This seems to be (a bit) of a non-sequitur since she mentions that the "intermittent reward" is for people who upload videos (sometimes one randomly goes viral). But most users (probably 99.9%) are purely consumers, so they won't ever see this "reward".
Also, the video gives little evidence (one video of her three went viral ... maybe it was just somehow more engaging? Or there is just some randomness to what goes viral, especially if you are an unknown account and their algorithm can't judge how likely your videos are engaging).
Still sounds bad for the uploaders of course! And if they use dark patterns for hooking uploaders, they probably have few to no scruples employing whatever serves their goal for video consumers.
I disagree, I think users get it too. You're looking at a stream of videos you mostly skip over quickly before the algo thinks you liked it, then a lot of the rest suck, then you occasionally love something.
Dinner parties: I have people over for meals fairly regularly, but it's much more of a minefield than it used to be. I have vegetarians, vegans, and then diabetics who eat low-carb. You know what fits all those folks? Almonds. That's about it. I wind up making two entrees. I make dinner rolls but the gluten-free folks won't eat them. If you're doing a potluck at a vegetarian's house, they often won't let you bring animal products, which means my diabetic husband has to sit there and not eat anything (except almonds!). The olden days, where you made a nice dinner and everyone just came over and ate it, are long gone.
I strongly disagree with your claim that dietary restrictions are anywhere near the primary barrier to the decline in social events. As someone with a laundry list of my own, it is really not very difficult to draw up a menu that suits everyone, especially when one opens themselves up to different cultural options beyond the traditional American fare. AI tools have made this even easier, if that's your jam.
For your husband, a quick google of "low-carb vegan meals" provides a wide range of options, from Chipotle-Orange Broccoli & Tofu to Green Curry Soup or Zucchini Noodles. Not to mention, the widespread growth of fake meat products should provide easy, low-cruelty, replacements in the dishes you already love.
Yeah, those things aren't actually low carb. And "strongly" disagreeing with me over my personal reflections about the changes in socializing seems excessive? You sound like you're spoiling for a fight. Go fight with someone else.
I was in a relationship once where I was competing with another guy for a woman's favor. The woman said she had better chemistry with the other guy, but his "special dietary requirements" made dating him such a hassle that it ALMOST wasn't worth it.
+1 for walking being a great relaxation vector. I'm a huge proponent of the belief that everyone should walk more under the natural sky. It is good for both the body and the mind. My most out there portion of this view is that a lot of the benefits that people in the community try to achieve with meditation can be achieved more effectively with long walks. (This is why I do the podcast)
Puzzle: How is meditation like masturbation? They both make you feel better, but your body gets zero exercise . . . okay zero with meditation, and very specific narrow exercise with masturbation.
With 20 to 60 minutes of walking, you may get many of the benefits of meditation and masturbation, but also the extreme benefits of the physical exercise. Especially for older people , the "mobility exercise" of walking is extremely important.
With apologies to Sam Harris, I think this is the ranking of how beneficial these activities are in descending order:
Most tech people that I talk to who are opposed to things like PEPFAR and EA just don’t believe the people who make claims in support of them. There’s this basic problem that you allude to, common to all charities, that every large charity is incentivized to rearrange all of its spending so that the marginal dollar looks like it’s going to go to the most critical cause. And yet somehow when you analyze the overall spend, it’s unclear whether USAID or just all NGOs operating in Africa combined are actually having a net positive impact.
The next step in the California insurance saga is as bad as you'd expect, deputizing insurers into tax collectors: "After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades."
Re: hosting friends. I have a proud history of inviting people and receiving them in a house untidy, with the dishes from my last meal still in the sink, and immediately putting them to work on preparing the dinner.
Coincidentally, most of my friends come to my house regularly, whereas I've never been invited at most of my friends' homes...
My favourite sentence by Chesterton: " if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly".
