1. It would be more efficient for the state government.

We already have a system in place for collecting property taxes. Increasing the property tax rate would not require any more infrastructure than we already have. Eliminating the income tax would allow us to shed an entire department of the state government, saving the taxpayers money.

2. It would be cheaper and easier for taxpayers.

Every year I pay H&R Block something like 30 bucks to process my state income tax form. The fact that there’s an entire private industry that revolves around a specific type of tax should be a warning sign that said tax is too complicated. Nobody has to pay a 3rd party company anything to handle their property or sales taxes. Eliminating the income tax would save time and money for anyone who works in Massachusetts.

3. Taxes are a disincentive.

Taxes, while bringing in revenue, also dissuade certain behaviors. Cigarettes, for example, are heavily taxed. Sales taxes dissuade consumption and encourage saving. Property taxes encourage living efficiently. With the income tax, we should be asking ourselves: what are we trying to disincentivize? Productivity? Making a living? Eliminating the income tax would eliminate an undesirable disincentive.

For these reasons, I will be voting Yes on 1 in November, and I hope you do the same.

The Changes
Specifically, we discarded the Detective entirely and played with two “Elders” on the side of the Civilians. (Elders are what we ended up calling the character type that my previous post called the Police). We used my previous post’s Method 1; during the pre-game phase, the Elders got to see who all the Elders were, and that was the extent of their powers. Additionally, we put a constraint on the Elders that they were a new victory condition for the Mafia — if all the Elders die, the Mafia win. This was designed to prevent the Elders from announcing themselves publicly.

We also introduced an entirely new mechanic to the game — we allowed private note passing. In theory, there was nothing stopping anyone from doing this in our previous games, we just made it an officially condoned part of the game.

Thoughts
I liked the way the Elders replaced the role of the Detective. Traditionally the Detective would start a game knowing that one other person was a Civilian. In our game, two people started the game with this information, making turn one at least slightly more interesting¹. Removing the swing mechanic that the Detective brings to the game was also a positive change.

I really liked the note-passing mechanic. As expected, there were a lot of unnecessary/joke notes flying around, but this was arguably a good thing — it made passing real notes much less noticeable among the noise of the joke notes. As an Elder, I managed to use the note-passing mechanic to my advantage². Mike also speculates that note-passing would make the Mafia much more interesting if there were two or more of them in a game — I agree.

I still kind of felt like the “turn one problem” still existed, if in a slightly reduced form. At this point, I’m not sure how to solve it entirely. Adding more information to the game on turn one at this point seems too powerful. In the past, we’ve relied on noise-making as a catalyst for accusation-making — people seem to either be getting stealthier or deafer, and there were no such accusations during our two games. Maybe a solution to the turn one problem involves forcing the Mafia to do something more complicated during the night, like ask the moderator if a certain person is an Elder or not. This would not only make the Mafia potentially louder during the night, it would also give them a reason to speak up during turn one, since they would have more specific targets in mind.

We encountered a problem that at some points in the game, it was statistically favorable for the Elders to come straight out and declare their Elderhood. I felt like this was a lame conclusion to the game and so I didn’t do it, but that temptation is a problem. It would definitely be lame to come right out and declare it, but how lame is it to declare it privately to one person in a note? (I ended up doing this.) If that isn’t lame, would it be lame to send that note to another person, or two? Where do you draw the line?

Our short-term patch was to give the Detective a pre-first-turn guess, which A) isn’t usually much of a help (if they pick a Civilian) and B) can be too much of a swing (if they pick a Mafia).

Here are my proposed solutions:

Create a new character type – The Police
I thought of two ways that this character could work, and both methods could be used for varying sized games. What’s common to both methods is that there will be two or more Police characters, and they are on the side of the Civilians. The Police generally want to keep their identities hidden from the rest of the players.

Method 1:
At the beginning of the game during the pre-first-turn phase, the moderator has the Police all open their eyes and look at each other. This is the only special ability the Police have — after this phase, they act as normal Civilians. This creates a small circle of trust between a few of the Civilians, which gives them a much-needed advantage, especially in the first turn. This creates a first-turn situation in which a large number of players have an incentive to influence who gets killed, and more importantly, people who try to guide the discussion are no longer targets of suspicion. Of course, the Mafia will be looking out for people who seem to be confident or agree with each other all the time, so the Police need to be careful not to make themselves obvious targets. I envision there being 2 or 3 Police characters in a game.

