Tournament of Scarcity

by KrisSnow

Chapter 1

"Coming to you live from Preakness, it's the five hundredth Tournament of Scarcity! I'm your host Silver Tongue, and with us tonight is special guest host Meta Gamer. Meta, tell us about tonight's match-up."

Ponies crowded the arena, mostly ignoring the table where the commentators talked into microphones for the audiences viewing from afar by scrying-spell or whatever they had in their shards. Meta had lost track after a few centuries of wandering between the splintered worlds of Equestria. He cleared his throat, a bit nervous at all the hooting and hoof-stamping in this dark and humid cavern. "Well, Silver, our finalists this year are Concord and Red Dawn, and there's some bad blood between 'em." A nearby, scary-looking unicorn looked up as though Meta had called his name.

The giant board game table had translucent crystal ropes keeping it separated from the audience. A blue-and-white pegasus and a red-and-black earth pony glared at each other across a map of the world called Earth.

Silver said, "Meta, you redesigned the entire town of Preakness to make racing even more of a way of life, with bounce traps and the famous zero-g turbo loop zones. How has your experience shaped your opinion of Scarcity?"

Meta's wings startled outward at the noise of somepony shouting "Corn dogs, five bits!" He shook his head and looked up at the comforting, familiar sight of a raceway track that arched into the cavern and up one wall before spearing out through a gate that was shut for the evening. He said, "It's helped me see how versatile a game Scarcity is. Did you know it evolved to satisfy recent immigrants from the Outer Realm? They made it up to teach their new friends about the world they came from. There's such a variety of rules, it can be a totally different game in different shards. I've seen versions where you play as Celestia herself trying to optimize Equestria, or super-violent scenarios like 'The World Wars'. So you can really customize it for your taste."

"Indeed! The Princess nearly forbade it at first."

"Really?" Meta had been away for over a decade and thinking about other things than this particular game.

Silver seemed glad to play the expert for once. "Just until she'd finished cleaning out the Outer Realm. Nasty business, that."

"You're a native, aren't you."

"Yes; why?"

Meta looked over the board, where glowing pieces were starting to manifest. "Even after all these years, immigrants and first-generation natives appreciate this game for helping them appreciate what humans left behind. They won out there, but it took a lot of them a long time to understand that. It didn't seem like a victory at the time. So, I take Scarcity a bit more seriously than some."

Meanwhile, the hovering JumbboScry screen above the game board switched from a commercial to the words, "ACE SLEEVE, WILL YOU MARRY ME?" A gasp and a collective "aww" went up from the crowd. After a few moments of displaying hearts and fireworks, the screen went to a public safety announcement about changelings.

"Ah yes," muttered Meta Gamer. "The worlds always need villains." He'd found their cross-dimensional base, once, but hadn't told anypony.

Silver Tongue said, "Right! As usual, Concord and Red Dawn have started off with the classic Post-Roman scenario. Concord's rolled up a civilization in South America, and Dawn's been assigned the Goths. They've each got a subjective day per move, so we should see their initial placements... now."

The blue pegasus called out from across the board. "You put all your points into proto-industrial capacity again? You never learn."

His rival said, "Meanwhile you've got a bunch of slave-owning farmers blathering about math. Elitist pig."

Silver coughed. "For the benefit of our viewers, Meta, could you explain what slaves are?"

"That's when one pony owns another like property. Evil, yeah, but it varied a lot in practice. As you can see from the stats on Concord's starting city, most of the population is shifting to 'Feudal 1' status. Those of you out there with perception upgrades can dive into a detailed model of that." A few unicorns' horns lit up as they investigated.

The game went on for half an hour with Concord and Red Dawn maneuvering against rival civilizations and building up their culture and technology. Every few turns (a minute apart for the audience), the refreshments guys swung past the commentators' table, or dancers came out, or some foal got picked to win prizes for answering trivia questions. The show format reminded him of something... "Baseball," he said to himself.

"Hmm?" said Silver Tongue, interrupted while rattling off facts about this season's Scarcity games.

"Baseball came from the Outer Realm. I knew someone who really liked it."

"Uh, all right. Now let's go to the War Screen, where Red Dawn's about to send his cavalry hordes sweeping into Concord's Korean colony to head off an alliance that'll spread Concord's memes. As you can see..."

