Gaming Outpost Discussions

1. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   This would probably be grouped with 'Societal Structures' along with 'Status of Women', and such stuff.

   Societal Cycles:
   ================

   The notion of cycles in history fascinates most everyone. Cycles offer a glimpse into the future, and warn of impending disaster for the nation or the world. But, they have more advantages than is commonly understood. One problem for Future Historians is how they make their histories too smooth, without sudden zigs and zags. Cycles can help. Another advantage to cycles is they can help you understand history far better. And once you understand History on a 'almost lived it' level, then you're a more capable world creator and gamemaster because you can take those scenarios from the past, refurbish them, and use them. And they will feel real, because they were based on a solid understanding of history.

   Isaac Asimov based his Foundation Series on the Decline and Fall of Rome. The Dominic Flandry series is based on the conflict between the Medes and the Persians even as its set in space with Lizardfolk battling Humans. If award-winning, bestselling novelists do it, then maybe you should too. Mine History, and one of the best tools is an understanding of cycles.

   One set of cycles, I've used twice. For my "Hide From the Evil Day" project (not yet finished) I wrote up four hundred years of future history leading to a superpower conflict on a landlocked moon across the galaxy. In "Starsong Systems" a Transhumanist game setting, I also wrote up four hundred years of future history leading up to a society of human cetaceans, and human trees, and human commando-forms, and a whole lot else (including the kitchen sink) for a society of a trillion humans spread over nine planets, and many asteroids. I used the Strauss and Howe Cycle of History for this.

   You can read about it in "Generations" (OOP), or in "Thirteenth Generation". I am simplifying here.

   It is a structure of four stanzas with two eruptions that are forty years apart. The whole takes eighty years. And then it repeats.

   There are four generational types:
   1. Teamplayers--Sharing, conformity, and a focus on the material tend to be their life.
   2. Finetuners--They seek to make the world safer, smoother, fairer, more precise.
   3. Fireborn--Cries of individuality, of furious morality, of the need to shake off the corrupt world abound.
   4. Hardcore--Actually more individualistic than the Fireborn. They try to put society back together again, and to survive.

   In their youth, the Teamplayers fight a Phoenix War. The old world order is destroyed, and made new. They then live in plenty, and create the glories of a new modern world. Airports of towering pre-stressed concrete spring up where corn and log cabins once stood. The Finetuners come, and make their harsh and material world with its sudden judgements and its unfairness a much more pleasant and kindly place. And then the pampered children who have been given everything they ever asked for arrive. They see the glorious world their parents made, and consider it the normal baseline. Towering airports are nothing to them. Instead, they see a world of corruption, and materialism. They seek a new relationship with the Divine. In some cycles this is a Missionary Awakening, and in others its Flower Power. The Teamplayers fold before this furious onslaught that they don't understand, and retreat to splendid retirements. Suddenly the spirit-minded change, and go forth to seek money and status avidly, but they carry their values inside them, and they preach them loudly when they may. And society begins to change from the inside out as their Fire burns everything.

   "We didn't start the fire" one rock singer claims, but his generation sure fanned those flames as hard as they could.

   Unnoticed, frequently despised, the Hardcore arrive in a world that doesn't really like children anymore. They see a world that is completely falling to pieces. Even the most basic elements of society are on the verge of total collapse. They teach themselves how to survive, and start trying to fix things to general revilement.

   Everyone remembers the Norman Rockwell picture of two parents looking in on their baby safe in his crib. Those parents are adult Hardcore. They are protecting what needs to be protected. Its interesting that this picture, and Norman Rockwell in general draws scorn. This picture draws scorn because a lot of people don't want to focus on the basics the way the Hardcore know down deep in their bones that you have too.

   By this time, the Fire is ready to burn the world. The Teamplayers have been reborn. A new generation of eager, kindly, cooperative children are young adults. The children are Finetuners who realize that the adults are about to do something dreadful, and they should keep quiet. The Hardcore control most of the positions of power with their steely-eyed gazes. The top-most positions, and the seats of the visionaries, are held by the old prophets and seers, the Fireborn. And the Fireborn have been telling everyone for the last forty years that certain values need to be enforced.

   Fireborn who once were all about choice and diversity and tolerance. Fireborn who in their youth protested against war will now call in a loud voice for WAR. Another Phoenix War is upon the world. And the world is about to be shaken by the tail, dumped upside down, and totally changed.

