Electronic Arts would happily settle for a little less from Battlefield, but needs at least a solid hit.
Grozny today is less a battlefield than the renovated seat of a new police state within Russia's borders, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the republic's young and exceptionally violent president.
He later told the Guardian that although artificial intelligence in controlled environments – a factory, a lab – can work quite well, "our stupid AI today is not as amazing as the human brain" in the unpredictable real world, much less the battlefield.
The terrain of this novel is Lili's interior landscape, which is no less a battlefield than Verdun, for Lili is at war with God, and she spends her intellectual ammunition on a quest for "a single, perfectly formed argument she could offer to the world: a proof of God's nonexistence that could not be softened by anything, not even by the notion of mystery".
And they kept the candidates more or less off the battlefield and tried to make them look presidential.
A new front in this literary conflict has opened at pelicanbooks.com, although it looks less like a battlefield than a boutique in an online Marylebone High Street.
But because everything bad that happens is the commander's fault, Mr. Rumsfeld's tenure may be remembered less for its battlefield victories than for the damage it caused to the morale of the Army.
But Plutarch wanted a more realistic texture for his portraits, and he was less interested in battlefield achievements than in, as he put it, "the virtues and vices of the men who performed them"; "a chance remark or joke," he wrote, "may reveal far more of a man's character than the mere feat" of winning a battle.
And this took an incredible amount of faith and courage and I call it fearlessness because essentially he was allowing himself to add more chaos to the battlefield, less that he could control directly, but it gave him incredible flexibility on how to handle the danger of strategic moment.
Snow stresses that in this case, the technology is still serving the experience of actually visiting the battlefields: less about children staring into screens rather than at the world around them, and more about using those screens to better understand what they're looking at, while they're there.
