The Struggle To Cram Game Of Thrones Inside A Video Game

It's not for want of trying. We've had three notable releases based on the series: a bad RTS, an average action game and an adventure series that was...fine. Nothing has come close to making the same impact on games as George R.R. Martin's saga has on other media, though.

To date, the best Game of Thrones video game experience hasn't been a standalone release at all, but a mod (casually known as AGOT) for Paradox's excellent Crusader Kings II, a PC strategy game that's as much about sex and intrigue as it is conquering armies.

CKII is notorious for its scope and detail, as players are able to fill the boots of any one of thousands of European nobles over a 700-year period. Between that and the tone you can see why the two properties are a good match.

And yet not even CKII has been able to contain the universe of Game of Thrones, whose epic journeys, warring factions and deep lore have been challenging the AGOT team for years now.

To get an idea of the struggles involved in trying to cram Martin's universe into a video game, I spoke with Matthew Clohessy, a man who has been on both side's of the project, first as a member of AGOT's core development team, and now as an employee of Paradox, the creators of Crusader Kings II.

"My role throughout most of AGOT's development has been general scripting and the implementation of various fun stuff that you see whenever you play", Clohessy tells Kotaku.

"In essence any decision you can click, event that pops up or piece of history that makes all the start dates lore accurate are things that there is a decent chance I have touched at some point or another whether it is implementing them, bug fixes or just a minor tweaks."

Clohessy worked on AGOT from 2013 until earlier this year, when he left the team to take part in an internship with Paradox while helping out on Jade Dragon, Crusader Kings II's latest big expansion. He's since moved from the UK to Sweden to take up a fulltime position at Paradox, where his experience with Westeros and CKII is being put to use as a Content Designer for the studio.

While we could have chatted about how amazing AGOT is, I've done that enough on this site, so instead I wanted to learn more about the ways in which Westeros couldn't be contained, even by a game that allows everything from Aztec invasions of Britain to incest to Horse Lords of Rome.

What have been the hardest things the AGOT team have had to try and stuff into Crusader Kings II's framework?

I would have to say one of the harder things in general is forcing certain characters to do things, like ensuring the members of the Kingsguard are always around the King. Same with the Night's Watch, it is playable, however it has many maintenance events to keep it working as the Night's Watch does in the lore, as the aim of CK2 has always been a dynastic game, and the Night's Watch does not care about dynasties when they elect their rulers.

The unique war system in the mod is also tricky, as it lets all the vassal lords become independent so as to choose sides, in a similar way to the War of the Five Kings. Once war ends the lords need to be remade into a vassal of their original lord, and sometimes that can go wrong.

Also the general tendency of characters to die a lot, be it through the player killing them or just randomness in the game, can break certain event chains. But that is also part of the fun, seeing what funny and interesting scenarios happen when a certain character dies and who rules what!

What are some of the compromises AGOT had to make when trying to carry ASOIAF's tone, history and themes into CKII?
There are some balance compromises that had to be made so that certain regions were not extremely strong compared to all the others.

We still do not have it perfect as some regions like Dorne -- who in the book's history managed to survive Aegon the Conquer's invasion with three dragons -- really struggles to do the same in AGOT, as there is no good way to model guerrilla warfare through the game's mechanics, so instead we had to try and buff them in other ways. But they are still easily defeated.

Other regions that are weaker as well include the Iron Isles, as there is no ship-to-ship combat in the game, so they have lots of ships but not many troops to actually ferry around with them.

The Wildlings are also a struggle to model accurately because they are extremely weak within the game's framework, as they are made up of very small lordships. If you do end up conquering them they have lots of revolts to free themselves, but these revolts have to be artificially increased in power so they are not just 300 men standing no chance against the Iron Throne.

How did you approach weaving the backstory of Westeros into the mod's starting points?
When placing the Lords and the titles they hold we always try to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes we have to switch things around to fit the mechanics of the game, or just to not make it ridiculously unbalanced to play. For example the Reach should have more troops than they actually do, but they already have a huge amount, so giving them even more diminishes some of the enjoyment from fighting against them.

Of course there are some errors here and there, or guesses we made about certain things that then had to be updated as more information was released, with the official World of Ice and Fire book (released in 2014) being a prime example, as it shed light on many historical areas of the lore that we had previously made guesses on, or gave us information about the far off lands of Essos and what unique cultures and religions they have.

