You can read about what Syphilisation is here and the manifesto for the game here.

Work Done

This was an unfortunately short week for getting things done on the game, but I did make some progress on making the research into history important to the players from an early point. I’ve split the research topics into answers to specific questions and now the player can tie each of those questions to a specific city. This helps with making the cities specialize, which is a thing that I think that I want at this point. This also makes discovering new questions feel good as it allows the player to use previously unused capacity, which always feels good for the player.

I chose this over the previous idea of making a specific city to handle the report because it felt like it put too much weight on that single city. I like the idea of specialized cities, but having one that’s entirely responsible for the core of the game seems like too much to me. I’m very likely to explore the design space that I’ve unlocked here in the future though.

I also changed the rewards of the stances to aid in this specialization. I have yet to complete the feature. I’ve stubbed out the production costs of integrating new stances for now as I still want to play with it a little more before I decide if I keep it. If it looks good, then I’m going to make the cost of adding a new piece to your answer cost more if it contradicts with other pieces. I’m trying to represent the idea of having a complete picture being more difficult to internalize than one with a strong viewpoint, but also more rewarding.

Interesting Fact of the Week

The second most interesting fact is more of a small anecdote. Churchill was made Secretary of War shortly after the end of WW1. He complained that there was not much point to the post if the war was over. Future PM Bonar Law replied “If we thought there was going to be a war, we wouldn’t appoint you War Secretary.”

The most interesting fact is that the O’Dwyer administration put a Rs. 1.85m impost on the Punjab province after the massacre at Jallinawalah Bagh. This killing of unarmed protestors at Jallinawalah Bagh and the aftermath was what convinced many people, including Mahatma Gandhi, that hoping for the colonizers to live up to the idealistic picture of colonialism as paternalism that was often accepted at the time. The incident is still well known in India, almost 100 years after it happened, but reading about the impost associated with it was new to me.