Do you recall what the criteria were for the awards in the bottom-right of that page? I'm especially curious what one would have to do to merit the title of 'Kissing Pigs' or 'Golden Pickle'.
I'll write to Conrad (the tournament director) and see if he can recall.
Edit:
'Drunk' was almost certainly meant literally.
'Golden Pickle' was awarded to Frank who had traveled from the Netherlands. I believe the criteria was "furthest distance traveled".
To elaborate a bit more: Diplomacy differs greatly from similar games (i.e. Axis and Allies, Risk) in that each army/fleet has the same 'strength'. There is no die-rolling involved to determine who wins in an encounter, it's just the number of units on offense/defense. It's impossible for a single army unit to capture a region so long as that region is occupied by an enemy unit, so taking territory requires either a concerted effort from multiple units that you own (which makes you weaker on other fronts), or it requires allying with other players in the game (which opens you up to being betrayed).
I wouldn't quite call it "the game that ruins friendships", but since it places a lot of emphasis on the social aspects of the game, rather than the strategic, it involves lots of lying and backstabbing, which can (understandably) strain relationships between the players.
I consider Diplomacy to be a brilliant game on par with chess or go - the only modern game I hold in such high regard. It's extraordinary that it's so well-balanced. Even Italy, the weakest power, has a decent win rate in online play ratings. The rules, with nothing left to chance but no alternating turns, make the game far more unpredictable than you'd expect.
And in my experience, good Diplomacy players do very little lying or backstabbing. The compulsive liar types can't get the strong alliances that lead to traction. A two or three way alliance that culminates in a later betrayal are the way to win.
It's a little weird, but being weak makes negotiating easier. You get more bidders, more or less. Say you're in a 3 way dispute, with two stronger powers. It's real easy position them against each other and you're the obvious ally. This works well enough that even the weaker starting positions seem to be more influenced by alliance choices than by their objective positions.
Austria is second only to Italy in difficulty. The central board position is a strength, but also a weakness. I'm a firm believer that Austria needs to crush either Turkey or Russia as quickly as possible, so they can get their back to a wall somewhere and not be constantly surrounded. Turkey is a better target, because it enables naval operations later. But ultimately it depends on your opponents.
Yeah, it's just hard to make Italy-Austria work, with the neighboring centers. Plus there's the ever-popular Lepanto. I love playing Italy, but if Austria offers me a Lepanto opening, I agree to it and then stab them immediately. Lepanto is a sucker's game.
There's also the Lyttle Lytton contest[0], which is a similar contest that limits entries to 200 words, plus has some additional contests. I'm a fan of the Found contest, which is a competition to find the most unintentionally bad/silly thing that's actually been published.
"Save the rain forests" has (for most first-world residents not presently part of #OccupyRainForest) a concerned-but-distant feel about it. It raises consciousness without doing too much to cause mental anguish.
Spend some time thinking about how things can fail (not uncommon for tech types, particularly on the ops side), and you start realizing there are a large number of paths to that destination. Some more probable than others.
For complex systems in general, the problem isn't the stuff you've got lots of -- yes, you can fit the human population into the state of Texas with a reasonable amount of breathing space (about 1025 ft^2 -- 32 feet square) -- but what constrains you -- Leibig's Law of the Minimum:
Turns out there are a lot of things humans (and civilization) depend on which are in fairly short order: energy, environmental sink capacity, topsoil, phosphorus, freshwater, and a whole slew of critical industrial minerals for starters.
And it's kind of a downer to think about it.
But ignoring problems doesn't make them go away.
How close is the tipping point? Good question.
I've been playing with some geometric grown and consumption calculations:
Turns out that if you take the numbers for oil consumption from BP's Annual Review for 2013 and plug them in, oil at present reserves, rates of growth, and consumption, runs out cold in 2048. What that actually means is that the rate of delivery is going to start getting choked much sooner, and it's peaked as of 2005 with a bit of a bumpy plateau since. Oil fuels 95% of all transporation, which in Richard Heinberg's eloquent turn of phrase is the heart of commerce.
I could go on about oil exploration capex (Steve Kopits), fracking well depletion rates, and a slew of other stuff, but you probably don't want to hear about it.
It actually makes for pretty good power plants, usually they're called some variant of 'solar power towers'. The plants use a bunch of adjustable mirrors that focus sunlight in order to heat water and make it into steam that powers a turbine. There are also ones that use molten salts as a heating element, but that technology is a lot newer.
I'm definitely a fan of the brief 'About Moves' section they have at the bottom of the page. Too often these acquisition posts offer no details about what the app/company actually does, with the main website either not accessible through any links on the page or just gone completely.
It's analogous to the current situation with the metric and imperial unit systems - yes, it would make sense to switch away from imperial units, but it would require many people to fundamentally change how they think about distance, volume, speed, etc. (or time, in the case of the calendar).
Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.
I do not know how analogous this is to metric standardization. Everyone using metric seems to produce some very clear and concrete gains.
I like to think we (americans) are standing on principle and refusing to accept the metric system on the basis of semantic consistency: an SI base unit should not contain a prefix.
Just stop teaching imperial units. Europe adopted the Euro and usage of old national currency is fading away. Even the elders around have started to stop converting Euros to old national currencies.
It's hard but not impossible. It's a matter of doing it and stick to it.
That reminds me of the book The Windup Girl - it's set in the 23rd century, and all of the natural resources we use today have been depleted, so energy storage is done by having genetically modified elephants manually wind up springs. Who knows, maybe your boss is just way ahead of his time. :D
