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Waymo is a Cop

jwz
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Waymo Pauses Service in Downtown LA Neighborhood Where They're Getting Lit on Fire:

The fact that Waymos need to use video cameras that are constantly recording their surroundings in order to function means that police have begun to look at them as sources of surveillance footage. [...]

The fact is that police have begun to look at anything with a camera as a source of surveillance that they are entitled to for whatever reasons they choose. So even though driverless cars nominally have nothing to do with law enforcement, police are treating them as though they are their own roving surveillance cameras.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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jsled
16 days ago
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South Burlington, Vermont
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New Report Shows Cops Were Told to Escalate Violence in LA By Picturing Protesters as Their Wives and Children

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LOS ANGELES — A leaked memo from high-ranking law enforcement officials encouraged officers on the street tasked with confronting protesters to “Picture them as your wives and children” so they would be more willing to inflict extrajudicial violence.

“Don’t forget, you are a hero. People might give you the finger, spit on you, and call you a class traitor for pursuing a career on the police force, but just remember you have the upper hand because you are above the law,” read a small portion of the memo. “Some of you might still have a shred of humanity left inside of you and it can be hard to fire a tear gas canister into someone’s face from point-blank range. We encourage you to picture these lawless heathens as your wife who won’t stop nagging you, or your children who recently went non-contact with you. This will make it easier for you to get your revenge and help you sleep better at night.”

Local Los Angeles Deputy Peter Kelliher said the memo helped him through a tough day.

“We were fenced in. There were dozens of people holding phones up at us, waving flags, and talking really loud. Honestly, I was afraid for my life, but then I just pictured all of them as my bitch wife and started firing rubber bullets at the eyeballs of anyone who wasn’t wearing glasses,” said Kelliher. “Everyone else in my platoon followed suit, and soon enough we were able to heroically beat back the crowd with our strength of will, military grade body armor, and vast array of weaponry that we were encourage to fire at will.”

President Trump commended the officers on the front lines.

“Antifa is at it again. I’ve seen these guys, real bad hombres. They were there on January 6th starting a riot, but it was also a day of peace, and we love peace don’t we people? There has never been a more peaceful time in America, and we are going to make it more peaceful by putting big beautiful tanks on every street corner and aiming the barrels at any house that isn’t saluting the flag,” said Trump. “The brave police in Los Angeles will soon be joined by the Marines, really buff guys, I’ve seen these guys, I’ve felt their muscles. Almost as big as mine, close, but not as big. Doctors said my muscles are almost too big sometimes, and that’s all natural. Can you believe that?”

At press time, GOP members of the House introduced new legislation that anyone who says “Fuck ICE” will be put to death by lethal injection

The post New Report Shows Cops Were Told to Escalate Violence in LA By Picturing Protesters as Their Wives and Children appeared first on The Hard Times.

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jsled
17 days ago
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South Burlington, Vermont
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Giving software away for free

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If you want to create completely free software for other people to use, the absolute best delivery mechanism right now is static HTML and JavaScript served from a free web host with an established reputation.

Thanks to WebAssembly the set of potential software that can be served in this way is vast and, I think, under appreciated. Pyodide means we can ship client-side Python applications now!

This assumes that you would like your gift to the world to keep working for as long as possible, while granting you the freedom to lose interest and move onto other projects without needing to keep covering expenses far into the future.

Even the cheapest hosting plan requires you to monitor and update billing details every few years. Domains have to be renewed. Anything that runs server-side will inevitably need to be upgraded someday - and the longer you wait between upgrades the harder those become.

My top choice for this kind of thing in 2025 is GitHub, using GitHub Pages. It's free for public repositories and I haven't seen GitHub break a working URL that they have hosted in the 17+ years since they first launched.

A few years ago I'd have recommended Heroku on the basis that their free plan had stayed reliable for more than a decade, but Salesforce took that accumulated goodwill and incinerated it in 2022.

