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.
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.