Just randomly remembered this one fan-made custom Lord of the Rings scenario for Civilization II that was a brilliant application of game mechanics for a use they'd never been intended for
A few reminders of Civ II game mechanics, in case you've forgotten or never played it:
!["I appreciate it. Nobody has done that for me before."
Again silence, before Kaarna spoke.
"You were saying about quantifying the realism of your expectations?"
"Right! So the problem was that I was boiling down this big range of uncertainty down to a single number for each trait - what's called a point estimate. And then I was multiplying them together to get an estimate for how rare a person with all those traits would be. Which has multiple problems, one being that the traits are not independent of each other - I'll explain that in a second - and the other being that multiplying point estimates together is not the right way to do it, you need to multiply the underlying probability distributions. I'll explain that too. Do you know the Fermi Paradox? That actually also arises due to incorrectly multiplying point estimates..."
[footnote: Sandberg, A., Drexler, E., & Ord, T. (2018). Dissolving the Fermi paradox, arXiv:1806.02404.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:b4mowotdjgxr2sdodwcwxrig/bafkreigh7zgg5sb36tumwzgwjoh6objdikwvtd7xwwho25luyamjpomvdm)
