Just The Caffeine Talking

Chatbots and Gamemasters

The author of one of my favorite roleplaying game blogs — he uses the handle "Noisms" and the blog is called Monsters & Manuals — recently tried an interesting experiment to see how well ChatGPT could run a solo roleplaying session using his own published game setting "Yoon-Suin." Short answer: not well. 

It's worth reading his post to see how the chatbot failed.

One problem was that its scenario seemed too generic, but that could be the result of asking it to use a somewhat obscure and quirky game setting. It might have done a better job using something with abundant on-line documentation like the Forgotten Realms or Golarion. (And, to be cranky, both of those settings are pretty generic anyway, so who would notice?)

The second problem was that the GM-bot simply assented to whatever the player decided to do — while simultaneously doing its best to "railroad" the player into a specific course of action. I was very amused by this, because this sounds exactly like the style of "cooperative storytelling" gamemastering which exists at one vertex of the Game-Narrative-Simulation triangle. Amused, because the flaws that ChatGPT displays are exactly the things some gamers find unsatisfying about that style of roleplaying: no meaningful challenges, and you're stuck in a plot you can't escape.

"Artificial Intelligence" (a term which gets overused even more egregiously than "force field") has always been unsatisfying at running games. In online fantasy combat games the AI-controlled NPCs are notorious for only being able to draw from a limited menu of canned responses. ChatGPT simply expands that menu to the entire online world, but ultimately it's still just spitting back something vaguely appropriate based on keywords.

In early roleplaying games the GM was often called the Referee or the Judge, a holdover from tabletop wargames, but it's worth remembering that all gamemasters still have that job when running a game. Judging requires judgement, and that's something which ChatGPT just doesn't have.

So for now, at least, gamemasters are safe.

 

In Memoriam

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie —
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find — it’s your own affair —
But… you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!).
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone — wherever it goes — for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-time loan is as bad as a long —
So why in—Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

— Rudyard Kipling

"Astra"

2010-2023

Scarab Mission NOW Available

I have eyewitness confirmation from a friend that my new novel The Scarab Mission has reached bookstores. Or a bookstore, anyway. I'm assuming the distributor isn't just shipping to one retailer. So to everyone who has been waiting for a copy, go forth and buy! And if your local store doesn't have The Scarab Mission, demand it!

And for a little lagniappe, here's my latest podcast appearance, on Roger and Janet Carden's The Halfling and the Spaceman. You can listen to it here.

 

Radio Active

My media presence continues to spread. In addition to podcasts, blogs, and social media, now I'm on AM radio! I was a guest on WHMP in Northampton, talking about (what else?) The Scarab Mission. You can listen to that episode here (my segment starts at the 31 minute mark). 

Megan Zinn, the interviewer, had a great list of questions, and we didn't get to most of them. That's the biggest problem with broadcast media: the very strict time limits. Anyway, this is what I sound like.

Boskone 60

This coming Friday I'll be at Boskone, the longest-running SF convention in New England, at the dear old Westin Seaport hotel in Boston. If you want to stop in and see me in person, my convention schedule is here:

FRIDAY, February 17

4:00 p.m.: Serving Up a Tasty World — There's more to fictional dining than Stew. I'll be moderating a panel of writers talking about food in fantastic fiction, how to make it appealing, and how to use food as a way to reveal things about settings and characters.

5:30 p.m.: Becoming a Space-Ready Society — I get to be on a panel with a bunch of genuine experts, all discussing what it's going to take to create a permanent and self-sustaining human population off Earth.

SATURDAY, February 18

11:30 a.m.: The Declining Readership Rate Among Children — I pitched this topic so they're making me moderate the panel. We've got several professional educators and experts to talk about the problem of declining readership among young people, how serious it is, what's causing it, and what we can do.

1:00 p.m.: Group Reading — I'll be reading a short selection from The Scarab Mission, if you want to hear what you're missing.

7:00 p.m.: Why Science Fiction Loves Getting Science Wrong — SF loves to break the rules, but what's the difference between speculation and just getting it wrong? This won't be just a litany of goofs, but an exploration of when you have to break from reality, and the role of accuracy in storytelling.