   Before the Spanish Armada, Spain ruled. After, not so. Before the Civil War, America was a Republic with slaves and not slaves, with a co-equal agrarian and industrialized sectors, after it, slaves were gone, the agrarians were under the yoke, and the Republic had become the Nation. Before World War Two, there were many powers. After it, there was America and the Soviet Union and MAD.

   Whats the next Phoenix War? In my Starsong future history, I postulated an invasion of China by America in 2025 or so. And defying the so-called 'Rules', America wins. And after that...the near solar system is opened. People in 2040 will look back on us the way people in 1950 looked back on 1910. It will be a different world, not just in relations between nations, but in so many different ways that it would be hard to catalog.

   How can you use this?

   1. Create a Future History with some jags, and zigs to it. History twists and turns, and is full of plot twists. Who from 1951 would have predicted Woodstock? Who from 1981 would have predicted the Fall of the Berlin Wall?

   2. This short intro may help you to see into history a bit more clearly. Sometimes, the reason someone is angry at another one is not class interests, or philosophical differences, but one man might be of another generation than the other. If a forty-year old Hardcore attains power amidst a group of twenty year older Fireborn, its almost certain that nothing he does will make them happy.

   3. While this Cycles will be most useful to Near-Earth timelines, those events in history can be used after appropriate cover from metaphors as Space Wars, or as battles between the White Order and the Legions of the Abyss.

   4. You may find that you can also just use small generational differences in certain conflicts. The new lord of a castle is as in #2 a Hardcore. All his advisers are Fireborn. You've just set the stage for court conflict, possible treason, too aggressive tactics by the young lord, and general revolt in the land as forces pull one way or the other.

   5. This may be of use in Non-Player Character Creation. At one time, cartoons which featured teams of heroes usually had one hero with the personality 'Woman'. That is, they might have four guys ('Cowboy', 'New Yorker', 'Scientist', and 'Brash Enthusiast') and 'Woman'. Nowadays, many such shows have more complicated female characters which is good. But, in desperation, you can certainly make a group of people by rolling 1d4...Joe is a Finetuner, Mary is a Fireborn, Sam is a Teamplayer, and Kevin is Hardcore. Add a few more traits from the Three V Non-Player Character Creation chart, and you might have in the space of three minutes something approaching real enough people.

   6. I've found also that this schema is a useful outline to hang history on. Because, knowing dates does not get you very far. You need to see the forces and the patterns flow in order to get a clearer understanding.

   Wed Nov 14 2007 5:07 pm #
2. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Great Power Cycles
   ==================
   The theory described was created by Paul Kennedy.

   Power is based upon economic strength. Superior economic strength offers a foundation to build a military dominance upon. Once this dominance is achieved, the economic strength it was based upon is already declining.

   This is because of three reasons as follows:

   1. Imperial overreach. The political leaders of a society try to do too much with too little.
   2. Too much money is going to the military, and too little money is going to the economy. The economy, which is the base of the strength, weakens comparatively to others.
   3. Frequently, the wealthy class in society is not willing to tax themselves enough to pay for the military. Thus inflation, and debt become used to finance the military which weakens the whole of the society.

   Typically, instead of reducing military responsibilities, taxing the wealthy, and trying to manage the decline gracefully, the leadership will increase responsibilities, go into debt, and assert a need for a revivified will.

   This is not a determinist theory because a large role is reserved for the skill of the political leader. An inferior nation (with weaker economy and military) may triumph over a stronger nation due to bad moves on the part of the stronger nation. Germany, before the Wars is instructive. It had the ability to dominate economically, and later militarily at least the European continent, but it made a series of bad choices which ended up with it partitioned among the victors.

   Political skill substitutes in this theory for draining expenditures on the military.

   NOTE: It does seem that this theory has issues because although it was aimed at the US, in the end, a low tax to boom the economy, a high debt regime, an increase in responsibilities, and a revivified national will exemplified by President Reagan did in fact triumph. Of course, this is in part acknowledged by some who point out that the Soviet Union was even more mismanaged.

   A good point. However, war has been characterized as a series of catastrophes that leads to victory.

   And later, America has emerged as the Hyperpower with only spending about 5% of its economy (or less) on the military.

   In part, this is explained by a factor not mentioned in the reviews. Europe spends almost nothing on the military, but a very great deal of money on social welfare. A broader formation of Dr. Kennedy's theory would be thus....

   Whatever you spend huge percentages of your economy on, that is not the economy, is a drag on the economy, and thus weakens your nation. So building a war machine of an army, or a cradle to grave welfare apparatus, the finest set of family tombs in pyramidal style, or a one-off mission to Alpha Centauri before you're really ready is going to weaken the Nation.

