Author: mikeduncan

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Publication Updates

I haven’t updated my CV on this site in awhile, and there has been some activity piling up, so.

I had a Perspectives article in Technical Communication Quarterly late last year, 2021, “Expanding Ethical Pedagogy in Technical Communication: Learning from Killer Nanobots.” It’s probably the first peer-reviewed work I’ve written that is almost entirely about teaching, though I also make a broader argument about ethics and tech comm.

I also published a short story in the Feb/March 2022 Analog Science Fiction & Fact, “Math of the Spear Carrier.” The print version came in the mail the other day. There’s an equally interesting story behind the writing of it, but I’ll leave that until later.

Thirdly, while I was in line at the DMV today, I received word that the article that I co-wrote with Drs. Ozaki and Hill in Technical Communication in 2020, “The Rhetoric of a Kamikaze Manual,” has received the 2022 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical and Scientific Communication. Yay us!

Lastly, I’ve known this bit of news for awhile, but I have a forthcoming monograph at Fortress Press/Lexingtonentitled Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem. It’s in the production stage currently, so I’m more confident now in describing it as a done deal, and it may appear this year. It’s been a long time coming, and it may end up being anti-climatic for me, but it is something, definitely, to sense a project has nearly been realized.

The book will argue that the Farrer Hypothesis is the best working hypothesis to the Synoptic Problem in New Testament studies by way of rhetorical theory. My innovation is seeing the Synoptic Problem as less about source and textual criticism and more as a writing problem, a question of how ancient writers composed that can be addressed using interdisciplinary knowledge of how all writers and rhetors typically compose. The book’s six chapters feature case studies of different aspects of gospel rhetoric, such as how the post-resurrection accounts interact with each other and how the apostles are portrayed from gospel to gospel. These case studies collectively argue the synoptic gospels as we have them are consistent with them being a series of competing rhetorical narratives about Jesus, with the authors of Luke and Matthew reacting to previous gospels with the goal of superseding their versions of Jesus’s life. However, at the same time, I acknowledge that the Farrer Hypothesis has special difficulties and cannot be pushed beyond an educated guess. The Synoptic Problem, I hold, is an unsolvable problem due to a lack of evidence and lost original context, and it is only a philosophical acceptance of the inaccessibility of a solution that paradoxically allows a frank and unsentimental view of the limited options.

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Politics Short Essays Writings

The Casus Belli and the White Peace

Now that the Cold War is turning Warm again for good, some thoughts.

The Cold War reached its zenith when I was a kid in the 1980s, but it only manifested itself indirectly from my perspective.

One way was by the siren song of G.I. Joe toys, which thankfully failed to recruit me into the armed forces. They usually fought Cobra, but old school Joes who read the comics will remember the Joe’s frenemies, the October Guard, led by Colonel Brekhov. Any of those stalwart Soviets were always quick to point out that the Joes were only the running dogs of capitalist imperialism.

The second way was via a long series of history textbooks in public school that not only prepared me for division-level command through copious diagrams of the Battle of Chancellorsville and the D-Day invasion, but made clear that the Soviet Union and communism together constituted the antithesis of the American way of life. Whatever that was.

The third way was by film and television, as I don’t think there was a single instant in the decade when there was not a film in theaters that didn’t have a Russian bad guy. They were portrayed as honorable occasionally, but misguided, miserable cogs of the Soviet machine at best. 1987’s The Living Daylights comes to mind, where the default hero of the West, James Bond, saves the Russians from their own corruption – and in passing, Afghanistan from the opium trade. Yeah.

But those angles were all blatant. The fourth way was through actual books, not the standard drivel in school. On the pop end, there was stuff like 1986’s Red Storm Rising, where Tom Clancy laid out a fairly realistic scenario for how a conventional World War III might play out. This led to a pre-Wikipedia crash course on military matters. I learned about the Fulda Gap, where a doomed delaying action by the 3rd Armored and 8th Infantry would constitute the opening of NATO’s depressing game plan to hold West Germany or lose Europe. I noticed it might play out before I managed to enroll in college.

The dice were favorable, however. German reunification was followed by Soviet collapse, though I didn’t know yet that this collapse had started well before I was born, perhaps as early as the ’68 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which the current Ukraine situation reminds me.

All of that was too distant to have much of an effect, though. Not until later did I grok that the obvious propaganda was not entirely propaganda. One can go back farther than the 19th century to offer further proof, but that’s far enough to note that the United States and Russia, as nations, have almost no strategic interests in common. Their respective economies and cultures are distant at best. Save for Alaska, they are on opposite ends of the world and have discrete spheres of influence with few overlaps. The WWII alliance did not even span the war – it ended in truth well before Berlin fell. This means that when either side ventures outside of those spheres, conflict is inevitable.