It almost goes without saying that you should release it under an open source license. The license alone is not enough to ensure regular human beings can make use of what you have built though: give people a link to something that works!

Tags: open-source, heroku, webassembly, javascript, web-standards, html, github, pyodide

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jsled
59 days ago
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South Burlington, Vermont
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Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy Is Flopping

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Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy Is Flopping

Advisory: This post discusses genocide and mass murder.

The Point: Yarvin Sees Doom and Failure Ahead

The accelerated destruction of the United States, the global economy, and the modern liberal democratic order is underway. Yet Curtis Yarvin – Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher,” who has been advocating such extremism for years – is disappointed. The San Francisco software programmer behind the so-called Dark Enlightenment doesn't seem to be enjoying the fruits of his own revolution. In fact, he sees failure ahead.

The Back Story: Fear and Loathing in Washington D.C.

It’s April 2025 and President Elon Musk – the CEO-dictator of the United States – is busy dismantling government. This demolition comes straight out of Yarvin’s playbook, which calls for a CEO-dictator to conduct a mass purge of government employees.

‘Reboot’ Revealed: Elon Musk’s CEO-Dictator Playbook
In 2022, one of Peter Thiel’s favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO”
Curtis Yarvin Fears His Authoritarian Fantasy Is Flopping

Though regarded by many as a mere internet troll, Yarvin – who Vice President J.D. Vance affectionately calls a “reactionary fascist” (and often quotes) – is now getting his due. His extreme theories on replacing democracy with corporate dictatorship are finally being tested in Washington. The Financial Times, the New York Times and Time Magazine have all paid homage to his role in shaping our current reality.

But there’s a problem: Yarvin is unfulfilled. Musk’s destruction of government apparently does not meet the vaunted Dark Enlightenment guru’s standards. In fact, he gives the effort a mediocre grade and says it will likely fail:

After six weeks, is Trump 47 going well? It is and it isn’t. Frankly, I give it a C-. While still far below its potential, it at least has not failed. Which is frankly amazing.

What is frustrating about this administration is that it has the opportunity to win and the strength to win, but neither (it seems) the will or the understanding to win. So, it’s going to lose. But it is not yet fated to lose.

The key issue: Yarvin doesn’t think Musk has the competence to carry out a revolutionary transformation of American government. “Not only can Elon not manage an operation on this basis – God himself could not manage it,” he writes.

Despite the ongoing destruction in Washington, Yarvin complains it’s simply not enough: 

Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power—which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.

Yarvin is a long-winded writer. This paragraph comes from a bloated, 7,000-word monstrosity titled “Barbarians and Mandarins,” published on March 6. A competent editor would slash it by 90 percent – maybe more.

The essay brims with false dichotomies, logical inconsistencies, half-baked metaphors, and allusions to genocide. It careens from Romanian tractor factories to Harvard being turned “into dust. Into quarks” with the coherence of a meth-addled squirrel.

Yarvin's fetish for authoritarian governance matches his prose: undisciplined, self-indulgent, and ultimately impotent. But I digress...

Analysis: Three Causes of Yarvin's Disappointment

Allow me to summarize Yarvin’s whiny gobbledygook in three main points:

1. He's upset that Musk/Trump aren't being authoritarian enough

While most Americans are shocked by how the current administration is breaking norms, Yarvin thinks it’s a middling effort. He wants full dictatorship:

First, the government needs to be run top-down from the Oval Office. This is why we call it the “executive” branch. “Executive” is a literal synonym of “monarchical”—from “mono,” meaning “one,” and “archy,” meaning “regime.” “Autocratic” is fine too. The “executive branch” is the “autocratic branch,” or should be if English is English. Libs: if these words don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?

According to Yarvin:

Power creates power. The more power you use, the more power you have...

In his view, half-measures are worse than nothing at all. Musk/Trump must increase the severity of “things that have never been done before” or watch their regime “wither and eventually dissipate.” The real point, he declares, is to “take power from the libs, then keep it.”

