Pouch Deposits

A "Year in Review" issue is hardly ground-breaking but it is effective when gauging a year's worth of work. My work? Hardly. The Zine has and always will be all about you!  You the readers. You the authors. You the note writers. You the players.

In a year's time, you the readers, authors, writers, and players responded to topics such as RT juggernauts, western triples, dip etiquette, stalemate lines, 1900, 1913, the Grand Prix, "North Sea to Picardy", and the Sherlock Holmes to name a few. Speaking of Holmes, the "Case of the False Start" remains outstanding. Who is going to be the first to solve this little mystery and extend the Sultan of Suwat's lease, huh?

This year-end issue features topics on "Diplomacy Without A Board", JDPR, meta-gaming, Eliminating the Paradox in Diplomacy and of course, General mail. Make no mistake, there was nothing general about what you had to say.

Please let the Zine and it's editor know what you thought about the Pouch in 2002.

On occasion, a question or challenge will be posed to The Pouch audience illiciting thoughts, comments, and/or continued discussion. Don't hesitate to respond. Remember, this is your opportunity to be heard, to voice your opinion -- the reader's forum. Let The Pouch (dippouch@devel.diplom.org) know what you think. Here's what a few of you had to say:
 
 

Erlend Janbu (janbu@online.no) writes about the Zine:

Great work, Edward. Very nice to have a zine like the Pouch back on track with zines every "season"!

Edward Hawthorne's (edward@diplom.org) response:

Thanks for the support and gracious compliments. As I told Manus, it's been all my pleasure.

Philip Thomas (p.a.h.thomas@durham.ac.uk) writes:

Sitting reading through your wonderful online magazine, I thought up a new variant (well new to me). I wanted to 1) preserve the original map as far as possible, 2) ensure no two powers have scs adjacent to each other and  3) make sure all powers have 3 of their scs adjacent to two others (like Austria, Germany and Turkey have in the original setup).

The result has just 6 changes from the original:

1. The Sc (and starting Italian Fleet) in Naples is moved to Tuscany
2. The Sc (and starting Italian army) in Rome is moved to Piedmont
3. The Sc (and starting French army) in Marseilles is moved to Picardy
4. The Sc (and starting English fleet) in London is moved to Yorkshire
5. The Sc (and starting Russian army) in Warsaw is moved to Livonia
6. The Sc in Trieste is moved to Galicia; Austria Hungary's starting F(Tri), becomes A(Gal)

Crazy? Probably. Balance destroying? Almost certainly. But I'd be interested to see any comments....

Jon Hills (jhills@justlaw.co.uk) writes about the Zine:

As a novice player, or rather a novice player introduced to the game years ago and only now looking to pick it up again, I haven't got a clue how any of the ratings systems work. I would expect, though, that any rating system reflected the diplomatic skills employed to achieve the given result. The problem is getting the balance right.

Obviously, solos should be worth more than draws, but is a high number draw harder to achieve diplomatically than a two-way? Alternatively, does a high number draw reveal a diplomatic failing on the part of any or all the participants?

To pick up Bill White's comments though, I can't see why the style of game play should change simply by recognising draws as well as solos. Surely we all play to get the best result we can - win lose or draw. As someone at lot wiser then me has already written, we usually start by wanting to win, and revise our expectations down from there according to the game position. Recognising such a deterioration in one's position, and altering strategy accordingly is integral to the game, although preventing it in the first place is better.

I am not anti-Soloist in expecting that draws be recognised, simply that I would want my time and effort rewarded. Nobody could reasonably expect draws to be valued as highly as solos.

As for meta-gaming - that's a red herring in my book. Anyone concerned with their player rating surely wants it to be as good as possible. To deliberately contrive a situation where two or more players colluded so as to improve their individual ratings would be absurd. Why would they bother? Even if it were succesful, such a scam would require such superior intellect to conceive that the owner would probably be more than capable of achieving the same result by the "traditional" route.

The DJPR should be very useful in determining your approach to the game, it's just that there are six players to consider. Using the ranking information may lead you to be more or less inclined to ally with an individual or make you wary of possible coalitions. You might combine against the next highest ranked player to give your rating a boost, or gratefulyy accept a draw from the top seed. Whatever the permutations, this isn't cheating but simply using all the available information to form your judgement.

No doubt someone out there will disagree!

