 Okay. Thanks for coming to listen to me. I'll try not to do the butterfly with my hands. The content of my talk is going to be who I am. It's going to talk about some early games, some games in school, a little bit of books, arcades in Silicon Valley games, a little bit of politics. I'm a libertarian, some 90s games, some family games, some online multiplayer games. Current games, that's the game part. There's also going to be blogs and media. So the end of history since Francis Fukuyama wrote the book in 1992, at the end of the Berlin Wall, which is partly why I'm here also. Blogger, how I've written some blogs in blogger using the Wayback Machine to get my dead mo-time blog back a little bit. The fall of the Berlin Wall I mentioned. Some of my favorite bloggers, Neo-Neocon and Askblog of Arnold Kling, other book marks I make, a little bit of Facebook where I have a lovely love-hate relationship, some Twitter and Trump where I have a love and a disagreement relationship, a tiny bit of WordPress at the very end. Who I am. I'm an American. I'm a libertarian that's mostly free market and freedom-oriented, freedom with responsibility. There's two kinds of freedom. There's adult freedom and child freedom. The child freedom is freedom from responsibility, so that if they make a mistake someone else pays for it. Adult freedom is the freedom to act. But along with the freedom to act goes the freedom of the responsibility to pay for the consequences. What almost everybody wants is that adult freedom to act with the childish freedom of responsibility. So if there's a mistake they want someone else to pay for it. I've been working in IT. I'm a finance expert, a game player and technologically very savvy, but I'm getting tired of learning new updates all the time every six months, every three months, language after language. How did I get to Slovakia? Now I should also mention that they say you should take five minutes or so. Five minutes or so per slide. Well, I've got over 100 slides. That's going to be 500 minutes. No, I have to start speeding up. And it's about 10 seconds a slide once I start moving. A little bit of economics transition. I came to Slovakia with my own EverX 386 laptop notebook, six kilo machine. It was kind of unique at the time, but I don't have a picture of it anymore. So I'm going to start with card games. I'm going to talk a little bit about Rummy, solitaire, pinnacle, spades, hearts and poker. Rummy is very much like the Slovak game Joliet. And I played Joliet with Jokers. And it's the basic game. You try to create a trick and you play it and you score the most points and wins. Solitaire, most of you have played it. It's also available on a computer. My mother loved this game and she would play it every night. In fact, the night before she died, she was at home. She was playing solitaire. She went to bed and she didn't wake up. That was 14 years ago. I went to America for her funeral. It was sad, but it was also nice to see my family. Pinnacle is a very strange game. Pinnacle refers to a queen of spades and a jack of diamonds. That's a pinnacle. It's played with the high cards and the suit goes in order ace, 10, king, queen, jack. So it's a strange game, but I liked it. And I played a lot of it when I was in junior high school. Spades, I still play spades. And spades has the advantage of you have to choose how many tricks you're going to win and then you play tricks to get those. And spades is always trump. So you can see here, south is bidding two and it's got three trumps, king, queen, jack. And it's got this king of clubs. It doesn't know if the king of clubs is gonna be a winner. Probably won't because the ace of clubs will be higher than it or it might be trumped by someone who doesn't have any clubs. So he's got two definite winners between king, queen, and jack and he could even get three. Spades punishes you minus 10 points times the number you bid if you miss it. But if you get over, so if he does get three tricks, he'll get 21 points. And you usually play up to 200 or so. My daughter likes spades. My wife doesn't like it so much. She doesn't like card games. I like card games. I like hearts. Hearts is a very different kind of card game. The idea is to not get points. And the way to avoid getting points is to avoid suits. High cards of suits and it has the disadvantage of trading, you trade three cards. You pass three cards to the left, then pass three cards to the right and pass across and then you keep according to the rounds of hands. It also has a strange scoring system where every heart that you get on your tricks is one point, which is negative and the queen of spades is 13 points. So it's very negative. And there's also another interesting thing. If you get all 13 hearts plus the queen of spades, you get 26 points, except that you don't get that. Everybody else gets it. So this is called going for it all or shooting the moon and that's what makes hearts really, really interesting because most of the time you're trying to avoid so everyone else is thinking, oh, they're doing great. They're getting no hearts, but you're taking them all. So you take them all and then they all get 26. It's great fun. Then there's poker. Here's a list of poker rankings if you don't know, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, and eye card. And the pots get big when two people think that they're both going to win. Or when one person is bluffing and the other person thinks he's going to win or one person is bluffing and the other person thinks he's bluffing but isn't sure who's gonna win. Chess, board games. I played lots of board games when I was young. I liked chess. One of the interesting things as I'm looking for these images on the internet is that many of them are advertising images. If you look at this board game, beautiful stunt and pieces, by the way, it has black in front, sort of closer to you and white on the other side. Most of them are the other way. If you