It was a few days ago that an event took place in the grocery store that I couldn't really stop thinking about. At checkout, it is now normal for grocery stores to ask you for your app. Every store these days has an app, and this app contains a QR code you can scan to give up your user data in exchange for some extra discounts. Of course in the past these discounts were attached to the price tag directly, but now that smartphones are everywhere you can generate additional customer retention by making them invest some effort to get these discounts. By making users install apps, you get an ad platform directly on their phone and by ritualizing the scanning you get repeated interactions with the brand in a way you couldn't have dreamed of just a few years ago. It's the “assemble your own shopping discount” for grocery stores in the way that other shops would make you assemble the furniture yourself so that you can feel accomplished and therefore happier about the product. And did I say it's an ad platform that locks product discounts behind a user data forfeiture gate? Even though we used to just get discounts for free?

It's quite amazing, really, the people who don't and won't care wouldn't download the app anyway - and if they are in the store anyway then there's no point in giving them things cheaper. That's lost profits. But those who do care, who would download an app, sign up and repeatedly forfeit their privacy, there's something to gain here! By locking these discounts away, we have now filtered away the people who we don't care about anyway, and we're now only giving out discounts to people who we care about, the people we think are “valuable” and who we hope we can get as a returning customer. It's brilliant! Imagine being able to just flat cut away all the discounts for people who won't be very profitable anyway. Like, let's say 30% of our customers are like that and we can cut access to discounts for all of them… you've just saved 30% of your losses on discounts with no downsides and you also get free customer and retention and brand reception!

So, I was at the grocery store and, as usual, the cashier asked this customer, 70 to 80 years old retiree, whether they had the app. Hmm, little did he know, that was a mistake. The man opened by declaring that he did not have the app and that they would be outlawed in a few months anway. The cashier expressed his surprise and said that he hadn't heard of that. He asked the customer where he had that from, and after a bit the customer said that they announced it in the radio. Since none of us had heard of that before this was questionable, but not impossible. However, the man then followed up by declaring that the apps will be outlawed because old people like him don't understand them.

(silence)

I will have you know, I wouldn't usually be talking about things like this. But, I think this interaction lays bare a very interesting pattern of thinking/behavior this isn't usually this obvious. How much should we bet that this man has a grudge against technology he doesn't understand, heard a report in the radio about how the app system discriminates against the elderly, and his brain turned “they should outlaw it” (or perhaps even “members of the ruling party are working on an initiative to outlaw it”) into “they will outlaw it”? It's an externalized frustration. He is capable of turning on and tuning a radio and does that even though this would technically discriminate against his ancestors who wouldn't be able to do even that. Now, we are able to use apps (although technological literacy is low even in Gen Z). And that, so he wants to think, discriminates against him. However, the technological progress here isn't the problem, it's the inability of some to understand newer technology that frustrates and makes them wish that the technology didn't happen.

We have found the quintessence of “mad cuz bad”, and it affects everyone, old and young, we just experience it in different ways. Not in the moment, but after the fact it's always easier to see how our frustrations are so often motivated by our own lack of understanding. If you were shown a replay of a moment in a video game that made you angry two years ago, you'll very often realize just how not-good you were at the game. In my personal experience, it always came down to me not understanding a thing and then getting frustrated. Whether it's a game you don't understand, new technology, another person, modern pricing and customer retention strategies, there is not typically a reason to get angry unless you're upset with your own failure to understand it.

I mean, nothing against getting mad at stores who use apps like this, this is annoying. But that's not why this man in particular was mad.

So, where does all this lead to? Well, ultimately this is a conversation about expectations and accessibility.
Expectation is what makes a person frustrated in the first place. If you didn't care about something, it wouldn't get you mad. It's only that when you expect yourself to perform at a certain level, or you expect something else to do something, that you can get frustrated. It is about the expectations that both others and you yourself put on yourself. In this case, the store levies the expectation on its customers that they have a phone and a working connection to the internet. And additionally, it expects the user to know how to use the phone, how to sign up, how to get an email address, how internet works in the first place and so on and so forth. (Try to explain to someone in a way that they will remember that they aren't connected to mobile data and that without it their apps (but only some!) won't work, how to spot when their mobile data is not connected and how to turn it on and off - all to a person who doesn't understand cellular networks in the first place, or what the internet is at all) Similarly, the man expects to be able to able to participate in society like everyone else. His inability to do so is what leads to the frustration in the first place.