Brandon Clarke (bjc@stevensons.co.nz) writes:

Hi Nathan,

Pretty damn good article that... a topic as big as Ben Hur, and I think you did it quite a lot of justice. Well done indeed.

There were two areas, near the end of the article, where I stopped nodding and thought, "nah, he's lost the plot now"....

The first was when you said:

"PBEM, by its very nature, reduces Diplomacy down to faceless statistics and probability."

I suspect you might have been talking about NoPress PBEM Diplomacy, in which case your comments are a little more understandable. If on the ther hand you were talking about Press PBEM Diplomacy I'd have to disagree almost completely. While I would acknowledge that you have more channels of communication open to you in FtF play than you typically do in PBEM play, such as body language, tone, speed of speech etc., to conclude from that that PBEM play is simply all faceless statistics and probability is rather rich. I have made some incredibly in depth friendships playing PBEM Press Diplomacy and got to know people extremely well... it's harder to get to know them well by email, but it is possible....

The second point I had difficulty with was when you said:

"Finally, I think it is important to remember that Diplomacy is a game. Because it's a game it should be two things: a fun, entertaining experience, as well as taken somewhat less than seriously. Specifically in regards to this message and meta-gaming, I want to point out that games are an activity you participate in with friends and would-be friends."

Earlier in your article you noted, "First, foremost, and most centrally, there are fundamentally different understandings of what Diplomacy is within the hobby. The recognition of this simple reality is both the first step on the path to successful diplomacy and the genesis of all the emotion generated by "meta-gaming."

Similarly, in critiquing your coment above that Diplomacy is a game... THAT means different things to different people. You claim "Because it is a game it should be two things: a fun entertaining experience, as well as taken somewhat less than seriously." Who says... for me for example it's precisely because it is a game that I think it deserves to be taken extremely seriously. Why does it have to be fun? So you play games for fun... cool... but who says everyone else does? You also say "I want to point out that games are an activity you participate in with friends and would be friends." Who says? I play a lot of games with people I niether count as friends or want to have as friends.

Different people play games for different reasons, and different ways of valuing different outcomes. That's the crux of your very perceptive exposition on meta-gaming... ditto for this point too I say.

Cheers, BC.

Brandon Clarke (bjc@stevensons.co.nz) writes:

Manus,

"It's like Big Brother as a board game" article... *shaking my head in disbelief!*

Diplomacy is:

It's a board game involving negotiation and human interaction, centred on a theme of political intrigue, in which you can: lie; cheat; sneak; double cross; blackmail; extort; spread rumours, and try and overhear what other players are discussing and agreeing upon, and basically use any tactic or mechanism you can think of to try and outwit your opponent, including telling the truth.

Scott Enderle (Enderlejs@aol.com) writes:

Hi Manus,

I was utterly facinated by this discussion and wanted to add my own two cents, belated though they may be:

If we're willing to take this into extreme abstraction, it seems to me that this question can be boiled down to the following:
In a paradoxical situation...
Is space inviolable, or
Is will inviolable?

To explain, I am going to claim for a moment that a diplomacy game consists of two things: 1) a space (the board) and 2) a set of actors moving through the space (the pieces/moves)

(Included in the space are all the rules that establish how one may move through the space--these are things that the actors cannot influence, hence they are space, not will.)

Now, normally, a person enters moves according to his will, which are then dealt with according to the rules of the space. But when a paradoxical situaiton arises, does space bend, so to speak, causing a destroyed fleet to maintain its support by some sort of "spooky action-at-a-distance" (yes, I'm mixing my metaphors)? Or does free will give way, causing actors to behave in non-paradoxical ways in spite of themselves (i.e. the army to hold rather than convoy across as ordered)?

Now, I don't know the details of the many Bell's Theorem light polarization/electron spin experiments well enough to really talk about this, but I'm going to anyway--it seems to me that there's a very strong parallel here. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, here is a brief, totally unscientific explanation of this wierd quantum physics phenomenon, which you'll just have to take my word for.

As I understand it, the generally accepted interpretation of the results of these experiments is that: The choices of the experimenter, regarding which values to observe, actually change the values themselves. In the process, a fundamental logical rule is violated. This has lead more philosophically minded physicists to conclude that either a)logic is invalid, b)quantum mechanics is nonlocal or c)the particles do not have spins/polarizations until they are measured by the experimenter.

