Third Bloc is a supremely cool looking text-based political management sandbox set in the Cold War

I like the idea, but a lot of the prose gives LLM very distinctly ("The ledger closes every six months; history does not wait for it. A satellite, a signature, a shelter — the order is the state's decision. Rockets rise or they fall. Both go into the record. In 1990 the report says what was left."). No disclosure as yet either. I'm no purist, the things are very useful for mechanical work, but I want the creative parts to be creative.

I would prefer people don’t just automatically assume something is generative AI with zero proof. Let’s not do that.

I really like the look of this! I was expecting something closer to AAlib, but this is both much cleaner, and more dynamic.

Concerning the prose, it reminds me more of HAM radio texting or classic science fiction computers - a style plenty of other games have used for decades.

Quoting: Liam Squires-HandI would prefer people don’t just automatically assume something is generative AI with zero proof. Let’s not do that.

Sorry, I'm wondering rather than assuming and should have been clearer about that.

There must be some people who write in this sort of style (the LLMs must've picked it up from somewhere), yet despite a lifetime spent reading widely I can't recall ever really seeing it prior to a few years ago when LLMs became publicly available. Nowadays I encounter it all over the place, like an all-too-familiar scent in an article I was otherwise enjoying. It's possible there's been a massive sea-change in how people communicate in the last five years or so such that this style has suddenly gone from 'virtually nonexistent' to 'practically everywhere' (maybe people are starting to write like LLMs now?), but…if it reads like an LLM, and it quacks like an LLM, the sad Baysian prior these days is that it's more likely to be from an LLM than a person deliberately mimicking the style of one. I hate having that probability intrude into my mind unbidden so often, but that's the unfortunate reality we inhabit.

Can I prove this was generated by an LLM? No. Does it set off vague mental warning bells in a way that nothing I read prior to ~2022 ever did? Yes. Do I mind if other people enjoy the game? Not in the slightest; it just doesn't seem to be for me.

As a supporter of those in the Third World I was initially excited by the prospect of this game, but upon further review this appears to be nuke/space fantasy for those who like the idea of killing hundreds of millions in a South Park style "everyone sucks" power trip.

My thought was that it would involve the impossible task that non-aligned post-colonial countries had during this insanely interesting period of our history, where they were caught between two ideologies acting carelessly towards other peoples, but instead this is just a fantasy game focused on nuking/abandoning the world with your fictional history-less country moving to Mars, or perhaps staying and becoming the colonial boot themselves, who knows! If they wanted to be bold, perhaps allow us to choose a real Non-Aligned Movement country to do this with!

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm mostly speaking harshly because of how closely its missing the mark of a topic near to me in its trappings. I will nonetheless follow this game in case I am wrong.

Hrm. Leaving the question of LLM-generated prose aside, looking at the trailer the concept seems rather narrower than I envisioned when I read the paragraph description. Not that the paragraph is misleading, just . . . I was envisioning building up a country, where this seems more along the lines of building up a nuclear weapons ICBM program, which doesn't seem as interesting. And while having nukes did turn North Korea into "a country the US will almost certainly not try to invade" it did not turn NK into a "third power", and still wouldn't if NK's missiles had intercontinental range, so I think the game's creators are a bit naive.