Accessibility is about enabling as many people as possible to participate in society and live a self-determined life. Essentially, the conversation about accessibility is always one about reducing the number or changing the nature of expectations that are being placed. Undeniably, if you just penalize everyone who can't meet all your specific expectations, for any reason - that is innately discriminatory. Some people could learn this, others will never understand smartphones, and both should be nevertheless fine and able to participate in society like the rest of us. The old man in the store would have been perfectly fine meeting any other expectation placed on him, just not these particular ones. Everyone would deserve getting expectations they can actually meet, and everyone - not just this old man - who gets expectations placed on them that they cannot meet would rightfully feel left behind.

Added later: There is an interesting element of friction here between technological progress and accessibility. Looking back at this rambling, I came up with another example of a thing the man is capable of that his ancestors probably weren't - driving a car. Even in the olden days, cars were not intuitive machines and required time in school to get right. This man probably has - or at least had - a driver's license, and there are some good odds that his ancestors did not. Now whether you actually needed a license that long ago and whether it was safe are valid discussions in their own right, but needless to say that someone who is 80 years old is going to have trouble if the car happens to be invented just then. Here again, I understand there is historical context, the car back then wasn't nearly as essential as it is today.

But, and let's be honest about this, it's not like it is “essential” to have and use the grocery store's app. And, let's be very honest about this, anyone can learn how to use a phone, even at age; but a driver's license takes time to learn AND at least 2000 bucks for tuition and the tests. A price tag of 2000 bucks is NOT accessible. In fact, it's so inaccessible that 2000 bucks are inaccessible whether you're old OR young. And I'd argue that, between the grocery store's app and a driver's license, one is definitely more essential than the other.

I'm part of a community of the video game First Strike. First Strike is a nuclear war sandbox real time strategy game that lets you take command of a nuclear superpower and duke it out with nuclear rockets until your nation is destroyed or the last man standing*. I discovered this game back in 2017/2018 and fell deeply in love with it. The game satisfies a specific fantasy I didn't know I wanted to experience in a game setting.

First Strike was made by Blindflug Studios, a swiss indie studio which really tried their hardest to make the best of it. Unfortunately, even though the game was extremely popular during its peak, it never really had any proper traction behind it. Over the years they tried and tried again to push the game forward, they remastered it, added multiplayer etc. etc., but it always seemed like they came too late. They had a window of opportunity during which they could have kept the game “alive”, but the gears over at Blindflug grind slowly, so when a big update finally dropped, everyone had already moved on. They even went out of their way to develop the long-awaited multiplayer game mode which literally 95% of the community had been asking for for the last few years. Granted, it did bring some new life into the game, but that too quickly faded. Now, it has been another few years and Blindflug has finally moved on to their new flagship game, Ground of Aces.

However, there is also the often forgotten game Stellar Commanders. As a game designer, I find Stellar Commanders interesting. Stellar Commanders is a real time strategy deck building game in a First Strike theme, and I am convinced that the design of Stellar Commanders lets us see deep into the thought process Blindflug must have had when designing that game. I will say that the following little rambling is aimed at players who are familiar with First Strike and that I won't make too much effort explaining some of the gameplay details to those who don't know or understand it. Play it on Steam, on Android or Apple (Classic version preferred, only on Steam or Android it seems?).

So, what's this about? Well, I think that First Strike is a great game, but that it has a few problems. I've thought about these for a long time and I think the best way to talk about these problems is by talking about some potential solutions. Basically, what would I do with the game if I was in charge?

1. Problem: Gameplay is strenuous and primarily dictated by the player ability to perform actions per minute
2. Intended design goal: First Strike should be focused on strategy and decision-making
3. Solution target: Change the mechanics of the game to not be limited by actions per minute, by identifying the mechanics that are limited by it. Do not remove the ability to do a lot of things at once and instead make actions per minute limited naturally by strategy. In other words, it should be better/more strategical to do things slowly rather than all at once in rare but spiked bursts.

What do I mean? In First Strike, players can use their owned territories to take actions: Build rocket, destroy rocket, acquire a neighboring territory, research, shoot rocket, defend against incoming rocket, build superweapon, deploy superweapon. The problem here is that there is nothing stopping you from doing all of these all at once. This, in my mind, disrupts the strategy aspect of the game because your primary ability in the game is to do all of these things at once. No amount of strategy will beat a player who is capable to click through all the menus so quickly and do everything at once. There is no cost involved with most of these actions so the only cost is your willingess to sacrifice your hand and finger muscles to play “faster”.

