What if you have a hidden agenda, but you are allowed to proclaim (but not prove) it?
One issue is that the game before the reveal and the game after the reveal are completely different games, it’s too destabilizing or multifarious as a design problem, it’s probably impossible to design a game good when people are switching from A to B independently whenever they decide to. Coupling hidden goal semicoop games to peacewagers is probably not a good way to carve gamespace into digestible chunks.
But discovering peoples’ real motives by looking at their actions is interesting, in the context of the value learning problem. Ultimately, preferences only meaningfully exist in terms of the effects they have on our actions, realized or counterfactual. So looking at action and inferring preferences is an interesting exercise.
But another issue is that I’m not actually sure hidden motives can elude the sight of a competent peacebroker. If I ask you why you want a deal, and you try to give me an answer where the math doesn’t work out, I notice that immediately. I know you’re lying about something, and I say, “try again.” You don’t get a deal until it makes sense to me.
I suspect that in natural situations, or at least any situation in our own future, transparency is a dominant trend, it ends up winning out, and that’s good, so a situation where we beg the question, what if transparency doesn’t win out, I don’t see what’s interesting about that.
This adds a layer of complexity which might be undesirable, especially for less advanced players
Right, and I don’t think it’s a good starting point for studying negotiation. How do you learn to go from opaque preferences to exposed preferences if you don’t know what the end point is like, if you’ve never experienced that, and how would you find the motivation to learn it, if you’ve never experienced the benefits of having exposed preferences.
The fun in shared creativity
Mm 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 (and it is possible for us to get better at it because the lawyers are few, overspecialized, distant, and old).
But in games we can just try legal experimentation and see what happens. So there could be a lot of fun in game focused on unexpected consequences of attempts to legislate, hmm.
minecraft mod
Oh, some modded minecraft servers are already peacewagers, I forgot to mention. Sounds like very much that kind of thing. A nice story about one such server is: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
But yeah, I’m super interested in games designed to test civic principles and economic mechanism designs, because they can’t always be tested irl.
My friend Murat Ayfer is both working on open multiplayer games and governance systems for online communities and I hope something comes out of that.
It could also be interesting to have rounds of the game with and without omnipotent contract enforcement, and with/without hidden agendas, and with/without the game being a partial-information game
For sure. There’s going to need to be a combination of random permutation and levels of play to explore the whole gamespace.
another issue is that I’m not actually sure hidden motives can elude the sight of a competent peacebroker. If I ask you why you want a deal, and you try to give me an answer where the math doesn’t work out, I notice that immediately. I know you’re lying about something, and I say, “try again.” You don’t get a deal until it makes sense to me.
This actually sounds to me like an argument in favor of the hidden-agenda mode, because I bet most players don’t currently have this level of competence, and this might be a useful exercise for training it.
I agree that it’s worth giving them that experience a few times, but I sense there might not be a deep game there. Another way of putting it is that I think suggesting that players take delight in negotiation under incomplete information is almost the same as training them to delay the approach towards complete information, which I think is a very unhealthy tendency to train, like, I don’t want to teach people to avoid looking gift horses in the mouth. That is a real and common vice.
I think I was also intuiting that exposing a person’s hidden motives is basically the same process as brokering a shared plan. Hints of the existence of hidden motives start to arise when the opponent starts telling you nonsense about how their claimed values are not satisfied the proposed plan even when the plan is very good for their claimed values, or when they start deviating from the plan. You can only tell a plan is good for their claimed values (whether they’re behaving disingenuously) by first having the negotiation skills to know what the fair compromise is and take a stand when the opponent diverges from it.
One issue is that the game before the reveal and the game after the reveal are completely different games, it’s too destabilizing or multifarious as a design problem, it’s probably impossible to design a game good when people are switching from A to B independently whenever they decide to. Coupling hidden goal semicoop games to peacewagers is probably not a good way to carve gamespace into digestible chunks.
But discovering peoples’ real motives by looking at their actions is interesting, in the context of the value learning problem. Ultimately, preferences only meaningfully exist in terms of the effects they have on our actions, realized or counterfactual. So looking at action and inferring preferences is an interesting exercise.
But another issue is that I’m not actually sure hidden motives can elude the sight of a competent peacebroker. If I ask you why you want a deal, and you try to give me an answer where the math doesn’t work out, I notice that immediately. I know you’re lying about something, and I say, “try again.” You don’t get a deal until it makes sense to me.
I suspect that in natural situations, or at least any situation in our own future, transparency is a dominant trend, it ends up winning out, and that’s good, so a situation where we beg the question, what if transparency doesn’t win out, I don’t see what’s interesting about that.
Right, and I don’t think it’s a good starting point for studying negotiation. How do you learn to go from opaque preferences to exposed preferences if you don’t know what the end point is like, if you’ve never experienced that, and how would you find the motivation to learn it, if you’ve never experienced the benefits of having exposed preferences.
Mm 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 (and it is possible for us to get better at it because the lawyers are few, overspecialized, distant, and old).
But in games we can just try legal experimentation and see what happens. So there could be a lot of fun in game focused on unexpected consequences of attempts to legislate, hmm.
Oh, some modded minecraft servers are already peacewagers, I forgot to mention. Sounds like very much that kind of thing. A nice story about one such server is: https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
But yeah, I’m super interested in games designed to test civic principles and economic mechanism designs, because they can’t always be tested irl.
My friend Murat Ayfer is both working on open multiplayer games and governance systems for online communities and I hope something comes out of that.
For sure. There’s going to need to be a combination of random permutation and levels of play to explore the whole gamespace.
This actually sounds to me like an argument in favor of the hidden-agenda mode, because I bet most players don’t currently have this level of competence, and this might be a useful exercise for training it.
I agree that it’s worth giving them that experience a few times, but I sense there might not be a deep game there. Another way of putting it is that I think suggesting that players take delight in negotiation under incomplete information is almost the same as training them to delay the approach towards complete information, which I think is a very unhealthy tendency to train, like, I don’t want to teach people to avoid looking gift horses in the mouth. That is a real and common vice.
I think I was also intuiting that exposing a person’s hidden motives is basically the same process as brokering a shared plan. Hints of the existence of hidden motives start to arise when the opponent starts telling you nonsense about how their claimed values are not satisfied the proposed plan even when the plan is very good for their claimed values, or when they start deviating from the plan. You can only tell a plan is good for their claimed values (whether they’re behaving disingenuously) by first having the negotiation skills to know what the fair compromise is and take a stand when the opponent diverges from it.