We all like to win games. We all try to win games. You play the game. You're winning the game. Or at least you're trying to win the game, right? Right. I'm gonna argue that most of you are not actually seriously trying to win the games you play. Most people do not try to win. Or at least they think they're trying to win, but they're not actually putting any full effort necessary to truly be a winner. Yeah, like you're counting points, you're doing your stuff, you're winning at about that same 30% rate among three friends that everybody wins. You're not that guy that everyone's like, oh, he always wins games. So, we have to give you some warning before we continue. If you stay in this room, we're gonna take you somewhere. We're gonna take you to a kind of sad place. That ferryman is not going back the other way. It's a one-way trip. I'm not gonna drink. So, three bad things will happen to you if you stay in this room to the end and one good thing, the air hockey problem. So, whoever here is like really good in a particular game, maybe you're really good in Street Fighter or something like that, yeah. And your friends don't want to play with you because they are not also as good, right? So you can't get to play that game to really want to play. Well, if you follow our advice to start winning the games, like me, a really good air hockey, people aren't gonna want to play those games with you and you're just not gonna get to play them unless you find pros at a place like that. And the rest of the year, you're just not gonna do it. And even then, there's a big gulf between not good at games, pretty good at game, professional. It's a desert in that matter. I can beat every choose person that I go air hockey. If I go to air hockey world championships, I might as well not even show up. It's not right, so I'm gonna take it again. Two, the term taking problem. You will hate all of your friends for the rest of time if you get good at games. When you're good at a game, you usually play it pretty quickly. You know, someone who's bad at a game, someone has to sit there thinking for a long, long time.   My problem with them is that I don't always have time for a three-hour game. What? Seven Wonders for us is like 45 minutes tops. If someone takes more than 5 or 6 seconds on the term, I start getting antsy. Three, the matrix problem. Not only will you make all of your friends not fun anymore, you will make games not fun. You will see through the matrix. You'll sit down at a board game, brand new game. Your friends are super excited about it. People will be like, oh, this is obviously just like a direct competition, open information game. I'll win by doing boo-boo-boo, and you'll figure out the whole game without even playing it. And then your friend's gonna feel really bad. One good thing will happen though. You will become not just a gamer, but a player of games. This isn't going to break this book. All right. Assign everybody a summary. Read this book. The idea is that a lot of us are good at a game. We're good at some games. We're good at some aspects of games. If you understand games at their core, you will become good at all games. Even games you've never played before, games you've never seen before, by learning these core skills, you will get better. It's like leveling up as a fighter in D&D, but you also learn magic. And you also learn stabbing. Backspot. So let's get right into this. You keep saying that word. Game. Game. What is a game other than visual pilots? It kills your father.  That's not a game. You're not a gamer. You just play casual games. What does the word mean? What does it mean? So if you're an insufferable pedant, you'll want to go to the dictionary. And the trouble is the dictionary does not really help out your costs. I mean an amusement or pastime. That covers pretty much everything I do on a daily basis. Me too. But I mean the trouble is, colloquially, we as gamers, we all know what we mean. When we're talking about game, we mean pheasants. Do you consider patty cake a game? Well, I mean a baby could theoretically lose a patty cake. But there's no points. It's not like the mother gets like one victory point every time the baby misses the cake. Is that how it works, this cake? I thought there was just patty in the cake that's just sort of the name. So colloquially, we call this a game, but yet there's no way to really win or lose. It's an interactive amusement at best. I think we all agree this is a game, right? Candyland is a game. There's almost no one who would say that Candyland is not a game. But if you think about Candyland and you actually know the rules, you don't make any decisions during Candyland whatsoever. All you do is flip over the cards and find out who won. There's nothing you can do to make yourself win at Candyland, besides what I did as a child, and stack the deck to give myself a big prize. But in fact, it's sort of cheating, which you shouldn't do. It says right under the badge. No cheating. Number four. So we all agree that Candyland is a game, but obviously we're not talking about how to win at Candyland, because there's nothing you can do to win or get better at Candyland. Not about games like this. This is a game. No one's going to say that's not a game, yet you're not testing any skill. You can't win or lose a game like that. And these are actually not the kinds of games we're going to talk about today. Right, people, a lot of people don't realize this, but in the video, in the movie industry, there's the MTA, right? In the music industry, there's the RIA. In the video game industry, there's the ESA, the Entertainment Software Association. Even the video game industry itself recognizes this is entertainment software, not a game. Most of the things that people just co-oply or call video game are really just entertaining software, and it isn't actually a game by a strict definition. Yup. So it's this amazing piece of software. So we're not going to talk about this stuff, but there's a pretty simple answer. You know how to win at single player games like this? Enjoy them. If you're not enjoying them, you're losing and you should probably stop playing. So if you talk to game designers or people who are kind of more in the game industry or paying attention, and you ask them, what is the definition of game? They'll usually say something that boils down to one of these three things. And number two, which is in my definition. Right? Yeah. It's interesting to use. And we can break all these down, but again, at least one of you is an insufferable pet. So for the purposes of this discussion, Richard Garfield has actually saved this because in a book that he wrote with some friends, called Characters of Games, he gave us a word, orthogame. Orthogame describes exactly the kinds of games we're talking about right now. The games you can actually win. Yes. A competition between two or more players, so not puzzles, using an agreed upon set of rules and a method of ranking. You have to be able to win or lose. There has to be a way to determine who wins or loses, and there has to be more than one player. That is all we're talking about. You'll be the insufferable pet who is arguing with you about the definition of game. Just use the word orthogame every time and you'll be the insufferable pet. So there's one more thing we really have to talk about. One more definition for where you're going. The idea of utility. That's the carrot. When you're playing a game, what are you trying to do? You're trying to get victory points. You're trying to get score. You're trying to win the game. Winning is your utility in this case. Being higher ranked than the other people you're playing with. Sometimes you play a game with someone who isn't going for the same utility. You're trying to win and get victory points. So when you finish the race first, someone else, maybe they're in a marathon and their goal is push as many people over as possible. That's what we call alternate utility. Their utility is not the utility that it's supposed to have. And that's what we call a troll. Or a griefing. A griefing is usually the word. So when you're in World of Warcraft who just kills you and camps your corpse, that's griefing. They're not trying to win and level up and do the things you're supposed to be doing. So we're assuming in this discussion that you at least, whatever the game is, the game has victory points. If that's how you win, that is what you're going for. If you're seeking something other than the core utility, winning the game, then really this talk doesn't apply to you and also your friends probably hate you. I don't think the person has friends. Alright. What we really want to do is give you very specific advice because the point of this is I want you to all go out for the rest of packs and beat all your friends. At every game you play for the rest of this weekend.  So what you two need to do is look at one of the slides that's coming up later and then get a third frame to play with you. Juristics. Humans can't do differential calculus by birth. Even the ones who know differential calculus. But at the same time, if you toss a ball at a young child, they will often catch it. So how are they calculating where that ball is going to land? If they can't do the math, they can't look at, like, they don't know the force of gravity and the wind and everything. They can't, like, do all this complicated math.  It turns out there's something that humans do called the gaze heuristic.  They will then move their body forward or backward, left or right to ensure that that angle never changes. If you do that, you're guaranteed to catch the ball. It's a heuristic. We're not calculating the speed, the velocity, where it's going to land. We're using a heuristic, like a simple rule. I will follow this simple set of rules and if I follow them, I'm guaranteed to achieve a particular outcome. So in games, there's game theory. There's math. We talk a lot about how, you know, game theory and how you can calculate the states of games.  We can't do that math. Yeah, so there are maybe two different kinds of heuristics, right? The first important one is the directional heuristic. How you decide what to do. The gaze heuristic is directional heuristic, right? Is a process by which I figure out what my next move is going to be. Okay, so we have two bridges here in Shadowgate. How do I decide which bridge to go on? Do I go on the bridge? What's bridge on the bridge? The bridge is a bridge. Because you've got snakes on it, too. I thought snakes. I thought that we just heard a sis. There's a brook on them. I think the brook in step here is an indication that I should not go over here. So your method of your directional heuristic is choose the safest bridge. That's exactly what I'm going to do. By default, my heuristic, if I see two bridges, whichever one looks safer. That's a good directional heuristic. Yeah. Alright. The vision for heuristics. So how do you know who's in first place? I mean Mario Kart. It says, oh, Rem's in first place. Waluigi's in second place. All their Waluigi's in third place. But you all know, you've played Mario Kart. That is not true. First place is really third place. The second place is first place unless the gap between second and first is so small that the blue shell explosion is both of them. In which case third place is first place. So if directional heuristic is how to figure out, based on what I am now, what do I do next? A positional heuristic is based on the board or the game or the state or all the inflation I have, who is winning? Where am I ranked among the other players?  