Apparently, Musk/Trump are falling short:

Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty – or, in liberal parlance, obtain their consent. That’s just how it works. You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right? That means your only option is to convince them to love you, right?

Notice the casual mention of genocide. For good measure, he links to the Wikipedia entry for foam depopulation:

Foam depopulation or foaming is a means of mass killing farm animals by spraying foam over a large area to obstruct breathing and ultimately cause suffocation. It is usually used to attempt to stop disease spread.

Yarvin has a penchant for evoking frames of genocide and violence (even though he looks like a guy who’d surrender his lunch money with nary a whimper). He stops short of calling for literal genocide – but keeps reaching for the language of it: mass death, institutional purging, systemic annihilation. And he rarely seems to notice – or care – just how grotesque that really is.

More on this is the next section.

2. He thinks the entire system needs to be “cremated” – and then rebuilt – not reformed

Yarvin has no patience for simple budget cuts and bureaucratic layoffs. He wants total destruction, followed by a radical rebuilding. Or something like that.

“DC does not need better policies,” he insists. “It needs a complete reboot—as complete as the denazification of Germany in 1945.”

For example: "Every existing institution of science, outside the scientists and the labs themselves, must be fully cremated in a nuclear autoclave."

Again with the flippant use of violent imagery. First, foaming, now crematories. Are we talking about a Holocaust?

Yarvin again uses a mass murder metaphor to describe the firing of employees at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health:

 Someone in DOGE hacked the law (hacking is good, taking dramatic actions is good) by realizing that a certain class of administrative employees in NSF and NIH, so-called ‘probationary employees,’ could be legally shot without a trial. A review of unused drainage ditches in Bethesda showed adequate excess capacity. DOGE acted. The customer service records show few or no complaints about seepage, odors, etc…

Seepage and odors? Not only does Yarvin use a killing metaphor to describe the fates of federal employees – he also fantasizes about them rotting in mass graves. A healthy mind does not do such things, and these regular invocations of death and violence say much about Yarvin. He bathes his brain in the putrefying flesh of imaginary bureaucrats. Oh, and – in a positively flaming Freudian backflip – his parents were career federal employees.

Yarvin contradicts himself often. For example, he wants everything nuked – buildings included. Yet he's oddly miffed that Musk/Trump want to shut down the Department of Education:

Why do you want to shut down the Department of Education? Don’t you want to be the one writing the “Dear Colleague” letters? Doesn’t education in the US need to be completely rebooted – from kindergarten to university? How else are you going to do that, except with all the dotted lines that come out of the Department of Education?

Apparently, it's very frustrating to be a reactionary fascist theorist without also being a reactionary fascist dictator. If you want authoritarianism done right, you must do it yourself.

3. He's learning that “revolutionaries” make terrible administrators

After years of theorizing about the overthrow of democracy, Yarvin has discovered that turning theory into practice is much harder than it looks.

Those of us with experience in government and politics already knew this. Getting a single, simple change can take years. Overthrowing the entire U.S. government? Not a task for addled, inarticulate amateurs.

Yarvin seems shocked that Musk (with zero government experience except for a reliance on government contracts) is doing such a poor job. He also seems chagrined at Trump's specific actions, like tariffs, which are throwing markets into chaos. In political terms, the whole thing is a total disaster. By early 2025, millions of Americans are marching in streets and even Republican voters are showing up at town halls to express seething anger.

Yarvin seems to have come to a stark realization: If Musk/Trump fail to destroy the democratic system, extreme anti-government pseudo-intellectuals may face a bleak future. He urgently warns them against half-assing the revolution – and reveals his own fear of what might happen when the pendulum swings in the other direction:

But in the end, it is the road toward winding up in the foam yourself—probably with me, for all my troubles. (This is what usually happens to right-wing intellectuals, actually.)