According to my gonzo definition, logic would be an element of space (it's a rule that can't, supposedly at least, be changed by will); hence

1. Constitutes a violation of space.
2. Constitues a violation of space for obvious reasons--nonlocality = spooky action at a distance.
3. Also, I believe, constitues a violation of space in favor of will; the observer's choice--his will--actually creates the spin/polarization values of the particles.

(Therefore) I would argue that, at least if you're willing to accept this very strange but very real parallel between the game and the physical world, will overrides space.

Hence, for me, proposal one is the better of the two.

Manus Hand's (manus@manushand.com) response:

Thanks for the excellent response! Wow! I never thought that my position was supported by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle! Who knew? :-)

Adam Place (ephraim_jarvik@hotmail.com) writes:

I have long-time been a reader of the Diplomatic Pouch webzine, and as you are the editor, I was wondering if you could make a suggestion to your contributing writers/faithful readers. In chess there is a simple way to keep records of the games as they progressed, for analysis and exemplification later. This is not an inherent part of chess, but it is an inherent part of Diplomacy, this being the order-writing process. If there were games of Diplomacy that were stored similarly to chess (there are chess databases which contain well over 5 million games), they could be used to stress a certain tactical point, or just provide a basis for an entertaining analysis by some of the game's best. If such a place exists where Diplomacy games are already stored, then I regret the waste of your time; but if no such does exist, perhaps as editor of the webzine you could encourage others to create this sort of game repository. This would not be just limited to club games and local tournaments, but perhaps the games at WDC could be recorded for a demonstration on how the best players play the game. With expert analysis, these games would not only improve the tactics of every devout Diplomacy player but gain name recognition for the top players in the hobby, which is one of the keys to its development. I incerely thank you for your time.

Adam Place
 

Doug Massey's (masseyd@btv.ibm.com ) response:

He's [Adam] correct -- I keep only the end-game summary.

Chess has simple moves -- 100 or so, which can be expressed in a simple form such that an entire game takes up only a couple kilobytes of memory.

Diplomacy is much more complicated -- 34 units moving 20 times or so per game, with nomenclature that's more complicated. In itself, this isn't *that* big a deal, considering that there are orders of magnitude more games of chess than of Diplomacy. But the real reason the moves aren't kept is because they're not terribly important -- the tactics of Diplomacy are less important than the verbal negotiations. The moves, by themselves, don't tell you much if the game has negotiations going on behind the scenes.

It might be of interest to keep the moves *and* the negotiations for game on the Judges, but then you jump to megabytes per game. This bridges the gap between chess and Diplomacy in terms of storage space and complexity of the task. There's also the issue of privacy -- I don't want what I say in a game to automatically be posted for the world to see.

The moves in the no-press games might be on interest to some. No-press is a pretty feeble variant compared to the real game, though.

There have been a few games where the partial press is saved with the moves in the Showcase section of the Pouch (which I'm sure you're well aware of). But these are understandably the exception in the Judge world, in my opinion.

Cheers,
Doug

Edward Hawthorne's (edward@diplom.org ) response:

First, thank you for writing the Pouch. I'll have Doug Massey respond as well. As you may know, Doug is the "keeper" of the Pouch Email section and JDPR. Here are some links regarding your "repository for dip games" comment:

• http://devel.diplom.org/Email/
• http://devel.diplom.org/Email/Ratings/JDPR/jdpr.html
• http://www.floc.net/observer.py?page=help&node=Help%3AJDPR
• http://www.floc.net

There are a number of sites and services that capture individual player ratings, results, and games played. Here are two:

• http://devel.diplom.org/Email/oldbie.html
• http://www.floc.net

Several judges have been setup to log each game phase result but you'll need to know the game name and the judge it was played on to query the game summary. Floc.net is also an excellent source for game material and phase results though I'm not sure how extensive the information.

All of that said, no, there is not a single, universal source or site that captures or provides output for what you're asking. Such endeavour would be quite the under taking. This isn't to say it can't be done nor am I discouraging such initiative. I don't know your background but is this something you'd be interested in researching or delving into further? Maybe even writing an article on what the chess community has done and how such correlates to the dip hobby and the benefits?

At the very least, I hope I've addressed your comments/questions and if not, don't hesitate to write. Until next time.

Cheers mate,
-Edward-