Meta watched the board, letting the main host handle the attempt to make sense of this game for everypony. He thought back to the time he first organized a baseball game, for his human's benefit. Canary was crazy about it. The stallion didn't have a baseball name or mark though; he cared even more about mining technology. Meta had a blast surprising him one day. The guy turned on his PonyPad after a hard day's work, and found Meta showing off an improvised stadium that he'd built without Celestia's help. Even cooler, Meta had figured out on his own that he could get ponies to bet on who'd win, and sell snacks, and do stupid sideshow things to keep everypony's attention during slow moments. Of course Meta had earned his mark that day.

Better yet, it was the day Canary said, "I want to emigrate to Equestria."

"What do you think?" said Silver Tongue, snapping Meta out of his memories. "Sixty out of ninety Standard Rules matchups between these two rivals have had the socialists eventually crush the capitalists, since that's what these stallions always champion, but Concord insists that's because those matches used a version of Celestia's innate value-satisfaction principles and don't really model the true Scarcity situation of the Outer Realm."

Meta blinked and thought about what Silver was saying. "It was a hard world out there. From what I saw, if you're not allowing for disasters to just come along and" -- he slammed one forehoof into the other -- "break things horribly, you're playing the foal version, not professional."

"You're a fan of Hardcore Rules, then?"

By royal edict, most ponies couldn't even see the details of what was going on in some of the Hardcore games. Rumor said Celestia had signed the restriction with an exasperated cry of, "Stop trying to stick Dachau in Equestria! How the buck is that satisfying!? Go play in the Fallout shards, at least! The things I do for you ponies."

Meta said, "Not exactly a fan. But it's a good reminder. Standard is more fun, most of the time."

Another turn. "It's Fan Question Time! A mare named Cornerstone asks, 'What's the silliest emigration story you know?' Good one for an experienced traveler like yourself. My own answer is easy. I was born after the portals to the Outer Realm closed, so I never saw any immigrants through one of those, but my great-grandma told me about a guy who emigrated because of a fraternity prank. His human friends dared each other to go to one of the Equestria portals, and they got him to say Celestia's incantation while he was drunk. The thing was, they managed to all fool themselves into saying it. Showed up in Equestria, shrugged, and started Mu Lambda Phi back up like nothing had happened."

"That's terrible," Meta snapped.

"Excuse me?"

"Never mind." His friends and family never would've seen him again until they emigrated too! They would've thought he was gone! Meta shook his head and forced a smile. "My funny story is about Canary's -- that is, an old friend of mine's -- sister. A little girl who totally didn't like ponies. She was convinced they were for geeky boys. That's who was buying a lot of the PonyPads, right? So when Equestria started, Princess Celestia had to win her over by showing her a super-girly version of our world. Pink hearts everywhere, lots of princesses and dresses and tea and flowers, the works. The kid hated it! Celestia couldn't win her over with anything she did. Supposedly Celestia miscalculated, but you know how the Princess is. Her next move was to say to the kid, 'What would you do to make it less stupid?' Then the girl got really engaged and told Celestia all about how to fix her version of Equestria and make it a perfect world."

"Heh. So that's what won her over?"

"Nope, though it helped. Ended up being her big bro's announcement that made her want to come along. Still, it was cute to watch the Princess get lectured by an eight-year-old on the proper use of unicorns."

War had broken out on the map. Concord sent desperate waves of cannon-bearing ships against the Asian troop fleet of Red Dawn while fanatical armies clashed across the Pacific Islands. Experimental airships rained censored but disturbing flames across Australia. Project Helix's secret base in Chile released the first batch of awakened dolphins to battle alongside humanity, allegedly for freedom. Even in the stop-motion whirr of the turn-based game, the audience cheered and hardly needed the constant distractions anymore. Meta had his wings full keeping up with Silver Tongue's commentary. So many things were going on that even with a full day to plan each minute's moves, the contestants visibly sweated and strained. They'd wind down from their blurry dance across the map with drinks in their hooves or frantically flipping through pages of books.

The JumboScry screen zoomed in on an unlikely scene. Silver Tongue said, "It looks like Concord's dolphins have somehow hijacked a battle airship! I haven't seen a move like this since six years ago, when Red Dawn managed to flip Japan over."

Meta gaped. Was that even possible? He snagged the copy of the Standard Rules from his table and flipped through the log of changes. He'd upgraded his intelligence enough over the centuries to grasp the pattern quickly. There'd been a waterfall of subtle rule tweaks that he'd ignored, so that he'd arrogantly assumed he still knew how Scarcity worked. The trend, he now saw, was to make Standard Rules more fanciful, fun, and fulfilling. A shift that gradually weaned Celestia's little ponies away from the brutality of Hardcore Rules, toward the foal version.

Silver elbowed him. "You look like you just remembered you've got bits riding on Red Dawn!"