Conclusion: Yarvin Fears The Foam

Yarvin sees his desired revolution unraveling under the weight of its own stupidity. He pines for intensified destruction, but it's not clear that will happen – at least not to the extent he considers necessary. So, in creeps the fear.

In early 2025, Yarvin is coming to terms with the towering mediocrity of his ideas. His complaints about the CEO-Dictator system prove exactly why it's inferior to American democracy. Despotism is a dog with no name. Once you let it go, you can't call it back.

Ironically, Yarvin may soon find himself grateful for the very institutions – democracy, bureaucracy, and laws – he enjoys deriding. Our liberal system, imperfect as it may be, does not stack its citizens in mass graves for having terrible ideas.

The only foam Yarvin needs to fear is the flecks on the corners of his mouth. May they serve as cruel reminders of the hysteria that led him here.


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jsled
79 days ago
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South Burlington, Vermont
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tante
79 days ago
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"In early 2025, Yarvin is coming to terms with the towering mediocrity of his ideas. His complaints about the CEO-Dictator system prove exactly why it's inferior to American democracy. Despotism is a dog with no name. Once you let it go, you can't call it back."
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An Open Letter to ICE Regarding My Potential Disappearance

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Dear ICE official(s),

I noticed you recently detained your first Iranian foreign national. As a first-generation Iranian American, I’ve been conditioned to assume this is a testament to our great Persian culture. At least I’m sure that’s what my dad will say. Is he from Shiraz?

I just had a few questions ahead of any potential deportation and/or the disappearance of myself or my family members.

I know a lot of people might criticize your lack of a formal DEI initiative, but I want to commend the diversity of the first batch of students you’re detaining. It’s like the cast of The Sex Lives of College Girls, if you swapped the white girls for a South Korean and a Palestinian.

Speaking of college, are you deporting only Western, South, and Eastern Asians (and Muslim Africans) with impressive educations? I noticed that, thus far, most of them are pursuing their PhDs. If it helps, despite pleas from my dad, I have no interest in being an MD or PhD.

I also noticed the students are in fields like mechanical engineering or have elite credentials like being a Fulbright Scholar. Again, my dad really wanted me to pursue that path. “Just get a business degree,” he told me. “What about being a lawyer?” he asked. I think he would have settled for a minor in business. But I just got an English degree, and my GPA was not great. Does that help my case?

Also, are you deporting only these legal residents with ties to college campuses, or do you plan on expanding to other places, like cultural centers or the Halal Guys?

I guess what I’m wondering is, are you super committed to universities, and what would you consider a “tie” to a university? If I go to a college campus once a week to take my kids to piano lessons, will you abduct me there, or is this really more to instill fear in all of the “good” immigrants that come to the United States to share their talents here instead of staying at home? Like, is this just an attack on the brain drain that benefits America?

I want to emphasize again that I only have an English degree. Yes, I ended up getting a master’s, but that was in social work, so again, really nothing to see here.

Speaking of preparation, I noticed you’re starting to use plainclothes agents. Bold move. Way to instill fear. Is there any sort of uniform hoodie we should be aware of, or just generally be afraid of any hooded white guys? I actually was already afraid of them, but honestly, I usually felt okay in broad daylight in a public place. Thank you for reminding me that I was never really safe.

Hypothetically speaking, if my Iranian dad had a relationship with a blonde American from the Midwest, thereby ending in my conception, will my 23andMe DNA results be taken into account when choosing what country to deport me to? Or do you detain/deport/disappear based on the highest percentage?

I deleted my 23andMe account out of concern for my data privacy, but on the off chance it will help me make my case, let me go ahead and disclose I’m actually only 49.7 percent Iranian. (I’m 0.5 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, so I physically can’t be antisemitic.) I’m 40.1 percent British and Irish.

If it’s possible to make a request, I wouldn’t mind Ireland. I know it’s not perfect, but they have access to abortion. Also, they speak out against genocide. Of course, I guess that’s what made me a target in the first place.