try to look at the pieces, you'll see this is strange. Black has made four moves and white has only made three moves because white is supposed to go first. So this was not really a game. This is just advertising. Monopoly, it's another great game that I like. And I used to know all the rents and all the properties and how you start out with the money, five ones, five fives, five 10s, six 20s, two 50s, two 100s, and two 500s. That's 1500 bucks. And if you land with a four in income tax, you pay the 10%, which is 150, instead of the 200. But as you start getting more money, it's 200 more often. My wife doesn't like Monopoly either that well because my daughter, when we were playing it, if my daughter would get upset, she would give all her money and all her property to somebody else and that would very much disturb the game. Another two person game that I like is Stratigo. And again, this is just for advertising purposes. No one is gonna put their flag out here near the front so that it can be easily taken because when your flag is taken by the other team, you lose. So almost always you want your flag in the back either disguised or protected by bombs. Now, they do have this guy protected by a few bombs, but you don't put the bombs in front, you put the bombs in back. But Stratigo's a fun game. A really fun game is risk. Now, when I was growing up, I had a box very much like this, kind of funky. And if you look at this, these are little wooden squares and there used to be also little wooden oblong pieces for 10, each of these is one army. The newer risks like the one of my sister has and when I was visiting my sister this year, she won a risk game and she was really happy. They take about four or five hours. It's not so quick and she has kind of cool little pieces that look like armies or cannons or cavalry. And you have three dice if you're attacking and two dice if you're defending or less. It might be if you only have one guy left, you only get one die. So it's a very interesting, lots of die rolling. Your three dice against the other guy's two dice if you're attacking and it's your highest dice against their highest die. And so if you have a six and a one and a one and they have a five and a two, your six beats their five but their two beats your one. So you lose one and they lose one. So you're attacking, you have lots of stuff and you slowly take over the world. It's a lot of fun. Another game that I used to play quite a bit is 3D Tic Tac Toe. I don't know how well you can see it but in this case, there were four levels of clear plastic and each level had a four by four so it was 16 squares so it was 48 possibilities and you try to get four in a row up, down, across or on sort of a Tic Tac Toe but for four. And that was very fun. A similar game is score four and you can see right away, again, this is the stupid advertising. They don't even have some of the posts. So they're supposed to alternate but the thing about score four, there's two ways of playing that we used to play. One is the first one that gets four in a row wins but you can see here ice white has four in a row here so it should win but you can also see black has three in a row and only needs one more on top but also over there has three in a row and only needs one more on top. So it looks kind of nice. I'm sure somebody in marketing was looking at it and say this is a nice looking image. There's, I think there's 16 black and only 12 white so it was also nice but it's nicely balanced anyway. Score four. Another game if you like graphs and things is Go. Now Go is a 19 by 19 grid and there was talk about how Go is harder for computers to play than chess and that was true up until the massive ability of throwing first more hardware at the problem and second smarter software so they have better artificial intelligence looking at patterns. Also when you play Go the way I was taught you can see very nicely here the little black and white pieces you're supposed to pick them up with your two fingers like this and put them on the board but I think most people don't do that and you also are supposed to use chopsticks when you're eating because it's a Japanese game. Battleship, you can buy battleship and play battleship but I would always play almost always play battleship just on graph paper. You make graph paper, you play battleship you put different size ships five for an aircraft carrier of four for battleship three for a cruiser three for a submarine two for a destroyer you put them on the grid somewhere and you guess where the other guy has his and he sinks your battleship. Dots, dots can start out as just four by four dots or usually on graph paper five by five, 10 by 10 and you make the lines and then the other guy makes the lines and you keep making a line until you start making boxes and then you count up the boxes and the boxes you get wins and this game that you, which was me I'm about to lose because I made a box here I'll make another box there and then I have to put a line and as soon as I put a line here or there or anywhere he'll get all the other boxes. I hadn't played this before on the computer so it was the first time I saw this as I'm looking for this because this was something I used to play when I was in elementary school and it's fun. Another fun graph paper game is five in a row and you, as you could guess you try to get five in a row like tic-tac-toe. To get five in a row typically you need two cases of four in a row without being blocked so that you're trying to get lots of threes in a row that will intersect so that you can get some two times four in a row. You can see here you can also play it on a go board which is kind of fun and nobody is winning here this is actually looking like it could have been a real game. Pinball, you know this is a walk through my childhood and I used to love pinball I used to go to bowling alleys to play pinball. Also when I was going to bowling alleys they didn't have automatic