Doncic trade: this deeply reported piece alleges that it was an agency problem:
- competent CEO-owner Cuban sold to incompetent CEO-chair(s) Adelson(s)
- Adelsons delegated executive authority to old school "relationship guy" manager Harrison
- Harrison had not fully absorbed the last two decades of Moneyball analytics (c.f. 4 teams passing on Luka in the draft when many observers were shouting about his generational talent); it's not just Harrison)
- Harrison was deeply steeped in manage-the-news-cycle practices and was particularly concerned about the personal cost to him of failing to do so
- the trade "market" is small and subject to a great deal of personality-driven dynamics, notably by the tradees; Harrison was caught up in game theory at that level
- Harrison didn't have the cognitive tools to understand that the margin value of Luka at 25 over David at 30 dwarfed the hassle of coping with the news cycle and the interpersonal dynamics
- Harrison didn't have the meta-cognitive skills to build and trust a team that would have saved him from previous mistake
I was "project lead" on Artifact, to the extent that Valve informally has these things. I'm writing this off the cuff and my stomach is a little clenched even getting into this...
We've met. You came and played and spent time giving us useful feedback. I've thought a lot about Artifact over the years. I may be wrong about what went wrong - no one can run the counterfactual - but I think I have a reasonable model for what went wrong.
Artifact had extremely high player engagement out of the gate. The average player played long first sessions and many hours before stopping. They played a number of long duration sessions and then quit and didn't come back. The average session time was in the top ten for games on Steam at the time. Take-up among Dota players was high, but plenty of other people played it and played a lot of it before never coming back.
To me, this is consistent with running out of things to do.
Artifact failed not because of complexity in the ruleset, but because it failed to engage players for the long term on any axis. There are probably many ways it could have achieved this engagement, but it all adds up to a lack of stuff to do.
This was a mistake and a forced error, particularly by me. Others on the team argued this was a problem and we should have held the game back and built out more stuff to do. My reasoning was "we can ship and continue to build stuff" but the fall-off in player count was rapid, severe, and not recoverable.
My bet failed to pay a return. My belief was informed by spending a lot of time building stuff for TF2 post-launch and growing that game's engagement curve over the course of successive updates. I was not in any way expecting a rapid fall-off in users as they quickly consumed everything the game had to offer. I figured we would have months to extend the game, not three weeks.
At the time, it wasn't clear what the right kind of content to build was. Single player? Competitive? We probably should have built out a bunch of rogue-like single player stuff. We had plenty of examples of this working in the wild (like Slay the Spire), but we were a multiplayer minded team and overly focused on Dota-like competition. Our internal playtesting was more "team tournament" and we didn't emphasize the solo play angle.
If you can't keep players engaged, there's nothing to compete over and no one to compete with. Causal magic is the heart and soul of magic, but hard to reproduce in an online environment. So probably don't try to reproduce it.
Dota Underlords (an auto chess game) also flizzled shortly after Artifact. I don't know exactly what happened, but I suspect it fizzled for a similar reason. I had left Valve by that point. Artifact was a substantial personal defeat that crushed me for several years and I had to leave Valve to sort myself out.
Yeah I edited to indicate I largely agree with you, I realized that my write-up there didn't make clear I thought he was wrong - I challenged with LoL/DoTa because to me it seems like it takes forever for those games to be doing anything meaningful/interesting.
A comment on Dota/LoL, I started playing back when it was just a WC3 mod and I didn't really struggle to grasp the game the first few times. Controlled just like WC3 and every other RTS, you had your base in one corner and the enemy in another. Go kill the enemy. Simple concept, and even the idea of just controlling one unit in an RTS had already been demonstrated in Blizzard's own WC3 campaigns. LoL and Heroes of Newerth had enough network effects when they launched to carry it from there.
Dota is fascinating because if you play the way every other RTS teaches you to play, you will not only fail but you'll cause your team to lose. And you probably won't understand why people are yelling at you to stop attacking and get out of their lane. Right click and kill creeps? You'll push your lane too early and probably die under the enemy tower. At the least you'll screw up the last hitting and nerf your team's farm severely. Die and you've just made the team much stronger without understanding how.
So many mechanics are counter-intuitive to the standard RTS method of play, even if you understand the economic rules that underpin an RTS.
Tutorials don't help. We spent a bunch of time building one only to find it taught the wrong things and the right things aren't easy to teach.
Friends help a lot. People who play Dota with a friend learn much more quickly and are more likely to stick around. Not just about a social effect. Learning the ropes is much easier with someone telling you "just sit tight under our tower, yes that's really how it's going to be the first few games." Friends also help you avoid or weather the hostility that tends to arise in team games, particularly when a person's lack of awareness can cause an early loss.
