Structuralist of Civilizations 2.0
Fifth self-publication anniversary Post exploring Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million, a sandbox macrosocial simulation game in an interstellar setting.
Overview: Taking a break this month from grand theory to talk about the macrosocial simulation game from which it arose. The project that became Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (“GGDM”), a sandbox macrosocial simulation game, started in December 1992 on an Atari-1040ST as a set of “advanced” rules for the 1980s Stellar Conquest board game by Avalon Hill (a reprint of Metagaming’s 1976 game). I started asking questions about the simulation of civilization as more than just “numbers.” Twenty-eight years later, it was self-published. I continue to “plow the sea” (Simon Bolivar). Sections:
· Decoding GGDM
· Flappy Bird Flop-Flopped
· Reading GGDM
· Integrity Check
· Mapping Human Civilization
· Seeing More from the Edge
Suppose someone robbed a store with a weapon and then went outside and called the police on themselves? Stood and waited, surrendered peacefully when the police arrived to arrest them, got in the car quietly and went to jail. A witness might quip, “well ain’t that the darnest thing?!; never seen that before!”
You’ve never seen it before because no one else is dumb enough to do it. Most people don’t rob stores and those that do, mostly don’t call the police and wait to be arrested.
What I have done in designing Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (“GGDM”), a macrosocial simulation game, and developing or arguing therefrom, an axiomatic macrosociology, has to my knowledge, never been seen before. Probably for the same reason ... that people don’t seem to find it very interesting and think they have better things to do with their time.
This post ‘celebrates’ the fifth anniversary of the copyright and self-publication of Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million in May 2020, the year of the COVID pandemic, and a few years before AI writing invaded human spaces. This is also my one year anniversary on Substack and is my tenth Substack Post.
Decoding GGDM
Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (“GGDM”) is a sandbox macrosocial simulation game in an interstellar setting, meant to be played with computer assistance (but is NOT a computer game), written by a life-long tabletop hobby gamer. It is massively complex and probably best for young college-educated audiences and intellectuals. First and foremost, it is intended to be part of and inspire in the players a continuation of the Great Conversation:
“The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day” – Robert Maynard Hutchins, who coined the term, as quoted in The Great Conversation, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.
“What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways.” – Mortimer J. Adler, “The Great Conversation Revisited,” in The Great Conversation: A Peoples Guide to Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1990, p. 28.
As such, GGDM covers all aspects of civilization on a grand scale, inspired by 1950s Golden Age (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke) and New Wave science fiction of the 1960s (“Day Million” pays homage to a 1966 short story by Frederik Pohl), and is not just a set of rules – in fact three quarters of the text consists of quotes (and epigraphs), commentary and extended discussions intended to educate and provide ‘fodder’ material for play of the game. Fully aware that this is a cardinal sin of game rules writing – and that a computer programmer may someday need just the rules – I subsequently extracted the procedural game rules sans commentary into an outline format titled The GGDM Wholism Project, which can be found here (in PDF):
https://clinecon.net/gestaltgenesisdaymillion/GGDMWholismProject.pdf
Crucial to understanding what GGDM is, is understanding the question that was being asked: Back in the early 1990s (and even now) in games, population, nations and/or civilizations were typically represented by numbers such as industry points produced, units generated by each territory, and nowadays, wooden cubes and cards drawn, all generically functioning as the “money” and “resources” of the game with which players acquired technology, higher level units and such to deploy in their quest for victory. As discussed in my first Substack Post in May 2024, I asked how can I simulate a civilization without reducing the population to just numbers, resources, industry to buy goodies in the game; the result was an increasingly complex and dynamic modeling of civilizations as I had to determine what parts were necessary. The extension of this process was the development of a macrostructural representation of civilization and the seeds of a grand theory of sociology which I continue to develop in each Substack Post.
