My first attempt at Chapter 1 - feel free to suggest amendments.
CHAPTER ONE:
You don’t know shit about…
Work is, of course, very important. It gives a man purpose and money to pay the bills and provide for his family. But for a moment work can wait. For when his computer flickers into life, the work emails can wait; Facebook can wait; even the free porn sites can wait. For what is really important cannot wait. What is really important is what country has he been allocated in his latest diplomacy game. It’s Italy (again). He sighs, Italy is terrible. He has never won a game playing the green country and perhaps never will. Other players love the little country which once spawned an empire, but he hated it. He would, of course, play nevertheless. Playing Italy is preferable to not playing at all. Not for the first time he speculated that the secret algorithm that decided who played which country was so complex that it somehow managed to track every interaction an online player had with every country before finally allocating everyone the country they hated most. He had considered testing this theory by faking his love of playing Italy in the forums to see if this changed his luck. Such an experiment would be doomed to fail for country allocation was awarded by chance; but chance obviously had a sense of humour.
The game he had signed up to play was a high-stakes nosebleed game. He had studied the Kelly Criteria whilst at high school and knew he shouldn’t be risking more than about 5% of his diplomacy points on each game. But where was the fun in that? He was now risking 1000
(nearly 90% of his total) on one game. A game in which he had drawn Italy and a game where he knew the opposition would be tough.
The game was being played anonymously, not only would he have to play well to survive but he also had to try and figure out who each of the others players were. He could then use that information to second guess their moves later in the game. He had kept copious notes of how each player played, some were cautious, some played crazy, some talked and talked and others said little. Knowing who his opponents were was critical to his success. The game itself required players to be consummate diplomats; to talk sweetly whilst backstabbing the people closest to them. All that mattered was winning. Conniving and lying, bullying and sacrificing friends was all part of the game. It is rumoured that the inventor had been inspired by his visit to the 1953 Tory Party conference.
This particular game was to be Winner Takes All (WTA) as opposed to Points Per Supply Centre (PPSC). This was considered the truest version of the game. If PPSC was draughts, WTA was chess – sure they were played on the same board, but that’s where the similarity ended. Not everyone agreed that WTA was superior and the differences were endlessly debated on the forum with more passion than any other subject save gun control, Gaza and gay marriage.
He had been considering playing a Key Lepanto for some time and had messaged Austria suggesting this. He had gone into great detail about how it should be played, not only the moves but the associated diplomacy required to make it work successfully. The reply he got saddened his heart. He now knew what it meant to feel pain in the pit of his stomach. “Sure.” Had been the response. To outsiders ‘sure’ would be positive, ‘sure’ was agreement, ‘sure’ was common purpose. But in diplomacy ‘sure’ meant only one thing. Austria was planning an Italian invasion. The best laid plans hadn’t survived first contact, it was time to work hard on forming other alliances. This was going to be a long, hard game.
This was his sixth year playing webDiplomacy, the internet version of the board game ‘Diplomacy’. It is often thought that the World Wide Web was invented to ease communications at Cern to aid their experiment to find the inappropriately named God particle. This is incorrect. The web was invented by an impatient diplomacy player whose postage stamp bill was the size of a small country’s national debt. The Web was invented for webDiplomacy. Sure it had been copied many times and the code had even been stolen, but webDiplomacy was the original and still the best. All the greats had played there: Ed Birstein; MadMarx; BobGenkisKhan; Maniac; Babak and most of Draugnar’s re-incarnations.
This game was starting to worry him. Germany had been flip-flopping since his first message. He decided to be firm. “Please be clear in your intention Germany. Are you in or are you out. Negotiating with you is like dancing the Conga.” The answer came back in a flash. “Don’t you mean I’m ‘in’ and ‘out’ like the Oaky-Cocky? This just proves you know shit about the conga.”
To be continued.
Anyone up for a Modern game?
)
)
)
)