Method 2:
Mostly the same as Method 1, except there is a secret chain of command in the Police. To explain by way of example, let’s say there are three Police cards, a Jack, a Queen and a King. During the pre-first-turn phase, the person holding the Jack does something to identify himself, like putting his finger on his nose (keeping his eyes closed). Then, the Queen opens her eyes, and sees who has the Jack. The queen then closes her eyes and puts her finger on her nose. The King then opens his eyes and sees who both the Jack and the Queen are. In this way, each Police character can either trust or be trusted by one or more people, but that trust is one way. The King will take care to listen to the Jack and Queen, but knows that they will be suspicious of anything he tries to tell them. The Jack will know that two people in the room are listening to him, but does not know who those people are. This method, being not as powerful as Method 1, would hopefully allow for more Police characters in a game.

Method 3:
Use either Method 1 or 2, and grant the Police a nightly phase in which they “Arrest” a character. When the group wakes up, the moderator announces who was arrested during the night. Depending on how strong of an advantage we want to give to the Civilians, the arrested character could either A) not be allowed to talk, B) not be allowed to vote, or C) both A and B. This gives the Civilians some wiggle room for suspected Mafia members without having to outright kill them. It also gives the Mafia members another method for determining who the Police are so they can be killed off.

Eliminate or Modify the Detective
The Detective is too swingy to be fun. It sucks as a Mafia member to be targetted so specifically by the Detective — there’s virtually nothing you can do at that point except shut up and accept your fate. Unfortunately, since this situation is the ultimate goal of the Detective, I feel like the character is fundamentally flawed and should be removed from the game.

One way to make the Detective more interesting/playable would be to change the moderator’s response. Instead of the Moderator answering the question “Is this person a Mafia?”, they could answer the question “Is this person either a Mafia or a Police?”, to which they would respond either “Yes, that person is one of those types” or “No, that person is just a regular Civilian”. This does two things: Firstly, it vastly improves the chances that the Detective will get a positive response, which makes the Detective arguably more interesting to play, and secondly it vastly reduces the impact that a positive response has on a game. The Detective would still have to try to figure out from the conversation who he thinks is more trustworthy. Additionally, if a Detective knew that two people were both Mafia/Police, he would have to figure out whether those two people were on the same side or not — if they were not, he would know that at least one was Mafia (as long as he could be sure they were on different sides, anyway). This change would hopefully also make the Detective less of a Mafia target, making it more of a strategy for the Detective to claim to be the Detective (and more of a strategy for the Mafia to claim to be Detectives). You could even have two Detectives, which makes the situation where two (or three) people claim to be Detectives much more interesting.

Let me know your thoughts on these proposed changes. I’d be eager to try something new in the world of Mafia. Because the way we play, Mike’s just too dangerous to let live.

I feel like I’ve been in here forever.

Wait, that can’t be right… cuz then I’d be dead.

Me, to myself, in a tired stupor, in the shower this morning.

There are a lot of proposed fixes to this problem, namely alternative voting methods. Condorcet, approval, and instant-runoff voting are all way better than our current system. Plurality voting is arguably the worst voting method, and how our system has worked for so long using it is beyond me. The nice thing about our electoral system is that it does not require any nation-wide initiative to implement these systems — states are free to adopt a better system and use it to determine how their electoral votes get spent. A nation-wide initiative would probably never get enough steam to be seriously considered, whereas it’s entirely conceivable that more progressive states could make the switch in the next few years.

The only problem that I see with this (and in my opinion it is a rather large problem) is that no matter how the states determine how they spend their electoral votes, the electoral vote is itself a plurality vote, and it will suffer from the same problems as the state votes. For example: Let’s say Massachusetts decides to use instant-runoff voting. During the next presidential election, people in Massachusetts feel safe in voting for their favorite third party candidate knowing that if he doesn’t take the state, their vote will default to the Democratic candidate. With this new voter confidence, that third party candidate gets enough votes and takes Massachusetts — hooray! In the electoral vote however, the Republican candidate wins barely enough votes and becomes president. Everyone in Massachusetts bitterly suffers under four years of Republican rule, knowing in the back of their minds that if they had voted Democrat, their electoral votes would have swung the election and they would have a Democratic president instead of a Republican one. They will not make this mistake in the next election. Essentially, while changing the state-wide voting system is definitely a step in the right direction, it is only a piece of the ideal solution.

