Report on some initial playtesting of the auction game

My friends Ruth and Femke helped me playtest the auction game (previously here and here) last night.

Initial verdict: I still think there’s something there as a concept, but it definitely Needs Work.

We played 2.5 variants of it (about halfway through the second game we switched variants).

The first version we played was more or less as I described it in the last post. Rather than a random ending we played with a small, fixed, number of tiles (12) just to get a feel for the game.

It turned out to be almost completely non-interactive. There was very little incentive to auction your tiles, so no one did.

We decided to switch this around in the second game. Rather than having you get tiles, we played concurrently: A tile came up, everyone bid on it, everyone got to move, everyone collected money.

This also turned out not to work very well – the problem was there was a really large early mover advantage because you don’t start collecting money until you’ve won an auction.

About halfway through we changed the rules because they were obviously not working. We placed one tile per player face up and then auctioned them in order, then collected money. This definitely worked better.

General observations I would make:

the game is definitely currently lacking something. That something might just be “finely tuned enough rules that the game flows better”, but I don’t think so.
there are too many colours. Right now most tiles are a bit useless. I think a palette of 3 or 4 colours would play much better as it would allow for a larger variance in tile utility
The game currently suffers from massive rich-get-richer problems.

Here are the changes I think I need to make immediately:

Sort out the colour palette. Unfortunately this means that the pre-printed tiles I got are almost completely useless. Wahey! Stupid way to prototype this game I think. I’m going to buy a giant order of these blank hex tiles and colour them with sharpies. I might try just reducing it to black and white to start with and then grow it upwards.
Sort out the auction mechanic to be better balanced. A thing I was thinking of is to change the rules as follows: You take it in turns. At the start of your turn you may either auction one of your pieces or put a randomly chosen piece up for auction. The money for the auction goes to you either way. This gives an advantage to people who haven’t managed to win auctions yet.
Come up with a better end condition.

Venison stew

After publishing my updated dietary policy yesterday I headed out to Borough market to do some food shopping. I bought some things, and last night crafted a meal out of them for myself and two friends.

The result… feels like it should be a policy violation. It’s not. It scrupulously obeys all the rules – there’s no cheese, the only meat in it is game (I had a conversation with the person selling it to confirm that it was really wild caught venison and not farmed. Apparently he gets a lot of weird and ranty questions from customers so was pleasantly surprised at my “Is your venison farmed? No? Awesome. I’ll have a kilo please”), and the majority of the vegetables are organic and locally sourced.

I think it mostly feels like a policy violation because of misplaced puritanism. The resulting meal was deliciously decadent.

Here’s the recipe. It’s mostly approximate, as I kept tinkering and adding things throughout. There were 3 of us, and we all ate to satiation and there were plenty of leftovers – easily enough for a meal for two, probably enough for a meal for three with a side.

1 kilo diced wild venison
1 medium sized celeriac
6 large carrots
8 new potatoes
6 medium white onions
250g butter
1 bottle red wine (I went up to the nice man in the wine shop and said “Hello. I don’t drink wine but I need a decent dry red for cooking venison. Suggestions?”. He pointed me towards this one)
About 10 fresh sage leaves
About 1 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tsp grains of paradise (I’m not sure this was enough that you could actually taste them)
6 juniper berries
A fair bit of salt (I have no idea how much. “to taste”)

I’m not kidding about the wine and the butter. There really is a whole bottle of wine and a whole block of butter in this stew.

Directions:

Roughly quarter and break apart four of the onions. Put them in a roasting pan with half the butter and put it in the oven on 200c. Dice the potatoes, carrots and celeriac into roughly cm cubes (Precision is not important here). Once the onions are starting to soften, add the diced root vegetables to the onions and butter and toss thoroughly.

You’ll need those vegetables roasted reasonably well, so you might want to wait a bit before starting the next bit (don’t wait until they’re roasted before starting, but maybe give them half an hour)

Take the remaining two onions and dice them finely. In a large pot, fry them with the remaining butter and some salt. Once they start to soften, add the paprika, grains of paradise and juniper berries (I cut up the juniper berries first and smashed the grains of paradise in a pestle and mortar).