scores so if you were playing bowling you had to score it yourself. If there were leagues and there were lots of bowling leagues they had to score themselves. Now most people who bowl when they're bowling in league one of the nice things about bowling is you can be a little bit tipsy and still bowl. In fact you can be barely walking and still bowl but you can't keep score and you're barely walking so I would keep score for these guys and because I knew how to keep score it's a little bit complicated bowling if you get a spare it's 10 plus what you get on the next roll if you get a strike it's 10 plus what you get on the next two and if that's another strike then it's 20 plus the next one but if it's a spare then it's 20 directly plus you have to add each one so you get eight in the first frame and then you get a spare in the second frame and then in the third frame you get another eight but you got it by eight in one ball so that's 18 plus eight is 26 and then another eight is 34 so you got to keep that score that was in the bowling alley pinball was much more easy and fun you put the quarter in in the slot over here and you have the flippers and you pound it and you tilt and you really get upset then finally moving towards arcade games the first one was computer space and this was a this is what the arcade machine looked like and there was a little guy I had visions of having little animations here but the animations take too long so you're not going to get animations I'm sorry but one of the things about computer space is you don't have the tie fight air moving quickly in the air because in space nothing stops your momentum except your own thrust you have to turn thrust against the way you're moving and slow down and then start going another way or you can turn but your momentum is really a big thing and these early games were very interested in getting the mathematics right so that was most of my high school junior high some important books Lord of the Rings a beautiful wonderful fantasy I read it a few times and it led to Dungeons and Dragons and adventure games Moon is a Harsh Mistress Libertarian Politics another way of getting to Libertarian Politics is Atlas Shrugged and Ein Rand and I read those too but that's not how I got to Libertarianism Ender's Game was a fun book but also had a very interesting side story where Ender's older brother and older sister were having conversations on the world wide net and this is before there was the internet and they were shaping a public opinion I read lots of science fiction and fantasy here in Slovakia you find out very little science fiction in Slovak it's in Czech and I don't I don't know I don't know Czech lots of Slovaks don't know that they grow up listening to Czech on their TV programs and reading Czech books in classes Czech people know that because they don't listen to Slovak stuff and so lots of Czech adults have difficulty understanding Slovaks and Harry Potter I read all fourteen Harry Potter books and only seven were written how did I do that I read them in English and I read them in Slovak but it helped my Slovak now I'm getting into college and finally some games one of the games was Star Trek now the games in Star Trek and college were actually I say it's here but they were actually written on paper like this which I find up in the back and the paper came out printed like this where it would say here is the Starship Enterprise here are Klingons you have some shields you can put up you have photons you can use against the Klingons and you try to kill them and you say what's happening and you get a command and there's a list of commands but it was typed out on paper in fact it was typed out on a machine kind of like this which was really kind of loud but it was kind of fun we get them up and we type on the keyboard not only Star Trek but also Lunar Lander this was an old form Lunar Lander where you have your speed and fuel and you're supposed to be giving the fuel to slow yourself down you can see he's not doing it he's not using up any fuel and he's not slowing down in fact he's getting faster so he touches down but he doesn't quite touch down he crashes he blew it appropriate condolences will be sent to your next of kin later on Lunar Lander allowed you to that was also quite fun Adventure was a game I spent a good amount of time in one Christmas when I was at Stanford Welcome to Adventure you're standing at the end of a road before a small brick building around you is a forest a small stream flows out of the building and down a gully so this is the beginning of Adventure in your mind or just north or south and you go somewhere and you find some other description and you find a great you get into Colossal Cave which was actually based on a real cave by this guy Will Crowther but most of the Adventure games in the US colleges were revised by Crowther's first pass by a guy named Don Woods who I met and will get to later oh and we're here on these are text games so there's not really graphics on the mainframes you could also play Monopoly this is kind of hard to see there's Monopoly but because it's a text game it's basic attempts at graphics of the different properties and you can quickly play it this is not a text game and you'll find out that a lot of my games are not text games or computer games this is diplomacy and it's a no luck game everything that happens in diplomacy happens because people order it or they don't order it or they miss order it so if you have a piece in Vienna and Russia and Russia has a piece in Warsaw and you order your piece to Galicia and he orders his piece to Galicia they bounce so then nothing happens so what do you have to do? well you have to take your piece that's in Budapest and support your piece in Vienna going to Galicia so that you get two against one and then you move but of course if he thinks that you're doing that maybe he's going to go somewhere else maybe come down here and so it's a very