Most of what I know about life in the bronze age comes from The Wise-Woman's Dog[1], a slightly fantastical game that leans into what life was like for regular people at the time. It's made by someone who researches that sort of thing for a living, and is full of interesting footnotes too.
It's a fun experience and a useful way to make a place and a time really feel alive.
(Not strictly on topic but having played it really lends texture to TFA and other comments posted here.)
I think you overestimate how much people want an actual truthful answer. I think people are often looking things up to silence a nagging voice in the back of their heads, or settle an argument to be able to move on. In those cases, no decision is riding on the answer, and a quick answer, even when factually incorrect, could be argued to serve the purpose just as well as (or better than) a slow but more correct answer.
I realised this for myself when I read Sivers on being without internet[1]. He discovered a process to silence the nagging voice without searching:
This reminds me of what Deming used to say: there is no correct value for any measurement, there are only the outcomes of methods chosen to measure something.
I've never played Diplomacy, but I try to turn every other board game I play into Diplomacy[1] and it's great fun. For me, the reason to play physical board games over other kinds of games is precisely the in-person negotiation and problem-solving that gets people closer together.
I have done this for places I visited a lot in my early childhood but since have never returned to. It's a bit eerie to see the memories come back to life. Often I remember just enough of the place to be able to find my way between what were the main attractions to me at that age. Somehow, despite forgetting all the details of the path, something in the back of my head compels me to follow the right road even in confusing intersections. I find it fascinating.
I didn't want to shell out $20 a month for the general thing, so I spent $90 on data collection and built my own for code comments specifically. It runs locally in your browser with a relatively small classification model trained on old-school stylometric features. You can try that before turning to Pangram for uncertain cases, if you wish.[1]
It's easy to get high accuracy numbers if you're testing on long (50+ words) texts. Much harder when the documens are short, as code comments tend to be.[2]
It's a fun experience and a useful way to make a place and a time really feel alive.
(Not strictly on topic but having played it really lends texture to TFA and other comments posted here.)
[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
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