Once the onions are reasonably well browned, add the venison. Let it brown on the outside, then add about half and half boiling water and red wine until the venison is covered and reduce the heat a bit. Let it cook for another 10 minutes or so, then add all the roasted vegetables and the fresh sage. Top it up with half boiling water and wine again until covered, mix thoroughly and transfer to the oven.

It’s now going to take a while, so start cleaning up. You basically want to leave it cooking until the meat is falling apart – this took about two hours for me. Check on it every 20 minutes or so, if it’s starting to look a bit dry top it up with more wine (I started mostly using wine at this point with the occasional top up of water).

Once it seems ready, turn the oven off and leave it in there for another half hour or so. It’s probably not totally necessary, but the result is just that bit softer and tastier for it.

Updating my dietary policy

A while ago I wrote about my personal dietary policy.

I’ve been pretty good about adhering to it. I’ve occasionally missed the meat targets when e.g. visiting people, but on my own it’s not been hard to stick to them. I’ve if anything done better on the fish and seafood targets than I’ve expected – I think I’ve had fish maybe once in the 4 months since I started it.

But I think it’s time to update it.

There are a few reasons I think it’s time to update it. The main ones:

I think it misses certain key areas
I don’t think it’s hardcore enough
It bans various things that should be permitted
It’s not well designed to create positive feedback loops. It says things I can’t do rather than things I should do

So I’m having a think about how to redesign to improve these.

Here are my general goals:

Environmental sustainability is key
I am moderately but not strongly interested in animal suffering. I will take steps to reduce it where it does not otherwise conflict with my goals, but I’m not going to bend over backwards for it. I will happily spend money to by lower suffering versions of things I eat though
The dietary policy must not feel like a hardship. Obviously I’m going to have to make changes to my life, and I’m fine with that, but if I’m constantly resenting it then I’m going to fail to live up to it
In general I am interested in designing systems which cause me to behave better and are self-reinforcing rather than systems which require constant maintenance.
I utterly reject any system which requires me to add up things like grams of carbon footprint consumed because I simply will not follow it. I’m OK with using these as guidelines for creating general rules though.

So with these in mind, here is what I’m thinking of. This is not a firm commitment to follow these rules, and some of them may be stupid ideas.

Firstly, I’m reducing the number of violations I can have. I am allowed two “cheat days” a month. The months strictly follow the calendar and I am not allowed two cheat days in the same week (for reasons of convenience, a week here starts on Saturday and continues to Friday. This follows the pattern for my eating habits much better than starting it on Monday)

All rules may be compromised on when my adhering to them would be a massive pain in the ass for someone who has not bought into them. I understand I may have to compromise on this some times when visiting people. I will express my preferences in these cases but if it’s inconvenient/undesirable for people to match them I won’t raise a fuss about it.

In all other cases the rules will be strictly adhered to.

The following are banned foods except on cheat days:

All meat except that is not explicitly white listed (see below)
All cheese (possible exception to follow)
All fish and seafood

Some meat is always permitted. In particular, chicken is just an allowed part of the diet, no restrictions. Other small birds and animals may be allowed too. Game, in particular venison, is always allowed (though I probably won’t eat that much of it because it’s expensive!). The reasoning here is that small animals are actually pretty efficient in terms of carbon/gram of protein. They grow fast and are low overhead. Arguably if your ethics are environment centric, chicken is better than tofu (I don’t actually have numbers for this. This may be false, or highly dependent on the sources of each).

Cheese is… regrettable. Again going on the metric of carbon/gram of protein, cheese seems to be as bad as many of the worst meats. The problem is not dairy products in general but cheese specifically, as there seems to be about a 10:1 ratio of milk to cheese produced. It’s unclear to me how much the byproducts like whey offset this.

I will probably allow myself cheese as a garnish about once a week, because sadness, but meals for which removing the cheese would make them not-meals are definitely a rules violation.

So that’s what I’m not allowed to eat. I also need to commit to some positive behaviour changes.