A person with 1 game under their belt will destroy someone with 0 games. A person with 2 games will destroy someone with 1 game. The rate of early learning and the return on that experience is very, very steep.
Ultimately effort put into finding ways to incentivize playing with friends was higher yield than effort put into teaching the game rules (re: Dota).
This also meshes with how people learn games these days, which is more Wiki+Reddit+YT than tutorialization.
Complicated UI and arcane interactions that cause you to lose aren't a barrier to having market success, if the game is [good/fun/hand waving]. HOI4 and EU4 are both quite complicated, have relatively poor tutorials, but have very detailed community resources for learning. HOI4 is up and to the right, it's more complicated than ever and more popular than ever. (https://steamdb.info/app/394360/charts/#max)
If you make a complex game, there are other trade-offs you have to consider, but judging games by apparent complexity alone is like reasoning about a price without context.
Dota and Lol are both a bit unique in that the "complexity" has become a lot greater for new players simply because the communities have been around for so long.
Back in the WC3 days, just knowing about denying would put you way ahead of the average player. It probably took my like 20 games to find out there was a shop in the jungle area (is that still in Dota 2?) or Roshan.
I started Lol in the beta. Only 40 champions or so to learn, there were no defined 'lane roles' and most games I played back then had no "jungle" players. You'd often end up with 2v1 lanes because one team had a jungle.
I stopped played the main mode a decade ago, but the few times I've ventured back in has been pretty baffling for me. You're expected to just know how you match up in lane to the other champs. There's a ton of extra mechanics in the jungle, often with confusing messages popping up mid game. There are of course way more champs and items (though at least those I know).
I assume it's similar in Dota 2; it's no surprise both games have reputations for such terrible communities when the amount you need to know is so large. What you said about playing with friends being most important makes perfect sense.
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Regarding your point about Paradox type games, I think this is valid, but I still think there is something to the "If you can't get a basic grasp in 5 minutes, you'll stop playing a game". There are a lot of games with a lot of different audience sizes and financial aims, so there are plenty of niche exceptions to this rule, but it probably holds true for many larger titles
I *strongly* doubt this being true as a general true. It *might* be true for the friends circle of that one writer -- and I'd bet good money on even *that* being heavily exaggerated for the sake of building a good narrative. Any time someone tries to paint an entire country with such broad strokes, its almost certain to be BS.
I don't know, it rings true to me. I'm an American married to a French woman. Also, I once had a French literature teacher basically come out and explicitly say this, that it's French culture to express nuanced different points of view on a topic.
Interesting! Curious: If I were to place a recorder in your dinner and transcribe its contents over 50 dinners, what % of time would the conversations follow the patterns as-described in the book?
“ I believe that technically, what you can’t do is make an offer that is too low.”
It’s a pet peeve of mine that in real estate the buyer is the one making the offer. To me, in a market the seller offers property and the buyer bids money for it
Well, that's *also* what happens in real estate? When someone puts their home on the market, there's normally an initial asking price, which is then open for negotiation.
The last couple of games that I really got into took me hours of YouTube videos to figure out what to do and how to play.(Factorio; Satisfactory) For me it has to be complicated in the right way. Learning it has to also be interesting. Also, any new card game is competing against the time I play Magic Arena so it better be really fucking good. Good luck with that. I've never played a card game that immediately got me addicted the way Magic did.
No, this is bad, incoherent, and fails the Intellectual Turing Test. Firstly, the concern is overwhelmingly #2 (#1 seems like incoherent nonsense, glibly mischaracterized in any event, but regardless it is clearly worse to be a battery cage hen than not to be born), and secondly, factory farmed animals are not "bred to tolerate" their conditions except inasmuch as (for obvious reasons rooted in evolutionary history) organisms are very bad at committing suicide even in circumstances in which they are subjectively immiserated.
Brood sows who cannot even turn around in gestation crates are living in a human-created version of the Torment Nexus. South Koreans, low fertility notwithstanding, are not.
Related to this, particularly in view of this blog's (excellent) coverage of AI topics, I might offer the advice "Superior Intelligence, align thyself!"