interesting simple game the mechanics are simple but what it is is you as Austria talking to Germany about how you two should go against Russia but then you talk with Russia and you say you and Russia should go against Germany or maybe you and Russia should go against Turkey or maybe you talk with Turkey and say the two of us should go against Italy and then there's Italy and France it's a fun game take over Europe but no luck involved you have to get them to order it's turn-based, everyone writes orders same time the written orders are read and the results are shown very often that's one of the results that you feel you get stabbed in the back that was a lot of fun I've never met a woman who really likes playing this much and when I was going to war game conventions in Silicon Valley not too many women were even interested in playing getting back into the arcades starting with Pong and Pong is like ping pong with a nice little boop boop boop back and forth and this is what the consoles look like and this is what it looked like when you were actually playing and I liked Pong a little bit, not so much but I preferred Atari Breakout and was more fun and more colorful but the game I really liked at the time which was the breakout game was Space Invaders a little bit like Jaws and it was fun and it was getting louder and louder and faster and faster as you're killing these aliens that are coming down and moving and shooting also at you and a little alien up there another arcade game that was fun was Defender and Joust the reason I mentioned Joust is because Ready Player One was a movie that came out recently it was a fun movie and it helped inspire this talk because I thought well the guy who wrote Ready Player One played all these games I played a lot of games so that's why I'm talking about it and Joust was more important in the book which I read of course than the movie most people who see the movie they don't need to read the book I'm not like that and another game that I played a little bit but was more important in the movie was Galaxian the huge, huge winning arcade game that caused hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue to the arcade industry after Space Invaders was Pac-Man and lots of women liked to play Pac-Man and they didn't seem to have a big preference for Miss Pac-Man but they did like it then there was Donkey Kong and then there's Silicon Valley games now back to text there's covered up here but your little guy is Rogue and in these boxes there'll be some villains and you go and kill them that was Rogue, I liked that it was fun but you can see here list of your inventory then there were the early personal computers which were game playing machines like this Atari and I had a friend who had an Atari and one of the things about the Atari is hooking up four joysticks to it so this game Dandy which was not a very well known game it has one player mode you can have four players in it and then you have four guys here that are shooting the heck out of these guys and you go down levels A, B, C, D, E we got to about Q but we were having a fun time drinking too so we had a ton of fun and there's four of us with the joysticks just blazing away that was my friend who had an Atari I had a Commodore 64 which looked a bit like this and this was one of the games, Archon which is a little bit different because it's a chess type game but with different characters and when two characters meet there's a not an automatic win you go into a little battle area and you fight it out like a little arcade game but the appropriate, stronger piece, so sorry would typically win but not always and like I said I had a Commodore 64 so I did play a loadrunner I did play four apocalypse and I did play Excalibur and Excalibur was a fantasy takeover England game where you have to do different diplomacy with the other people and you have different wealth and taxes and army and you have gifts and honor and ways of getting with other people Phoenix, I'm not going to go into Phoenix it's a very complex game the rules are 94 pages long I really liked it it would be diplomacy take over the galaxy and you have factions you have alliances, you have battles it was a lot of fun it took up a huge amount of my time far more than it's worth Tetris was another game very fun taking up a good amount of time I mentioned it because the 3D Tetris was not so much fun to me but this guy he was the Russian friend of the guy who did Tetris and he was one of the key programmers of 3D Tetris so when I came to Slovakia in 1991 before I came to Slovakia I had a 3 month ureal pass in Europe so I spent a week and a half in Moscow at Andres Negov's house in an 18 story panel some of which have been falling down and they had rats in their chutes where you put the garbage in and it goes down they had beautiful subways though at the time I was kind of surprised Ultimate Frisbee I played Ultimate Frisbee in Silicon Valley I urge all of you to play Ultimate Frisbee it's a fun game it's also I think the best game for men and women to play together in terms of physically in kind of a no contact fair way and you can see a lot of mixed teams in Ultimate Frisbee we're at the point where another game of thrones well it's politics I ran as a libertarian candidate in California a couple of times because I'm very politically I was very politically oriented then I came to Slovakia as an advisor to Jan Czarnogorski because this guy Tim Evans was paid by or funded by the Adam Smith Institute in the UK to be Jan Czarnogorski's advisor when he was a vice prime minister but at that time, 1991 Mechiar you have to tell me when I have ten minutes five minutes okay so this is his wedding ten years later and most of these people I met here in Slovakia because of this issue and I focused on privatization Minesweeper, that was a game Castle Wolfenstein, another game this was a good game this was the first person shooter, I'm not big on first person