SUNDAY, February 19

11:30 a.m.: Autographing — I'll be signing books, anthologies, magazines, casts, bookplates, and anything you care to bring along.  

Unexpectedly Serious Musings

The economist Robin Hanson has a wonderful wide-ranging curiosity. He developed the "Great Filter" concept for SETI, and wrote a paper about expanding alien civilizations and what it means if we haven't detected them.

Now he's tackling the ideological divide in our society, the so-called "culture war" by examining how it derives from what people consider sacred. Here's his draft paper on the subject, and two posts on his blog Overcoming Bias on the topic. This one is especially useful.

Mr. Hanson's analysis clarified some of my own recent thoughts on the subject. It really does seem as if modern Western society is going through a kind of religious awakening — though in this case the new faith is resolutely anti-theist and goes under a variety of names. "Progressivism," "Social Justice," or maybe "Wokeness." At times I feel like a Roman of the era just before Constantine: a new faith is spreading like wildfire, and like a fire it seems to be consuming many of the things I consider essential to our civilization.

Sometimes a new faith is like Christianity (or the Protestant Reformation) — but too often it winds up more like Robespierre's cult of the Goddess of Reason, or Hong Xiuquan's Heavenly Kingdom. Destroying the old order is easy, but building a new one is hard, especially if you've convinced yourself that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid and evil, and any failures of the new faith must be due to wreckers and saboteurs. That's always a reliable way to wind up with a pyramid of skulls. 

 

 

 

Howard Hughes Vindicated!

DARPA, the Defense Department's official mad-scientist branch, has signed contracts with two companies to develop a super-heavy-lift flying boat for military transport. Here's the article from the US Naval Institute Web site.

Why resurrect a technology which has been sidelined for seventy years? Since the end of World War II flying boats have hung on in a couple of very specialized niches but otherwise they've joined long-range passenger airships in the category of "stuff we don't use any more." The modern world has paved runways everywhere, so airplanes don't need to land on the ocean.

Unless . . . you're the US Navy and Marine Corps, and you're thinking very hard about how you'd fight against a certain large country on the western side of the Pacific. You'd want to use the island chain running from Kamchatka to Australia as a line of unsinkable air bases and combat platforms. You'd want to be able to move forces rapidly around that region, which means you need something faster (and cheaper to replace) than amphibious landing ships. 

Speculation: I expect older ballistic missile submarines will not be scrapped as newer boats replace them. Instead they're going to be repurposed as undersea transports, suitable for rapid, secret deployment of small combat units to islands near Asia.

I've Got A Little List . . .

The nice people at Shepherd.com asked me to submit a list of five book recommendations. I chose "The Best Novels About Exploring Big Things In Space." It's kind of a funny coincidence that I chose that topic, right when I have a book out about people exploring a ruined space habitat. Their site has loads of other recommended-reading lists on a whole range of topics.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any suggestions for books on that same topic. Maybe you can come up with a better list than I did!

DiFilippo on Scarabs

Paul DiFilippo put up a very kind review of The Scarab Mission in his Locus column. You can read it here, at Locus Online.

The summary: he liked it. The review calls Scarab a "rousing, unstoppable, non-stop adventure," which is good to hear. That's what I wanted to write, but you never know if you hit the mark. I think that is the single most frustrating thing about writing: the lag time. I wrote Scarab in 2020-2021. The last revisions were done last summer. I've mentally moved on to the next book, and only now can I find out if anyone understands or likes what I was trying
to do three years ago. And of course some people won't find this book for months or years yet. 

Copies should now be hitting the mark in bookstores, so pick up yours today. Buy them all up so I can stop promoting and get back to the Worldbuilding series. 

 

FOUND!

Good news for everyone waiting to get a trade paperback copy of The Scarab Mission: the lost copies have been found! According to my publisher, "they should be going where they were supposed to this week." 

I'll send a signed bookplate to whoever comments first that they got their copy. (And to anyone else who requests one, but the first commenter gets bragging rights.)