Bits and pieces of small changes

doc/Appraisal.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+# Appraisal
+
+## What is Appraisal
+
+There's an thing that all non player characters can do, which varies greatly from person to person, and which is of particular importance to merchants, and that is appraisal.
+
+Each category of goods has different dimensions of quality. A sword may be evaluated, for example, on
+
+| Dimension            | Better is                          | Ease of appraisal |
+| -------------------- | ---------------------------------- | ----------------- |
+| Hardness             | More                               | Difficult         |
+| Toughness            | More                               | Difficult         |
+| Wear                 | Less                               | Intermediate      |
+| Weight               | There's a sweet spot, but it's low | Easy              |
+| Length               | Judgement call                     | Easy              |
+| Decoration/Showiness | Judgement call                     | Intermediate      |
+| Workmanship          | Better                             | Intermediate      |
+
+A person learns to appraise the qualities of a sword by having direct experience of swords with a range of values for the particular quality. A person who's only ever handled one sword does not know whether that sword heavy or light, pristine or worn. However, once a person has handled a dozen swords of different weights, they'll have some idea of what weight an average sword is, even if their idea may actually be a little off. Weight and length are easy to assess. 
+
+Similarly, once someone has handled a few dozen swords with different degrees of wear, will have an idea of how many chips, how much corrosion or pitting, is normal. Wear is harder to assess, but it doesn't need particular techniques or skills to assess, just observation. To assess hardness, you really need to have sharpened the blade and then used it to the extent that it needs sharpening again, but if you've handled a lot of blades of varying qualities you may associate patterns in the steel, such as pattern welding, damascus steel, or a hamun, or particular markers' marks, with varying hardnesses. Toughness is even harder to assess (without actually chipping or breaking the blade) and is really going to come down to recognising either high quality steels or particular makers' marks.
+
+## Developing appraisal skill
+
+So: how does one gain experience? I'm going to assume that anyone who's bought a sword has handled it before making the choice. That anyone who's survived on the winning side f a battle unwounded will also have handled eight of each type of weapon used, for each such battle (the victors will have the pick of the spoils on the battlefield). That a weapon smith has handled sixteen for each year they've been working. And possibly that a master weapon smith will at least examine more weapons in a year than a journeyman, who will at least examing more than an apprentice. But, essentially, appraisal skill develops with exposure to items in the particular category. The exact mechanism for tracking this I'm unsure of, because there is a tradeoff between richness of records and data compactness, and this game looks like getting rather big.
+
+Of course, some people may be more observant than others, so it's possible that some people may gain appraisal skill on the basis of less exposure than others. But at this moment that's not a thing I'm planning to model.
+
+## What does appraisal skill by you?
+
+In any category of goods, some individual items are better than others, and this difference may be significant. A person with good appraisal skill will recognise this difference. So a person with good skills, offered two items at the same price, will be able to select the better one; if bargaining for an item, will be prepared to offer a higher price for the better one; if selling items, will be prepared to sell the better one only for a higher price.
+
+Price arbitrage is how a static merchant makes money.

doc/Division of tasks between server and client.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+# Division of tasks between server and client
+
+## What do I mean by the 'server'?
+
+There is something which manages game state and things like the gossip network, merchant network, and major world events. This something is almost certainly written in some form of Lisp; I'd prefer Clojure but I don't think it's performant enough so probably Common Lisp. This means that it has inevitable pauses for garbage collection. Underneath this is a database which handles persistent storage of game state, which is probably an SQL database and quite likely [SQLite](https://www.sqlite.org/index.html). 
+
+The initial idea of The Great Game is that it is a single player game, but it actually doesn't need to be and it would be quite possible for one server to support multiple clients, each being used by a different player. 
+
+## What do I mean by the client?
+
+There is something that renders an interesting and lively display of the part of the game world that the player can see from their current position. This display has to run without significant pauses — it's not OK, for example, for all conversation to stop suddenly in a market place just because the server is garbage collecting.
+
+The client is written in some high level game engine system, possibly Unreal Engine (although for ideological reasons I'd prefer an open source one). 
+
+
+

doc/Dynamic-consequences.md

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ My vision for The Great Game is different. It is that the economy - and with it,
 