That was money well spent for you. It was. Mine's freaking great. I spent all my money on this thing. The game says I'm in first place. I'm in first place. A level two heuristic, I know that second place is actually first place based on this complex heuristic. A level three heuristic, I've actually analyzed the source code and I'm running a debug mode thing on the cartridge that's paying attention to where everyone is and is calculating a real-time game state based on odds. Sometimes a positional heuristic is easy as look at the score, like in a hundred meter dash, who are we from this way? There's no question about that. No one's bluffing in a hundred meter dash. Those same boys just hold the patch. But in some games, the score is completely hidden and fingers and your fradies are cubed. You just hit it behind the shield. You don't know what anyone's score is unless you've been counting since the beginning of the game and you haven't been. There's no way you haven't been. It's a possible. So in all games, remember these heuristics. Come up with simple rules to follow and then as time goes on make those rules more and more complex. You can be that jerk who plays a board game like a choir and calculates every turn who is winning and the exact number of victory points. Play tic-tac-toe and try every possible combination every round to figure it out. That's not fun and probably you won't actually get better at games if you do that. You need to develop heuristics that you can make snap judgments. You can almost intuit how to win games. People talk about analysis paralysis, which usually is this situation when someone has really bad heuristics and really inefficient points. They have to think for a very long time to take their turn. And as we said before, someone who's not good at a game is someone who takes a long time with their turn. If you're going to win a game, you have really good heuristics and you take your turn quickly. So some games, this is our first main tactic. How many of you have played a game called Yahtzee? Yeah. We've been to places where people haven't heard of Yahtzee. So we've got to check. Yahtzee is a component of many other games. King of Tokyo has Yahtzee in it. Roll through the ages. Has Yahtzee in it? Lots of these games, if you play them, it does all sorts of stuff going on, but there is a sub game within the game. In this case, Yahtzee. If you play Half-Life, Half-Life has a shooting game in it. It has a platforming game in it. It has puzzle games in it. So if you learn those sub games separately, when you go to play a big game, it has lots of sub games in it. You'll be good at those sub games because you've already played them. Yahtzee specifically is a good one to get good at. If you, at any point when you're playing Yahtzee, have a difficult decision to make, your heuristics are not good enough yet at Yahtzee.  And then at the end, they will give you a ludicrous number of incomprehensible statistics comparing how well you did versus how well the bot did. To see, are you truly as good at Yahtzee as you can be? I was very happy with the way that bot ranked us. Sorry. But Yahtzee specifically get really good at Yahtzee. You'll start being better at calculating odds. You'll be better at making quick decisions. Yahtzee is one of the best games. It's like, well, you know what? It's like exercising with a heavy baseball bat. Table top games work. Well, no, what doesn't work is swinging with a heavy baseball bat right before you're going to swing for real because it gives you this perception that you have more control when really, you just fatigue your muscles. So, tabletop games. A lot of our examples will be from tabletop games. But we're not telling you how to just win tabletop games. The reason we use tabletop games as our examples is because they're like exercising specific muscle groups. Table top games are physical. They have to fit within this sort of conceptual space. A human brain can hold the state of the game in their head in those tabletop games. You can understand what's happening. By getting good at these kinds of games, you're exercising those individual brain muscles. The shortest path. So, sometimes you play a game, and the game, the first thing any good instruction book is going to tell you is how to win that game. Counter-strike, bomb the spot or cap risk to the hospital or kill the whole other team. In a game like Chalice, get the most victory points. So, the first time you play a game, you've just learned that you're playing it for the first time, you should look at that very carefully. And when it says get the most victory points, the next thing you should do is say, where are the victory points? They're in the castle. The thing that takes up a third of the game board, maybe it's important. Why doesn't it take up the entire top of the game board? Maybe what I would do the first time I played this game is do nothing but mess with that castle. And you know what? That would win 90% of the time. In particular, this is like an easy heuristic. If you're learning a new game with friends, don't do anything complicated. Whatever the most straightforward path is to victory, do it. You'll probably win, and then drop the mic and never play that game again. Most people play a game like this for the first time, and if they're not the kind of person who plays to win, they're going to mess around with what looks fun. Ooh, this sheep. Ooh, this gold. I don't know how to mess with that. And then at the end of the game, it's like, oh, I have like 10 points. Yeah, I have like 100 because I actually mess with the castle that is taking up a third of the game board. So positional heuristic number one, a very simple one. If you're looking at a game, if the rules talk a lot about one part of the game, pay attention to that part of the game. So some games will have what we call a degenerate strategy. So degenerate strategy is basically a VS easy way to win. Oh, I push one button, and I win. So push that button. Yup. This is a very famous example. When Mario Kart came out of the Diaz, there was a problem in that you could do a very physically uncomfortable thing called snaking.  And you were basically guaranteed to win. You would lap people if you did this and they were not also doing it. Thus, the only way to win this game was to snake because everyone was snaking. If you didn't snake, you were guaranteed to lose. This was with this strategy overpowered every other strategy. It's usually what people mean when they say something is cheap, right? Because usually you're thinking, well, the harder something is to do, the more powerful it should be. If there's something that's really easy to do that's way more powerful, that's not cool, right? Because then anyone with a very low amount of skill can get a great amount of success. It should be more skill, more success, less skill, less success. But in this case, it was simply more thumb endurance. Now you might say, it's a bad game. Sure. Yes. It's terrible when games have this. Degenerate strategies are the things that keep game designers up at night. But you're not designing a game. You're winning a game. So if you play a bad game, either I don't play it, which is a good idea in the case of Mario Kart DS, or B, just snaking. The Pareto Frontier. There's an idea in game theory and other maths called a Pareto Efficiency. Let's say there's a fighting game. So this is my strength. Down here in the bottom left, that is the strongest, fastest character you can be. And up here, the further away we get, I'm slower. The further away we get, I'm weaker. I have a lot of decisions of characters I can make. And they're all trade-offs. So this character might be a little bit faster, a little bit stronger, a little bit weaker. So you've got to make the 0 because I'm in one corner. They're fast because a lot of them are going to get from the top to the other corner. And if they're in the summer in the middle, what are they going to be? So if there's a lot of decisions in game, there is a way to sort of calculate, either mathematically or in a more complex game, just sort of intuitively, then some decisions are just worse. For example, say this is Ryu and this is M-Bull in the sense that they both are equally powerful in different ways. I have to give up something to get something. I have to give up something to get something. There's no character you can pick that is simply both stronger and faster than Ryu had to advise. You're going to be right? If you think either one of them is going to be, it's okay, Joey. So Dan Hibiki is hanging out back here. He is just slower. He is just worse. He is in every possible way objectively worse than other choices. I can make a different choice, get something, and give nothing up in return. If you want to win games, only choose characters that are along the Pareto frontier. The edge of efficiency, everything beyond the frontier is literally just worse. Pay-to-win games! You can only access with money that is farther out on the frontier than the options available to everyone else. You can see our brand new red square with dollars not around it. That's going to be, I don't know, the boss, I guess. Yeah? Scott, you want to be good games? How do you win Pay-to-win games? Kill Bill Gates and take his money? Yeah. Just pay money. If you're playing a game that has a money component and you're serious about winning it, pay the money. You want to be the best in Magic the Gathering? Open the wallet. And if you don't open the wallet, you can't win, right?  It doesn't matter what you do. We have a semi-favorite 10 times as smart as they are. We have a semi-favorite example of this of a game store that had a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament and they took all the best cards. So they took all the best cards together. It was just like in the year 2000. They weren't that many Yu-Gi-Oh cards. So they had the game store had literally like 10 copies of every Yu-Gi-Oh card that ever existed. They made basically the best possible Yu-Gi-Oh deck money could buy and they entered it into the tournament played by a 20 ounce bottle of vanilla coke. Vanilla coke? This was a regular coke. This is serious. It followed simple rules about draw a card, played if you can, very simple procedural rules and it came in second place in the tournament. So if you really want to win Yu-Gi-Oh, get like 10 friends together, spend $1,000 and make the God deck. Yeah, I talked to the Yu-Gi-Oh guys like in the motif the other day and I was looking like see which card was the most expensive. There was one that was like 60 bucks. I'm like, it's that card that you're doing. He's like, yeah, you can play it and you really just play it. So $60? $60. I said, how many cards can you have in a deck? Three. I'm like, all 180 dollars on the King of Yu-Gi-Oh. So $60, $70 times 40 cards equals winning every Yu-Gi-Oh tournament and you'll make a lot of kids really sad. It meant that the most cards matter is a lot more than anything with your skill base, right? But equipment isn't meaningless. So in golf, you can take Tiger Woods golf clubs and let's see you go out there, right? It's not going to happen, right? But Tiger Woods with some shitty golf clubs, it's not going to go too well, right? Like he'll be in us still. Yeah, he'll still crush us but the point he won't be as good as he is with the clubs that he knows. A bigger example of bicycling, right? I can go and take Lance Armstrong's bike and I will not be able to get up any of the hills in the Tour de France. It just won't happen. I will die halfway up to now.  So if you want to win a game and there is an equipment component where equipment matters, whether it's pay to win in a game where equipment matters more than skill or a game where skill matters more than equipment but equipment still means something by the rest of equipment, right? If it's the Olympics, there's one Olympics where they have the speedo baking suits that are just better. Buy one of those.  