Games And Metrics

Shall We Play A Game?

Jon Peterson | Asterisk | 22nd April 2026

Conversation with an expert in simulated combat, encompassing 18C Prussian wargames, Dungeons & Dragons, AI, and more. Interesting throughout. "Don't sell the role-playing in 1824 short. The game was actually played in the feedback loop, in the dialogue. A referee gives you a situation, you play a commander, you are roleplaying somebody in the field. It’s a level of role-playing purity" (3,900 words)

Puzzle: Play Nomido, the Browser’s daily word game.

The Half-Life Of Metrics

Matt Duffy | Signal-Noise Ratio | 21st April 2026

Civilisation is data-driven: we know this from Rome, Egypt and countless other examples. But sentiment, "the actual mood of the citizenry", has always been hard to track other than by proxy. For a time, metrics like GDP or crime rate work for this. Then the metric begins to decay. Crime is going down, but people feel less safe. The economy booms, but they feel poor. Numbers need retirement, too (2,000 words)