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General Discussion / Re: How large was Opis?
« on: April 22, 2024, 07:15:45 AM »
Three thoughts on artistic intent here:
- Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)
- It's really interesting how difficult it is, in real life, to have true and accurate strategic/historical knowledge. Game simulations don't tend to embrace this in their mechanics because getting inaccurate numbers is really annoying and therefore really difficult to make 'work' as a game. But here, it's a matter of narrative/aesthetic, not part of the mechanics (except insofar as we give rough powers-of-ten population estimates), so it's OK to do!
- To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted. Or, indeed, people who are "real" to bureaucracy but don't actually exist! All those population numbers in Wikipedia are guesses, and it only gets worse as you go back in history, or into states/polities with less bureaucratic capacity, or less trustworthy bureaucracy. These are all potentially very interesting narrative problems (which, perhaps, could only be overcome by an absurdly powerful god-like AI integrated directly into the state apparatus, perhaps some kind of "core" which we would assign a first-rate signifier on some kind of scale of effectiveness...)