If it's legal and it's better, buy it. Now many of you might have you know, your utility is to win the game but you might have another secondary utility of still being able to afford food but this also feeds into being good at games. Don't just buy the best equipment. Buy the best equipment that you can understand and explain to someone else why it's the best and don't buy better equipment until you can say I need that ski because that ski will reduce shutter at high speed something I experience while playing. And if you know what that means then you can buy those skis if that sounds like something the guys is telling you to sell you some skis don't buy them. And in fact, buying the high-level equipment if you don't really understand will make you worse at games. Rock climbing is a sport. I rock climb. If I buy the more expensive shoes I will be worse at rock climbing because those shoes require a different technique. They also really really change to wear. And if you choose to use the same neighborhood I mean all this stuff is bad. Carcassonne. If you guys have all played carcassonne, right? I'm going to tell you how to win specifically in carcassonne right now. I basically never lose carcassonne. I lose all the time. So maybe listen to him more than that. I have an 80% win rate. I don't know why Scott hasn't figured this game out yet. I have. I just really bad at it for some reason. I just perpetual bad tile draws. That's it. Yeah. I've been back for the last two years. Yes, I'm like. So what are the simple positional heuristics in carcassonne? Well, level one, who's got the most points on that point track? Level two, points on the track and points that are on the board but on the score. Right? Oh, who's got an equal? It's on a road and it's a three long road. That's three points right there. And so I got to add that into the score. Oh, it looks like he's in second place because he's down by two but actually that road puts him in first place. He's in first place. Go get him. Exactly. So the first basic strategy that applies to all games, the kingmaker. Say I'm green. I drew this tile. I can't put it here because that just gives retitum points. But if I put it here, I can put one of my guys on this and then if the right tile comes up, we'll join these cities and Austin Red will share the city. If I put my big meeple, I'll get all the points. If I put my little meeple, Red and I will share all the points. Now wouldn't you just obviously put the big meeple and take all the points and screw Red over? Well, how's Red doing? Red's not doing too well. He's not looking so good for Red.  But Red's not going to beat me anyway. If I put the big meeple, Red now has zero incentive to finish that city. In fact, by not finishing that city, Red will make sure that my big meeple is out of the rest of the game. So it'll actually hurt me. And, we need a special tile to fill this city. It's kind of hard to fill that spot. It's not exciting. If I'm trying to fill it by myself and there's five players, for every five tiles that come out, only one tile has a chance to fill that hole. If Red and I are working together, two out of those five tiles have a chance to fill that hole. We are significantly more likely to fill the city out. And giving those points to Red, literally is the same as burning them. Right? It is perfectly okay if you want to win, work together, cooperate with the people in last place. If this is a move that gives you 10 points and the guy in last place has 10 points, great. That's amazing. Just don't give the guy in second place 10 points. That'll be bad. So this is exactly what you want to do in this situation.  You have a much higher chance of winning the game. Think about how you can apply this to other non-carousel games, right? Maybe you're in a car race, right? Back behind someone.   But this is how the guy's engine is way awesome, this red bull forget it, right? Not this year. So you team up with this guy's first player. I heard that one guy back there with five plays attached to him. You team up with him and pass it around. And now the guy helped you pass the good racer while you pass him and you win. Same deal. The king breaker. This is where you team up with your dumbest friends. This is where you identify your smartest friend and you wreck them. So we all know Grimm is going to win a carousel. So listen, start the game. Everyone gang up on rim or else he's going to win. Seriously. I'm not even joking. If all the other players form a city like this, say there's four players. Three out of every four tiles that come up can fill that city in. And these are points for these players. These are just negative points against red. If you all gang up and this is a widely applicable thing, say there's a four player game. If three of the players agree to royally dig over the fourth player, your chance of winning went from 25% to 33%. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. Eight in three players do it again and you just raise it from 33 to 50. And you want to make sure that you do this too. The player who's the biggest threat to you. Right. You don't do this if red is weak because what's the point? Oh, great. It's minus 10 points. Great. Big deal. Right. But if red is in first place and you have minus 10, yes, everyone caught up because we all worked together.  Sometimes getting one point is not as useful as taking 10 points away from the guy ahead of you. Right. So here, blue and green are about to get this huge city, right? That road. And that will really make it almost impossible for that city to ever finish it because there's a road aiming it. Now there's only one kind of tile in the base set that can even go in that spot. The odds of that of blue and green drawing that tile are really, really, really low. So basically putting that road there is negative points for blue and green in terms of minus one people. And never forget negative points to someone who's a threat to you are just points for you. Straight up. So if you can't get a lot of points out of that road and how can you hurt them as much as possible? By how many turns blue and green spent putting tiles there, now all those turns are just wasted, canceled out, they scored nothing. It's like hockey, if I can't score a goal, hurt somebody on the other team. Notice I didn't put my red guy here. This is where the game gets a little complex, but I made this to tick somebody. Yeah, that road is worth at least three points. Why would you not also in addition to giving them negative points get three points or a Vote Who Wins game? A lot of games are Vote Who Wins games in disguise. If you want to play them be someone who gets votes. Arguably, all games that have more than two players or more than two teams of players are Vote Who Wins games unless they're just a solid team. Any time there's a game where you can mess with other people or do a thing like this game is literally just we're in a room. Let's vote who we're going to kick out of the room getting by the zombies. Just in a circle. So if you've recognized that a game is like that you have to really play a sort of psychological game and get people to not notice you. Recognize that as a Vote Who Wins game and pejoratively call out oh, Scott always wins the Vote Who Wins games so don't vote for Scott. Never vote for Scott in that game. Yeah, mafia and werewolf is also your classic Vote Who Wins game but other games are Vote Who Wins games that you don't realize it. So maybe you're playing up on a rim. Okay, two people's degree to vote that rim will not win. Yep, it doesn't matter what dice you use, where you put your troops two people can't dump on you. It's just not good. The heuristics you can use in these situations are along the lines of not I destroy four troops of Scots but it's simply I attack Scott at all. Keep track of how many times each player got attacked and you'll figure out independent of everything else on the board to vote for Scott to vote for Joe Jojo and then I get up with Joe Jojo to vote for Scott and then eventually I win because I've got everyone to hurt someone else and a person that's a threat to me and in the end no one's actually trying to hurt me. That is called and Richard Garfield talks about this a lot in his book Characters to Games Politics Political Games you have to recognize what kinds of politics are in games. Direct attack I attack your army in risk indirect attack on the baby spot in a rick-a-la denying you a baby. These are harder to figure out you need to recognize situations. A lot of games don't seem like you can attack other players. Worker placement games are actually highly political blocking someone else matters a lot in those games. The only games that aren't political are games that are two players or if there's more than two players there's a running race. Yahtzee Yahtzee is not political just hold up if there are more than two players which means there's an opportunity to vote for people as opposed to I'm always opposing you and you're always opposing me or teams or any important two people you have to choose sides there's more than two sides and there's a way to interact with other players politics enters into it to some extent all the way up to diplomacy which is 100% politics. Bringsmanship Scott's gonna win on his turn Oh yeah if you don't take an action right now Scott will win on his turn I already took my turn so it's too late it's either you or Scott wins What are you doing? That's Bringsmanship These are two good examples Citadel's and Cit5 we're playing a game of Cit5 like this long online like multiplayer game and one dude is often this con and by himself just getting more and more and more powerful while we're having this petty warfare on this tiny little con that off to the side so I'm really trying to convince everyone else to go attack him before it's too late it's not too late I don't want to spend my resources attacking him but I want someone else to spend those resources the warlord lets me give up money to remove victory points from someone else I as a player if I want to win games never want to be the one doing that but I want someone to do it every single round I want to remove victory points from the game I want to get Scott and Joey Jojo to just bang against each other as much as possible Whoever uses the warlord loses points because they lose gold whoever gets hit by the warlord loses a card they lose victory points if other people keep doing that to each other they're all constantly losing victory points as long as I am not the target or user of the warlord I'm going to win this game so very specifically in games this is a very direct technique point at an individual person and explain to them why they have to take X action or else other person will win the game and tell them and if you can tell them that you're not going to take any action I'm not stopping if I can't win no one can so this is a game called Tronaross it's like a little card game for you guys really cute basically you just flip over these different time periods like different events to change history and depending on your character you're trying to get a certain time configuration in which your character exists some country exists in a world where 1917 and 1918 are alternate histories 1950 is your own history so notice paradoxes here if too many paradoxes are up at one time the game ends and everybody loses because time itself is falling apart if I'm not winning remember we're utility we're trying to win the game we're trying to be ranked higher than the other players if I will not end the game ranked higher than the other players why not make it a 10 way draw I'd rather have everyone lose and be even than have rank win so if I have victory it's too far away from me and victory for rim is really close I just say get rim if you don't do this thing to help me win on your turn it's not winning and the game will be over that's your choice the reason we can do this in games is because back to utility sure