Suspected Swedish assault was just a man playing a computer game

A man in northern Sweden was paid a visit by police on Sunday who had been called to his apartment because worried neighbours thought a violent assault was taking place.

But when officers arrived, it turned out the man was simply engrossed in a loud computer game.

"The person who reported it had heard banging, screaming and loud swearing and thought that someone was being assaulted in the apartment," Swedish police communications officer Börje Öhman told broadcaster SVT.

According to the police, the man did not appreciate the visit and it made him angry. He was then instructed to turn down the volume before they left.

Despite the mix-up, police said it was right for the neighbour to sound the alarm:

"It sounded like a case where someone was being hurt. This time it wasn't, but it's really good that it was called in because it could have bee something serious".

Are computer games a teacher's friend or enemy?

In 1995 the Danish game "Pixeline" appeared in the book stores. The colourful product promised parents a computer game that would help small children to learn in a fun and contemporary way.

Just a couple of years earlier, two of the USA's largest computer console manufacturers, Sega and Nintendo, sat before the US Senate to fend off complaints that video games were harmful. So harmful in fact that the state ought to control their distribution.

These two events occurred at a time when every home has a computer and highlights the underlining narrative: Games have a strong psychological impact on us.

How did games become so popular so quickly?
Here in Denmark the recent rise in popularity of video games in learning coincides with the success of the Danish electronic-sports team, Astralis. The team took part in an international competition for the popular video game "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" and quickly gained widespread popularity.

Soon after, schools, local municipalities, and parents started to initiate their own "e-sports clubs" and increasingly look to include games in their teaching activities. The logic in this movement is to allow adults and educators to edge into an otherwise invisible screen-based subculture from which we have hereto been largely excluded.

But using games as part of the learning process goes back thousands of years or more: From jousting with blunt lances to flight simulators, Bishops using dice games to teach bible verses, and classroom activities based on games like Global Conflict, Portal and Minecraft.

Pedagogy vs. moral panic
Cultural history shows us how fear of popular new trends is often interwoven with society's concerns of the day. In the 1930s, cartoons went through the wringer, where as today we are concerned about putting iPads in the hands of young children. Back then people were broadly concerned about moral decline and youth loitering. By 2010 parents and schools were engaged in a moral discourse around weakening concentration and "grit".

A part of this pattern, however, is the appropriation of new media for "worthy causes". Some began to see comics as a legitimate artistic form of expression and a potential learning tool. And Doctors and psychologists came out on both sides of the discussion.

The pattern is recognisable: Children and adolescents take up a new media that becomes associated with the cultural fear of the time, such as moral decay of society or a rise in violent behaviour.

Fear travels faster than cautious scientific research, fired up by scientific sounding words, such as 'dopamine', 'algorithms' or 'dependence.' What makes this confusing is usually that public fears of comics, games and now small screens are typically exaggerated.

Yet they often rest on some kernel of truth. For example. from  less spectacular scientific studies, and/or genuinely disturbing cases such as the Columbine Massacre in the US, which was unequivocally intertwined with murder fantasies expressed though the game Doom as well as other more causally salient factors in the two perpetrators' lives. Often this is strongly exacerbated by popular pundits, and the fact that the media love nothing more than a good moral panic.

But even so, there are some things that we can be sure of: Games do have an impact on us, game developers are finding new ways to separate us from our cash by, for example, designing games for cell phones, gamers themselves are taking up teaching, and computers are now ubiquitous.

Even if school teachers do not use games themselves in their teaching, children are certainly using them. For some, it becomes a lifestyle and this is why we need to have gaming education.

Where there is doubt, there is freedom
Most children will get something our of a computer game. If they dedicate enough time to a subject or an activity, they will probably learn something in the end.

But it is the teacher's leadership of the interaction between impressions from the game and everything else in the school curriculum that predicts whether a class leaves the computer lab either having had just a jolly old time, or genuinely having gained a transformative learning experience.

All teachers are familiar with eye-rolling students demanding us to "give the correct answer" right in the middle of our best attempt at establishing a good debate—especially close to exam time. But with games it is different.

In a game, we are all ignorant and fallible—the teachers just as much so as the students. We do not know what waits around the next corner. We do not know all of the avenues of thought or strategies. No one is an expert in a new game, not even the teacher. "Ubi dubium ibi libertas"--Where there is doubt, there is freedom.