Failure to understand the question being asked is the major barrier of communication, and the trolling and name-calling by those who fail/refuse to understand the question being asked are the surest signs of ignorance. I believe this is the major problem with criticism of Jared Diamond, which I discussed at length in GGDM, and which I labeled the Diamond Problem. Professor Paul Mason, Duquesne University, Dept. of History, advanced the idea in graduate History of the Enlightenment class that during the Reformation, the bureaucratic Roman Catholic Church did not understand the question being asked by the Protestants, in his words, “How can I know that I am being saved.” The Church did not understand the idea of a personal relationship with God being then put forth by the Protestants.
Flappy Bird Flop-Flopped
“Philosopher: A man who is convinced that the universe doesn’t give a damn what he thinks or wants, and who expects to be ridiculed or ignored by his own, is a philosopher, free to speak what seems true. For whom does he write?
Any honest philosopher knows that the world (or even their own people) would not be better off being ruled by them. The distinction is notable; the aggressors of World War II were not seeking to make the world better by ruling it, but rather, to benefit themselves and their peoples by domination of the world. This is true of almost all aggressors in history; few have the good of the world in mind. It is thus that conquest is usually considered incompatible with the philosopher, who should not be confused with radical ideologues or imperialists.” – from Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (“GGDM”), p. 9.
Is it the fault of the writer if no one ever reads their writings? If you are familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, you know the answer to the preceding opening line:
“Enter Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. Coined by British journalist Ian Betteridge, it states that ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no.’’ It’s a cheeky nod to the tendency of some writers to use question-based headlines as clickbait, without delivering on the goods.” – Chris Silvestri, LinkedIn article, “The only headline rule you should follow,” May 3, 2023.
Prior to 2000, I had endeavored to limit the predecessors of my magnum opus work, Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (“GGDM”), to about 100 pages length, on the bare chance that it might be commercially published someday. But I wrote in an endnote on p. 105 (p. 101), written in about 2020:
“It’s a funny thing that back in 1999, I was determined to keep this project to 100 pages. You are now on Page 101. Keep reading!
If you took just a single edition of Dungeons & Dragons, let’s say Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the 1980s (with which I am most familiar) plus all of the material for just one setting (Dragonlance, Ravenloft, etc.) plus all of the Dragon Magazine articles on general AD&D play, GMing, map and dungeon building, world building, weapons and armor, variant classes, magic and deities, planes etc. and describing play in the chosen setting – how many pages would that be? I’d bet it would equal or exceed the 1,591 pages of GGDM. Not many players complained, though they joked about the weight of the AD&D books they hauled around. There is always the game rules and fantasy world setting, and there are layers of dissertations, explanations, angles, arguments, analysis, details, backstories, spin-offs. A decade or two hence, I will not be around to clarify, expound, comment on GGDM, or to defend it, thus I have sought to both educate the reader and provide tone, commentary, analysis and clarity to GGDM to my mortal limits.”
Having long ago learned from our society that nothing I wrote – no matter how learned, profound, sublime, and well written – would ever be published other than by me, read, liked, appreciated, that I would have no intellectual circle or peers, at some point around 2000 I just let it go, let the game design project go wherever it was going, let it be what it was going to be. It was self-published in May 2020, and I have seen no evidence that anyone has read even a word of it or cared – because they couldn’t make any money off it and it was too much effort.
Thus on p. 11, I further noted:
“Timewaster: Why would anyone spend time reading these rules if the game will never be played? ... The hard (sad) truth is that very few will find GGDM exciting or interesting, and I am the only one who will ever be obsessed with it. GGDM is a game for people who would read the rules ‘just because’ then think, wow, this is a game I’d love to play. GGDM is not a game for the fickle, those who don’t care, or the video game crowd. The rest will spend their time playing Flappy Bird.”
Do you remember Flappy Bird, the viral download sensation of 2013? What a great brain rot contribution to civilization that was, even the designer was ashamed of its viral popularity and after making a fortune from it, pulled it from the downloading sites.