 As Role Playing Games have moved towards open worlds - where the player's movement in the environment is relatively unconstrained - the clockwork has become strained. The player has to get to particular locations where particular events happen, and so the player has to be very heavily signposted. Sometimes the mark you have to hit to trigger the next advance of the plot can be extremely awkward; [an example from Cyberpunk 2077](https://youtu.be/GEYkuctBUYE?t=2990) is finding the right spot, in the quest 'They Won't Go When I Go', to trigger the button which raises the cross. 
 
-Another solution - which I'd like to explore - is 'plot follows character'. The player is free to wander at will in the world, and plot relevant events will happen on their path. And by that I don't mean that we associate a set of non-player characters which each quest - as current Role Playing Games do - and then uproot the whole set from wherever they normally live in the world and dumping down in the player's path; but rather, for each role in a quest or plot event, we define a set of characteristics required to fulfill that role, and then, when the player comes to a place where there are a set of characters who have those characteristics, the quest or plot event will happen.
+Another solution - which I'd like to explore - is 'plot follows character'. The player is free to wander at will in the world, and plot relevant events will happen on their path. And by that I don't mean that we associate a set of non-player characters which each quest - as current Role Playing Games do - and then uproot the whole set from wherever they normally live in the world and dump them down in the player's path; but rather, for each role in a quest or plot event, we define a set of characteristics required to fulfil that role, and then, when the player comes to a place where there are a set of characters who have those characteristics, the quest or plot event will happen.
 