Game-based learning should be an ongoing dialogue between the class, teacher, and the game. In this context, lack of knowledge and the challenge of learning is shared and genuine, and we cannot progress without actively solving a problem.

This is what makes a game so alluring. And the educational value of such a game can be elevated by both psychology and education.

Creating a new Nordic Game Pedagogy thus equally involves becoming literate and pedagogical about the games that are already in children's lives, and leveraging the psychological and cognitive powers of those games for pedagogical purposes.

Self-learning computer eclipses human ability at complex game Go

The timing was uncanny. Within days of the announcement of the UAE's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, scientists unveiled one of the biggest-ever advances in the technology – and arguably the scariest.

They have created a computer programme that learnt to play the notoriously complex game Go, and then trounced the world's greatest player 100 wins to nil.

That might not sound like big news for those of us who struggle with checkers, let alone Go, but beware: the implications are huge.

Only last year a programme called AlphaGo created by a team from UK-based Google DeepMind made headlines by beating the human world Go champion 4-1.

At the time this was hailed as a landmark in the development of computers with literally superhuman abilities.

But a year is an eternity in AI research, and now the same team has achieved something of far greater significance.

AlphaGo consisted of a fleet of computers trained for months using tens of millions of real-life moves and input from expert players.

Now its abilities have been utterly eclipsed by AlphaGo Zero, a single machine that mastered the game in just three days – and, crucially, without any human input whatsoever.

Beginning with just random guesses, it worked out how best to play the game all by itself. And its prowess is truly astounding. That 100-0 victory was achieved not against a mere human but over AlphaGo, the programme which defeated Lee Sedol last year.

Reporting their work in the journal Nature earlier this month, the researchers point out that in the space of just a few days, AlphaGo Zero went from knowing nothing to rediscovering strategies humans have taken thousands of years to develop – and then pushing onward, finding new strategies never before seen.

This is more than just an academic triumph. Despite Go's apparent simplicity – in essence, it's about capturing more territory than your opponent – it involves no luck and offers more combinations of moves than there are particles in the known universe.

As such, it involves making the best choices in the face of an overwhelming range of possibilities – an all too familiar real-world challenge.

To tackle it, researchers in AI have developed an array of techniques, taking inspiration from many different sources.

So-called genetic algorithms cut through the myriad options using a kind of "survival of the fittest", in which random guesses are ranked according to their success, with the best being combined and mutated to produce "offspring". Over time, these evolve into better solutions.

DeepMind has focused on so-called neural networks, which take their inspiration from the architecture of the brain. Put simply, a computer is programmed to act as if it is made up of a network of interconnected nerves, each with inputs and output. The network is then trained using lots of examples, with algorithms tweaking the connections between the neurons until they produce the appropriate response to a given input.

With the original AlphaGo programme, the training came in the form of tens of millions of moves, with it discovering strategies that seem to work well. But these moves incorporated human knowledge of the game, giving the programme a considerable boost.

With AlphaGo Zero, the researchers have developed a so-called reinforcement learning algorithm that allows the programme to acquire skill by repeatedly playing against itself. Being forced to play against a closely matched "opponent" led to the programme improving with astonishing speed.

According to the researchers, it is now possible to train computers "to superhuman level, without human examples or guidance, given no knowledge of the domain beyond basic rules".

This has sparked concern that we may soon witness something called The Singularity.

First mooted by scientists over half a century ago, this marks the point at which computers acquire the ability to improve exponentially rapidly, becoming unfathomably intelligent.

According to some – notably celebrity scientist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk – The Singularity poses an existential threat to civilisation.

Others dismiss it as sci-fi scaremongering.

As so often with emerging technology, the reality is likely somewhere in between.

DeepMind lead researcher Dr David Silver has publicly stated that because it can learn from scratch, AlphaGo Zero can be transplanted from the game of Go into any other domain.

The idea of a computer with such an algorithm being let loose on the world certainly sounds like the plot for a sci-fi novel that doesn't end well.

Yet it is already leading to another – and more benign – sci-fi plot: humans benefiting from the wisdom of a super-intelligence.

In the same issue of Nature, American Go experts Andy Okun and Andrew Jackson describe their excitement at seeing what AlphaGo Zero can teach them about the ancient game.