there's a story about how we just destroyed the world but you know what I didn't lose or I didn't lose more than you lost this is as good as winning alright so let's play some paper rock says we're Scott I'm gonna throw a rock I lied so if someone threatens you in a game ignoring ignored when if someone else tries to do to you what we just did previously about oh I'm gonna let him win you've got to ignore that the words people say are just noise if someone says don't attack me in risk or I'm gonna attack you literally look them in the eye ignore them and do whatever you're gonna do anyway because it's it's just noise it's just a dog barking in the dark in a mirror he can't prove to me that he's actually gonna throw a rock alright there's no he said he was but doesn't mean anything he can throw any of the three options they're all equally likely no matter what he says alright so I'm gonna pick randomly as well that's the best thing to do and rock paper scissors it doesn't matter what he threw in the last turn you can all options are perfectly equal on the next turn alright I'm gonna make a credible threat I'm gonna throw scissors I already threw it okay yeah it turns out in some games credible threats don't work or in some games threats are credible no I made my threat credible here's an example say there's a game where you play a card to take an action maybe I take the card and I put it down early and I leave it there and I take an action that I cannot take back I already did the action I cannot undo it so as a result my threat is credible because there's no way for me to back out I've proven that I'm capable and willing doesn't always work in some games credible threats are not always useful but you have to be able to understand the difference between a credible threat and a non-credible threat the latter must be ignored no matter what it's the same as bluffing and poker and you'd be done to ignore the other guys so how do you make an effective credible threat? so here's played chicken hopefully nobody you know it's 1950 you've got slick back hair you want to get the girl or the guy you're both dressed up in greaser jackets and you've got mustangs and you're going to take your cars and go fast at each other and either swerve or die you each make one simultaneous decision do I swerve or do I not swerve if we both don't swerve we both die if I swerve and Scott doesn't Scott gets the girl and vice versa so how do I make a threat in this game with our own heuristic care if Scott says I'm not going to swerve I'm going to ignore that of course he's going to say he's not going to swerve I always have a full house always there's only one solution here take a steering wheel off throw it out he literally reduced his options he has thrown away an option that he said hey, they're by forcing my hand I am not swerving 100% guarantee not swerving now when you say 100% rock that's a bad idea but 100% not swerving great idea now to counter this again, utility I want to be ranked higher than Scott if I can't be I'd rather die there's something else that is more important to you than winning you're not going to win because there is someone else out there but before that winning is number one friendship camaraderie having fun those things out the window we told you what you're watching the door arbitrary most decisions you make in games are arbitrary sure this might be slightly this way this might be slightly that way but in the end a lot of the decisions you make really don't matter so this is the Russian mechanics the absolute best game you can plan to play Hearthstone is pretty good too yeah so it's 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 there's 19 places you can put that star in a tile but in reality there are only four places that you can put that star in a tile anywhere in the entire second column you know ring is identical it doesn't matter which one of those places you put it in it's exactly the same it doesn't matter so really you're only making a decision between four things it doesn't take that long you'll know people who take a long time on their turn are people who actually don't realize it and they are deciding between all bringing 19 possibilities not recognizing so many of them are exactly that should I throw rock or scissors well scissors are pointy but rocks are heavy if you see someone agonizing over an arbitrary decision you can assume a lot of things about their skill in this game and act accordingly so quickly how many unique choices do I have now if I'm placing my purple guy here how many unique choices are there quick quick come on three yes yes good that's it so even when the games get more complex there are still not you can almost always cleave a whole ton of decisions away so even here this guy has directionality now yeah you can rotate that guy so that matters a lot too and the board now is much more asymmetrical than it was before even then it breaks down there aren't that many choices I can remove these choices without even thinking and you need to be able to recognize that automatically in your brain and even further you can eliminate a lot of decisions just because they're inside the Pareto front here they're bad news see these little guns don't take them these guys shoot right even if I choose A I can choose what rotation I want every rotation that's shooting off the edge of the board obviously I don't want to do that ever there's no reason to ever do that so even still I'm eliminating decisions yeah if you pick A there's only two rotations that are worth it not the usual six possible rotations because that hits a guy so you need to be able to eliminate decisions that are arbitrary you need to be able to eliminate from those decisions or from similar decisions options that are either bad suboptimal or equal to other options and you need to be able to do this very quickly and you need to be able to recognize when other people do not realize this so if there's poison in one cup or the other cup or both cups depending on how long that guy thinks you know whether or not he's going to die of poison acting random so sometimes when you have these arbitrary decisions if all you know in the Eurasian ahead it's not all four of those choices were equal choices they were just a few number of them but in rock paper scissors all three choices are always equal in power in a situation like this in Citadel it's okay not all the choices are 100% equal in power but if you choose the most powerful one that's the one people are most likely to think you're going to choose and you get this poison cup situation if people know what you're choosing then actually the powerful position becomes the weak position if it's known so in that kind of case what you want to do is pick red like literally and remember the credible thread before look the other players in the eye take the cards shuffle them pick one randomly without looking at it and just slam it down on the table I do this in network all the time instead of like trying to bluff like is this a thing you want or is this thing a don't you want is it a trap or not I'll take like two cards I'll shuffle them on my hand and put one down and it's like I don't even know if it's a trap or if it's the card you want go for it it's one big chance for you or you're going to take it or leave it now I don't even need a poker face I don't need to be able to bluff I don't need to be able to lie the cards are doing it for me now sometimes and you'll notice because Netrunner addressed this specifically it's very difficult for humans to act randomly we cannot try to write a string of random numbers and anyone who knows better can look at your string and tell them you know right there's a bot online it's very good in Rock, Paper, Scissors and what happens is you play against it and it learns your personal preferences and it figures out your patterns and because you're a human being and not a computer you cannot be perfectly random even a computer can't be perfectly random unless it's a hardware-read number generator but basically it will figure out how you play Rock, Paper, Scissors and over time eventually it'll just start beating you way way more than 50% of the time so Netrunner they allow the rule say they may bring a device to generate randomness you can have a little d20 they're just rolling while you're playing to make your decisions they're specifically allowed to have one they said so and they had to say if people were asking constantly like are we allowed to do this or not and they said yes you may have one so because you're allowed to have one use it equipment get it don't not have one many games do not allow you to bring external materials like a lot of different variants you can't bring a pen and paper just write victory points down you can't like bring extra dice and roll them on your turn it's arguable whether or not this is cheating I'm going to tell you something that I've done in the past for real I did this in music theory classes and I did it in board games I will if I have to make a random decision look up at a clock if the second hand is on an even number or in a certain quadrant when I looked at it I choose right or left I use the world to generate randomness because I know my brain is incapable of doing so this has nothing to do with winning but I will do the same thing about playing games but I need to get a name for something I will look around the room and I'll be like, yes Captain Exit and it's showing up funny my brother's name is also Captain Exit yes, this room is surprisingly bare and it is Mr. Enforcer you'll have a battle with Captain Exit so even if a decision is arbitrary act randomly act randomly such that other players cannot figure you out and interpret what you're doing and then as a result like that bot second guess step ahead of it this plays into a much more complex idea of a mixed strategy I want to play that vision I got to choose a card if I play the vision and no one assassinates me I get like five victory points like it's just the best he's got so many blue cards I was getting so many golds it's going to be amazing Scott's not done he knows I want to play the vision he knows this is... the blue cards are face up I can see he's all vision yup Scott could play the assassin and assassinate the vision meaning that if I choose the vision and he assassinates the vision I'm screwed so you might think well I should never play the vision but then Scott doesn't actually need to take the assassin the mere threat alone prevents me from getting my points and winning the game but if I try to choose I'll take the vision or not Scott can try to figure out what I'm doing I need to make a strategy a mixed strategy that's the game through a turn so I might decide in my head 20% of the time in this situation I'll play the vision 80% of the time I will play another random role so you do the random thing still but before you shuffle up the cards and pick one you would take the vision and put it down shuffle among the rest and then put that one on there or shuffle right and then sort of figure out which one the vision is and then not take that one or take one if it's the vision put it back take it differently so here I have an arbitrary decision so I act randomly here it's a non-arbitrary decision the decision matters a lot but I'm not going to let my brain make the decision because my brain's not going to figure it out optimally but odds will odds remove a lot of these issues from the equation and they give me the chance to play the vision but if I play a pure strategy and I always play the vision or I never play the vision I wouldn't get less points overall over time if you go to a casino and you play games you lose because the house wins so if you can make yourself a casino and your opponent is now facing the house and you are in the house by being random that is very good