 ## Cut scenes, cinematics and rewarding the player
 

doc/On-sex-and-sexual-violence.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+# On Sex, and Sexual Violence, in Games
+
+For me the purpose of games is to provide worlds in which players can explore moral actions, and the consequences of moral actions. Sexual violence is something that happens in the real world, and which happens, even within the real world, more frequently in areas of poor governance and open conflict; and those are areas in which there are important moral actions, and important moral consequences, so they are areas in which it is interesting to set games.
+
+It would be ludicrous to argue 'sexual violence is wrong, therefore we should not represent it in games.' Killing people is also wrong, yet it is extremely common in games. However, sexual violence — and in particular the representation of sexual violence — does pose some specific problems that need to be addressed.
+
+Firstly, sexual violence is extremely gendered. Yes, male people are sometimes subjected to sexual violence, but nevertheless the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual violence are female. Yes, female people are sometimes — extraordinarily rarely, but sometimes — perpetrators of sexual violence, but nevertheless perpetrators of sexual violence are almost exclusively male.
+
+Secondly, it is extremely tricky to represent sexual violence in visual media without eroticising it. There's a [very famous scene in Last Tango in Paris](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/last-tango-in-paris-butter-scene-b2270513.html) which the director might claim is consented in context, but which appears to me to be a clear case of anal rape, which is nevertheless highly erotic. There's a scene in [High Plains Drifter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Plains_Drifter#Plot) where no part of the rape is actually represented — it happens off screen — but it is nevertheless perceived by many people (including me) as eroticised. Many people — I suspect more men than women, but certainly including women — do find the idea of rape erotic. It seems to me highly undesirable that a game should be seen to be rewarding immoral action.
+
+(Yes, I know many modern games do quite explicitly reward killing, including of characters whose culpability is at best trivial, but — surely — this is something we should be seeking to move away from.)
+
+## Subtlety and Nuance
+
+A final issue here is that sexual interactions between people are subtle, and are subtle even around issues of consent. A less powerful person (normally a woman) — alone or as a member of a weak party, a party of perhaps older people, other women, children — may submit to sex with more powerful others without protest in order to protect others in their party, or to avoid death or serious injury, or to avoid starvation, or to escape debt. Do any of these things truly count as consent?
+
+Again, a less powerful person may submit to sex with more powerful others transactionally in return to protection, or shelter, or food, or other resources. In modern society we might see this as sex work, and we might argue that sex work falls into the same moral category as any other labour entered into transactionally. But, generally, is it moral that people should be put into a position where their survival depends on their ability to sell any sort of unwilling labour?
+
+(This is not to deny that some people, who do have secure living conditions or who could choose to do other things in order to gain secure living conditions do choose, willingly and voluntarily, to engage in sex work; and it isn't to criticise those people in any way).
+
+Games are not very good at subtly and nuance. When, while playing a game, the character who is our avatar in the game, who we thought we were controlling, does something which we didn't intend them to do, it's very wrenching and immersion-breaking.
+
+At the same time, if other characters in the game interpret something the player's character has done as sexual violence when the player did not intend sexual violence, that's also undesirable.
+
+So, questions:
+
+## Sex between non-player characters
+
+People have sex. If people didn't have sex, there wouldn't be people; but more, if people didn't have sex, there wouldn't be (many) stories, since most stories are driven at least in part by sex. So pretending that non-player characters don't have sex is worse than unrealistic. 
+
+We live in a pathologically repressed society, in which open sex — sex in public places, sex with other people present — is rare, is seen as deviant, is (perhaps in consequence) highly eroticised. Does that mean that all the societies we represent in our games must be similarly repressed?
+
+I would argue strongly to the contrary. Games are environments in which we can explore moral possibilities, and a society in which public sexuality was normal is clearly a possibility. Would such a society be a better society? Games are a mechanism through which we can ask that question, and questions of that sort. 
+
+If we're going to represent a society in which public sex is normal, then we're going to have to represent public sex on screen. It can take one of many forms:
+
+1. Sex as normal activity — it's just going on in the background, and no other non-player characters pay much attention;
+2. Sex as conscious performance — sex where the participants intend to be watched, and other non-player characters do pay attention (this may include consciously eroticised performance);
+3. Sex as part of a religious or other ritual event — this is related to, and is, sex as conscious performance, but the purpose of the performance is symbolic and/or sacramental. This doesn't mean it is not eroticised, but it may not be eroticised.
+
+By 'eroticised', I'm meaning deliberately intended to trigger sexual feelings in the audience — which, if the player character is present, includes the player.
+
+## Sexual violence between non-player characters
+
+In a world in which there are characters who are thuggish, who seek to dominate, terrorise and subdue other characters, whether those characters are outlaws or soldiers or aristocrats, to pretend that rape would not be used as a means to dominate, terrorise or subdue is… bowdlerisation. It's unrealistic, and it's a morally indefensible choice.
+
+So there has to be a mechanism for non-player characters to decide to commit acts of sexual violence towards other non-player characters. The player must at least hear of such events through the gossip network, and should be able to find the specific non-player characters involved, and speak to them. Whether it's necessary to portray acts of sexual violence on screen is something I'm much less persuaded by, simply because it runs the risk of eroticising them.
+
+## Mutually consented sexual activity between the player character and non-player characters
+
+Mutually consented sexual behaviour between the player character and (certain, scripted) non-player characters has been a feature of video games for some time, and has occasionally been portrayed with real sensitivity and eroticism. Two cases I would point to are 
+
+1. The sex scene between Geralt and Shani in [The Witcher]()
+
+## Sexual violence from the player character towards non-player characters
+

doc/on-dying.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-# On Dying
+# On Dying, and Injury
 
 Death is the end of your story. One of the tropes in games which, for me, most breaks immersion is when you lose a fight and are presented with a screen that says 'you are dead. Do you want to reload your last save?' Life is not like that. We do not have save-states. We die.
 

workspace.code-workspace

@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
 		}
 	],
 	"settings": {
-		"java.configuration.updateBuildConfiguration": "automatic"
+		"java.configuration.updateBuildConfiguration": "automatic",
+		"java.compile.nullAnalysis.mode": "automatic"
 	}
 }