HUMANKIND Lore and Human Bioarcheology of the Transition to Agriculture

#humankindgame #amplitudestudios #vipmod #vanillaimprovementproject

Late April Fool's Day Humankind stream or are we going to kick off a series of Amplitude Streams this month in the weirdest way possible? I dunno, I just keep on trying to think of ways to describe what I wanna talk about in a form that can be transformed into a video and honestly it's like a three hour conversation at this point - depictions of history in video games.

This time I guess we're going to be playing HUMANKIND as a vehicle for understanding history, historiography and narrative depictions of history. I think a lot of historical 4Xs do a good job of tapping in to the narrative designs that we humans tend to project onto our lived experiences so we'll probably talk more about historiography than history itself, but expect that to be a conversation too.

I hope you guys like talking about corvee systems and deforestation.

https://books.google.com/books?id=-Y9...

Introduction to HUMANKIND and Amplitude Studios: (0:00)
Paradox Interactive and the Creation of Historiography-as-Gameplay: (2:52)
Human Bioarcheology of the Transition to Agriculture and YOU!: (5:43)
An Introduction to History and HUMANKIND Lore: (10:05)
We don't really know how the Agricultural "Revolution" worked in history, interpreting it in a game is freeform jazz: (14:47)
The domestication of the modern human: (21:26)
The "Neolithic" period and Nomadic Pastoralism and the small n problem: (26:25)
I think that's enough talking about history, let's talk a little bit about HUMANKIND (and it's narrative and lore): (30:56)
Herson says that MP people like randomness in competitive Civ VI and they absolutely do in MtG and Poker so just let rivers move and volcanoes erupt already: (34:28)
How to use modtools "video" for myself more than anyone else so I can stop bothering Bruno about it: (37:30)
Skip this until the next chapter unless you want to watch me to struggle with the UI trying to figure out that you can't whip units out: (39:27)
Whipping sucks in vanilla, it is a noob trap, noob traps are hostile game design, please fix this: (43:32)
Roleplaying in a (historical) 4X: (47:15)
Religion and mostly true heuristics: (49:39)
The function of religion (if you insist on using spreadsheets): (52:28)
Civilization IV is maybe a 92/100? Maybe a 94? I dunno, I like culture swapping, fight me irl: (53:46)
The AI is a poor pedagogical tool that deprives both casual new players as well as invested old players of the opportunity to learn from the game, forcing us to learn in opposition to the game: (59:48)
The "Industrial Revolution" and HUMANKIND (it does not work in mod tools so it's mostly just talking about it): (1:01:59)
What Sulla's discord thinks about HUMANKIND reinterpreted in form, and also me talking about plagues and catastrophes (do it better than Paradox, I believe in you): (1:04:20)
The modded content problem, which ultimately I suppose we have elected to ignore: (1:07:04)