for you catching up this is a picture from that book we keep referencing Bridget Garfield's characteristics of games who's winning here is A winning or is B winning what if B rolls two so it turns out that there is no such thing as a catch-up mechanism in a game there is literally no way to have a game that has a catch-up mechanism if you could have caught up you weren't behind that is I heard a few people going that is crucial to being good at games if you're in second place with a red shell the red shell is not a catch-up mechanism you're in first place as a result you need a very complex positional heuristic power grid initial D two very different games power grid if you're in last place right now in terms of the points on the board you get all these advantages in game you get to go to buy resources first you get to bid on power plants better you get to play your house to be in last place watch a power grid tournament the people who win will fall into last place they will bounce off the bottom they'll bounce off that fake catch-up mechanism to come back later and less app players will look at Scott and say oh Scott only has nine houses he's not winning I'm not gonna worry about it 11 you're gonna be oh I bought all six rain houses in one turn because I was in the awesome last place position initial D racing games often have this too the further behind you are the faster your car is so the strategy to winning this racing game is stay behind someone until the very last second and then suddenly pass it now if you play initial D in the arcade pro tip you can look online there's a fact hold certain buttons down while the game is starting and then turn that off so you'll go as fast as you can go and you can leave your opponent in the dust now bonus points if you trick a kid into holding down the brake pedal and then starting and then they think that the game will still let them catch up and it won't oh what? what did we just say? so desperation in hockey if my team's losing and there's a couple minutes left pull in the golden that's crazy to pull the golden it wouldn't be so easy for them to score but they're winning anyway what's the worst thing that can happen to lose which is already going to happen okay fine but maybe with that extra player this force power play maybe we have a better chance to actually have some miracle coming if I'm falling behind in Yasi I gotta start going for that Yasi because I roll two twos go for a Yasi every round football oh crap we're down by a whole touchdown that's 30 seconds left let's go for it yeah Citadel so maybe I haven't raised that 20% chance to take in the bishop up to 30% because I really need to take that risk you're not risking anything you're already losing you might as well go bigger go home and when an empty net goal happens which most of the time it happens you lost anyway oh no I lost by a couple more points I'm still ranked lower than the winner yeah it doesn't the goal differential doesn't matter most hockey tournaments so it's okay if you lose by one more like an NHL regular season game you lose by two you lose by three no difference this is a universal directional heuristic in basically all games the further behind you are the more risky your strategies need to be straight up and the opposite is also true when you are far far ahead like I'm winning this football game by 30 while I'm living on the side of the check or on the goalie or anything else play as conservatively as possible hold on to your lead just do the safest possible thing over and over again and people might know you're doing the safest possible thing but what are they going to do about it your moves are really really safe that's what makes them safe is that they can't know anything about it team fortress 2 my team is up by two captures it's going to come down to points or sudden death at the end whether the risk of capture turtle turtle turtle turtle turtle candy boxes anyone played this game called candy box does anyone play the game that's basically candy box in disguise I don't know the thing under 3DS or the street passes or ingress anyone play ingress go green team anyone on duty ingress and the hallway candy box is the game where every second you get a candy if you just wait you get all the candies so any time the game rewards you for waiting or for doing something that costs you nothing like an ingress as I'm walking down the street I hack every portal in the physical world like I walk past the place I hack that portal there's no cost no incremental cost to doing an action in a game and that action rewards you do that action infinitely and forever I have a very specific and weird example of this I used to play semi-competitive quake 2 like yeah old like weapons factory which was the precursor to what eventually became team fortress 2 like that sort of genre of games and in that game you could be a cyborg the cyborg could sell disrupts and what I would do in some of the like ladder tournaments is my role on the team was to every round because I had the skill to do this run into the enemy base avoiding all the everyone else avoiding the midfield defense and blow my game yeah, I'm crossing skill and I blow myself up I would do that every 40 seconds for the entire 2 hour match if you hit a button you get a victory point just hit that button as much as you can and as fast as you can cards extend information so if you're playing blackjack count cards just do it if you're playing tiggers and euphrates you'd better know how many victory points everyone else has it's really hard to count all those little tiny cubes but if you want to win count all the tiny cubes a lot of games have hidden information or really complex information that is still available to you it's not completely secret you can learn it you know, you play netrunner you access someone's hand you better remember every single card that was in their hand they're better on any mysteries for you yep if you don't remember every single thing that you've seen and you'll never forget until the game is over then you're giving us all the disadvantage a lot of games many of you have probably played a game called small world nice tabletop game that's actually a rescan of another game called vinci and the main difference between them is that in vinci you have a score track and you see everyone's score small world hides the score because your friends are not actually paying attention to who's winning so if you're playing small world literally keep track of who's winning you don't need to know the exact number that might like if you're learning a game and you try to count cards 100% like you try to count in hearts every single card that's been played you're probably going to mess it up and lose track that's a very difficult scale unless you're some sort of you know, crazy genius this is not going to happen so come up with a heuristic counting cards in blackjack is just a direction of heuristic you're just using a meta number a simple calculation to decide what to do so in hearts I don't count all the cards I just count the hearts and the aces and that's all I count in small world I don't count the number of victory points I keep track of who's winning and by how much and that's all I care about so I'm supposed to win by a lot this one person's losing by a whole lot this one person's beating me by a little bit and I'm going to pass that in Tigris and Euphrates I don't know how many blue, red, green and black things Scott has but I know he needs black the most and he needs blue the least so if I'm trying to get more blue points just let me get blue points because I already have so many if I need black I'm just going to stop even getting black at all possible costs the full rules you'd better know what every one of these fucking things does every pixel every item you'd better know that this weapon is 10 more DPS than that other weapon or else go home I mean you really want to win it's not just each what each thing does what does each thing do with every other thing right what is the exact bill order if you're playing Starcraft you don't have a memorized bill order for game or even game this applies to tabletop I mean it applies to sports and hockey and football you'd better know what options you have if you're falling behind in football you'd better know what an outside kick is if you know what a free kick is alright when can you drop kick when can you not drop kick what's a quick kick do you even know what that is have you ever seen it I saw Tom Brady do it once you ever even play in a board game and then there's that one guy you don't know because you're playing a patch of the stranger and he just quietly did something and he doesn't want to tell you what he's looking at so one memorize that rule book two if someone does that remember what's on one page in the rule book a lot of games have secret rules if you want to win a Pokemon you'd better know what EVs and IVs are alright if you want to win at Hearthstone you want to win and nourish him a hex those kinds of games you'd better know what every card is magic the gathering if you're surprised by a card that's a problem you'd better go every card in the whole game so strategies you want to go to chess you want to go to go read a book a lot of books don't try to figure that out on your own read a book memorize the Polish opening if you memorize the first four moves of a classical powerful opening in chess you will beat 90% of your friends even if you suck at chess memorize a build order they're the exact same thing someone else already did the work there is already a clearly superior path follow that path memorize that path that is the most powerful thing you can do in a game like this anyone can surprise you with a game where it's possible to already know everything that could possibly happen you didn't prepare sports okay so a sport I love that picture so more definitions again a lot of people like to have these no-true Scottsman arguments but like that's a sport that's not a sport whatever a sport is any game where there's some sort of physical component as part of the skill that is being tested street fighter is a sport why? because you need to move your hands really fast chess is not a sport because I don't need to physically move the piece my ability moving in pieces doesn't matter if someone has fought your collegiate can still place chess if the muscles in a human body are being tested by the game in some way right then it is a sport so yes ice hockey is a sport but so is car racing you need to move your arms if you used your brain to just control a car it would not be a sport anymore arguably having the brain might still be a chess anyway so if a game involves a physical component master that shit practice play it every day I'm okay at counter strike because I've played it almost every day for over a decade so do that to be good at counter strike strategy doesn't matter knowing the map matters way less than clicking on a dupe tag do you want to be in the tank of tennis? play tennis every day all day until you can't play tennis anymore we're running low on time so we're going to do some pretty particular strategies these are some pretty particular strategies this happened one of the omegathons four player game the top two players advance if I go first I pick a random player and attack him scott goes second what should he do I see that you're attacking blue so I'm attacking blue also player three should also attack blue maximize your odds if you're playing a game where the top end players advance pile on whoever falls behind first you're running from the zombies honest don't tell your friends but be aware of how clever your friends are if you have a friend who's not that good at math befuddle them in the course of games when math is involved don't bluff against your friend who's bad at the game they won't realize