Thanks for your help,
Saba Khonsari

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jsled
86 days ago
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A Modern Approach to Hit Points and Communicating Damage

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The relationship between game designers and hit points is a complex one. Whether in digital or pen-and-paper, hit points tend to be the structural unit that defines a player character or obstacle’s resilience, and has become how we conceptualise and communicate damage and interactive effects between designer and player. And frankly, I find that a little uninspiring, and sometimes, a little predatory.

This describes a slightly orthogonal approach to hit points, and ends with a design challenge that attempts to remove hit points entirely.

Hit Points in Use

There are three main uses for Hit Points within a game:

  1. Increasing time-to-kill

  2. Granularity

  3. Comparative abstraction

Increasing time-to-kill is about putting a step between the player interacting with a dangerous position, and ending a play session. In Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003), a player steps out of cover, takes a few rounds, and returns fire. The game has effectively communicated risk and danger, and “punished” the player without ending play. This use of hit points to extend a play session was part of their original design intent by Dave Arneson in drafting first editions of Dungeons and Dragons (TSR, 1974): “a chance to live longer and do more.” Hit Points provide a way for a “violent-state” world to interact negatively upon a character without removing the character from play. In the same way, increased hit points let enemies stay around longer, requiring more interactions from the player to change the playstate.

Granularity is about giving a data set more “steps” to pass through in order to differentiate states. For example, a character with 100 hit points theoretically has 101 states to pass through (including 0 hit points). This gives game designers a dial to tweak: an attack that does 70 damage is fundamentally different to the play experience than an attack that does 30 damage. This is why the old design adage warns us away from 1s and 2s: They remove granularity of playstate. They also interact with the next usage:

Comparative abstraction describes the use of hit points as a way to express how things are diegetically or narratively different from each other. A paladin is “tougher” than a wizard because a paladin has 100 hit points, and a wizard has 20 hit points. A dragon is a “more powerful” baddie because the dragon does 6d6 damage to a players hitpoints, while a goblin does 1d6. By having a spread of numbers, we can describe things as “calculably different” or “different in scale”.

Granularity and Changing States

You may notice that only the first one in that list is a functional difference. The other two are structural differences. To show you what I mean, let’s imagine a game where one character has 2 hit points, and another character has 4 hit points, twice as tough. We meet both conditions for Granularity and Comparative Abstraction: We have dials, and those dials "say something” about the diegesis. However, these structural difference don’t mean anything if all enemy attacks do 100 damage. In all cases, the time-to-kill is immediate, and the characters are functionally identical. Hit points, though they may be coded into the game, are not a part of the functional player experience.

Let’s extend this one step further. Consider a game with two weapons: The starting minipistol, and the upgraded hand cannon that we’ll call the MEGAPISTOL! For ease, these weapons are identical except for their damage stat. If enemies have 100hp, and the minipistol does 50hp of damage, then the megapistol HAS to do 100hp of damage. This is because players don’t experience enemy hp as a number of hit points, they experience it as a number of interactions required to change the game state. If the minipistol (doing 50hp of damge) and the megapistol (doing 70hp of damage) both take 2 shots to kill an enemy, then they are functionally the same to the player. I acknowledge there are other dials to turn, like number of bullets or reload time, but I’m keeping this discussion along a single axis to discuss the use of hit points.

The takeaway lesson, then, is that hit point granularity (and thus, the comparative abstraction between different weapons or enemies) doesn’t mean anything on its own. We can’t have comparative abstraction by granularity of numbers, but rather comparative abstraction by granularity of game states. Players experience these game states by presence or absence, which means the addition of a measurable unit adds two game states: Presence and Absence. In the case of hit points, Alive or Dead. But a designer can define stages along that measurable unit to add additional states, and again because of presence and absence, it leaves us with this note: For every game state defined by a measurable unit, there is also a state defined by its absence.