1. Identified problem cause: Almost all actions in the game are only limited by ApM. Especially building, expanding and shooting rockets have no inherent restriction and are only slightly discouraged in that building and expanding can be intercepted by a wary player (well, at least expanding. If you cruise spam then there's nothing an enemy could reasonably intercept)
2. Proposed solution: Tie most actions in the game to a limited resource, ie. money. My solution is that players have a steady stream of financial income and can spend it for example to build a rocket. This would immediately solve the actions per minute problem but still allows one to accumulate money and spend it all at once if they want.

Money is accumulated over a period of time and based on held territories + held (intact) cities. Maybe we could even factor in total number of humans in general, so China would be extremely powerful as long as their cities stand.

For FS I'd be thinking of measuring money in Millions. An ICBM might cost 100M. IRBM's and Cruisers should cost the same. Expanding into a region might cost 500M. We can still launch all rockets all at once using the First Strike button, and maybe we can even add a button that switches between 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the arsenal. Or maybe a button that can switch to only launch ICBM, IRBM or Cruisers. Auto-Defense might be removed from the tech tree and be given to everyone by default.

I also think of using money to limit the total possible growth of a superpower. Stationed rockets of any kind might cost upkeep and eat into your budget. Holding territory could also cost upkeep. The increase of upkeep for each rocket should be linear, whereas the increase of upkeep for territory should be exponential. Or maybe instead of territory upkeep, the expanding action itself could just get more and more expensive. The goal here is to encourage keeping your territory small, which means less overall clicking and more meaningful investments. As it stands right now in First Strike, there is no disadvantage to holding lots of territories, besides increasing the player workload more as they have more territories to take actions with. The more territories you have, the more you need to click around, which incrementally increases the player workload and quickly gets out of hand but doesn't even yield any actual strategic benefit.

Additionally, slow down rocket construction by a factor of 8 and make their travel speed 8 times slower too, this way rockets can be sent quickly, but it will give the receiving player a lot more time to prepare and to click the buttons once they are in range of the receiving player's cruises. Maybe we can/should axe the territory cooldown system, but maybe we shouldn't.

I'd also propose rockets be built in bulk somewhere and then you can go into a menu where you can just click where to deliver the rockets to. That way you don't have to open the build menu for every individual nation, you just build rockets in bulk and click once on every nation to send one of your stock there. That way we might even get something like supply routes where the target territory needs to be connected to the capital for delivery to be possible. That way an enemy could cut off some of your nations by striking strategically.
Oh, research! Of course research should cost money. Superweapon research should cost money too and constructing the superweapon should cost as well. Right now, superweapon research and construction is a no-brainer, but by tying it into the money system there is a tradeoff when thinking about building a superweapon each time you want to build it.

I will say that if you think about the money system I'm talking about, it will remind you a lot of Stellar Commanders, and I assume that's because Blindflug had similar thoughts when they thought about how to evolve the First Strike game. My idea is essentially like the Iridium bar from SC: You get more money constantly and you can invest it to build various forms of infrastructure. You can build a superweapon in SC but it requires you to sacrifice Iridium every time you do. Expansion in SC requires Iridium and is a lot more strategic because of the different ways the game lets you expand, each with their advantages and disadvantages. Defending in SC is done automatically but it too requires you to invest into defenses.

I really think that my design pitch for what the problems are and which focus to have when solving them is going to be really similar to BF's pitch when they thought about Stellar Commanders. It really is a straight evolution from First Strike and, in terms of design, in many ways is the better game.

I think there is a variety of reasons for why Stellar Commanders didn't land, one of which I think is particularly the fact that it is a deck/card builder and not First Strike. That makes it not First Strike. May sound dumb, but it really is that by making it a deck builder you are removing it from the freeform nature that First Strike gave you. Stellar Commanders is very different because it basically has “counters” and “win conditions” and preset strategies and dynamics with how each card interacts with the enemies' cards and synergizes with your own other cards. The First Strike-like elements in SC are now mostly accidental.

First Strike is good because it lets you have access to this big sandbox where you can do all kinds of things, it's basically a grand strategy sandbox game in that sense. In comparison, Stellar Commanders is essentially just the weak points (and only the weak points) of First Strike, made them better, and then added a deck builder.

Obviously that's not all the reasons for why SC didn't land and, also obviously, all of this is easy for me to say after the fact. I don't mean to be shitting on SC with what I'm saying here. In fact I really hold it in high regards for how it approached the attempt to take First Strike, take it away from sandbox and move it towards a proper, strategical game that you could genuinely play in multiplayer and have some genuine strategical gameplay in.