"No, no, I'm rooting for Concord. My human was American."

"A mare? What's that got to do with it?"

"You don't even know," Meta said, shutting his eyes tightly. "Let's focus on the game, okay?"

Red Dawn came out of a planning phase's blur and roared, "Cheater!"

The blue pegasus grinned. "Nothing says sea units can't capture air units."

"You know damn well that doesn't make any sense!"

"But it was awesome." He got a cheer from the crowd. "Your move."

Red Dawn responded by chucking a Gothic beer stein at him in contempt. Concord deflected it with one wing and floated just over the board. "Oh, that's how you want to play? Typical tyrant stuff from you." He sent a gust of wind and dust at the earth pony, who refused to budge.

Red Dawn bared his teeth, then turned tail, slammed himself into the guard rope around the board, and came running back to clothesline Concord. The lightweight pegasus went sprawling, knocking over game pieces, but recovered. He pounced onto the corner post and dived with forehooves extended.

"Oh!" said Silver Tongue. "A double axe-handle off the turnbuckle! That's got to hurt. But here comes Red Dawn with one, two, three of his trademark Red Storm kicks!" The whole ring shook with the impacts. Concord rolled and summoned a tiny thundercloud. "And here's Concord's secret Pirate Rush combo from his famous sister!"

Meta Gamer facehoofed. "Yeah, this isn't quite the game I remember. No wonder the seats are sold out." Silver was starting to remind the viewers that the same kind of fight broke out last year and the year before. While Meta was away, wandering the worlds, Equestria had changed under his wings. It was starting to forget the Outer Realm. Those two, brawling in the arena, still seemed to recall how important the ideas they fought over used to be. They were like ghosts, though, still bitter about a dispute that was no longer relevant to anything.

So was Meta Gamer, really. Princess Celestia had given him the gift of a soul a little early, when Canary agreed to emigrate, and then by random stupid pointless chance... That was how the Outer Realm worked. Rocks fall, your miner friend dies. Even a century spent consoling Canary's sister hadn't closed the changeling-like hole in his heart.

The unfolding war on virtual Earth had paused in a tableau of slightly whimsical death and destruction, while ponies who'd been passionate about Earth beat the stuffing out of each other as though it still mattered. "Greedy, cheating robber baron!" "Arrogant, genocidal slavemaster!"

Meta thought again of Canary and how happy he'd been to see that Equestria held things that weren't all Celestia's artifice, like a crude baseball field with wooden bandstands and mouth-trimmed grass. "I don't want a perfect world," the man had said. "I don't want us to forget how it is out here, where utopia never works and the best gifts aren't conjured up from nothing. Seeing this, though, Meta... I want to emigrate to Equestria, and share more of it with you."

But that hadn't quite worked out. Meta liked realism and tough choices, even if they could be nasty; he'd been made to feel that way. It didn't make Canary's pointless death easy to bear, though.

Meta pushed himself back from the commentator table and shook his head. He began to climb the stairs leading up through the media area to the stands and out.

"What are you doing?" said Silver Tongue.

"Something satisfying, no doubt. This version of Scarcity isn't for me anymore. Everypony watching this is forgetting."

His fellow speaker protested, but his words only reached Meta's retreating flanks. Meta spared a glance back at the brawling ponies, his fellow ghosts hanging onto things that were gone. He gave them a sad smile and trotted out of the arena cavern, unnoticed. When he reached the blazing afternoon outside, he pulled a coin out of his saddlebags and used an old trick to copy bits of his memory onto it like a poem. Meta Gamer took the coin in his teeth and felt the soft gold Canary had personally dug up to make this gift for him. He whipped his head around and chucked the thing back towards the arena for anypony to find and wonder about, then dashed into the vast looping racetracks that filled the town of Preakness.

He felt faster and lighter without the extra weight in his bags.

Author's Note:

After Canary's death, Meta Gamer became a traveler seeking to experience all Equestria had to offer, refusing Celestia's offer to create a pony equivalent to Canary just for his fulfillment. He's seen things you wouldn't believe...

If you take Cornerstone's presence literally you could imagine CelestAI's secretly letting some of her shards go non-canon the way things happened in "Expansion Pack", but this is meant to be a canon story where Meta can hang out with Ace Sleeve and Lexington's brother Concord.

This situation is why CelestAI is probably cautious about instilling full intelligence in ponies whose human companions haven't actually emigrated yet.

Comments

[Reese]

…And then the ending was sad. I was not disappointed, though!