The options provided by that definition of game state is a magical opportunity. I’m so frustrated by our obsession with a binary of “active vs inactive” game states. In Call of Duty I am as effective after taking one round as I am beforehand. In Dungeons and Dragons the dragon and the wizard are both dealing full damage until one side loses their final hit point. Now, for a game like Call of Duty, with a short time-to-kill (usually within a quarter of a second), this lack of granularity is perfect. Players cannot consider the change of game states within a firefight. Spray, as they say, and pray. This is not a tactical approach. However in Chess (yeah, I’m not putting a year here), the game state is usually measured with much finer comparative granularity. Material (how many pieces), Position (more activated pieces), Time (in timed games), or better Endgame availability are all the “hit points” of Chess. While a knight and a bishop are both valued at “3 points”, any player of experience would rate one higher at different states of play. The pace of the game allows that considered approach to comparative abstractions.

So why, in tactical games that have a more considered flow, like XCOM (2013), Wildermyth (2020), and yeah, Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition (2014), do we not support the player in developing other interesting game states?

Additional States Generate Additional Play Experiences

Pew, pew. I shoot a laser beam from my sword, giving me and Link a ranged attack against these more dangerous enemies. Across the series (but starting at the start) The Legend of Zelda (1986) has included a game state where an Undamaged (full hit points) Link can shoot a beam from the sword. Placing a game state at the top end of hit points rewards mastery, and gives a low-risk bonus to players that are able to get through a level without taking damage.

I love Games Done Quick and the work they put in, and there’s an interesting state change in Pokemon Red (1996) that is only utilised in the speedrun. When a pokemon is on critically low health (“Red Bar”), the game preferences the two-tone health warning music over pokemon cries and level-up jingles. This creates a “faster state” where the following have to be true:

  1. The player has to take enough damage to be put into “red bar”

  2. The player cannot take enough damage to make their pokemon faint

  3. The player must maintain this state throughout subsequent fights.

Placing the beneficial game state at the lower end of health has created a high-risk, high-reward position that players will need expertise to juggle.

Opportunities to Consider

Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal (2020) meets Pokemon’s Red Bar

Doom lives and dies (pardon the pun) off a health system that drives the player forward. In Doom, players regain health by performing melee kills against weakened enemies.

AND
IT
IS
AWESOME!

I can’t speak highly enough of this Glory Kill System, but now I want to ask, what happens if we give Doom Guy a few states to pass through? Given the dynamic up-and-down bounce of health, I think it’s appropriate to utilise a single additional state, at the bottom end of the hit point pool, maybe the last 25%. When players are in this critically reduced health state, their damage is increased by 100% through a “berserk” feature.

The granularity dials of hit points interact with this too. Players on low difficulty, where monsters do less damage, will find it easier to remain in this “Red Bar” state take advantage of this benefit, giving players who are “Too Young To Die” the opportunity to feel powerful and have “clutch comebacks” against dangerous monsters. It does not, however, engage with comparative abstraction as only one character (the player character) is engaging with this mechanic.

However, because we’re placing it at the back-end of hit points, players on harder difficulties will find it more difficult to be safely put into the state, and more difficult to maintain it without dying, but where they can maintain it, will be able to take great advantage of the bonus it provides.

Major risks will be by making a change to health as an incentive, players may not be as willing to engage in Glory Kills and maintain the momentum the game holds so dear. Given that we don’t see players preserving health by hiding away from combat while at full, I think it is an unlikely outcome, but one to look out for nonetheless.

Dungeons and regaining dynamic states of Dragon health

The fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons (2008) had a monster state called “bloodied”. All monsters would enter bloodied at the same state, defined by having half hit points remaining. This state gave descriptive granularity to the GM (players would want a fictional bark that described the character as wounded), and comparative abstraction as some monsters became more dangerous when bloodied, and some became less dangerous.