One fix to the previous situation is to use fusion voting, where multiple parties can support the same candidate. In this system, third parties can gain popular confidence without “hurting” the primary parties until hopefully they gain enough confidence that they could win an election. Another benefit to this system is that it provides additional information to your vote — you can vote for the same candidate in multiple ways, and the party that you choose to go through lets the candidate know what you care about.

Another potential fix to the electoral problem that I thought of in a sleepless stupor last night, which as far as I know isn’t being considered at all, is to change the voting method for electoral votes. If plurality voting is a bad system, why use it anywhere? A seemingly quick fix would be to change the electoral college to use an approval voting system. If the Democrats take Massachusetts, let them cast their full 12 electoral votes toward the Democratic candidate. But if 10% of the state voted for the Green party, why not let them cast another 1 vote for the Green candidate? One consideration is whether a state would want to cast votes for both primary parties. Certainly, if swing states did this, they would no longer be as important in the election, and these states would have no incentive to do so, as they would receive less attention during campaigns. The elimination of “swing states” would be arguably good for the country as a whole, but even if each state only cast votes for one primary party and then as many third parties as they wanted, that would be much better than the current system.

Alternatively, states could use a ranking system such as condorcet voting. Whichever party gets the most votes, the state ranks that candidate first. The party with the second most votes gets ranked second, etc. This method would perhaps require less judgement on behalf of the electoral body, and would likely eliminate the question of how to vote for both of the primary parties.

If we enacted all these three changes: state voting method, electoral voting method, and fusion voting, I think our system would be pretty damn good. Luckily, these changes all together are only really necessary for the presidential election, since the electoral college problem isn’t present for the senate/house elections, for example — and simply implementing a state-wide condorcet vote would likely be an acceptable fix for that. As always, feedback/criticism is encouraged.

Then there’s a whole other class of game that relies on real-world physics to operate. Sure, there are non-board games like basketball where it’s expected that physics plays a role, but it really fascinates me that a game of Fireball Island would play out differently on the moon than it would here on earth. In zero-gravity environments, several games come to mind that would be completely unplayable. The poster child of “relies on physics to operate” is of course Mouse Trap, which is arguably unplayable anyway, but it probably takes a pretty narrow range of gravitational acceleration to successfully go through the whole chain of traps from start to end. Hell, I could only get it to work about 50% of the time anyway. Games where things roll around a lot like Crossfire or Hungry Hungry Hippos would probably end up with a lot of balls flying off the table if you tried to play them on the moon. Dominoes would be boring at best.

Hypothetically, in the distant future when the economy spans multiple planets, games such as these would be difficult to design. Gravity is such an intrinsic part of our interaction with the world that I can’t even begin to imagine how the board game industry would cope with it being variable. Chess, however, is a game you can play anywhere.

Left-side economics refers to a system where demand begets more demand. The demand here is for the left-side seat in the car. The actual seat is not worthy of demand, but it has a higher position in the hierarchy than the right-side seat. Why? Because it has higher demand. To recap more succinctly: Everyone wants the left-side seat because it has more prestige than the right-side, but it only has more prestige than the right-side because everyone wants it.

Here are a couple analogies.

In the 1920’s, the stock market was chock full of left-side economics. People bought up plenty of stocks because of the expectation that stock prices were ever rising. However, rising stock prices were caused mostly by the increased demand for shares of stock. That is, the demand for stocks was caused by the existing demand, and this only created more demand. What’s missing from the equation here? Actual value. Go left-side economics!

The same can be said of the Tulip crash in Holland. The same kind of thing happened — people started to notice a trend in the tulip market that tulip bulbs were going way up in price all the time. Everyone bought them up expecting to be able to sell them for more, and this buy-craze only served to increase prices further. Again, the tulip bulbs themselves have very little value, it was only the artificial value that made people buy them. Left-side economics strikes again.