As someone with an ongoing case where the absurd difficulties in cost-effectively recovering an *uncontested civil judgment in our favor* have been major considerations, I think Esper's tweet betrays an unwarranted confidence and somewhat baffling notion of how our systems operate. The judicial branch's complete dependence on the executive to enforce any of its orders has been a longstanding feature of our system of government and an obvious source of a possible constitutional crisis given the lack of recourse (other than impeachment [insert sarcastic laugh track]) should the Executive choose not to obey the judiciary. This has been observed since extremely early in the history of the Republic and is generally believed to be one reason for the substantive outcome (rather than the better-known lofty claim of the right of judicial review) of Marbury v. Madison, which in substance was a capitulation to the executive on an issue the nascent Court feared otherwise being shown up as having no bite to its bark on. See also Andrew Jackson's later apocryphal pronouncement "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
Even after re-reading a few times to see if I missed a good reason it was linked, it struck me as incoherent cope also. Related to another link, just ask what Picard would have thought of factory farming?
Re: "There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation."
Does anyone have any particular writers to recommend in this regard? Someone who produces monthly / some regular interval of roundup, preferably non-overlapping with Zvi's?
Can someone explain to me what agency means in the context of having more "agency"? I understand it as the belief you have 10x the options/choices than what you think you have in a situation.
But seriously, agency involves taking initiative to figure things out yourself, exploring options actively, and not defaulting to asking others for basic definitions that you could easily research
> Can someone explain to me what agency means in the context of having more "agency"?
If the smartest, most capable person you know / can think of were facing this problem, what would they be doing right now, and what long term solution would they be aiming for?
Imagine a one dimensional axis with one extreme being master of the universe and the other those rats where they knocked out the “do something” receptor and they starve to death being too apathetic to walk a few inches to get food.
Re "Apple is offering a curated ecosystem for a reason, it’s their call" - It's not. I own the device, and the EU is merely forcing Apple to let me use it as I wish. Apple can curate their App Store, of course, but there is no good reason (other than profit maximization) to not have alternative app stores, which users can OPT to use. If they want to keep people from using their phones as they wish, they should be honest about it, stop selling them and just rent them out for a monthly fee.
Alternative app stores make my life as a device owner worse. I don't want to download another app store without Apple's protections because a developer of a particular app wanted to pay lower fees or whatever. Obviously I can just not do that, but in the counterfactual world, they'd put it on the one and only app store and I'd get it with the protections.
Obviously there's a dead weight loss of apps that wouldn't be developed if Apple's app store was the only option, but Android exists, and if I'd wanted that ecosystem, I would have bought one.
I also want to be able to set parents etc. up with idiot proof phones that don't allow side loading or other nonsense.
(Man, this latest update to the Substack UI sucks ass. Website should not look and browse like mobile! Painful to even write comments now.)
Fun within 5 minutes of Magic? Feels like that gets easier at either low power levels (prereleases or other limited) or high power levels (optimized slug-it-out). With low power, constraints help keep the focus on flavour and base mechanics, no one player is so much more advantaged than the other*, and turns don't get arbitrarily long. High power, the fun derives from the stakes...every turn meaningful, every interaction carefully considered, risks and reward aboud. I imagine it's similar with poker. It's in the uneven middle when things get unfun...going 0-3 sucks, going 3-0 can feel hollow, it feels "unjust" for someone to plot out an elaborate 5-minute turn and then they don't even win/come meaningfully closer to victory for it anyway. I've never directly asked the audiences at my pod's games, but seems like those are the ones that turn people off the most too. Everyone likes a fast, "fair" game where each player's got Some Stuff going on. (And then once they're hooked you can start introducing complexity...)
*but man some of those R and MR pulls with recent sets have been insane...it's one thing to get roflstomped by the terrifying-but-somehow-adorable evil elementals in Bloomburrow, another to face someone who packed a Special Guest Sword of Fire and Ice and it's like well gg. Many Such Cases, sadly...
Re: The TikTok intermittent reward thing:
This seems to be (a bit) of a non-sequitur since she mentions that the "intermittent reward" is for people who upload videos (sometimes one randomly goes viral). But most users (probably 99.9%) are purely consumers, so they won't ever see this "reward".
Also, the video gives little evidence (one video of her three went viral ... maybe it was just somehow more engaging? Or there is just some randomness to what goes viral, especially if you are an unknown account and their algorithm can't judge how likely your videos are engaging).
Still sounds bad for the uploaders of course! And if they use dark patterns for hooking uploaders, they probably have few to no scruples employing whatever serves their goal for video consumers.