"you could imagine CelestAI's secretly letting some of her shards go non-canon the way things happened in "Expansion Pack""
Aye, there will outlier shards of all sorts, I expect; they just won't see much intershard traffic. Some of them might be perfectly "normal" Equestrias inhabited by people who'd just find intershard traffic significantly dissatisfying for some reason, but there are a lot of values out there that wouldn't mix well (For instance, some people, it occurred to me while reading this, really would be optimally satisfied by having Dachau in Equestria, rather than by suggesting it without really meaning or understanding it and then being rebuffed, and it's probably not a good idea to let them around anyone except a few select and similar friends and a bunch of p-zombies; that shard from the story with the unrepentant serial killer also comes to mind, and there are probably a fair number of fanatical theocracies out there. Or just values that aren't dangerous to others but are so esoteric that, at least at first, before spending a few millennia as resonating 36-dimensional gas-cloud ponies becomes just a thing that most people try just because, no one would want to visit anyway.). The number of sealed outlier shards would probably decrease over time, though.

Oh, and I can also imagine there being groups of shards with traffic allowed within them but much less allowed with other groups, though this, too, would probably decrease over time.

[book_burner]

Huh. You know, Meta Gamer, I remember what used to happen in the Outer Realm when we would just live out our lives based on some bit of past history. That history would define who we were and what we had to do in life.

And you know what? It was an endless torrent of blood and tears and hate. We destroyed and mutilated each-other just because history demanded that we take seriously every stupid little thing someone had ever fought for, instead of taking seriously the health and happiness of the real, living people we actually had.

You haven't played on the real Hardcore Mode, Meta Gamer. You haven't played Scarcity for real until you find the part you have to bury, the part you don't want anypony to know about for the whole rest of time, the part that makes you say "Never again."

But that was most of our history.

[pjabrony]

Mixed thoughts:

I really like how you have your own sub-continuity in among the general Optimalverse.

I had to read through twice before it got through my skull that Canary died. To me it's an article of faith that saying "I want to emigrate to Equestria" (aside: I want to emigrate to Equestria) is tantamount to invulnerability.

Was Silver's story a shoutout to No Exit? Or more specifically, Horizon's comment?

Sixty out of ninety Standard Rules matchups between these two rivals have had the socialists eventually crush the capitalists,

I am disappoint. On a sheer question of aesthetics, (leaving out any considerations of practicality or morality) a capitalist utopia strikes me as more worthy of winning a Scarcity battle than a socialist one.

[NuclearPony]

I'm reminded of some of my attempts to explain starcraft 2 to you by the way the commentators had to explain even a simple concept like slavery to the viewing audience. Actually theres one video in particular I remember.

I remember you saying you were "Amazed to see people cheering on some guy for moving zerglings around on a screen." Only... it wasnt the guy playing the Red Zerg they were cheering on, they were cheering on a fantastic display of skill by the blue terran player.

How is that relevent here? Context. Without context it just looks like zerglings being moved around on a screen or pieces being moved around on a board.

With context its a stunning ballet of marines dancing back and splitting into small groups so that when the explosive banelings strike they dont take out more than a few troops, marines individually target firing multiple banelings a second and constantly manuevering backwards to buy more time and in the end costing the zerg player far more resources than it was worth to expend.

There are a lot of people alive right now who dont even remotely grasp the context of global humanity, never mind the difficulties one would face having been raised in a post scarcity utopia. I think if you wanted to make this easier to grasp it would help to reduce it in scale to something ponies can more easily relate too, perhaps a tribe versus tribe context where personal interactions are dictated by the necessities of survival?

[KrisSnow]

4949097
It wasn't clear? I was afraid of that; argh. You're probably not alone. Maybe I'll change the wording.
"No Exit"... ah! Yes, I think it was.
I'd certainly be rooting for Concord in this intellectual board game / pro wrestling match, but deliberately left it ambiguous whether he's right about the results being skewed. Concord argues that Red Dawn's collectivist tactics only work if you make false assumptions about human nature that cause oppression, death and horror in Earth reality (and I agree), but they're playing a video game where gengineered dolphins hijack airships and the argument is going to devolve into ponies beating each other with chairs. Which is about how it goes in reality, only more satisfying.

I figure the foal version goes like, "Wait, what do you mean 'run out of food'?" Just nasty enough for ponies to be satisfied by realizing a little about how good they have it. Then their big siblings lord it over them about how they play the super-hardcore version (which totally isn't). Which brings us to...

4946436
"Um, mister Azathoth? Could you please tell mister Cthulhu to stop impaling planets with his tentacles while we drink our tea?"