you're bluffing if they're looking at a place on the board a whole bunch what are they looking at? look at people's eyes someone will look at the thing they're going to do next and then you should figure them out that's such a problem in this game that they provide a hat in the box attacking me then pretending that he's losing when he's winning if you believe him that your positional heuristic isn't any good you'll stop attacking him and then he'll win I'll get serious I'll get so pinchulent and pissy I'm like man fuck you guys I'm just gonna whatever let's just finish the game come on hurry up I'm done oh is that despite doing lectures like this talk about the game after cause I made this one mistake on turn three that was it that was it that was it right there let's play again let's not make that mistake you've gotta talk about play a shit ton of games we played Puerto Rico a board game five or six times a day for an entire summer once just to master the three player version play so many games that you lose track of them so our assignment team is we're pretty much out of time homework there's a game called Stratigo I want you to figure out how to always win Stratigo against someone who is under the age of 14 there's a name for the best possible way we call it bombs and bullshit it's not helpful and you're just bombs and bullshit if you can describe to us how to beat any child at Stratigo then you have a sense of the moral of all of this cause we gotta get out of here we'll be able to take some questions in the hallway and if you grab a flyer we'll try to have video and you can see all of this taking the place before lots of videos of all our other PAX panels but seriously play games try to win but really try to win when it's your turn be thinking about what to do when it's not your turn be thinking about what to do don't be thinking about your spirit yeah distract everyone around you but you're thinking the whole time if you lose a game figure out why if you win a game figure out why if you don't know why you won you lost be a dick context of the game yeah you gotta shake hands after the game you've got to be the most horrific genocidal dictator the world has ever seen inside of that game of civilization 5 but you've gotta be a human being outside of that game grab a flower if you want to email us a question we'll be out in the hallway in a few minutes and give us a round of applause for the interpreters here because they were game mechanics game mechanics yeah everyone loves game mechanics the word is the word is thrown out all the time phrase whatever right what is a game mechanic no one even raised their hand one guy's trying but we're not gonna let him answer I mean the first person shooter like is shooting a mechanic is like gun collection a mechanic is just an entire game mechanic what if I play a game and that game determines who plays the next game right so what is a game mechanic the fact is if you look on the internet if you try to look at research and books and Wikipedia right the definitions for game mechanic are so vague as to include so many unrelated things


Just made the line all right. Go ahead. We've got another great speaker Ladies and gentlemen after you after Niger Uganda has the second youngest population in the world We have a population of 48 million people and 77% of these are under the age of 25 And this is reflected in the number of active editors that we know in Uganda and the kind of content that they Contribute as well as the quality of content that they contribute So that leaves a large percentage of senior citizens and other groups that are not presented on Wikimedia projects the dance floor that you see is the Wikimedia foundation Projects and the dancers are both young and old meaning that they are different strokes for different folks My name is Alice Chivombo Ekanya And I am a project lead for the Wikimedia community user group in Uganda And I'd like to share our thoughts on rethinking diversity and inclusion for our young and old population So over the years, we've had the opportunity to Participate in a number of projects that cater to diversity for example wiki for refugees Being a large refugee hosting nation. We've also had wiki for human rights We've also had wiki gap and many others that are not able to enunciate right now But these all cater to thematic content and thematic engagement and again another section of the population is left out So during these we have found that there are a number of people that are eager to participate with us People who have signed up for wiki media accounts But do not edit and most importantly are in positions of influence to be able to leverage their connection To expand our involvement in the community So we've had space and venue partnerships for example with a good a Zentrum in Kampala, which is a cultural organization. So we don't have to worry about space We have had Universities with university librarians who are wiki medians They don't have time to come and edit but they are able to provide the experience of glam on tour We also have panel discussions with experts to promote mutual understanding and support And we also have conversations with senior citizens and they give us access to private collections for references But most importantly we have a kind of citizen deposition program where we have recorded Conversations of their recollections of the times and the circumstances and we can use these audios to enrich the existing content on wiki media foundation projects. So all these in the long term they pick the curiosity and the population is therefore able to see and contribute to the topics that they relate to in In Uganda we say to see in good day, which means we are on our way and by boat By air, thunder, fire, magic, whichever way, we will see you in Poland next year Let's give it up Let's give it up That was fantastic


This year we've been doing a social media contest called The Hundred Days, Hundred Hours Gardening Challenge. We had seed companies and other organizations donate raffle prizes. Today we're talking to one of them, the Snake River Seed Co-op. This is the Low Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from Low Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 56 on September 30th, 2022, coming to the Low Tech Institute's recording room in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks so much for joining us today. We're talking with three folks from the Snake River Seed Co-op leadership team. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, where you can find both of our podcasts, as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on it advertising. While all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com. Slash Low Tech Institute. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, lowtechinstitute.org. So today we're joined by three folks from the Snake River Seed Co-op. So why don't you guys go around the table and introduce yourself so people can associate a name with your voice here. So who are you? What do you do? Do you say CRCS or what do you say for Snake River Seed Co-op for short? Yes. You can refer to it as SRSC. That's fine. It's Snake River Seed Cooperative or Snake River Seed Co-op or Snake River Seed Cooperative Inc. now. Yeah, and I can start the round of introductions. I'm Danny O'Malley. I've been working with SRSC for about two years now. I'm the Operations Manager and Wholesale Accounts Manager, and I've got a background in. I've worked on several farms a year around CSA Farm over in Viewell, Idaho. My wife and I had a farm in Northern California, and then I've also worked on a pretty large scale, well, I would say medium scale farm here in Boise, Idaho. I'm Riley Carney, and my title at Snake River Seeds is Finance Manager. I also do our seed production side of the business, so making sure that crops are assigned to growers each year with the appropriate quantity for growers and for us. And I had my own little farm as well for several years. I just ended that recently, basically COVID through a wrench into everything, and I just wasn't able to farm anymore. So, yep, that's my story. What about you, Mary Kay? Hi, I'm the Marketing Manager here at Snake River Seed Cooperative and also Communications or Community Outreach Coordinator. And I've got a 20 plus year background in marketing. As far as farming goes, you could call me a pandemic era gardener. I really got serious about it in 2020 as a response kind of inspired by the Victory Gardens, but going into it with an awareness of the World War II aspect of it, with the internment of the Japanese causing the need for a full scale localized reimagining of the Victory Garden era. I'm also affiliated with Cooperative Gardens Commission. Excellent. Well, welcome to all three of you. Thanks for taking time out of your schedules today. Hopefully we're coming down out of the busy season, but not quite there yet. So, would one of you be able to tell me a little bit more about SRSC or Snake River Seed Co-op? How long have you been around? What was the kind of original goal? Why was it started? Yeah, Snake River Seeds was started, basically it came out of two different organizations. One was Earthly Delights Farm, and the other was a Commonwealth Seed Library. So Earthly Delights Farm, the owner of that farm was Casey O'Leary, and she has been farming for over a decade. She now has moved on to being a horticulture teacher at our local community college. So at the time, this was eight years ago when Snake River Seeds was founded, and both of those organizations, Earthly Delights Farm, was saving seeds and selling them under their own label, just Earthly Delights Farm Seeds. And then the Commonwealth Seed Library was bringing in seeds from seed savers in the region and just trying to keep the seeds flowing. But what Casey found was that the farm side of that situation was just much more productive. There were more seeds moving through compared to the library. So she had the idea that if we can get a lot of different seed savers kind of gathered together through a business, then we would be able to move more seeds through the region, produce more seeds that are regionally adapted compared to those two businesses, or one was a nonprofit and one was a business. So she kind of combined the two with her friend, Carrie Jones. So they co-founded Snake River Seed Co-op. Oh, excellent. Has that overall ethos or founding mission changed in the last eight years, or has it largely been able to stay intact or take on new missions, maybe? Yeah, the mission has remained the same, and that mission is to empower intermountain west farmers and gardeners to plant, grow, save, and share locally adapted seeds. So that mission has remained the same. But the methods, I would say our methods have changed over time with how we approach that, how we can just bring that into the business. Okay. And how many farmers in that region are involved with the co-op? Yes, we work with about 50 different growers is what we call them. We do work with small-scale seed savers. So some are just a backyard gardener who is saving one seed crop with us. And then we also work with growers who have many acres of organic farm production. So we've got that full-scale. Excellent. Yeah, we're actually neighbors with a place called Agricoll. It's a prairie seed company, and they have large-scale monocrops of prairie seeds so that they can make mixes. And so it's beautiful to drive by their place because it looks like a patchwork quilt. It's, you know, purple and then yellow and then blue and then green and all these different flowers, which usually will grow intermixed in a prairie, but they grow them obviously with modified industrial equipment. It's an amazing operation, but this is, you guys are much more a distributed network of small, medium, and I suppose you have some large