Simulating public opinion in a game
The demonstration (in Russian) of a technical prototype of manipulating public opinion and explanation of how it works.
I continue participating in World Builders school. For the last month, I've created a technical prototype of game mechanics for manipulating public opinion.
You play as the chief editor of a news agency, who sends journalists on quests and publishes articles based on the results of investigations focusing on themes that you want to promote.
The top video is in Russian, so I'll go through the main points below.
Procedural news headlines without complex text generation
A screenshot of the interface for selecting a news connotation (from the prototype of the game about a news agency). News: the arrest of a teenage witch for drunk driving.
From the player preference survey, I gradually moved on to working on a game prototype.
The game will be about a news agency. You will be the chief editor, and your task is to manipulate public opinion by investigating events and choosing a connotation of news: where to draw the public's attention, what to hide, in what tone to present themes, etc.
Therefore, the whole game will be around the text of news.
Creating large blocks of detailed text for each news item looks pointless — the game is not about reading news but about managing them. Therefore, it makes sense to build interaction only around headlines.
But how can we make the displaying of news both interesting and simple?
About the book "Economics: The User's Guide"
Cover of the book "Economics: The User's Guide"
This is the second book by Ha-Joon Chang that I've read. The first one, Bad Samaritans [ru], left a good impression, and it was also positively reviewed by Tim O'Reilly in his book WTF? [ru]. So, "Economics: The User's Guide" took its place on my reading list, and finally, I have read it.
Here and further, all quotes point to the Russian edition of the book and are translated into English by me (I have only the Russian edition) => inconsistencies are possible because of double translation English->Russian->English.
According to Chang, the book was conceived as an "introduction to economic theory for the widest possible audience" (page 299), and this reflects its essence well. I would only add, from the perspective of my post-Soviet education, that the book looks more like an "overview of the diversity and complexity of economics, supplemented with an introduction to the theory" rather than an "introduction to the theory".
The book contains no mathematical formulas or jaw-dropping statistics, just concrete facts. What makes it valuable, however, is a set of prisms through which you can — and should — view the economy to gain a basic understanding of what's happening around you.
Chan provides a set of points of view through which you can examine economic processes; describes their advantages and disadvantages; accompanies all this with examples, historical references, and facts.
Since the book serves as a sort of textbook, I won't attempt to retell it in full — this would lead to an attempt to repeat the book in a couple of pages, and I definitely can't do that. I will limit myself to describing the author's view of the economy as a whole as I understood it.
Cleaning up the results of the strategy players survey
The survey was targeted at the fans of strategy games. It seems, I was able to find audience quite accurately.
Recently I asked you to fill in a survey about strategy games.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to do this. It's time to share the results.
363 respondents filled in the survey. 304 answers remained after data normalization and cleaning.
There will be two posts:
- This one — about the methodology of data collection and processing, and their cleaning. Cleaned data will be shared.
- The next one — about the analysis of the results.
Hello, World!
Nice to meet you, friends!
My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)
A few words about me:
- By occupation, I am a software developer, mostly backend, mainly in Python.
- For most of my career, I've been working in game development on big projects and own indie games.
- I like playing games, reading books, and writing long-reads about partially complex topics.
You can find more about me:
- In the about page
- In my GitHub profile: github.com/tiendil
- In the LinkedIn profile: linkedin.com/in/tiendil
This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!
Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.
Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.