I disagree, I think users get it too. You're looking at a stream of videos you mostly skip over quickly before the algo thinks you liked it, then a lot of the rest suck, then you occasionally love something.
Yes, for sure. Notably, that applies to other platforms with feeds too, such as Twitter.
I think that might be right (there definitely is something slot-machiny about it, down to the rythm and timings).
But it’s not what the video was arguing … and wouldn’t TikTok prefer to ONLY show you bangers instead of hiding them between heaps of bad videos?
So that seems to be more of a limitation of their algorithm/content than a conscious use of a dark pattern.
Still definitely not an app I’d want to spend time with nor let anyone dear to me get addicted to.
Dinner parties: I have people over for meals fairly regularly, but it's much more of a minefield than it used to be. I have vegetarians, vegans, and then diabetics who eat low-carb. You know what fits all those folks? Almonds. That's about it. I wind up making two entrees. I make dinner rolls but the gluten-free folks won't eat them. If you're doing a potluck at a vegetarian's house, they often won't let you bring animal products, which means my diabetic husband has to sit there and not eat anything (except almonds!). The olden days, where you made a nice dinner and everyone just came over and ate it, are long gone.
I strongly disagree with your claim that dietary restrictions are anywhere near the primary barrier to the decline in social events. As someone with a laundry list of my own, it is really not very difficult to draw up a menu that suits everyone, especially when one opens themselves up to different cultural options beyond the traditional American fare. AI tools have made this even easier, if that's your jam.
For your husband, a quick google of "low-carb vegan meals" provides a wide range of options, from Chipotle-Orange Broccoli & Tofu to Green Curry Soup or Zucchini Noodles. Not to mention, the widespread growth of fake meat products should provide easy, low-cruelty, replacements in the dishes you already love.
Yeah, those things aren't actually low carb. And "strongly" disagreeing with me over my personal reflections about the changes in socializing seems excessive? You sound like you're spoiling for a fight. Go fight with someone else.
I was in a relationship once where I was competing with another guy for a woman's favor. The woman said she had better chemistry with the other guy, but his "special dietary requirements" made dating him such a hassle that it ALMOST wasn't worth it.
+1 for walking being a great relaxation vector. I'm a huge proponent of the belief that everyone should walk more under the natural sky. It is good for both the body and the mind. My most out there portion of this view is that a lot of the benefits that people in the community try to achieve with meditation can be achieved more effectively with long walks. (This is why I do the podcast)
Speaking of: podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-27-february-2025?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Puzzle: How is meditation like masturbation? They both make you feel better, but your body gets zero exercise . . . okay zero with meditation, and very specific narrow exercise with masturbation.
With 20 to 60 minutes of walking, you may get many of the benefits of meditation and masturbation, but also the extreme benefits of the physical exercise. Especially for older people , the "mobility exercise" of walking is extremely important.
With apologies to Sam Harris, I think this is the ranking of how beneficial these activities are in descending order:
1) Walking
2) Masturbation
3) Meditation
Most tech people that I talk to who are opposed to things like PEPFAR and EA just don’t believe the people who make claims in support of them. There’s this basic problem that you allude to, common to all charities, that every large charity is incentivized to rearrange all of its spending so that the marginal dollar looks like it’s going to go to the most critical cause. And yet somehow when you analyze the overall spend, it’s unclear whether USAID or just all NGOs operating in Africa combined are actually having a net positive impact.
The next step in the California insurance saga is as bad as you'd expect, deputizing insurers into tax collectors: "After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades."
https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/
Side note--it's junk like this that exposes the claim that "California actually has lower taxes than Texas for the average taxpayer."
Re: hosting friends. I have a proud history of inviting people and receiving them in a house untidy, with the dishes from my last meal still in the sink, and immediately putting them to work on preparing the dinner.
Coincidentally, most of my friends come to my house regularly, whereas I've never been invited at most of my friends' homes...
My favourite sentence by Chesterton: " if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly".