   Someone is going to challenge you. It will hurt. Probably a lot. Chaos will creep in at the edges as pirates and bandits proliferate in out of the way places. And potentially huge armies will clash leaving regions that had been productive to become wastelands.

   It may take thirty years, and a succession of wars, but eventually, you're going to be yanked up short. Your natural level of power is going to reassert itself, minus the damage you suffered in the war.

   Thu Nov 15 2007 5:58 pm #
3. 

   M. J. Young
   Moderator

   Interesting overall.

   I've two questions for you to consider in connection with generational cycles.

   1. Insert a longevity program into the cycle, one which is nearly universal in its reach, extending the lives of most people tenfold--but do not alter the space between generations. There is no practical reason to think that people who lived to be eight hundred on average would not continue having children into their four hundreds at least, possibly their seven hundreds, but these children would fall into different twenty-year cycles, as there is equally no reason to believe they would not start having children around an average age of twenty. Thus we would have each type of generation recurring in the lifetimes of each individual. We don't know, though, whether fireborns of 2010 and fireborns of 2090 would have the same visions, nor who would have control at any given time.
   2. Next, factor in a sufficient geographical spread of humanity that people in different areas--in this case, I'm thinking star systems--would be sufficiently isolated from each other as to prevent concerns from easily crossing between them. The 2170 fireborns at Alpha Centauri and those at Sol would not be living in anywhere near the same situations politically, economically, or in almost any other way. How does this impact development?

   I have no idea, incidentally; I'm just tossing it your direction. I find it interesting that just as we've constructed these fascinating tools for predicting the flow of future history, we have also developed the potential to render them useless against the changes we face.

   --M. J. Young

   Thu Nov 15 2007 9:38 pm #
4. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   You met the L1's in Starsong, some of them had been born in the Twentieth Century. Many had lots of children. They were the first prototypes of longetivity programs. Other, more widely used and usable programs came along later.

   Which is to say, I dealt with a number of these related issues in Starsong.

   I think a hundred year cycle of 1)Work for 40-60 yrs. 2)Have three children for 40-50 years--with both of these being near full-time endeavours MIGHT be more likely. I also suggested that there were some areas that didn't allow the vote to those below fifty. Also, Starsong has layers...the ancient peoples tend to have secrets, and to play games on a much more subtle level than open politics which they tend to leave to those below onehhundred fifty or so. So, its a system with a deluge of information, but still deep secrets.

   But, like Industrial Breakdown, which deals with a Post-Scarcity Economy, that Starsong/Breakdown is just one answer to what would likely happen. There are at least several others that are valid.

   Now to more directly deal with your insights which I am quite happy to see.

   On the issue of having children--there is a bit of disagreement on this issue in the longetivity community. Most pro-longevity people assume a ZPG. However, some of the more capitalist point out that there is plenty of space, and if need be, we can actually go into space.

   This could be a major social flashpoint for a war. One side is ZPG, and the other side is Children Friendly.

   I do think that people would start having children a bit later, but I could also see having children a bit younger. I can make a good arguement that we ought to allow fourteen and fifteen year olds to marry with adult supervision. But thats another post.

   Lets just say, I'd call your assumption reasonable enough, but not fixed. It is ONE way of doing things.

   One thing I can say, the Fireborns of different generations would probably have difficulty with each other in many respects. And the older ones would not likely share power. The Fireborn more than most change their life goals as they go along...a young Fireborn wants to meet God, and dance in the street. An old Fireborn wants to burn the corrupt world down with the most powerful weapons in reach so that a new perfected world can be put in its place.

   Imagine President FDR (Missionary Awakening), and John Lennon in his early career meeting....There might be some tempermental friendliness, but otherwise....

   2. Easily answered....Think back to the Civil War....Abolitionists in the North, Firebrands in the South....Or....What happens when Alpha Centauri and Earth go to war, and both are racing to develop the Starshot which is a bit of engineering which allows one to launch a very large asteroid at near light speed to hit the enemies' sun, and cause it to nova.

   Yup, they could well wipe each other out. And unlike the leaders of the Cold War, they might just do that.

   One factor is that generations would tend to slip....they don't run on iron tracks....so you could find a Fireborn leader facing a Hardcore leader

   I like this. But I gotta go.

   Fri Nov 16 2007 12:46 am #
5. 

   WilliamTWodium
   Member

   This would probably be grouped with 'Societal Structures' along with 'Status of Women', and such stuff.