Chris Crawford’s classic PC game Balance of Power, another must-stop of the 1980s, is my first go-to when thinking about the U.S. and Russia. You score influence points by bluffing the Soviets to back down in external conflicts around the globe. However, the game rarely lasts long enough for those points to matter. If one side eventually refuses to back down – and this can happen over the slightest trifle anywhere on the globe – a nuclear exchange commences and you lose. It is very, very hard to get to the end of the game still intact (much less ‘win’) without learning a single and powerful lesson – the two superpowers had a hard limit on how much they can throw their weight around without destroying the world. Hence the endless proxy wars.

In real life, the U.S. ‘won’ the balance of power. The Fulda Gap scenario became obsolete when Germany reunified and Poland joined NATO. None of the former Soviet republics to this day can muster anything close to the endless divisions that would have stormed Germany in the 1970s. They don’t have the money or resources to maintain massive motor-rifle and tank divisions, or keep up with American military technology. Even Putin’s Russia.

Supposedly.

Watching Putin slowly push the West around and test what it’s willing to tolerate for the last fifteen years has been interesting. Russia is no conventional military threat to Europe anymore. But it retains its nukes, and this places it in the same category as North Korea, an entity that can never quite be confronted directly. However, Russia is far away, making it seem less pressing. The comparably tight geography of Korea makes removing the entire U.S. Eighth Army a bad idea – the 2nd Infantry is still there decades later – but there is no pressing need to garrison Europe with American troops to hedge against a Russian invasion, even today.

Not even after Georgia. Not even after Syria. Or even the annexation of Crimea.

Until maybe now.

Putin has been working for over a decade on a sufficient casus belli to give him control over Ukraine through annexation or puppetry, and thus move his western military border to Poland. He’s decided now, probably as he senses he can divide NATO enough with rhetoric to escape both a military confrontation and most of its sanctions, that the time is now to reclaim the biggest of the breakaway Soviet states.

Today, Feb. 21, as Russian troops invade southeast Ukraine, even the NYT won’t call it an invasion. But I think NATO has handled the situation surprisingly well so far. With the possible exception of Germany, the big players – the U.S., Britain, and France – are speaking mostly in unison, and sharing their intelligence gathering in an unusually public way, particularly Britain. The most important tool in their arsenal is not any threat of military intervention, though I think they could use their fleet-in-being powers more effectively; rather, it is their ability to collectively deny Putin any legitimacy. Even if Russia seized the eastern half of Ukraine and installed a puppet government, NATO could help turn the remainder into a heavily armed rump state and eventually force Russia out through attrition, not to mention gain a few new members, such as Sweden, Finland, and a rump Ukraine.

Thus there is no military solution for Putin here. He could occupy much of Ukraine, but he won’t be able to hold it very long, even if the buildup goes past 200k. The longer he keeps forces inside Ukraine’s borders, the more likely NATO will drop the sanction hammer, as they’ve already seen the possible tricks – the five-day war of Georgia, the proxy war in Syria, and the carving-off annexation of Crimea being the most obvious. All that’s left of the usual casus belli options is the hackneyed false-flag operation and the transparent claim of Ukraine actually being part of Russia all along, and we’ve seen multiple versions of both already. If his plan was to occupy the breakaway regions and offer to stand down in return for absorbing them, only to return next year to take more, we are already past that point.

The question, then, is if NATO can offer Putin an out that he will take that doesn’t allow him to claim yet another win. Eventually in the coming weeks, probably sooner than later, there should be a simple NATO ultimatum – withdraw Russian forces from Ukraine, or get the full sanctions treatment plus a Western supply chain at the disposal of west Ukraine.

I know, I’m dabbling in military matters here that I can’t possibly fully appreciate. But I do understand the language being employed, and in particular, that justification for war is always more than a legal fig leaf. It allows soldiers, diplomats, leaders, and common citizens the ability to think differently. Are my orders legitimate or a roadmap for war crimes? Is the other side acting in good faith when they negotiate, or are their intentions nefarious? Should I resist an invading force or capitulate? When people think differently via argumentation, they can act differently, even if the facts of the ground haven’t changed an iota. Thus the difference between a “legitimate” or “legal” Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine for “peacekeeping” to prevent “genocide,” and an autocrat’s reckless wielding of his nuclear arsenal as bald intimidation. The “winner” in Ukraine will be who tells the best story. I suggest that story should be one where Putin gets to show he pushed NATO around some, and NATO shows it can collectively stand up to Putin, but no territory changes hands. A white peace, in other words.