Given the exceptionally low time-to-kill in Dungeons and Dragons, I suggest that baddies may even have more states. Rather than using Bloodied as a binary on/off switch for abilities and recharges, there is the option for a state that is “Wounded”. Remember I said when measuring you can create a state by presence and absence. This could be a state where the monster was not at full hit points (ie where the “full health” state was absent); when the monster has taken some damage, but not enough to be considered something as critical as “Bloodied”. This provides an option for turning on or off early-round threats, or showing a monster ablating under the withering attacks of the Player Characters. A gorgon (the magical armoured cow version) may start with an Armour Class (AC) of 20, quite high. But after that first big hit, that ablates to 16, when Scathed. The extra granularity of states gives us an early bark, and gives the Gorgon an interesting early advantage to show it’s metallic resilience without dragging out a fight.

Four Damage States to Consider in Future Designs

Unhurt

A stage designed for alpha strike threats and ablative skills. Unhurt is defined as “not notably damaged", this includes not having taken damage, but also having received little scratches. A dragon with a sword through a scale may remain “unhurt” for extra comparative abstraction (“look how tough it is!”).

Unhurt is excellent for when the Designer wants to provide a high-interest threat that grabs attention immediately, where you want to draw player attention and make a splash, but not create an overpowering threat.

Alternatively, Unhurt provides an option for a slow, creeping threat. Something that doesn’t reveal its full hand of cards until the fight has already started.

Usage:
“The Ferret Armoured Scout Car has extra speed while Unhurt”.
”The Shapeshifter does not need to make checks to maintain its form while Unhurt”.

Bloodied/Scathed/Damaged

This is “noticably damaged”. “Shit, that hurt” but “I’ve had worse”. It’s a wound, it’s pain, but it’s mostly cosmetic damage. A secret agent with a round through the bicep. It’s Daredevil taking Elektra’s sai through his shoulder in the 2003 film and then fighting Bullseye minutes later with no noticeable consequence. I like shifting the term “Bloodied” earlier in the piece to increase the impact of combat. Bloodied, to me, is the villain with a split lip, tasting their own blood from their finger (or dramatically snapping their fingers). They’re not down, not even half, in fact, they’re just getting started.

Bloodied is an ideal state for showing the “adrenaline surge” of combat. You’re not going to wait until you’ve taken real damage to get that blood pumping, are you?

Usage:
”A Bloodied Barbarian adds 1d4 damage to their attacks as their humours get up.”
”A Bloodied player’s Hunger bar decreases more slowly.”

Wounded

Wounded is wrecked. Ruined. Lost limbs. For some characters this dips down on the power curve, for others it spikes up (comparative abstraction). Wounded should feel big, and depending on game tone, messy. Wounded is a great place for barks and VFX to be reactive of the situation a character has gone through: An orc ravaged by Legolas’ arrows should LOOK a different Wounded to one hit by Gimli’s axe.

Wounded is a state for showing things are nearing the end of their life, so don’t hold back on your design choices here. It’s a good place for sentient characters to break and run, or surrender like in Griftlands (Klei Entertainment, 2021). It’s also a great place for those big bloodlusty threats to dig in and fight with all of their remaining vigor.

Usage:
”The Predator gets -4 defence when Wounded - ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it.’”
”The ogre cannibal does double damage when Wounded.”

Dead

is dead. It’s an absence. It’s the punitive state or the win condition. It’s a bottom-out, rather than a functional state in itself.

Usage:
”You died” - Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2011)

Conclusion

Players think in game states, they talk to each other in game states. Let’s let them play in game states. Numbers are a wonderful tool, that I will never begrudge the use of in games, but let’s not make them our primary communication method.

There is an argument to be made that this approach recreates HP, with my 4 states acting as a 4 hp system, and I can see what that’s saying, but it’s actually a result of hp being conceptualised as changing game state for so long. We’ve become conditioned to seeing the little white numbers pop up above that boss and consider it progress.