   Tad, if you'll come up with a Tag for this sort of thing, I'll go back and tag those other two threads. I've already gone back and tagged eight threads with Vampires and twelve as Lists; you might have noticed those two appeared in the Hot Tags sidebar on the left of the Discussions page. Now all we need to do is label new vampire/list/sociology threads as such when we create them, and they'll always be easy to find again.

   Fri Nov 16 2007 12:52 am #
6. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Wodium,
   I've tagged it with 'Societal Structures'. Which is a dull, and earnest name. You're welcome to use that wild Discordian imagination to come up with something more interesting.

   MJ,
   I'm going to sketch a scenario I discussed with someone from Baen books and an author at the Barflies room at Constellation if I can remember it.

   Assumptions were the product of our host:
   1. Longetivity
   2. Continue to have children

   Result: Those in charge want to continue to be in charge, and to organize society around their concerns.

   Result: Those who cannot tolerate being permanent second-class citizens in their own land move to the frontier.

   Result: The frontier ossifies rapidly, making the process repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

   Pretty soon you've got tree rings of static cultures spreading out in spheres, to mix my metaphors, from Earth, and each additional ring out may well be quite weird. There will be an element of Random Walk to this which will act as a moderating force, but the human drive for the New will overwhelm it.

   Some of the outer cultures will be very, very weird.

   Consider my host's mental model. He said "Imagine a frisbee, held upside down. And this is your expanding cultures. Now imagine a ball on the outer edge, sometimes its going to roll back."

   Which is true. Weirdness will infiltrate even Earth. But frequently it will be resisted, and the cultures described are run by centuries old humans accustomed to doing things their own way.

   Result: War.

   Another Assumption: This will be a Post-Scarcity Economy. That is, the only things of lasting worth are 1)the Attention of another Human Being (which is what the Waffle House Waiters are really selling when they take their very, very high paid jobs in Starsong--which you didn't go along with). 2)Unique Items (Its not enough that you have an atom perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, what you must posess is the One and Only.) 3) Reputation and Status which I'm told by 'author guy' was what Cory Doctorow called 'Wuffies'.

   In a Post-Scarcity Economy, there really is very little to fight about. We speculated that there would be fighting, but it would be robots clashing with robots. No one would be willing to risk their thousands of years of life in a fight.

   And then I pointed out: What if one of those weird tree rings rediscovers Total War. And a doctrine of "Its better to roll the dice, and take a chance on total rule" (which would be seen as a way to extort Wuffies) would be a serious problem to all the other risk-averse cultures. They would tend to win was what I thought.

   Which would then necessitate the rise of a Christian counter. "Thousands of years of life is real sweet, but True Immortality waits. Have no fear."

   And from that I can see the spread of revival to some cultures, and I can see other cultures promoting something like the Knights Templar. A highly respected warrior group founded on Christian values while the rest of society continued as risk averse as before. And some societies would hate the new messages so much, they might either strike, or scream and fuss really loudly.

   Fri Nov 16 2007 3:52 pm #
7. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   One effect from your 10X Longetivity with children would be that those who prefer children would outbreed those who did not. Which could be the flashpoint for the Children's War I was talking about in my first reply. The ZPG folks see that in a very short time, say sixty years, they are going to be totally outnumbered....so the time to strike is now.

   Incidentally, this is happening now. Guess which political areas and parties are having children,a nd expanding, and which are shrinking. If you said Republican and Democrat respectively, you'd be right. And there is some hostility toward 'breeders'. As I understand it, the movie "Idiocracy" was about in part Red State rampant child rearing which was part of the reason that human IQ has gone downhill by 2200. Personally, I look at it as people who wanted a nice car, and a great job, and so skipped the kids, and are now whining about the results of their choices.

   Which illuminates the outlines of a future 'Children's War'. On the one side, a lot of middle-class families, and on the other side a lot of elite professors and their associates who have more concentrated wealth and power, but not perhaps as much as the whole of the spread out class opposing/wanting to be left alone.

   Now, if I try to get back to your assumptions....

   10X lifespan.
   Children every twenty years (which could happen. In this advanced society, it would be affordable. Unless, you make the rule that Children have to pay their parents 5% of their wealth for life--which would be a sizable incentive to have seven kids, and train them all to be stockbrokers. In that case, you'd recreate the agrarian society model where kids are an economic asset....and all with just one little law change. As a lawyer, this is probably not surprising to you, but I think to a lot of people they don't realize how much of their incentive structure and what they consider normal and reasonable is determined by the laws they live under. Everyone acts as if the current situation where kids are an economic drain is a Natural Law under a Post-Modern Society, but its not.)