A common theme among the stock market crash and the tulip crash is… well… the crash. Eventually people realize that the huge demand for these things is based on an artificial notion, and as soon as confidence starts to slip, the true value takes hold. This is the fundamental problem with left-side economics. And I am waiting for the left-side of the car to crash any day. (Especially if a woman is driving it LOLOL!!!111one)

Well, sort of. Turns out Joe and Marc are about 400 miles apart (as the crow flies), which according to my measurements is like the entire length of Massachusetts times four. Not exactly close. He’d either have to take a plane or else travel by train through North Korea (which would be a lot longer of a ride.) But when you’re so far away from them, it almost makes it seem closer, doesn’t it? Like if you knew two people that both happened to be on Mars, you might suggest they go see each other. On average, these two people would be about 6000 miles away from each other. But when you’re sitting on Earth, millions of miles away from both of them, it makes them seem a lot closer together, doesn’t it? But hell, they’re 6000 miles from each other. I don’t feel like driving across the USA twice to see someone, and neither would they.

Someone today found out I was from Cape Cod and immediately asked if I knew some people from Harwich. I know if you look at a map of Massachusetts, the cape seems pretty tiny, but once you get there, Harwich is pretty far from Sandwich. Not that far of a drive, really, but enough of a distance that I wouldn’t know anyone from there. It’s like finding out someone is from Boston and asking “Oh, do you know Nick?” Of course they don’t. Boston is fucking huge.

On a similar note, let’s say you were on a vacation in California, and you knew someone that was two hours from where you’re staying. You might go see them because you’re “close”. But that’s only because you’re very far away from your home (for me, about 3000 miles), so two hours (100 miles) seems a lot closer. If you had a friend back home that was two hours away, I bet you’d be a lot less willing to go see them.

Even when I lived in Sunderland, most of my friends were 5-10 minutes away from me, which was enough of a hassle that I didn’t see them as often as I might have liked to. Because hey, Mike’s in the other room so I might as well just hang out with him. Three seconds of walking makes 10 minutes of driving seem really out of the way.

Dragons. Dragons are a vital and necessary part of the D&D economic world. They raid villages and steal their treasure, and then hoard it for themselves back at their lair. Dragons never spend this money, they just love sitting on it, removing it from the money supply. Dragons are the reason that there is no crippling inflation in D&D.

Let’s assume for a moment that this gold somehow re-entered the world’s money supply.

(09:32:23) JakeTwo3: so say, hypothetically, there’s a legion of 20th level dragon slayers
(09:32:49) JakeTwo3: their greed could plummet the economy into depression
(09:33:28) DavTheGook: I mean, they’re gonna slay all these dragons, and find like hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, what are they gonna do? Probably try to buy castles or magical items
(09:33:41) DavTheGook: so the prices of castles are gonna shoot way up due to increased demand
(09:34:00) JakeTwo3: well, they need to construct the castle
(09:34:05) JakeTwo3: so that’ll provide jobs
(09:34:36) DavTheGook: okay, so the price of stone and construction labor will go way up
(09:34:45) DavTheGook: meaning that the lower middle class can’t afford to build new shops
(09:34:55) DavTheGook: stifling growth
(09:35:12) JakeTwo3: ah yes. so thats why reaganomics doesnt work

All that gold coming into the world at once would crash the economy! Sure, they may only spend their money on stone and labor. But then the stonemasons and the laborers are going to want to buy food and clothing, so the prices of those things are going to shoot up… it’s a vicious cycle of inflation. It’s a good thing dragons are so freaking powerful. The well-being of the entire world rests in their ability to keep their treasure from greedy adventurers.

To analyze the chorus:

Rise to the sun with seven wishes
Will you turn into stone with seven wishes
And your eyes on the run with seven wishes
Seven wishes

First of all, seven is the number of wishes you get from a fully charged wand of wishing (3 to start, 3 from a blessed scroll of charging, and 1 last wish that turns the wand to dust.) The phrase “rise to the sun” is a clear reference to ascension. A somewhat popular choice for a wish in nethack is wishing for a blessed cockatrice corpse, and the inherent dangers of doing so clearly correspond to the question “Will you turn into stone with seven wishes”. I think “eyes on the run” might refer to the “run” back up the dungeon from the bottom once you have the Amulet of Yendor, always keeping an eye out for the Wizard of Yendor showing up to piss you off.

The song was released in 1985. The first version of nethack was released in 1984. Coincidence? I think not! The band members must have been addicted to the game while they were working on their latest album.

I don’t really believe any of this.