Unfortunately, I think we might be past that possibility now.

Categories
Game Design Gaming PC Reviews Writings

The Long Dark, Appreciated

Little has transpired lately that cheers me, so here, I have decided to praise something that I like.

I’ve been using Steam to buy PC games for over a decade. The best one in my alarmingly large collection is, by any measure, The Long Dark. It has been in Early Access since at least 2015, but it doesn’t matter. It is pretty much everything I might want in a PC game, but at the same time, it is maddeningly incomplete, illogical, and nonsensical. But this is a case where the flaws create the sublime.

The narrative version of the game, “Story Mode,” is fine, if still incomplete after seven years of development. Irrelevant, though. The core fan base of the game is in “Sandbox,” where you, as a recent plane crash survivor on a remote Canadian island after a ill-defined apocalypse, are tasked to survive as long as possible.

That’s it.

It’s very cold. There are no living humans save yourself. Much of the wildlife is hostile. The weather is fickle and deadly. Supplies are rare and randomly placed in every new game, and “safe” areas are widely spaced from each other, forcing dangerous treks. It’s a game of careful planning and preparation, and in the end, you’re going to make a mistake and die, as TLD is permadeath. You can stop playing to save your progress, but dying is permanent, and you must start over.

It is a gorgeous game. The weather is dynamic, moody, and a character unto itself. A typical game consists of long stretches of pleasant monotony, carefully building up a reasonable shelter, broken by abrupt moments of sheer terror during meticulously planned expeditions to distant corners of the island for rare supplies.

But the game is also highly unrealistic, and by design.

Crafting items is essential to survival, but many of the most painfully obvious items that a reasonable individual in such a circumstance might think to construct are not featured.

For example, I can build a fire, repair clothing, sharpen a tool, forge an arrowhead (if I’ve got a forge), even fashion a rabbit trap and build a self bow, among other useful survival tasks.

But I can’t make a spear, the most basic and easy to make Paleolithic weapon, even if items like knives, arrowheads, cured gut, and hardwood saplings are in the game.

I can’t fashion a sled to carry more gear or an animal I’ve just killed so I can harvest it in a safer location. They did eventually implement quartering, but it’s not that useful.

Even with a hatchet, I can’t manually cut down a tree – I’m limited to hacking branches that have already fallen to the ground.

I can’t fashion a stronger or larger backpack other than the one I have at the beginning. It’s possible to make a satchel out of a moose to supplement my carrying capacity, but I can only carry one.

I can’t build anything larger than a small snow shelter, despite, again, having multiple hatchets, knives, and various appropriate tools, or modify an existing structure in any way.

Several firearms exist in the game – a .303 carbine and a .357 revolver – but the stock character, despite apparent 20/20 vision, can barely hit a deer at 20 yards when he/she is standing still and the ungulate in question is standing still.

Finally, perhaps, raw meat spoils far too quickly, even if left outdoors to freeze , and there is no way to preserve/pickle anything long-term.

Oh, and don’t even get me on the lack of booze and candles.

Now, you’d think a reasonable individual like myself would laugh all the way to never playing the game again, after taking all of this nonsense into consideration.

But all of these examples are examples of good game design. Games are never supposed to be realistic. They’re supposed to be fun and challenging. Walking right up to reality and becoming indistinguishable from it is not the goal.

Spears would unbalance the game. Solo wolves and bears and even the odd moose would be too easy to fend off, and conserving and handloading ammunition for the guns would be less important.

A sled would make the “expedition for supplies” play cycle too easy, which encourages careful inventory management.

Forcing the player to harvest an animal where it falls introduces considerable strategy when hunting.

Allowing the player to deforest an area or improve shelters in an area also unbalances the carefully crafted maps that balance shelter, resources, and danger.

A realistically accurate rifle would make hunting trivial.

Yes, constructing a bear-proof log cabin, with an endless supply of firewood and months of cured meat, plus some pit traps that would allow me to hunt without wasting bullets… that would be ideal. But it would remove the sense of improvising every moment, of immediate danger and death around every corner.

These limitations can also be explained. The character is a unlucky bush pilot, not a mountain man/carpenter/hunter/craftsman. So the technology and abilities is closer to what an average Joe might be able to do while in a perpetual state of total panic.

In other words, nothing heroic.

The first time I encountered a bear in the game, I slowly backed away, despite being heavily armed and theoretically prepared. I only had one life. Having one life and holding on to that one life requires a different kind of thinking, decision-making, and risk calculation. The strange restrictions that I listed before, then, actually increase my sense of realism. Letting the player get too powerful and capable would turn it into every other poorly-balanced RPG in existence. The limits are what make it great.