Doncic trade: this deeply reported piece alleges that it was an agency problem:
- competent CEO-owner Cuban sold to incompetent CEO-chair(s) Adelson(s)
- Adelsons delegated executive authority to old school "relationship guy" manager Harrison
- Harrison had not fully absorbed the last two decades of Moneyball analytics (c.f. 4 teams passing on Luka in the draft when many observers were shouting about his generational talent); it's not just Harrison)
- Harrison was deeply steeped in manage-the-news-cycle practices and was particularly concerned about the personal cost to him of failing to do so
- the trade "market" is small and subject to a great deal of personality-driven dynamics, notably by the tradees; Harrison was caught up in game theory at that level
- Harrison didn't have the cognitive tools to understand that the margin value of Luka at 25 over David at 30 dwarfed the hassle of coping with the news cycle and the interpersonal dynamics
- Harrison didn't have the meta-cognitive skills to build and trust a team that would have saved him from previous mistake
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/43676830/how-stunning-luka-doncic-anthony-davis-trade-came-together-los-angeles-lakers-dallas-mavericks
I was "project lead" on Artifact, to the extent that Valve informally has these things. I'm writing this off the cuff and my stomach is a little clenched even getting into this...
We've met. You came and played and spent time giving us useful feedback. I've thought a lot about Artifact over the years. I may be wrong about what went wrong - no one can run the counterfactual - but I think I have a reasonable model for what went wrong.
Artifact had extremely high player engagement out of the gate. The average player played long first sessions and many hours before stopping. They played a number of long duration sessions and then quit and didn't come back. The average session time was in the top ten for games on Steam at the time. Take-up among Dota players was high, but plenty of other people played it and played a lot of it before never coming back.
To me, this is consistent with running out of things to do.
Artifact failed not because of complexity in the ruleset, but because it failed to engage players for the long term on any axis. There are probably many ways it could have achieved this engagement, but it all adds up to a lack of stuff to do.
This was a mistake and a forced error, particularly by me. Others on the team argued this was a problem and we should have held the game back and built out more stuff to do. My reasoning was "we can ship and continue to build stuff" but the fall-off in player count was rapid, severe, and not recoverable.
My bet failed to pay a return. My belief was informed by spending a lot of time building stuff for TF2 post-launch and growing that game's engagement curve over the course of successive updates. I was not in any way expecting a rapid fall-off in users as they quickly consumed everything the game had to offer. I figured we would have months to extend the game, not three weeks.
At the time, it wasn't clear what the right kind of content to build was. Single player? Competitive? We probably should have built out a bunch of rogue-like single player stuff. We had plenty of examples of this working in the wild (like Slay the Spire), but we were a multiplayer minded team and overly focused on Dota-like competition. Our internal playtesting was more "team tournament" and we didn't emphasize the solo play angle.
If you can't keep players engaged, there's nothing to compete over and no one to compete with. Causal magic is the heart and soul of magic, but hard to reproduce in an online environment. So probably don't try to reproduce it.
Dota Underlords (an auto chess game) also flizzled shortly after Artifact. I don't know exactly what happened, but I suspect it fizzled for a similar reason. I had left Valve by that point. Artifact was a substantial personal defeat that crushed me for several years and I had to leave Valve to sort myself out.
JohnO: You were right about everything.
Yeah I edited to indicate I largely agree with you, I realized that my write-up there didn't make clear I thought he was wrong - I challenged with LoL/DoTa because to me it seems like it takes forever for those games to be doing anything meaningful/interesting.
A comment on Dota/LoL, I started playing back when it was just a WC3 mod and I didn't really struggle to grasp the game the first few times. Controlled just like WC3 and every other RTS, you had your base in one corner and the enemy in another. Go kill the enemy. Simple concept, and even the idea of just controlling one unit in an RTS had already been demonstrated in Blizzard's own WC3 campaigns. LoL and Heroes of Newerth had enough network effects when they launched to carry it from there.
Dota is fascinating because if you play the way every other RTS teaches you to play, you will not only fail but you'll cause your team to lose. And you probably won't understand why people are yelling at you to stop attacking and get out of their lane. Right click and kill creeps? You'll push your lane too early and probably die under the enemy tower. At the least you'll screw up the last hitting and nerf your team's farm severely. Die and you've just made the team much stronger without understanding how.
So many mechanics are counter-intuitive to the standard RTS method of play, even if you understand the economic rules that underpin an RTS.
Tutorials don't help. We spent a bunch of time building one only to find it taught the wrong things and the right things aren't easy to teach.