shooters but this was a really good game Sid Meier Civilization that's a great game, I'm big on this kind of game in this case American Civilization destroyed by Indians next big game that I loved Age of Empires sorry it's coming Mental Discorders, here in Slovakia there's actually lots of good ultimate disc players now and when I was here I was among the people who were helping found that and so I'm glad that that's happening here's why I'm staying my beautiful wife and I love dancing and she wants to stay here secret for marriage do the things that are easy for you that your wife likes so make her happy there's ten things five of them are easy, do those five things argue about the other ones but if it's easy for you, do them it's easy for me to stay I can live anywhere, I'm pretty flexible I have four kids and here they are but this is twelve years ago when Michael and Daniel were still young and just starting to play Age of Mythology daughter Bianca this was at Dell in one of their Mikulash things and that was for those three I was the year before or the summer before I was with my son Patrick at the beach so Titan, I'm going to skip Titan because we don't have time but you can play Titan by email and you can play Titan on a computer and it's a great game Don Woods and Tom Lehmann are two people who were involved in game playing in Silicon Valley other games Settlers of Catan Labyrinth Carcassan here's Age of Mythology and we still play that and the reason we still play it it's still working we play it through Vubli so multiple people and my son who's studying in Bernal can play it with us so online games Age of Empires online this is a copy of the original and remaster but we don't play Age of Empires so much we play Age of Mythology more some of us play Warcraft or especially World of Warcraft all these games Runescape my wife likes Runescape okay so she played that a lot her name was Avenka she was an 80 level warrior and she was having guys who were like 20 say you know she can't be a woman but she can be Harry Potter well there was a Harry Potter times and there were Harry Potter games and they were kind of fun Rayman was kind of fun we had Rayman 1, 2 and 3 isn't this kind of fun we played any of these games it's Walk Down Memory Lane Civilizations 3, 4, 5 and 6 with increasingly better graphics Portal that was kind of a cute game that cake is a lie that's my second son Daniel really likes lots of games but he's especially wonderful in Dominion he likes all the expansions and he plays it Race for a Galaxy maybe some of you have played that here this was written by this guy Tom Lehmann that was the guy back at Stanford that I met who was a friend of Don Woods who did the adventure games and we would all play New Year's Eve at Don's house for for 3 days on the weekend starting Friday night until people poop out or have to go back to work on Monday we still play the expansion set because you can play up to 6 with the expansion sets of settlers the original settlers for was maximum and finally League of Legends I like to play a Mumu I'm actually all my two sons and my daughter play League of Legends and I am but I really like Dr. Mundo okay that was the fun games now we get to the content it's probably I'm just going to zip through these it's a blog that I read and they typically have a very short piece of news sometimes a little bit so you can decide whether you want to click on it and get more details some of my blogs I wrote one that was going to be for my family which I stopped writing most of these blogs but here quickly Hayek in Slovakia was going to be economics weblog ABCs was going to be about weblogs software projects was going to be about software projects World Association of International Studies was actually this long email that I was getting from this guy Ronald Hilton from Stanford very interesting stuff but once it's not on the web you know there's the talk about Google you can't find it so I was making a blog and I was copying his letter into this blog so that it could be found then I started blogging more on Motime is now dead so it's gone you can find a little bit of this stuff through the Wayback Machine where there's 300 billion web pages stored so I looked up mine and I could go through more NeonioCon AskBlog is more economics comments are what makes a really good blog so this is a comment that I wrote on AskBlog Economic Issue PJ Media you can have blogs in a PDA form low graphics but I don't like that so much even though it's better for smartphones you can have it with the RSS feed but I don't like those and you can have monetization which I also don't use yet or PJ Media that was pajamas media the PJ Facebook my love-hate relationship with Facebook here's my wife this is our Christmas picture last year this was a picture 12 years ago so family what's on my mind it says what's on my mind but I just don't like Facebook that much but it's kind of like blogging so I'm going to be doing it more there's not six of us but there's seven of us that's because Victoria Gray is my oldest son Michael's wife so when she wrote Victoria Gray I was wondering who is that person because I knew her as Vicki it's like okay one of the things is they do have an age of mythology group for our family to play they have a type they have League of Legends Trump on Twitter I was suspended from Twitter for retweeting something of Trump I hadn't made zero tweets but I was suspended for four months they've recently not suspended me but I'm not going to be using it except to watch what Trump says and this is another guy who's very pro-Trump and is kind of a jerk about it almost I'm not lying two guys are pretty fair and one guy is kind of anti-Trump but a pretty reasonable anti-Trump and finally WordPress I have a WordPress blog and comparing blacks to blacks is that it? I have other slides that could go on and on and on I won't even mention it let's get to the end future desires that's it thank you