135B. Why I Make War Games

My complex origins led to my studying military science from the age of 5, but I became a pacifist at 18. Before I explain how to make the ultimate war games, I want to reveal my intent.

As I began to write the sequel to the previous paper, the one where I solve the problems identified there, I realized that something was missing: Intent. I can’t explain that in one paragraph. To tell my cautionary tale is perhaps going to be more useful to many of you than the mechanisms that I decided to push to article 136C. Why would a pacifist dedicate their life to making the world’s largest military simulations?

No one really knows what happened to me after I witnessed my father almost killing my mother when I was two years old. I’ve been struggling to understand this myself. It seems clear that I come from a long line of “autistics” (which I call non neurotypicals). On my fathers side, they were very militaristic. On my mothers side, traced back to Sir William Gray, they made warships and the infrastructure behind modern war. I discuss my ethnic origins here.

My father pled insanity and was institutionalized as a violent sociopath. I lost about 2.5 years of memory. I just remember my father returning and handing me a deck of math flash cards, and my brain turning back on. I locked onto those numbers and built a new world framework using math as my mental anchor. I never seriously considered relying on my family, or really any human, for mental stability.

When my uncle (who had a reputation as a misfit genius) taught me chess on my 5th birthday, everyone was surprised or even alarmed at how fast I learned. From that day on I went undefeated for 10 years and many people wanted to try their luck with this kid. My sister used to use me to scam people by betting them $5+ that they would not beat me at chess. But by the next year I had discovered Avalon Hill games and that became my true passion. My first AH game was Waterloo (first published in 1962), which I began playing in 1972. Since I had no one to play against, I would play against myself. I did this for years with various increasingly complex games until these sorts of games could be played by computers.

For whatever reason I seemed to be developing at ~3 times the normal human rate. This was confirmed by weeks of testing by the Santa Monica school district when I was 7. I was some sort of hybrid prodigy/savant freak. My human language skills got a late start as I mostly only talked to cats. No one really knew what to do with me, there were no protocols. My teachers put me in a corner for years and ordered me to self educate since they were unable to mentor me. This didn’t help my communication skills.

There was one person in my life who had a very clear idea of what to do with me: my Father. He spent a lot of money getting full custody of me when I was 10. He fully encouraged and funded my military science interests. He took me to air shows and military museums. When I was 14 I was credited with getting “Bomber” Bob Dornan elected in the impossibly liberal West Los Angeles district. Bob was the father of the B-2 bomber, which was used a few days ago to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

And this is exactly what my father had in mind. As his family was rounded up, tortured, and killed in 1979 by the Ayatollah’s revolutionary forces in 1979 (when I was 13, all intelligentsia were targeted) he wanted me to use my “unnatural” skills to become a military strategist and guide the killing of thousands or even millions of Iranians. Bob promised me the two congressional recommendations needed for whichever academy I would join, and military recruiters eagerly awaited my 18th birthday. I was ready to go. All lights were green, and all doors were open.

But when I turned 18 I had my first girlfriend. I didn’t feel it right to have relations with children when I was under 18 as I kind of skipped childhood entirely. At the age of 17 I would have been ~50 years old cognitively. My first partner was 34 years old with a master’s degree. She explained to me what happened in Vietnam when she found out about my career plans. I went to the library and confirmed that she was right about American war atrocities there. This was not the narrative I was raised on, and this was before the internet.

I had a lot of nightmares of my bombing Iran (which given this week’s activities, were eerily premonitory). [I feel some guilt as I contributed to that in some small way.] I decided that two wrongs do not make a right, that destruction is 10 times easier than creation (and I always play life on the hardest difficulty level), that a lust for power was unhealthy, and that I needed a Vow of Pacifism going forward to avoid temptation.

In a way I admire Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli general who killed many but then realized that peace was the way. He would earn the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and then be assassinated by a fellow Israeli the next year in 1995. He was 70 when he put down his sword, but I’m sure he was under intense pressure not to. Time is compressed for me. I’m also pretty good at simulating the consequences of my actions before making major decisions, so I was able to become a pacifist before the whole “killing Muslims” thing became locked in.

I enrolled in the nursing program at Santa Monica College when I was 19 to improve my social skills and learn how to give/create. My grandmother Marjory was a retired nurse and the coolest person in my family.

After I was sexually harassed by 6 female nursing students and 2 instructors I ended up filing a civil rights complaint against SMC and redirected to exercise physiology at UCLA. I had been homeless and powerless for a couple years by then, and when I was 18 the Olympic community began mentoring me. World record holder Tommie Smith was my coach and my first job was working at the Olympic Village at UCLA that same year. Four years later I would coach track at UCLA and was the trainer for Jackie-Joyner Kersee and Florence Griffity-Joyner (FloJo) when they set their world records. I also trained athletes from four other countries for that Olympics. For me this was my way of giving back to the community that had helped me.

I would join the Governor’s Council of Fitness and Sport under Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of my early idols, until running/fitness was taken from me by a drunk driver in 1994. It was during the two years it took to reassemble myself that I got into gaming just as it started to go online. I saw the elite fitness field and then game development as ways to fully utilize my talents without them becoming weaponized (which would break my Vow).

That has not been easy. Many have tried to weaponize gaming, and that’s only intensified as the technology to do exactly that has advanced. My willingness to explain how gaming has been weaponized, to regulators, turned all those lights to red and closed all those doors.

When I worked at Wargaming, it was a natural fit. I was the only American expert at the Austin think tank who did not have decades of military experience. That was never an issue at WG as my knowledge of military science was well respected and appreciated.

I see myself as something of a real life Andrew “Ender” Wiggins from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I have all the abilities he does and more. I feel that one cannot end war unless you understand war. You can’t talk to generals unless you speak their language. I don’t see myself as a traitor. When I’m building the social system and economic designs of the future, I see myself as what comes after the “Anarchist” stage of life. What’s the point of burning things down if you can’t replace them with something better?

When I’m building systems for massive scale cooperation in games I see myself as what comes after the “Military General” path in life. We will never maintain a lasting peace on Earth if we don’t pursue that with the same vigor and resources that we allocate to war. It is easy to learn about war. Where do we go to learn about peace?

Life on Earth is only going to get harder for humans as we approach multiple possible anthropogenic extinction events. How do you train for an extinction event without going extinct first? It’s a serious question. In a computer game simulation you can go extinct and then start over again and try to achieve a better outcome. Done properly, this can actually be entertaining!

Success, like in the Olympics, requires a lot of preparation. Using “Ender’s Game” like simulations we can gamify all of these events and practice the survival skills (real skills, not abstracted) we will need as a species going into the 21st century and beyond.

Done right, this can even be profitable.