While its approach to the start and end of games fits in with what humans have learnt over the centuries, Okun and Jackson admit that AlphaGo Zero's moves in the middle game are utterly mysterious.

Could it be that human players have fallen into the same trap for centuries – one which the programme avoided by ignoring the accepted wisdom and starting again from scratch?

That, in turn, raises the possibility of a myriad insights being discovered in countless other fields by computers left to their own devices.

In centuries to come, this month may be seen as the start of a new era in human development, where we partner with electronic progeny far smarter than ourselves. Whatever happens, the UAE's establishment of a ministry for AI is looking stunningly prescient.

The best chess games on PC

The best chess game was played between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in 1851, but the best chess videogames are something else entirely. The rules of chess are simple, but it's one of the most demanding tests of foresight, tactics, and mental endurance there is. Because there multiple reasons to play software chess—roughly split between causal fun, studying, and competition—there are many different kinds of programs and games out there.

This guide will introduce you to the software chess world, with advice for players who just want to play casually online or offline, as well as those who want to seriously study opening moves and analyze historical matches.

The best free online chess games

Lichess is my preferred online chess game. It's free and supports plenty of match styles, including multi-day correspondence. The best thing about it is that you can play anonymously without creating any kind of account, though I find that means I'm more likely to encounter players who resign or request a draw immediately—you never know who you might be paired with. For practice, you can also play against the Stockfish engine (more on what that is in the sections below).

Chess is a good commercial free alternative. You have to put up with a few ads, and it'll bug you to pay for an optional premium subscription, but as a way to quickly start playing chess online at any skill level, it's one of your best bets. It runs in your browser with a simple, clean board design, and has a ton of players so I've never had a hard time finding a match with someone of a similar skill level (which is to say, not very much skill).

The best chess videogame

Chess Ultra is a gorgeous chess game for those who just want to play chess without dealing with the complicated software in the sections below. It includes VR support, an AI opponent with several difficulty levels, as well as local and online multiplayer, Twitch integration, and the option to export matches. It also includes basic tutorials for newcomers. For anyone who simply wants to play chess, this is your game—simple and beautiful, like chess itself. It's a good deal, too: just $13 on Steam, and $9.09 right now during the Halloween sale.

For a free-to-play alternative, try Simply Chess. It's not nearly as slick as Chess Ultra, and it crashed on me pretty quickly, but hey, it's free. It supports online play with a separate account, and comes with a good computer opponent via the Stockfish engine (see the section below for an explanation on that).

The best chess engines and GUIs

If you want to play against a powerful, customizable computer opponent for the purpose of studying chess, you'll want a chess engine, such as the free and open source Stockfish engine or its derivatives. Komodo is also highly ranked, though you'll have to pay a subscription for the latest version (Komodo 9 is free), and Houdini costs €40 for the standard edition.

These engines are primarily for training—you can play against them, analyze chess positions, and pit them against each other—so they're for people who seriously want to study the game. If you're not sure a chess engine is something you want to tinker with, don't buy anything—free engines are extremely powerful.

An engine alone won't do much for you, though, as they don't include any kind of graphical user interface, just a console. To play against a chess engine or use it to analyze boards, it must be paired with a chess GUI, but there are lots of free ones. Most come with many engines installed already, so you can get started with one download.

Lucas Chess: Simple and easy to understand for beginners, Lucas Chess is a good place to start. It includes a bunch of engines and training tools, and the UI isn't too confusing, even if you're unfamiliar with the more complicated functions of chess engines.

Arena Chess GUI: Arena Chess is more daunting for newcomers than Lucas Chess, but it includes a great deal of features, as well as support for 19 languages and a Linux verison.

WinBoard: It isn't the prettiest GUI, but WinBoard and Xboard are feature rich and include support for chess variants, too.

SCID: Like the other GUIs on this list, SCID can be used to play against an engine, but it's most useful as a fast way to organize and analyze databases of chess games. You'll want to pair it with MillionBase, a massive database of chess games in PGN format (scroll to 'Data Downlods' here) or other chess game databases. If you like the SCID interface, you can also try SCID vs PC as a GUI for playing chess.

Commercial chess software

You can play and learn a lot about chess without spending a dime, and that's where I recommend starting, but pro packages come with lots of bells and whistles if you have the cash. Much of what you're paying for is their completeness, and the quality of their training tools.

Fun chess-related games

For something a little different, below are some entertaining chess and chess-adjacent games.