farmers as well? Yeah, we work with a few farms that are, that we consider to be large. They're still probably kind of small in terms of industrial-sized farms getting bigger and bigger. I would say the majority of our farmers that we work with have under 10 acres. Okay, okay, great. So seeds are kind of the central component here. So let's kind of shift and talk about those. I see on your website, which is snakeriverseeds.com, you have the word seed shed all over that website. So what is a seed shed? What is that? And why is it so important that it's on your website so often? Yeah, so the seed shed, we love this, or I love personally this visual answer my co-workers do too. It's basically when you think about the watershed and there's, you know, it's a cycle of water that's moving through an area. We think of our seed shed in the same way. So seeds are coming from farmers to our office. So it's kind of like the farmers are like a river, river of seeds coming into our office here. This is like a puddle that's growing with seeds. I love that just thinking about all of them coming here. And then we distribute them, we package them up and send them out to customers, which mostly include gardeners in our region as well as farmers who are planting our seeds for food crops. So that flow of seeds is really important to us because that's how we adapt the seeds each year is by growing them continually. Whereas a lot of seed banks prefer to just store the seeds and when you're doing that, they're basically frozen in time. So they're not adapting to any climatic changes that are happening. Okay, sure. And so yeah, we kind of have access thanks to, you know, our global supply chain now. We have access to seeds from all over the world. I'm growing, for example, a Ukrainian wheat, not for any political expediency this year with the events in Ukraine, but just happened to be I'm growing Ukrainian wheat and then I'll send some back to the bank that that came from and the rest I'll distribute out here or eat. If you're, you know, new to an area you want to take on a new crop, when is it best to bring in something and then over a few years or a generation adapt it to where you are locally and when is it best to look into already locally adapted? Where is there no real good answer for that? So yes, so we live specifically in the inner mountain west, that's where we are focused with our efforts. We respect other regions and hope that they can do the same, you know, grow their regional seed shed. And in our region, the great majority of the food that we grow here is not native here. There was not agriculture happening in the valley where we live prior to settlers moving here, European descendants. So in our mind, pretty much all of the varieties that we're that we're producing are not land raised, they have been brought in from somewhere else. So it is important for us to be able to do that because it isn't something that's already here, whereas other regions do have that, you know, long history of agriculture, like in southwestern United States, so they do have varieties that they can grow that are land races. But we don't have that as much. So that's something that we are just kind of always working on and selecting varieties to bring in that already do really well. That's that's basically how our growers introduce a crop is they have to come to me and say, Hey, I really love this variety. I'm already growing it. And now I want to save the seed and produce that for other customers as well. So I wanted to ask, I imagine you guys probably already have a good answer for this. But let's just dance on patenting seeds and the legal, there's other related legal structures that kind of restrict people from using and sharing seeds, even we're using our own seeds. I'd be interested to hear your stance on that. Yeah, we do believe that that is unethical to patent seeds. And for a couple of reasons. So usually seeds are produced either by selection or by hybridization or by genetic modification. Right. So for the first to selection and hybridization, the plant is being produced with the help of a human being. But the characteristics that the plant is showing are already there within the plant. It's not something that the human invented. So just patenting something that already exists in nature doesn't make any sense to us. And then kind of on the more ethical side, we love our seeds that we work with. We know they are living beings and we treat them with respect as much as we can. We treat them as living beings that are with us right now. And when people are genetically modifying seeds through gene editing, we honestly see that as not being really consensual. The seed is a sovereign entity in our mind. It's a living being that we respect. And we just don't think that that is respectful at all. Just to say that is something that I've learned from indigenous seed capers just over the years. It would be interesting if I don't know if anyone's trying this, maybe you guys would know. I know that some rivers or even some animals have gotten legal protections in some countries as beings on par with humans in terms of having rights and things, even if they can't necessarily express them. Maybe somebody should be working for seed citizenship or something like that where they would get some sort of rights where, yeah, like editing their genes without their consent, which they're not going to give. It would be helpful. And so the main reason I found you guys is we were doing a gardening challenge this summer. We were challenging folks mostly on social media, but elsewhere, also to spend more time with a garden like Mary Kay. You were talking about victory gardens. Just so happens in 2020 during the beginning of the pandemic, we had already planned to try and grow all our own food that year. So in January, we started and then in February, COVID actually became a big deal. So it worked out really well for us, because we had already bought all our seeds and things like that. But this last year, we challenged people to spend 100 hours in their gardens over 100 days, which is probably a bit of a steep challenge. Maybe we should do it less hours. I think that may have been intimidating. But you guys donated seed packs, which will be probably here in the next week or two, drawing participants and sending them out. So hopefully we'll get some people in touch with you guys. So first, I want to say thank you guys for being part of that. I thought the challenge was good. I thought 100 hours seems reasonable for trying to grow any substantial amount of food. But we're glad you're doing the challenge. Yeah. I'm so glad to have you guys on board. It seems 100 hours isn't a lot when you're growing subsistence levels amounts of food, but otherwise it might seem a lot. I don't know. So we'll see. It's hard sometimes.  I get home from work, get home from work. I work from home. We're based in our residence, but when I'm done with work and my wife has been working all day, she says, let's go for a walk or she wants to eat lunch outside. I'm like, oh, I've been outside in the sun all day. I want to be inside. Anyway, so speaking of my organization, maybe we have some folks listening who are big Snake River fans and are coming new to us. So my organization, another technology institute talks about what things are going to be in a quarter century when we don't have as much access to gas, diesel and other oil products, among other things, but that's going to be, I think, the big deciding factor is where we're going to change how we grow food. And so I know this is kind of speculation on your guys as part, but you have experience with this. So it's a locally distributed co-op model useful for folks as we become more local in our distribution networks. Would this be a useful model or would you guys lean towards something else? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, the image I like to think of when we're asked this question is just like many hands holding the seeds. So Snake River seed co-op has operated in the cooperative spirit since the beginning, really, but only within like the last nine or so months, we've had employee and grower ownership. That really means a lot to us. We operate as a benefit corporation. It took us a long, a long path to get to actually officially becoming employee and grower owned. Just really last summer, we started the conversations, had a steering committee, worked with a really great local attorney. And the value we see in cooperative ownership is really what you're talking about is being resilient in uncertain times. And then, you know, especially we could, you know, the original owner Casey O'Leary, she could have sold the business to somebody else, most likely with good intentions, but then you never quite know exactly what the outcome of that sale will be. And so we're really proud of the fact that we are cooperatively owned and our governance structure is really based on centering the voices of those with the most day to day work in that area. And so we listen to our growers concerns and needs, it's paramount, you know, to what we do. So definitely not sure if that totally answers your question. It seems like we're definitely in the same vein and committed to a lot of the same values. And if we look at the seeds themselves. So for example, in 2018, we did a potato growing study with USDA funding. And when I had to do comparative literature research for this grant, I was doing non mechanized potato growing methods, right? And it was really easy because nobody's ever done any studies with non mechanized potato growing methods with the USDA in the last 150 years, because everybody's mechanized with everything, especially commodity crops like potatoes, for example. And so it's really easy for me to say we're comparing five different potato growing methods, non mechanized potato growing methods for market gardeners who might not have potato harvesting equipment. And they're like, Oh, great. And we got funded. But that's just, you know, one crop, one example of how things would change if we're not able to use our tractors, use our large scale powered implements. So how do you think maybe seeds that you guys deal with a lot? I don't know, maybe if you could pull an example or two, how would they change if at all, when we'd be doing a lot more hand work in the gardens? Or maybe you have some growers who prefer to use more hand methods for crops. We talked about this, you know, generally speaking, we would be looking for drought hardy short season, long keeping plant varieties that will, those will be really critical for localizing our individual and community food supply. Looking at things that could be grown vertically using water really carefully. It's very precious out here. So we have a lot of lettuces, a lot of mustard greens, and there's a fair amount of, I'm like branching a little bit out of our region here, and then I'll bring it back in. But there's a fair amount of exploration in hydroponic and aquaponics efforts, for example, Microsoft main offices in the Washington, you know, Seattle, Washington area. Supplies are all cafeteria with fresh greens readily using an aquaponics system that's vertically situated. But outside of that, a few friends here and one fellow visiting our booth at Farmers Market a couple of months ago in Boise, I'm not aware of a scaled up effort in the Intermouth West. And I hope I hear about one now that I've said it out loud on the recording. My co-workers here were pointing out that, you know, that involves plastic. So it's not really like venturing out of fossil fuel. But I actually live in like a little permaculture collective household, and my house, housemate landlord does do aquaponics. I mean, we have like a little pond in the backyard powered by goldfish that are really robust. They overwinter, and then he's recycled