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Software Friction

(www.hillelwayne.com)
141 points saikatsg | 5 comments | 17 Jun 24 06:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.691s | source
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WJW ◴[18 Jun 24 11:13 UTC] No.40716351[source]▶
> What about event planners, nurses, military officers?

As a Dutch ex-Navy officer, we just called this "friction" as everyone had read Von Clausewitz during officer training and was familiar with the nuances of the term. Militaries overwhelmingly address this problem by increasing redundancy, so that there are as few single points of failures as possible. It is very rare to encounter a role that can only be filled by a single person, a well designed military organization will always have a plan for replacing any single individual should they accidentally die.

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pjc50 ◴[18 Jun 24 12:23 UTC] No.40716962[source]▶
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" -- attr. Napoleon

"I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses" -- attr. Lincoln (exact words vary by source)

It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.

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1. adrianN ◴[18 Jun 24 12:43 UTC] No.40717152[source]▶
I think we would need better AI to make games where you can only give high level commands enjoyable.
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2. WJW ◴[18 Jun 24 14:15 UTC] No.40718121[source]▶
Doubtful tbh, at least in the context of the article. The problem for games that simulate war (or any other environment with "friction") too closely is not that the AI is not good enough, it's that such environments are just inherently not "fun" and thus not good material to make games out of.

Games work on a tight gameplay loop where the player can have feelings of agency (they can influence what happens at all) and mastery (they can get better at influencing what happens with practice). For this you need to have a relatively predictable relation to actions and outcomes. Having the game randomly lose the orders you give to a unit without any feedback is kinda the opposite of that.

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3. throwway120385 ◴[18 Jun 24 22:17 UTC] No.40722676[source]▶
Requiring you to manage a messenger corp in order to dispatch armies past your borders might be a good example of a mechanic that generates friction though.
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4. WJW ◴[19 Jun 24 09:20 UTC] No.40726453{3}[source]▶
That's a nice mechanic and many games have something equivalent to that, but if you can merely pay a resource tax to have everything working perfectly again then it's not friction in the sense that the article is talking about.

The problem with real friction is that, even if you did everything perfectly, orders may still not make it to the unit that has to execute them or they may do something else because of reasons neither of you foresaw, or the enemy forces you saw on the minimap are only half the forces that are actually there. Imagine if you were playing some shooter and randomly on 25% of the time your controller does not respond to inputs at all and another random 25% of the time the inputs get reversed. That would be a super frustrating game to play.

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5. throwway120385 ◴[20 Jun 24 18:23 UTC] No.40741620{4}[source]▶
Basically like a really frustrating XCom run where instead of a 5% chance to miss you had a 25% chance to miss.