P&W Sickness, Chiccadilly

I apologize in advance for the rambly and somewhat incoherent nature of this blog.

Politics and War has become so popular at my school that I've made it a rule to never, ever talk about it during school hours. That's how sickening it's gotten. There's one person who vowed to never play it because it was so popular, but then all his friends only talked about it when they were around him, peer-pressuring him until he was forced to play it. He now plays it every day, constantly. I never see him offline. It makes me sad.

Here's what's so weird: P&W is pretty much exactly the same -- and as fun -- as manipulating a spreadsheet. Everything is numbers: Resources, dollars, military. There is no strategy, no mechanics, nothing but numbers. You just want the numbers on your spreadsheet to be higher than other people's numbers. That's it. I intended the game to be a tertiary, two minutes a day kind of thing. It now dominates a significant proportion of my class population.

In other news, I'm a fan of hidden identity games -- games where you try to figure out who other people are. I invented one today called "Chiccadilly" (because, and this has nothing to do with the game whatsoever, my favorite spoonerism is "Chiccadilly Pickadee". It rolls right off the tongue). Here's how it works:

There are three basic roles in the game: President, Diplomat, and Assassin. Each game, you receive one of the cards. No one but you knows what your card is. Two people trade cards. Only one trade can happen in a game -- once two people trade, the game ends. If the President trades with the Diplomat, they both win. If the Assassin trades with either President or Diplomat, the Assassin wins.

There are possibilities for a lot of other roles: Bodyguard (goal is to trade with Assassin), Trader (goal is to trade with anyone), Traitor, and others. I think this game has a lot of possibilities in terms of design space. It's also a lot of fun. Go play it.

-Me

On Numbers And Mysteriousness

I saw a cool proof that the sum of all the positive integers, 1+2+3+4+5+..., is equal to -1/12. Here it is.

This math proof is weird, and I'm not sure I buy it. (Wikipedia seems to agree with it.)
However, I seem more willing to accept it than other people. Why?

We typically conceive of numbers in terms of discrete objects. When I think of "1", I think of a single item. This helps me wrap my head around the concept, and generally it works very well. However, numbers are not discrete objects. They are conventions, constructions, things that do not exist anywhere but our minds and math publications. You're not going to go out and find 2 somewhere out in the universe, floating or otherwise. This can be more clearly seen when we look at complex numbers. The square root of negative 1, i, is unimaginable. i objects won't ever exist. Numbers are ideas.

Yet numbers' lack of objective, solid-state existence does not preclude them from forming the foundation of any technology we have. Numbers give us everything from the convenience of microwaves, to the exchange of goods for currency, to space travel. My point is simply this: Ideas are powerful, especially when you can transcribe them into solid-state existence. The most complicated, intricate achievements and innovations we have as a species come from the most seemingly basic idea of numbers. This basic idea, too, has grown into bizarre esotericisms, seemingly divorced from the objective realities we experience through our sensory perceptions.

This brings me back to the idea that the sum of all positive integers is equal to -1/12. Apparently, through mathematics I'm nowhere near smart enough to comprehend, this sum has actually proven useful in fields such as complex analysis and string theory. I'm not sure what "proven useful" even means; I'm just going with Wikipedia on this. Perhaps more astoundingly, the proof does not require anything other than the most rudimentary understanding of arithmetic and algebra. It's remarkably elegant and concise. It's also a little -- no, a lot -- mysterious, and I'm not sure if it ever won't be a lot mysterious -- to me, or to the most brilliant mathematician in existence.

I think there is some element of this world that will always remain a lot mysterious to us. I'm fine with that. In fact, I think I kind of like it.

-Me

Politics and War

So there's this game called Politics And War. It's a turn-based strategy game where you build up your nation by collecting resources, trading on the global market, and building a military force. Currently, around 715 active players exist.

Initially, I found it as a fun way to spend ~10 minutes a day; a "tertiary" game that doesn't demand a lot of attention. What I didn't expect was P&W to become extremely popular at our school -- so much so that someone paid $20 in real life to get money in the game. In fact, the Palmer alliance (The Corn Shuckers) is 18 nations strong and still climbing rapidly; we rank in the top 20th percentile for alliances and have no intention to stop growing. Then end goal is to become the absolute best alliance in P&W in the world. This goal is not too big of a stretch.*

One mechanic in P&W is the necessity of farms to feed your people. Farms, however, take up a lot of space and are a bit unwieldy in that respect -- you would much rather not have to build any farms and instead be able to focus on military, commerce, or resource production. I thought of a clever strategy to circumvent this limitation, however: I have built a total of 24 (read: a shit ton) farms and am putting up massive amounts of free food in the alliance trade system. As a result, no one else needs to get any farms for the rest of the game. I proudly dubbed this system TIFIS, or "The Instant Food Injection System".

Here's where things get really interesting: One scumbag took all of the food in Tifis today (this was over 900 food -- to put this in perspective, you only need about 20 food/day when you're starting out), left the alliance, and is planning on attacking people in the alliance.

The plan is to destroy this guy, absolutely and utterly. There will be no mercy.

-Me

*The best thing about P&W is how new it is. By joining at the ground floor, we all have an enormous advantage over people who join later.