18 Comments

What good would a game do? If people don't want to tell you how the world works, why would they put this information in a game?

It seems to me that a game is useful to assimilate factual knowledge, that is, to bridge the alief/belief gap. For example, a game would be useful to teach the value of exponential growth in networking, and thus the importance of compounding contacts of contacts. But it's no better than the model of the world that goes into it. It can't tell you the details of how to go about networking if you don't already know.

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It was presented in a talk at EA global 2015 and i haven't been able to track it down. :(

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As a socially competant nerd, having a good network often involves doing meaningless chat quite regularly - whilst also never being the one who gives out too much 'social attention' to someone. Making yourself seem attractive to people, Being confident in yourself, etc.

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Studies on such behavior (including the surprising original discovery of super defectors) have indicated that a small proportion of either super cooperators or super defectors can flip a whole network over from a defect-defect equilibrium to a cooperate-cooperate one or vice versa.

Can you link studies on this?

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It's an interesting idea. What good would it do tho? Wouldn't it be sort of like college: the more people get good at this the less valuable the thing itself is?Why does society need more people to be better at networking?Maybe society needs a certain number of people to be hermit like and therefore more likely to think differently than the well networked, who have a strong incentive to get along? But sure it sounds like a fun problem and I love games!

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You are wrong in at least one part - nerds definitely have a 'loyalty' instinct. There is usually less opportunity for nerds to be tempted to betray someone or at least be unloyal, as well as hazing less instances of contacts worth being loyal too (less friends). This leads to inexperience and lesser understanding of how loyalty functions in the world. Rectifying this particular aspect of social inexperience would very valuable to nerds imo

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Maybe something like grepolis and other empire building games, but at smaller scale, focused more on the abstracts and cooperation than the minute managing for most things (though specializing should come with its own benefits and be incenyivized to be the norm). Maybe online risk made for a few hundred players, but multiple groups can win?Or a 'beat the pandemic' type game, you have to build connections to get enough influence to stop a great evil from happening?

Quick feedback would be necessary to really teach skills consistently imo.

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Are you familiar with Nicky Case? ncase.me

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If you are truthful about how bad you are at networking, then you miss the most valuable part of networking -- loyalty. Nerds don't have the basic instinct of loyalty, nor do they understand how complex social ties and the efforts needed to invest in them breed loyalty in others. As members of a group slow to read others, they would be considered weak links in any network that would have them and be unable to judge what individuals in groups they join would be loyal to them, and consequently misread what signals they would need to send to or costs they would bear to deserve loyalty or at least induce loyalty through possible punishment. Those who have this skill instinctively or through upbringing in the right environments will also be better at harnessing networks than those who think joining some formal network and chit-chatting politely is enough to gain you entry to these worlds.

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Battle Royale games (hundreds of millions of players, eclipsing all other game types other than casual phone games in the span of a couple years) are popular not because they are particularly good, but because they serve social needs even better than board games. They have about as much downtime as board games, with the added bonus that everyone's downtime is at the same time. They've been described as skype with occasional shooting. So, battle royale games, in which around 100 people must fight in an ever shrinking circle until there is only one team left, are all about a defect defect equilibrium. Encounter another team, shoot them. What if there was a game with some of the same characteristics that included some sort of cooperate mechanic? This happens in practice as individuals or teams sometimes signal to each other to cooperate until they are the last two teams standing using in game communication if there is any. This is frowned upon, but it could be made an explicit game mechanic. This by itself wouldn't be too interesting. What would be interesting is the second layer: super cooperators ad super defectors. A super cooperator (defector) is someone in the network who takes on some of the costs of enforcing the payoff equilibrium. Studies on such behavior (including the surprising original discovery of super defectors) have indicated that a small proportion of either super cooperators or super defectors can flip a whole network over from a defect-defect equilibrium to a cooperate-cooperate one or vice versa. So create some mechanism by which players can take some sort of risk or pay some other cost to influence the game mechanics themselves to favor cooperation or defection. Give players abilities that lend themselves to different strategies, like items that automatically do tit-for-tat or some such, or that force you to do a cooperate or defect on your next interaction, forcing you to try to seek out an advantageous matching. I'm not sure how one would tune the rewards for cooperation.

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I've been sitting on an idea for a game which might partially fit the bill.

There is an inductive reasoning game called Zendo, in which players are exposed to some clues and need to figure out a secret rule.I imagine a single player game involving one or more secret rules which are consistent between play sessions, but less so depending on how far apart they are in time.For example, of five rules four of them will be in common between a session one week and a session on the next. This prevents them from being permanently discovered and going stale. They need to be continually rediscovered.

In order to do well in the game, a player needs to infer the secret rules. These may be difficult or impossible to determine using the data available in just a few play sessions, so collecting information from other players is a key component of making progress.

There's also a competitive aspect. A player's achievements in the game may optionally be attributed to a guild. The guilds are ranked based on the quality of games attributed to them.

With all this, success in the game would partly be based on: - creating/joining trustworthy groups that can defend against espionage - performing said espionage to gain an edge - effectively performing distributed inductive reasoning

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You could publish a list of 100 subdisciplines and give prizes to the teams submitting the best lists of cross-fertilization suggestions. Such a list would contain one or more subdiscipline pairs (X,Y) and for each pair, one or more ideas as to how the methods or results of X may help solve a specific problem in Y. Cap the number of ideas per team. Give an edge to teams whose submissions include more subdisciplines, teams who meaningfully extend this to triples, and (of course) teams with better ideas.

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I can't even get folks here to brainstorm and throw out ideas.

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out -> farm out

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If you have some seed money you could potentially out even a lot of the groundwork to competing networks of young people - goal definition, general rules, specific contest tsrgets, fundraising, infrastructure, etc.

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