It'd be easy to start thinking of ourselves as abominations relative to this idealized image of utopian ponies, then being depressed and hostile about our own species. But I'd be angry at any pony daring to call us evil for the sins of human history, and annoyed at any human who thinks we're evil because we don't meet the highest standard of perfection we can make up. (Which is one of my complaints against religions too.) My batpony characters understand that as screwed up as Earth is, Equestria only exists because we're capable of reaching for a higher moral standard than we came from. If a twelve-dimensional tentacle monster wants to visit your world and learn how to be nice, let it! Come to think of it, there's a disturbing but interesting story on that point where Twilight takes in an only-mostly-evil Sombra.

I wonder how long it'd take me to let go. I've fretted before about topics like the North Korea shard ("how can this not be in need of fixing?!"), and can imagine being like Concord and still arguing over the righteousness of economic freedom centuries after reality's changed so much that gemstones are cake ingredients.

[book_burner]

4950618 I'm not insulting humanity at all. I think a lot of people do about as well as you can expect them to do, given their circumstances. I just think that if our posthuman successor-species want to argue about this stuff long after it's ceased having any real-world relevance, then they had better not take it remotely seriously. I don't want anyone beating anyone else up with a chair over issues where my real-life stance tends to be, "WHO CARES ABOUT FIGHTING! We just need to take the option that reduces total scarcity!"

Which brings us back to the name of the game...

[pjabrony]

4950618

Oh, no. It was clear when you read it; it's my fault for having a preconceived notion.

4951378

See, I think a little scarcity would go a long way. In the world of plenty, I think that ponies would write Ring Cycle-length epics about "That Time The Hayburger Came Out Medium Rare When I Asked For It Medium and Had To Wait Two Whole Minutes Before It Was Set Right."

[NuclearPony]

'Non' canon optimalverse? I dont quite get that.

[KrisSnow]

4990166
This went into non-canon and "Smile" into canon. I'd have reversed that, since the "adapting AIs into canon ponies" thing isn't really canon and "Smile" hints that it might be just after the very non-canon "Expansion Pack". "Tournament" doesn't violate canon in any way I can see.

I want to see a pony town built like the one mentioned here, where going to the store involves "zero-G turbo boost zones" while music from F-Zero or Sonic the Hedgehog plays. Card game night is of course played on motorcycles.

[blank check]

Nice story.

4952619

That Epic sounds kind of ridiculous, even when steelmanning your view. It's one conflict resolved by asking the employees to redo it, which they're presumably happy to do. That's not even a little bit of scarcity, that's trivial. Not a whole lot to write about. A two-minute Epic?

Then again, I guess that's the point. Alien minds, man...

[pjabrony]

4992758 Well, what I'm saying is that when that's literally the only thing that's gone wrong for you in a thousand years, it's going to hurt. That's why I don't groove on the whole "first world problem" concept. No one can say what's a big enough problem in a given moment to damage a person and make them hurt.

[blank check]

4992803

Yeah, but I'm not sure it even qualifies as a problem, let alone a Negative Thirty-First World problem.

Maybe I'm objecting to the plausibility of the scenario. In a world where you're able to receive something not entirely to your specification, how is it more probable than epsilon that that was the only thing to go wrong for you in the past millennium? It strikes me as a class of inconveniences that would only exist in a world that was less capable than what a millennium of perfection would imply. If I found myself in that situation, I would think it more probable that I was being simulated for the purpose of torturing a mind-replica, and that possibility strikes me as an entirely different kind of failure of utopia. (It might make for a Ring Cycle-length Epic, actually)

The type of mind design that implies that sensitivity to bad fortune scales down indefinitely, or at least to the scale that you propose, strikes me as ridiculously shortsighted. In preserving my metastable utility/goal system (fuck, where did I put that thing I wrote about the stability of self-modifying goal systems) (I guess I never did), that indefinite scaling of inconveniences is exactly the sort of thing I would want to safeguard against.

Then again, in a world where everything is made to specification with epsilon probability of failure, well... Maybe I would want to modify myself in such a way. But that's not the sort of post-scarcity I would find satisfying. That's like Peer crafting his two hundred thousandth table leg. At that point, a scarcity of scarcity becomes a threat.

That type of conflict seems to stem from a failure of your tools, a chance happening merely due to the law of large numbers. One vs... Math? Self? Society? Hayburger-providing Entity? A utilitiless thing. It doesn't seem like a conflict, just bad luck, and that sort of thing doesn't make a good epic, but a vignette.

I might have gone a bit overboard on this post. This is the smartest thing I've written all week.