I will bring lunch to work at least twice a week on weeks where I’m working the full 5 day week. Why? Because I have much more control over the sustainability of what I make than I do over what I buy pre-made. This is a good way to reclaim some control over that, as work lunches are overwhelmingly my main source of food not made by me
I will eat a meal based on dried beans or lentils at least once per week. These seem to be a very good sustainable source of protein, much better than many other vegetarian options
Every time I throw away food, I will record (probably in a Google doc) what I threw away and why. I’m not as bad as many on the food wastage thing, but in terms of footprint I imagine the amount of food I throw away easily matches an extra burger a month or so. This should encourage me to reduce it.
Something about buying local, seasonal, veg on a more regular basis. I don’t yet know how this is going to work. Maybe an Abel and Cole box once a month or something.

That’s all I’ve got so far. I’m probably going to try following these rules for a bit (I’ll allow myself one more cheat day this month, despite the fact that the number of days I’ve violated these rules this month is definitely more than two, then start properly on the rigid cheat day allocation next month). Any suggestions extremely welcome.

Arguments I am unlikely to listen to

If you behave this way in these circumstances you must also behave this way in these other superficially similar circumstances
If you allow this thing you must also allow this other thing
The thing you are claiming is bad is actually good, it’s just that you’ve only ever seen it being done badly
The reason this thing has harmful effects is that you are not doing enough of it
The only alternative to the thing you are saying is bad is this other thing that is also bad
You are making a point that doesn’t matter
The things you are telling me are important are not actually important
If you ignore the details you are telling me are important then you don’t have a good argument

Most of these are not fallacies per se, but my experience is that with most arguments that look like this the resulting discussion will be unproductive and very frustrating and it’s best to avoid them.

I will add more items as I think of them.

Boycotting kickstarter

If you haven’t noticed recently, there was a pretty loathsome kickstarter project funded recently. TLDR, rapey (or at least advocating of rape. I have no personal evidence that he has ever committed rape, but it would be unsurprising given what he preaches) pick-up artist uses kickstarter to fund rape advocating pick up artistry handbook. Kickstarter have this pointed out to them and basically say “Sorry, nothing we can do about it”.

Confession: I was probably just going to roll my eyes at this and move on.

Then I read Jeff Kunzler’s take on this. In particular, I quote:

This is a large part of why you see women saying men cannot be feminists. Because they will say they support women, call themselves feminists, tweet about how much they hate misogynists, and when it comes to nerd bullshit, hypercapitalism, and being a proud consumer instead of a stand-up person, they will sell women out and continue to support a company that has profited from enabling rapists. Kickstarter made money off of Ken Hoinsky and the pathetic misogynists that donated to his projects. There is no cause, no purpose, no object worth supporting more than standing up to the thousands of years of misogyny and violence against women in our history. Worse more so that people like Ken and Kickstarter found a way to fucking profit off of telling men to force women to touch their genitals without their consent.

You know what? Fair point. Mea culpa. I (not personally, but as part of a group) have been correctly called on unacceptable behaviour. I will now stop engaging in said behaviour.

I’ve never been the most active user of Kickstarter, but I have funded a few things on it. As of now, I am no longer a Kickstarter user at all. I’ve deleted my account. There are other crowd funding sites, and I don’t need to be using one which supports this kind of filth (I would probably do this even if there were not other crowdfunding sites, but I admit it would be a harder choice).

But…

The thing about boycotts, is they only work if after the company has changed their ways you go back to them. Otherwise what will happen is that they will simply consider you not part of their target demographic and go after the large body of people who just don’t give enough of a shit. By returning to them after they have fixed their behaviour you are providing a positive incentive for change.

So I’m precommitting to creating a new Kickstarter account and using it to fund something as long as the following two conditions are met:

A complete apology is issued for this. No “I’m sorry people were offended” bullshit non-apologies need enter. The apology must contain words to the effect of “We’re really sorry. We fucked up. This should not have happened, and it’s totally our fault that it did”
They issue a unilateral promise to not permit similar activity in future when it is brought to their attention

(I think the ship has now sailed on blocking the money going to the rape manual, otherwise I would include that too. As such I’m willing to label it merely a very unpleasantly learned lesson and hope they actually learned it)

If they do issue that promise and go back on it, I will consider them to be irreparably corrupt, delete my account again and never go back.

I think the course of action I am taking is an extremely reasonable one, and I would encourage you to take it too. Kickstarter is an organisation that is very directly about voting with your wallet. Lets use ours to tell them that their behaviour is unacceptable and they need to do better.