like rain gutters. And he's got like, you know, broken up lava rock and there's things grown out of that actually snaps and photos when I was home for lunch, just like share it and prove it and whatever. And then, you know, we have so much, so much stuff in our in our world right now that could be repurposed that wouldn't involve, you know, utilizing new fossil fuels that could still accomplish a similar situation. So there's lots of PVC that, you know, without municipal water being pumped, because all of that's driven by grid energy, which is largely fossil fuel derived, you know, there's probably a lot of extra water lines out there that could be pulled up and turned into, if that's what you wanted to do. Yeah, much infrastructure. I mean, we, you know, we have land out here, but we're also in a big development boom, but that's been draining off the topic a bit. And there's the recent situation with tomatoes in California, causing pretty big concern about general large scale supply for tomatoes, labor impacts from COVID, rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased demand and strain in that situation, plus drought and fire season. There's concern about national availability for tomatoes next season. So large scale producers like some of your ketchup producers and whatnot are already looking to develop drought resistant varieties, but so saving tomato seeds that survive this hot, dry summer in this region and help bring a sense of security in that crop locally. And I found in the community garden, school garden that I've been working on this year, where I definitely got my 100 hours in. We did all right. Like some of those tomatoes went for three or four days without watering. I'm kind of learning by suggestion and learning by from experienced other gardeners or even scientists that are like, you know, I hear you can actually dry farm tomatoes. So I gave that a shot and they, they did better when they didn't get water over the water. Yeah, I just picked some tomatoes today and I was, I was, we were gone for the weekend and so I had uneven watering and I had some cracked tomatoes because they were so used to even watering. But yeah, selecting for, and for you guys, I think drought is so much more of a driving issue than, you know, for us in Wisconsin, occasionally we have dry years, but we also have very, very wet years.  Yeah, I think it's primarily unusually dry years all the time. It just rained here for like three minutes and we're like, oh my God, let's go stand outside and look at the rain. Yeah. And then to kind of like piggyback on what Mary K was saying, you know, that's why we choose to focus so heavily on the inner mountain west and on our regional area because of these like, you know, fears and concerns is one reason, but the other reason is just we, you know, we really support small local growers anyway. We don't really necessarily sell our seed to larger scale farmers. We're not really at that scale. And so we're really in service to the local producers and so providing them things that are easy for them to grow and harvest without machines is super important to us. Oh, that's wonderful. Are there other groups? So you guys talked about being situated in the inter-mountain west. Are there other groups like you that you know of in other regions that I don't know, maybe folks listening, you know, other parts of the US or the world could look up? Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance for one. There's not a lot of regionally sourced seed companies at this time. There are some that are moving in that direction, which is really exciting. And hopefully they'll continue, but it does have some challenges because it is putting a boundary around where you are in your business and saying, this is it. This is the only place where we will source our seeds. So that does create some challenges. Yeah, unfortunately, it looks like the market pushes people to do things that are not long term helpful for. Yeah, we have that discussion all the time and as a values based business, we continue to just stay within the inter-mountain west. We sell seeds online to, you know, whoever will buy them, but all of our wholesale accounts and all of our growers are in the inter-mountain west. Another helpful resource for people are seed swaps, seed libraries for people that are looking for those locally adapted seeds. And also, I would imagine, at least I know in this area, there's a lot of Native American groups that are actively working on maintaining and reviving their own local varieties and things that have been at least in this place in this area, you know, corn and other things that have been grown here for, oh, I don't know, a couple centuries or more. And so, you know, those will be very locally adapted, longevity and all kinds of variety and all hand harvested and things like that. So, people might avail themselves of local groups, if they're around, if they're willing to work and share outside their communities. We do have, we do carry some drought-hardy Native species that are native to our area that have been traditionally used by the indigenous communities in the inter-mountain west. Like kind of Podia type things or? Like berries, some herb varieties, flowers, and grasses have been used for medicine, have been used for food that have high nutrient value, things that could be, you know, stocked because this has been a really hard area to live in without all of the alterations that we brought with it or brought to it, I should say. So, the people here, from what I've learned from Indigenous Idaho Alliance in conversation, was that traditionally it was a seasonal, people moved around seasonally, they moved to where the salmon were for fishing, they moved to the mountains and they had caches of food, different seasons of the year, but you know, our varied vegetables and fruit trees, that's something that we've been cultivating. I'm probably missing some foods that have grown here naturally in the desert that we have no idea about, we don't carry those seeds. Yeah, unfortunately, so it's kind of funny in anthropology, there's kind of a joke that like, oh, there's so much emphasis on the hunting of hunter gather, we're talking deep time, right? Because, well, what do we find in archaeological record? We find arrowheads and spear points and things like that, we don't find the baskets, we don't find the food, we don't find the remains of all the food that was gathered and across cultures, this is a generalization, but across cultures, many times the women and children were doing most of the gathering and they were also getting most of the calories anywhere from 60 to 95 percent of the calories were women, the women and children were doing it because it's something you could put up and put down, but we don't see it archaeologically, so there was forever overvaluation of the contribution of hunting to these societies, whereas gathering would have been by far, gathering it and then propagating and also growing food would have been by far the most important input into people's diets. I mean, yeah, it's just it's really a shame that we can't reconstruct quite everything because there's probably some pretty great or at least interesting food out there that we're missing. So I used to be an anthropologist and archaeologist and so yeah, seasonal sedentism was seen all across the world right before people started to really get intensively into agriculture and so you know imagine doing this seasonal sedentism and then maybe grandma or grandpa gets sick or breaks a leg or something and can't move with the camp, so maybe you start to be more sedentary, so you focus more on the plants around you and things like that and that's one way that domestication may have happened and you guys are so close to one of the richest natural environments the west coast where people could live in these really large permanent settlements because the land was so rich, you guys definitely are in that rain shadow that makes it a lot more difficult, but yeah, we're starting to wind down on time here so I just want to say thank you guys all so much for taking real time out of your data chat with me about the co-op and kind of your outlook on you know what's important for seeds and growing co-ops and people working together to preserve seeds and grow food and kind of think about the future a little bit with me, I appreciate that, ask them kind of oddball questions you guys playing, playing so nicely. Are there places besides snakeriverseeds.com, are there places online that people could find you or learn more about what you guys do or have going on? Yeah you can follow us on Facebook or Instagram both of those are linked on snakeriverseeds.com and I'll put the show notes too. Yeah and then since we're you know since we're regionally focused all of our wholesale accounts are in the inner mountain west so anywhere in Idaho we have got about 70 wholesale accounts in Idaho Wyoming Utah Oregon and we just got our first one in Nevada this past year and so we don't you know snakeriverseeds.com is the only place online that you can buy them but if you're in the inner mountain west go check out your local garden center and if they don't have us let us know. Oh yeah good point good point but yeah you guys are it's great that you guys are there to I like that you started as a seed bank that's really that's really fun and now we're I've turned that into a larger scale business to to share those seeds with everybody so thanks again so much for taking some time out to chat with me today and now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the institute we had member event this last weekend picking apples and we had a dozen people out and we were in our orchard we picked apples for the afternoon and pressed cider so that was a lot of fun if you want to find out more about more member events please sign up as a member on our website as I mentioned before or patreon.com slash low tech institute we also demonstrated thatching at an event called the Wisconsin permaculture convergence so feel free to check that out on their website or next year's permaculture convergence please ignore the crying in the background that's my daughter we do have a couple of of things coming up a prairie seed gathering event and we also have two other things coming up on the 8th of october we have a free prairie seed collection workshop find out information at our website lowtech institute.org and then on the 9th we'll be demonstrating coopering that is making small buckets in the village of new glaris wisconsin at the heritage festival for the historic new glaris village museum there you'll be able to find out more information on our website that's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me scott johnson and co-produced and edited by miss azuki this episode was recorded in the low technology institute's recording room which still needs more soundproofing uh subscribe to those podcasts on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thanks for our forester and land steward level members maryland skirpon sam b and the hambuses and i did just want to know i met sam uh randomly this last weekend when i was demonstrating that change so that was great to meet some of the people that help us and support our community uh people i know in person and some are from far away so thank you to everybody and i hope to meet many of you at uh random future times so thanks again low technology institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the low technology institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org find us on social media and reach me directly at scott at lowtechinstitute.org our intro music was ancient memories of the album forager by holizna that song is in the public domain this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much and take care