After thirty-plus years of the internet, our society has not improved, in fact, it has moved in a worse direction. I can see now in 2025 after several years of posting on LinkedIn, Substack, and now Medium, that nothing has changed.
Reading GGDM
While I deeply appreciate any expressed interest in GGDM, I know that that interest will likely not exceed the first ten pages of GGDM. GGDM is written differently, it begins slowly and proceeds to a roar that eventually ends with a bore (snore). Like Sister Mary Elephant’s class.
Were GGDM written as a commercially-published game, it would proceed with:
Here are the pieces,
Here is the board,
Everyone starts with this many of each piece,
The first player takes a turn,
The turn proceeds like this,
Each player takes turns, in this order, and,
The game ends when... and this is how you figure out who won.
This basic skeleton of a commercially-published game, described above, does exist within GGDM as I was a lifelong hobby gamer, but there is considerable bit more to it between each step, with much space and distortion. GGDM begins with musings and commentary; the introduction to the parts of the game is through the set-up of the game. It is likely that many players will quit the game before the player position set-up is completed even with computer assistance; the extensive set-up process is commensurate with the complexity of the game. Description of the game procedures begins on p. 75, whereas, the rules to most commercially-published games are much less than 75 pages, even with the large, color illustrations used in most game rules now.
Thus, GGDM was long ago alienated from commercial game standards and expectations, and as such, GGDM is not intended to be approached as a regular old game:
“The core concept of the Gestalt Genesis/DayMillion (GGDM) game rules is the ability of players to collectively change the game, to shape the game universe, and the emergent playing experience. Unlike most other game systems, particularly those of computer moderated games or most high-end manufactured board and card games, the rules of this game are not eternally absolute in any sense and the system is not ‘closed’ or ‘contained.’ Even victory is negotiable. Such a system requires a different approach to playing this game, and perhaps greater effort than many players are used to putting forth in systems where the rules are absolute and externally defined (i.e. the printed rule book or computer game program).
GGDM is a space opera wargame, with a strong Nomic element introduced and interwoven into the game. Or perhaps it’s a Nomic in the form of a space opera wargame; either could be true. The vehicle for the Nomic element of the game is the Interpretations by which players manipulate the game reality and change the rules. Other players may not like the way the rules or game reality are being manipulated or changed, and try to change the game in another way. So, in the end, GGDM is also a wargame, of sorts.” (p. 5)
Instead, GGDM was intended from the first pages to be an adult-table discussion of human civilization:
“This game is not easy to play, its story is an ongoing cooperative work by the Concierge and the players. The game is a launch pad for intellectual discussion of everything human and of human civilizations; GGDM is the “adult table” discussion of humanity. An intuitive understanding is helpful; each player will bring to the game knowledge of their favorite intellectual subjects and pursuits, and their education, profession, and expertise in some areas.” (p. 15)
And a sort of peer-to-peer education might occur in playing the game:
“In this sense, GGDM is like a peer-to-peer learning experience or program, like the one operated by Xavier Neil’s ‘42 program,’ except that GGDM is peer-to-peer learning in humanity. In this, everyone who participates wins!” (p. 1476)
And a game to engage the readers as a sort of literature, a ‘literary game’ as I described GGDM on p. 17:
“...Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].” – Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir (2000).
GGDM might further be accused of being scholarly, intellectual, educational, over-long, obsessed and involved, depressing and boring, all of which are an anathema to people who manufacture and sell hobby games, whether video, online or tabletop varieties.
Also, GGDM is a group storytelling game, as discussed on pp. 153 and 1547:
“Group storytelling in GGDM is a collective emergent narrative, which is more powerful than a single-person emergent narrative created by video game play.... With some professional postgame tweaking, the GGDM collective emergent narrative might raise to the level of a sci-fi work without characters (or maybe like Mike Resnick’s Birthright: The Book of Man (1982)).”