Friends help a lot. People who play Dota with a friend learn much more quickly and are more likely to stick around. Not just about a social effect. Learning the ropes is much easier with someone telling you "just sit tight under our tower, yes that's really how it's going to be the first few games." Friends also help you avoid or weather the hostility that tends to arise in team games, particularly when a person's lack of awareness can cause an early loss.
A person with 1 game under their belt will destroy someone with 0 games. A person with 2 games will destroy someone with 1 game. The rate of early learning and the return on that experience is very, very steep.
Ultimately effort put into finding ways to incentivize playing with friends was higher yield than effort put into teaching the game rules (re: Dota).
This also meshes with how people learn games these days, which is more Wiki+Reddit+YT than tutorialization.
Complicated UI and arcane interactions that cause you to lose aren't a barrier to having market success, if the game is [good/fun/hand waving]. HOI4 and EU4 are both quite complicated, have relatively poor tutorials, but have very detailed community resources for learning. HOI4 is up and to the right, it's more complicated than ever and more popular than ever. (https://steamdb.info/app/394360/charts/#max)
If you make a complex game, there are other trade-offs you have to consider, but judging games by apparent complexity alone is like reasoning about a price without context.
Dota and Lol are both a bit unique in that the "complexity" has become a lot greater for new players simply because the communities have been around for so long.
Back in the WC3 days, just knowing about denying would put you way ahead of the average player. It probably took my like 20 games to find out there was a shop in the jungle area (is that still in Dota 2?) or Roshan.
I started Lol in the beta. Only 40 champions or so to learn, there were no defined 'lane roles' and most games I played back then had no "jungle" players. You'd often end up with 2v1 lanes because one team had a jungle.
I stopped played the main mode a decade ago, but the few times I've ventured back in has been pretty baffling for me. You're expected to just know how you match up in lane to the other champs. There's a ton of extra mechanics in the jungle, often with confusing messages popping up mid game. There are of course way more champs and items (though at least those I know).
I assume it's similar in Dota 2; it's no surprise both games have reputations for such terrible communities when the amount you need to know is so large. What you said about playing with friends being most important makes perfect sense.
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Regarding your point about Paradox type games, I think this is valid, but I still think there is something to the "If you can't get a basic grasp in 5 minutes, you'll stop playing a game". There are a lot of games with a lot of different audience sizes and financial aims, so there are plenty of niche exceptions to this rule, but it probably holds true for many larger titles
Re: The art of the French dinner party
I *strongly* doubt this being true as a general true. It *might* be true for the friends circle of that one writer -- and I'd bet good money on even *that* being heavily exaggerated for the sake of building a good narrative. Any time someone tries to paint an entire country with such broad strokes, its almost certain to be BS.
I don't know, it rings true to me. I'm an American married to a French woman. Also, I once had a French literature teacher basically come out and explicitly say this, that it's French culture to express nuanced different points of view on a topic.
Interesting! Curious: If I were to place a recorder in your dinner and transcribe its contents over 50 dinners, what % of time would the conversations follow the patterns as-described in the book?
I'm actually tempted to try this
“ I believe that technically, what you can’t do is make an offer that is too low.”
It’s a pet peeve of mine that in real estate the buyer is the one making the offer. To me, in a market the seller offers property and the buyer bids money for it
Well, that's *also* what happens in real estate? When someone puts their home on the market, there's normally an initial asking price, which is then open for negotiation.
The last couple of games that I really got into took me hours of YouTube videos to figure out what to do and how to play.(Factorio; Satisfactory) For me it has to be complicated in the right way. Learning it has to also be interesting. Also, any new card game is competing against the time I play Magic Arena so it better be really fucking good. Good luck with that. I've never played a card game that immediately got me addicted the way Magic did.
Re: Hoffman on veganism.
No, this is bad, incoherent, and fails the Intellectual Turing Test. Firstly, the concern is overwhelmingly #2 (#1 seems like incoherent nonsense, glibly mischaracterized in any event, but regardless it is clearly worse to be a battery cage hen than not to be born), and secondly, factory farmed animals are not "bred to tolerate" their conditions except inasmuch as (for obvious reasons rooted in evolutionary history) organisms are very bad at committing suicide even in circumstances in which they are subjectively immiserated.
Brood sows who cannot even turn around in gestation crates are living in a human-created version of the Torment Nexus. South Koreans, low fertility notwithstanding, are not.
