Idea: Instead of allowing arbitrary deals, allow only a few specific kinds of deals, then gradually add more kinds of deals in advanced scenarios.
As noted in the post, a system for enforcing arbitrary deals can be used for nasty stuff like precommitment races if players are clever. Conversely, less-advanced players might not even think of the many ways you’d like them to use it. You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
If you start with limited deals like “no attacking each other for N turns” or “I’ll pay you X if you do Y” then you can exclude problematic cases, and you can encourage players to experiment with more complex deals (dominant assurance contracts?) when they are “unlocked” because they’ll be a shiny new toy and players won’t need to invent them.
Additionally, this might make it tractable to have a computerized version with AI players, which makes the game much more accessible (and may even help with playtesting/balance if the AIs are sufficiently human-like).
Difficulty: The game becomes much less about players talking with each other (especially for AI).
Difficulty: Players might try to negotiate informal deals to work around the limitations.
You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
Personally, so far I’m just looking forward to this. I’ll need to experience it and maybe get bored of it before I’ll want to come up with solutions to it x]
I think fully general contract enforcement might be something I have to leave in, though, discussed in this reply.
I kind of want the lego of legal experimentation. I want to get to a world where laws can be changed by those who live under them as easily as a gridbeam construction. To do that irl, we’re going to first have to reckon with the fact that most of us are not very competent in it yet, we have to become better at setting our laws than the lawyers before we can justify deposing the lawyers
Idea: Instead of allowing arbitrary deals, allow only a few specific kinds of deals, then gradually add more kinds of deals in advanced scenarios.
As noted in the post, a system for enforcing arbitrary deals can be used for nasty stuff like precommitment races if players are clever. Conversely, less-advanced players might not even think of the many ways you’d like them to use it. You also risk players making ambiguous deals and then disagreeing about whether they were fulfilled.
If you start with limited deals like “no attacking each other for N turns” or “I’ll pay you X if you do Y” then you can exclude problematic cases, and you can encourage players to experiment with more complex deals (dominant assurance contracts?) when they are “unlocked” because they’ll be a shiny new toy and players won’t need to invent them.
Additionally, this might make it tractable to have a computerized version with AI players, which makes the game much more accessible (and may even help with playtesting/balance if the AIs are sufficiently human-like).
Difficulty: The game becomes much less about players talking with each other (especially for AI).
Difficulty: Players might try to negotiate informal deals to work around the limitations.
Personally, so far I’m just looking forward to this. I’ll need to experience it and maybe get bored of it before I’ll want to come up with solutions to it x]
I think fully general contract enforcement might be something I have to leave in, though, discussed in this reply.