Further,
“GGDM may be regarded as intentional emergent game play and emergent narrative via group storytelling, depending on what is considered as simple game mechanics – admittedly, most gamers would not regard the mechanics of GGDM as ‘simple’ but might agree readily that the situations created by the mechanics and human players are potentially complex. GGDM is as emergent as the players and Concierge wish and can find a way to implement.”
And most certainly, a game that is exactly counter to ‘brain rot’ of which even I have felt the effects in the last few years.
“The reader may feel that GGDM is engaged in a constant assault on their intellect. In this, I am unapologetic: Any education or experience is always an assault on our current and previous selves.” (p. XII)
Integrity Check
In the last two years there has been a rising chatter about the use of AI in social media and publishing. I read a Substack Post recently which cited to a Wired Magazine article saying that up to 40% or more of the articles surveyed on Medium were written by AI, which is shrinking the pot of money available for authors there.
I have thought recently how fortunate it was that I copyrighted and self-published my works in 2020 and 2021 before the raising alarm about AI writing. Future historians note: There exists a bright temporal line that ensures that any work written before that time was authentically written by a human.
My U.S. copyrighted works for which I have certificates (just for vanity, just for the record) are:
Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million, a sandbox macrosocial simulation game in an interstellar setting (“GGDM”), which can be found at:
https://gestaltgenesis-daymillion.net
The last four games were ‘pencil & paper’ “shadow games” of the main GGDM game and use some of the terminology from the main GGDM game rules; they are shorter games intended to be playable by a group around a table or other flat surface within a reasonable time, with minimal material needed:
CUBES! A GGDM ‘dream shadow’ Game;
SPHERES! A GGDM ‘cosmic cultural crisis’ Game;
TURNS! A GGDM ‘transcensional unity reality node’ Game (this game joins the previous two into a larger truly cosmic contest across times and space);
LEGACIES! A GGDM ‘civilization custodians’ Game (a separate game from the preceding games).
The four ‘pencil & paper’ games were also published on LinkedIn as a single combined PDF document at:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7030257962711453699/
Prior, they were published in separate blog entries in PDF format on the GGDM web page (and on a local hobby game club message board) which PDFs can be found at:
https://clinecon.net/gestaltgenesisdaymillion/CUBESFinal.pdf (13 pages)
https://clinecon.net/gestaltgenesisdaymillion/SPHERESFinal.pdf (13 pages)
https://clinecon.net/gestaltgenesisdaymillion/TURNsFinal.pdf (7 pages)
https://clinecon.net/gestaltgenesisdaymillion/LEGACIESFinal.pdf (23 pages)
I had actually considered not copyrighting my works since I self-published and gave them away for free on the internet, but my legal professional instincts prevailed ultimately. Thus, there exists somewhere in the most obscure, dust-filled corner of the Library of Congress, an electronic copy of my original works which were submitted for record and posterity by yours truly. Which will probably be lost when the dust overwhelms the ventilation system and overheats the government server or we get nuked.
Further, nearly everything I have published on LinkedIn, Substack, and copied over to Medium, are descended from, derivative of, and linked directly to subjects discussed in Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million (often I cop my own original text). The majority of my 150+ LinkedIn Posts before Substack were written and published before the AI issue arose.
I have never used AI for writing and was slightly insulted when LinkedIn installed the ‘AI rewrite’ options on Posts. I don’t want AI “rewriting” anything I wrote, no matter how bad. I also don’t want some damned AI rewriting my résumé and I hate that employers are using keyword scanners to reject job applications.
So, readers can be assured that everything that is published by me was written by me – and not by ChatGPT – for better or worse.
Mapping Human Civilization
I recall a curious high school lecture where the teacher distinguished “hard” sciences from “soft” sciences. By “hard” sciences was meant the traditional sciences whose experiments could be repeated, such as physics, chemistry, that lead to technologies, whereas, “soft” sciences clearly meant criminology, psychology, sociology, and such, sciences whose experiments are generally non-repeatable, whose data is statistics and surveys, and who are less understood in our civilization. It is not clear where history and astronomy fit in this scheme, which suggests the first fallacy is a false dichotomy.