Related to this, particularly in view of this blog's (excellent) coverage of AI topics, I might offer the advice "Superior Intelligence, align thyself!"
Re: Enforcing Court Orders [Note: Volokh Conspiracy link seems to be broken - I presume it's this https://reason.com/volokh/2025/02/11/the-danger-of-trump-disobeying-court-orders/).
As someone with an ongoing case where the absurd difficulties in cost-effectively recovering an *uncontested civil judgment in our favor* have been major considerations, I think Esper's tweet betrays an unwarranted confidence and somewhat baffling notion of how our systems operate. The judicial branch's complete dependence on the executive to enforce any of its orders has been a longstanding feature of our system of government and an obvious source of a possible constitutional crisis given the lack of recourse (other than impeachment [insert sarcastic laugh track]) should the Executive choose not to obey the judiciary. This has been observed since extremely early in the history of the Republic and is generally believed to be one reason for the substantive outcome (rather than the better-known lofty claim of the right of judicial review) of Marbury v. Madison, which in substance was a capitulation to the executive on an issue the nascent Court feared otherwise being shown up as having no bite to its bark on. See also Andrew Jackson's later apocryphal pronouncement "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
Even after re-reading a few times to see if I missed a good reason it was linked, it struck me as incoherent cope also. Related to another link, just ask what Picard would have thought of factory farming?
Re: "There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation."
Does anyone have any particular writers to recommend in this regard? Someone who produces monthly / some regular interval of roundup, preferably non-overlapping with Zvi's?
Can someone explain to me what agency means in the context of having more "agency"? I understand it as the belief you have 10x the options/choices than what you think you have in a situation.
"can someone help me be more independent?"
But seriously, agency involves taking initiative to figure things out yourself, exploring options actively, and not defaulting to asking others for basic definitions that you could easily research
> Can someone explain to me what agency means in the context of having more "agency"?
If the smartest, most capable person you know / can think of were facing this problem, what would they be doing right now, and what long term solution would they be aiming for?
Imagine a one dimensional axis with one extreme being master of the universe and the other those rats where they knocked out the “do something” receptor and they starve to death being too apathetic to walk a few inches to get food.
ooh I like this
Re "Apple is offering a curated ecosystem for a reason, it’s their call" - It's not. I own the device, and the EU is merely forcing Apple to let me use it as I wish. Apple can curate their App Store, of course, but there is no good reason (other than profit maximization) to not have alternative app stores, which users can OPT to use. If they want to keep people from using their phones as they wish, they should be honest about it, stop selling them and just rent them out for a monthly fee.
Alternative app stores make my life as a device owner worse. I don't want to download another app store without Apple's protections because a developer of a particular app wanted to pay lower fees or whatever. Obviously I can just not do that, but in the counterfactual world, they'd put it on the one and only app store and I'd get it with the protections.
Obviously there's a dead weight loss of apps that wouldn't be developed if Apple's app store was the only option, but Android exists, and if I'd wanted that ecosystem, I would have bought one.
I also want to be able to set parents etc. up with idiot proof phones that don't allow side loading or other nonsense.
(Man, this latest update to the Substack UI sucks ass. Website should not look and browse like mobile! Painful to even write comments now.)
Fun within 5 minutes of Magic? Feels like that gets easier at either low power levels (prereleases or other limited) or high power levels (optimized slug-it-out). With low power, constraints help keep the focus on flavour and base mechanics, no one player is so much more advantaged than the other*, and turns don't get arbitrarily long. High power, the fun derives from the stakes...every turn meaningful, every interaction carefully considered, risks and reward aboud. I imagine it's similar with poker. It's in the uneven middle when things get unfun...going 0-3 sucks, going 3-0 can feel hollow, it feels "unjust" for someone to plot out an elaborate 5-minute turn and then they don't even win/come meaningfully closer to victory for it anyway. I've never directly asked the audiences at my pod's games, but seems like those are the ones that turn people off the most too. Everyone likes a fast, "fair" game where each player's got Some Stuff going on. (And then once they're hooked you can start introducing complexity...)
*but man some of those R and MR pulls with recent sets have been insane...it's one thing to get roflstomped by the terrifying-but-somehow-adorable evil elementals in Bloomburrow, another to face someone who packed a Special Guest Sword of Fire and Ice and it's like well gg. Many Such Cases, sadly...