   Back on track again...

   Three children every twenty years as an average. Thats a fifty percent growth rate...no, the parent continues to have children....wild, mushrooming growth....this impacts the culture too....The culture is both wise and ancient, and wildly enthusiastic and young all at the same time.

   So....We use the English colonization of the world for a model. The English were driven to expand because their death rates dropped radically, and their birth rates stayed the same as they started to seriously industrialize. So their population shot up. They were thus aggressive, confident, and bold.

   Space is huge. These people start colonizing it with a will. And they are guided by the ancient minds back home and in various spots here and there so they tend to make good long-term decisions which saves a lot of bother.

   Its a Golden Age of Colonization. Dozens of ships leave the solar system daily to colonize other worlds. In the span of a few hundred years, a bustling, vibrant, go fast culture is created among the stars. They build things....really huge things like stardocks that are five hundred miles long.

   What I'm assuming here is enough homogeneity that common concerns would be where the culture is at.

   However, what if the Golden Age of Colonization was more of the Diaspora. A booming Earth is willing to help its troublemakers, and minorities on their way. And once these minorities are gone, Earth becomes more staid, more normal. The minorities build themselves up cultures and systems which have their own values.

   This leads to 1)Conflict Among the Stars. Its a great setting for Space Fleet War or for Single Destroyer Combat or for Hunt the Pirates. 2)It could easily lead to a war of annihilation if things are allowed to develop that way. 3)One solution to 1 and 2 is for cultures to clamshell, to do what Mandarin China did. You might even see some socities deliberately destroying their starships.

   This could lead to a Grand Tour Diplomatic Game where the diplomats go to a bunch of different cultures bearing the bad news that some huge alien predatory fleet is on the way, and all you groups that hate each other need to cooperate or die.

   Another possibility is something like the Da Vinci Code...archeological puzzles. Perhaps some of the people who were supposed to destroy the starships did not destroy them all, but hid a few, just in case. So their is a secret society--the Hidden Starship Society which gets tattoos on their thumb and first finger--which look like something or other, but when properly aligned look like a starship. They are hiding the starship down the centuries.

   There are clues in dangerous places, and in rare books, and you have to trek all over the whole world...and off world to the astroid belt to find the starship so that you can 1)Go get help for an ecological catastrophe 2)Fight off some invaders.

   Eric

   Fri Nov 16 2007 4:44 pm #
8. 

   Tadeusz
   Member

   Pendulum Cycle
   ==============
   By Eric R. Ashley

   No doubt this is not wholly original, what is? Hopefully it is a profitable restatement of what great men before me have understood.

   The Pendulum Axe, first bequeathed us by Poe, and beloved of black and white horror directors since is an appropriate metaphor for a declining age. It swings wildly to one side, and then wildly to the other side, and each time it drops a notch vertically closer to the victim tied up on a table underneath the pendulum axe.

   With the blade whirring above us, let us think.

   There are intellectual positions, standards of behavior, that are superior to others. They balance various concerns, and square circles that need squaring. But some people don't understand this subtlety. They get enamored of some idea, and forget competing concerns. They make themselves a slave to a single issue (which is not always bad).

   These partisans push the pendulum way out of its natural resting spot in the middle. And for a time, they achieve their desire. And they push it farther, and some begin to decry their influence, and how it is destroying society. Pundits and preachers fear that if this goes on, it will destroy society.

   And it would. It would. But there are counter-vailing forces which gather strength as they are challenged.

   And eventually a tipping point is found, and the Pendulum screams back the other way, and on to the other side. And now its out of balance again. Such wars have ways of making things cruder than they need to be which is what war does. The counterforce focuses on the primary issue, and doesn't take the time to restore the complicated ecology of knowledge which was the beginnion of this struggle.

   Let me give you two examples to clarify this thought.

   Anti-death penalty supporters struggle to keep murderers from receiving what most of the nation thinks they deserve--a fair trial, and a quick hanging. Using the logic of a committed few, which allows a very few people to turn the wheel of history if they are hardcore enough, they push the pendulum way past what the middle ground is.

   In the middle is a concern for justice, for safety, for seeing the victims avenged, and for deterring future victims, and a desire to let the guilty go free if there really is not enough evidence.

   And yet, I've heard people say that we ought to torture to death murderers. That is the gathering force for the other side of the pendulum swing.

   And its a drop downward of the pendulum axe.

   More later...

   Fri Nov 16 2007 7:10 pm #

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