My favorite addiction game came out with a major new release a couple of weeks ago. "Civilization VI: Rise and Fall" is still the same core game, but it has added a number of features which make it even more immersive. Several reviewers have described the difference as going from looking down on your civilization from 50,000 feet to feeling like you're living in it, and that is a very good description. In particular, the interlocking systems of specialized governors for cities and shifting city loyalties create a sense of a much richer, more dynamic, more "real" world. And the city loyalty mechanism finally eliminates one of the most annoying, unrealistic strategies formerly used in the game -- founding cities wedged deep in another civ's territory to deny them resources or serve as forward bases for a planned war. Now, if you try that, the fledgling cities will rather quickly decide they're better off being part of the civilization that's all around them, leaving your empire to join the nearer one. Of course, there are multiple ways to influence city loyalty, making battles for hearts and minds in border cities an entirely new mini-game within the broader management of your civilization.

The other major new feature is "ages" -- dark, normal, golden, and heroic. Various things your civilization achieves earn you points for accomplishments within the current era (ancient, classical, medieval, and so forth). When a new era dawns, your points are measured against a pair of targets. If you fall short of the low one, your civ enters a dark age for the new era; if you're above the high target, you enter a golden age. And if you were in a dark age in the previous era, but exceeded the golden-age target, you enter a heroic age. Each type of age has its own bonuses and penalties. At first, I was ready to quit the game when my Nubian empire fell into a dark age during the classical era. But the game is well designed to make it challenging to hold things together during a dark age, but not impossible. And in fact a combination of some good luck and a lot of careful planning scored me a heroic age during the medieval era. The exhilaration I felt as the map went from the drab grays and browns of a dark age to the almost painfully bright colors of a heroic age is a perfect example of why I love this game so much. Later in the game, I had a normal age, followed by a golden age during which I achieved a science victory ("Nubians in Spaaaaaaaace!"). It was nice that I got a full tour of the age types during my first game.

Last night, I started a new game, this one as Sparta. The Dutch to my north made the terrible error of picking a fight with me just as I developed hoplites. I stayed up way too late completing the sack of Amsterdam, and even then had to force myself to walk away from the keyboard rather than carry the campaign on to the helpless cities further north. And then there was my heroic Scout, which was caught behind the lines when war broke out, and was then twice almost killed while conducting guerrilla raids in the Dutch interior, pillaging enough mines and farms to cripple the Dutch war machine before finally being overrun by Dutch war chariots. I imagine there is a rather large monument to these heroes in Sparta.

In brief, I can't recommend this game highly enough. Yes, like all Civ players, I have a laundry list of things I'd love to see fixed or improved. But even as it stands, this game is astonishingly engaging and challenging.

A few of my friends and family members have been drifting from Facebook to Dreamwidth over the last couple of years. I've had an account here for a while, but up until now I've only used it to leave comments on others' posts. However, I too am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Facebook -- and more to the point, with the way that modern interactive media is eroding my attention span. In the various chunks of spare time during my day -- on the bus, during lunch, late at night -- when I would have been reading books a decade ago, I'm instead reading and posting an endless stream of 30-second snippets of thought and emotion. I've gone from eating healthy intellectual meals to subsisting on cognitive junk food. And the effects of this are beginning to become apparent to me.

So, I have decided to begin posting more actively here, with longer-form material. I'll probably remain active on Facebook as well, as that quick fix of interpersonal connection does have some uses. But I plan to put more energy and thought into what I write here.

This is in part because one of my goals for 2018 is to begin working toward writing professionally. I don't expect to make writing a career, but I believe I am good enough at writing, and have enough interesting things to say, that it could become a rewarding hobby. If I am going to pull that off, I will need to do some limbering-up exercises first; it's been a long time since I last wrote long pieces about a subject other than software system design. As I plan to try my hand at both fiction and non-fiction, I imagine both will show up here. It's conventional to say at this point that I will welcome feedback, but please, take me seriously: I will welcome feedback. I didn't carefully create a life with a lot of smart, insightful friends and family in it so I could waste that opportunity!

So, here we go. As I write this, the northern winter solstice is less than twelve hours away. Before the next winter solstice rolls around, perhaps I'll have made some progress as a writer. At the very least, I'll have blown the dust off some long-idle tools which I wielded with great pleasure long ago.