from underneath the knight's arm, parallel with his torso -- which is in the realm of trick shots, not things it's seriously worth planning to defend against, the same category as hitting an M1 just underneath the turret.

And yes, believe it or not (since most popular historical truisms aren't worth the electrons they're printed on), it really was firearms that made plate armor obsolete. Eventually (around the early 16th century, I think), heavy firearms were developed that could defeat medieval-thickness plate armor (and the Swiss). This meant thicker plate armor which could defeat a musket; but when you're building up ridiculously heavy armor for the front of the torso, plus perhaps lighter armor for the arms, legs and head (although steel and labor were expensive, the human neck is only so strong, and limb wounds can be survived in a way that torso wounds can't), all-around coverage optimized for single combat with swords is suddenly a lot less appealing. That, and knights were obsolete by this time; the early-modern cavalrymen were paid by the state (well, supposed to be paid by the state) as mercenaries or regulars, lived in barracks (or rather, again, that was the theory), and fought as a massed force rather than as individuals. So they did an awful lot less single combat, and sword-proof armor is a lot less necessary when there's someone nearby to watch your back.

Also, cavalry had largely given up on swords by this point, in favor of hammers, picks and small maces -- weapons that could break through armor, even musketry-proof. Between that, the weight and discomfort of armor, and the very low deadliness of early modern musketry (especially if you were riding towards the musketeers at a trot rather than standing still to receive and return fire), the French were issuing orders to their cuirassier officers to wear their armor instead of leather jackets like their men's as early as the late Thirty Years' War. (Meanwhile, England was a backwards country militarily; in the English Civil War of the 1640s-50s, only one regiment of cuirassiers fought at all, on the Royalist side. After one battle, a wag observed of their commander that had he been as well provisioned as he was fortified, he could have withstood a siege of eight weeks.)

So, what's the armored analogy to a cavalry hammer? Pete Takeshi reminded me that the Abrams uses ceramic armor, so there's nothing for a DU sabot round to spall through -- so that option's out. My theory is a battlefield laser; an early form is currently under development, designed to swat artillery projectiles out of the sky, but I think that this could be a second 88 Flak, with a dual hatting more valuable than its original role. I know Boeing's not reading this, but I hope they keep that in mind.

Also mentioned on Wired: the American approach to commando operations...

Also, I forgot to mention: the verdict's in, Gary Brecher is fictitious; someone checked the Fresno phone book, and found no Brechers at all, Gary or otherwise. Apparently Richard Ames, the Exile webmagazine's founder and a really, really obvious KGB agentsomehow capable of surviving multiple run-ins with enraged Russian authorities, has a history of making up characters like this. And regardless of whether he has KGB connections or not, he burned down Victor Davis Hanson's vineyard! Then again, if you keep saying stupid things about the classical Greeks, you can expect these kinds of things sooner or later.

The War Nerd also likes the Sikhs. So we have that much in common.

Operation Flashpoint: Later On.

I figured out that the trick to commanding a tank is to stick to the target-designator viewscreen ("V" command) and let the driver do the negotiating; it makes the most sense to just issue a "Stay In Formation" order and use the strategic map to move if necessary. Assigning targets and getting the gunner to fire is finicky, but it mostly works. I still haven't figured out how to manually rotate the turret -- my tank is generally the one with its barrel pointed slightly off from due aft, as opposed to towards the enemy -- but it seems the gunner will rotate it into proper position to fire anyways. Still a pain, but made up for by the impressive power of the tanks themselves.

By the way, look at this. It turns out from Iraq that an M1 Abrams pretty much can't be stopped by anything short of a 155mm artillery shell going off _underneath_ the tank -- it's pretty much impervious to RPGs, for one thing (a point also mentioned in passing in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a book that has exactly the merits and flaws that its title implies, but certainly is worth reading). But the main point to consider here is that no army issues its infantry a weapon that can stop an Abrams equipped with reactive armor. Light infantry warfare is predicated on the idea that suitably-equipped and adequately skilled infantry can defeat anything they oppose; what does the presence of invincible tanks mean for this style of fighting?

Then again, the question is probably academic: light-infantry warfare, Vietnam-style, is very far removed from things like the war in Iraq, and even in Afghanistan -- where it's a little closer, and the Soviet-Afghan War was certainly a light infantry conflict -- there's much more COIN (where the main challenges are rebuilding the infrastructure, protecting it, and not blowing one's top when an insurgent snipes one's squadmate) than there is open-field warfare of any sort.