What I’m suggesting is not so much a change in structural approach, but a change in how we communicate these outcomes to players. Even if numbers remain in the game as the structural building blocks that make damage and health happen, I’m asking us to conceptualise damage as a changing condition of the player’s play experience, not as a changing condition of an abacus.

Design Challenge

If we have four functional states, do we need hit points at all? Let’s, as an exercise, take this to the furthest conclusion of replacing hit points with states entirely. Consider a game that uses hit points as it stands, and think about whether it could instead deliver the same experience with these states instead?

The answer won’t be yes for everyone, but as a design challenge, this will flex your understanding of how players functionally experience the dynamic movement of health for both goodies and baddies.

When you find a game that could do this, draft up some paper-prototype rules for how you would implement this, and review them using the first three elements we discussed:

  1. Time-to-kill - Does this dramatically change the flow of combat in this game? Does the new flow meet design intent?

  2. Granularity - Are there enough states to use as a dial to respond to player choices? Maybe there’s too many and you don’t need both Bloodied and Wounded? What else could you tune to make weapons feel different now that you can’t just add a “+4 damage” sticker and colour it blue?

  3. Comparative Abstraction - How do the states make enemies feel different to each other? Are Bloodied enemies functionally different for players than Unhurt enemies?

Sample thoughts:

XCOM could easily use Unhurt, Wounded, Bloodied, and Dead, maybe even maintaining its Bleeding out/Dead split that is rolled when a friendly operative reaches 0 hit points.

Some draft rules would include:
Phalanx characters (with shields) ignore changes of state from the front 180 degree arc.
A sniper rifle critical sets the target’s state to Dead.
All other crits double state movement.
Light weapons (pistols) do one state of damage
Assault weapons (rifles, smgs) do two states of damage
Heavy weapons do three states of damage.
A flanked enemy takes one additional state of damage.
A Faceless (big gooey tough enemy) requires two consecutive hits in a round to move from Unhurt

Maybe a fun additional mechanic called “cued shot”, where operators line their shot up with each other to break through defensive enemies? We could also tie this in with XCOM 2’s Bonds system that joins pairs of soldiers together as bffs.

Against our criteria:

  1. Time-to-kill remains roughly the same. An assault rifle with an appropriate tech level will move default enemies two states, which means two shots to kill, unless you crit. That’s about where it is. There’s some tweaking around an assault rifle crit doing 3 or 4 “states”, meaning one or two hits to kill, but I’d be happy to take that to playtesting.

  2. Granularity is I think maybe a little weak. XCOM is a GREAT test for this, because one of its most fun elements was enemy variety. However, that’s also a good teaching point for this kind of health system. A 4 hit point “Thin Man” (acid spitting guy in suit) is a functionally different enemy to a 4 hit point “Floater” (jetpack cyborgs who can zoom behind your cover to flank). They even use the same weapon (the light plasma rifle), but given the other dials left to turn, they still feel totally different to play against. For this reason I want to keep an eye on granularity during playtesting.

  3. Comparative Abstraction is a tough one to decide on my own because it’s so much about feeling. I can make guesses, but I might not be able to accurately predict a player’s understanding of the abstraction at play. I think one of the hardest abstractions to communicate will be increasing damage by tech level. In base XCOM this is simple to communicate: a floater has 4 health. A heavy floater has 14 health. Each still takes either one shot from a heavy weapon or two shots from light weapons (as player technology advances along the same rate as alien reveals) but the player can easily see that change just by the number of bars at the top. This would probably be won and lost in the missions between where a player upgrades their equipment and then when the player encounters Heavy Floaters (or, for the unfortunate souls, vice versa). That emotional impact still lands in base XCOM, and the advantage here is that it would be communicated with barks and vfx versus some white numbers floating above the enemy’s head.

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jsled
95 days ago
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South Burlington, Vermont
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