People know and care more about the structure of atoms – what little they remember from high school – than they do about the structures of civilization. This is because the former were taught to them as a “serious science” in high school that underpins all of the gadgets we love. Atoms don’t have opinions as far as we know and won’t argue with you:
“When Ludwig von Mises began to establish a systematic theory of economics, he insisted on what he called the principle of methodological dualism: the scientific methods of the hard sciences are great to study rocks, stars, atoms, and molecules, but they should not be applied to the study of human beings. ...
Mises remarked that human beings distinguish themselves from other natural things by making intentional (and usually rational) choices when they act, which is not the case for stones falling to the ground or animals acting on instinct. The sciences of human affairs therefore deserve their own methods and should not be tempted to apply the tools of the physical sciences willy-nilly.” – Michael Accad, M.D., “An introduction to praxeology and Austrian school economics,” alertandoriented.com (blog), April 13, 2016.
As noted in my first Substack Post on May 4, 2024:
“There the question began to form: How do I simulate a civilization without treating populations (i.e. territories, à la the classic Risk board game) over-simplistically as armies, money, or points of any kind, e.g. Industry Points, Resource Points to buy ‘stuff’ in the game? ...
The question asked leads down some long and diverse roads. From a simulation game point of view, the question was, what ‘parts’ do I need to identify and incorporate dynamically to make a reasonable and playable simulation of civilization? That is, it’s a puzzle where the end picture is sort of known, but what are the parts, what do they look like?
Thus, the macro-structures and/or macrosociology of GGDM arises organically from a simulation, which is a vastly different starting point then traditional sociological approaches.”
What I have done in teasing out the parts of civilizations in designing GGDM is similar to how scientist went about mapping the subatomic world. They could not see atoms, and we seem to have a difficult time seeing the macrosocial structures of our own civilization. I have never understood why we are not obsessed with our own civilization; it is all we have.
Seeing More from the Edge
“Finnerty shook his head. ‘He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.’ He nodded, ‘Big, undreamed-of things – the people on the edge see them first.’”
***
“It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952).
I guess the approach of GGDM might be called macro-structural or macro-civilizational as GGDM reached to connect with evolution, literature, phenomenology and philosophical traditions regularly shunned by mainstream social sciences; remember that Clarence Marsh Case was a pastor and a schoolteacher who became a sociology professor, and who else in sociology is talking about him?
I have felt and thought at later times, that the understandings that have developed in GGDM are part of, imperative to, the mature understandings that humans must embrace before colonizing space or moving to the planets and onto the stars. Humanity colonizing off Earth right now would, as Loren Eiseley and others have warned, simply bring Earth’s problems into space:
“Is man at heart any different from the spider, I wonder: man thoughts, as limited as spider thoughts, contemplating now the nearest star with the threat of bringing with him the fungus rot from earth, wars, violence, the burden of a population he refuses to control, cherishing again his dream of the Adamic Eden he had pursued and lost in the green forests of America...” – Loren Eiseley, “The Hidden Teacher” (1969)
If this makes you think of the movie Avatar...?
Space colonization would likely be, as science fiction has envisioned, simply a replay of the Age of Sail and Age of Discovery, a replay of bits of Earth’s history for the last 500 years. Wholesale human expansion and colonization into space – for example, if we suddenly discovered the technical means for space travel over significant distances within reasonable human time scale – would be like an unsupervised group of pre-teens going on a road trip with a ten-year old driving.
“This work isn’t about today; I will pass, gladly so, into the nothing. My life is an absurdism, my youth gone, GGDM is all that remains to be finished. When the howling of today’s critics abates, there will be the silence of centuries; the existential void.” (Gestalt-Genesis/Day Million, p. XIII)
Preceding Substack Post: “Lodestars of Human Meaning 2: Meta-Aspect,” https://charleswphillips.substack.com/p/lodestars-of-human-meaning-2-meta (April 20, 2025)