But back to Operation Flashpoint: there were only two tank missions, than a special-ops one (which took me more tries than it should've to get right; how did I forget that firing on the tanks from a hill with an RPG was not a very special-ops way of handling them? But that said, I discovered a possible flaw in the engine: you can't knock out tanks with a single RPG shot to the turret), and back to infantry -- where the US side has gotten significantly better, and the Russians have gotten significantly worse, than they were when last we met. The US troops are now fighting at the same level as the guerillas I mentioned earlier, still advancing in line but using cover (and hitting the dirt as soon as shots come in); the Russians are walking around fully exposed, routinely silhouetting themselves over ridgelines, and moving in squads with embarrassingly little concern for cover. One time through a mission where I was carrying an M60, I managed to sprint to a group of bushes early on and slaughter six Russian troops who were standing in a village crossroads -- even though they knew that fighting had already begun.

Having more or less learned how to engage with an M203, I've now tried learning to use RPGs. They're a lot more useful than they are in Far Cry 2, but I need some practice in judging how much elevation to give the round to impact usefully, and how many seconds I should expect it to stay in the air. I've managed to enfilade a group of Russians and wipe them out with RPG fire a couple of times, though; at least the rocket can be launched more or less straight, as opposed to lobbed underhand like an M203.

By the way, something I've discovered in this game: if there was just one thing I could do to improve a US squad skirmish line, it would be to throw out flankers -- to have the rightmost and leftmost members of the squad equipped with high-firepower weapons not heavy enough to compromise their mobility (probably the M249 SAW, which was explicitly designed to be like this), and have initiative to either remain with the squad or advance to cover ahead of it, with each flanker looking forward and inward towards the line. Flanking fire is incredibly valuable in a firefight; it's fairly easy to find cover against threats in one direction, but not in three.

That said, do we still use formations like that? I was unable to determine that via Wikipedia and Google (which is actually a good sign -- Poole says that the Chinese treat their infantry doctrines as just about as confidential as their nuclear technology, and we should be doing the same), and I know at least that we now focus on four-man fire teams -- but Poole, writing in the '90s or the 2000s, did complain that we were still using pre-machinegun tactics, skirmish lines in particular.

(Also, disclaimer to those concerned: I think that all parties involved in the recent use of torture by the United States should be punished appropriately, and I'm disappointed that Obama is trying to rule out the punishment of some or all of them; "moving on" will only be appropriate once all culpable for violations of international treaties are jailed or dead. The US Army, and the FBI, would agree on that, although probably not the "or dead" part. I'm beginning to wonder whether it is appropriate to disband the CIA, given that extraordinary rendition is also forbidden by the UN Convention Against Torture -- very, very explicitly at that.)

The fantasy way of war?

I was reminded of this problem again while reading Order of the Stick comics looking for the iconic Monster in the Darkness scene, and again by the opening for Valkyria Chronicles, currently on Pete Takeshi's frontpage, although it looks like Valkyria Chronicles had a mild case of it at best. (It also has medevac, Pete Takeshi relates; I may want to look it up.) The problem at hand -- vividly illustrated here, and here, and here -- is that warfare as we know it evolved on account of firepower as we know it. Massed troops were first used on battlefields with no more dangerous ranged weapons than crossbows and catapults. Firearms are predicated on the idea that there are targets on the battlefield that are soft enough that they can damage them (and note that the 16thC musket was a massive, one-caliber weapon firing a two-ounce ball, the only shot heavy enough to punch through plate armor). Heavy fortifications were abandoned after it was no longer conceivable to usefully harden them against artillery and man-portable explosives (and gliders).

Settings that contain massive amounts of firepower without highly advanced technology -- fantasy is of course the primary offender here -- assume that the style of war used in their civilization will be the same as that used in a roughly analogous era on Earth. But medieval castles were constructed on the assumption that no one could easily knock down their walls -- and once that assumption became invalid, castles were completely re-imagined, although only after a rather harrowing hundred years (ca. 1400-1500). So for a fantasy setting to have castles, Lord of the Rings-quality magic is the absolute upper limit, and even then I'm not entirely sure; but magicians who can conjure up earthquakes and supernatural creatures would coexist with massed archer formations for about as long as machine-guns would coexist with armored knights, for exactly the same reason.

So, what should a fantasy setting's style of war look like? ... Well, it would have to involve small numbers of highly-trained elites capable of unleashing massive firepower, who would fight chiefly not by defeating their enemies but by escaping detection by them; fortification would be done carefully and stealthily, and mobility would be a massive part of all military campaigning. In other words: it would look almost exactly like contemporary warfare, as practiced by its best practitioners. In other words, ambushes, patrols, land mines, Ospreys, blooming-lotus assaults, and the siege of Hue City -- massed units of any sort, however fast and powerful, would find themselves harassed, ambushed and bombarded into irrelevance; just ask Saddam Hussein.

Pete Takeshi observed that the fastest way of summarizing this problem -- and the more general issue that fantasy with regularized, powerful magic tends to evolve into much more modern styles of civilization if you think about it long enough -- is to call it the Flintstones Principle.

The definition of the Flintstones Principle is, "If you need a definition for the Flintstones Principle, you shouldn't be writing fantasy."