I quite liked @mako yass’ Peacewagers/Cohabitive Games so Far. But I found myself wanting to link to this essay by Jeff Vogel, an indie game developer and blogger. I think it says something important about the constraints of how to develop Cohabitive games.
Then I thought “actually, Jeff Vogel’s post here is just a great post, I wanna make a top-level linkpost.”
Vogel is an indie-game developer I’ve been following since the 90s, and he’s got a great blog that’s focused in large part on how to be commercially successful as a game developer. You can have all kinds of beautiful artsy ideas as an game designer, but if you can’t make something that makes enough money to pay your bills, well, then there’s a limit to how many games you can make, how many people you can hire to help make them, etc.
I was excited by mako’s vision of “cohabitive games from a perspective of improving society.” i.e. helping people practice openended negotation, and giving coordination theorists an empirical sandbox. But I think succeeding at this requires games that are commercially successful. (i.e. if you’ve only made a niche product for a few atypical gamers, you probably haven’t succeeded at the more ambitious goals in the Peacewagers post)
With that context, here’s some quotes from Jeff Vogel’s post:
“Power Fantasy” is usually used as a pejorative term. The phrase often has the word “adolescent” tacked on before it for a fun bit of ad hominem.
Yet. What makes video games different from other artistic media? It is activity. Video games aren’t about consuming words or sounds or images. They are about action, doing things.
In almost every game, what are you doing? You are making changes in your environment. You are giving gifts in a dating sim. Designing roadways in Sim City. Shooting bad guys in, well, just about everything else.
When you change your environment, you are exercising Power.
You are doing this inside a game, a space that does not exist. Every video game takes place in a mental construct that is imagined. In other words, all video games take place in Fantasy. (In the dictionary sense, not the “casting fireball at an orc” sense.) Yet, in your brain, the Power FEELS real, and that is what counts.
Video games are about using power to make changes in a fantasy space, for pleasure. They are power fantasies.
There is nothing shameful about this. The only error is denying it. This will make you not understand video games.
...
The Main Takeaway, To Save You Reading
When players end a session with your game, aim for one of two things:
1. They feel better about themselves.
or
2. They feel that, with effort, they will feel even better about themselves. The delay of gratification should make the feeling stronger.
If your game isn’t offering either sensation, beware. You are in the Danger Zone.
...
Players are very clear about what they want. Look at the list of the most popular games.
Most games are about two things. One is overcoming: Defeating puzzles, challenges, other people. The other is building: Creating and reshaping an environment.
This is what people want. It is what they expect. When you sell them a game, in their mind, that is the bargain: Customers give you time, attention, and money. In return, you give them a feeling of power, of success.
...
What Is Power? How Is It Expressed?
Power is a vague word, deliberately so. I claim video games are so popular because they let their users feel intermittently powerful. There are, however, many, many routes to this goal.
The purest expression of raw power in video games is a dating sim. Dating sims give you the ultimate power: The ability to choose who loves you. Not even the Genie in Aladdin could do that!
Sim City is a double fantasy. First, that we live in a world that works under rational rules that we can comprehend. Second, that we can affect that world.
Fishing in video games lets you have the power to make fishing interesting.
Horror games give you the power to survive, no matter how horrible your surroundings are.
All the most popular games are PVP. When you beat another player in a game, you have affected that human being’s emotions in REAL LIFE. That’s so good a Power Fantasy that it’s hardly even fantasy anymore.
Idle and clicker games let you gain and use power without even the indignity of actually doing anything. They are the best example of how compelling and seductive video games are: They let you feel satisfaction and accomplishment even when you aren’t doing anything at all.
Puzzle games create a very simple, abstract world in which you can be smart, competent, and have mastery. If you dispute the power fantasy element of this, I merely observe this: When you solve a difficult puzzle correctly, you feel powerful.
I think there are a lot of cohabitive games that are focused on building (i.e Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time). The thing that feels missing to me here is… gamey-ness. I think people have “criticized” Minecraft for being unclear what the point is, and being more of a toy or sandbox than a “game.”
One of the things I’m particularly interested here is games that specifically reward your choices of how to prioritize negotiation, conflict, and building, and that give you something of a measureable outcome you can improve on. Minecraft has a very vague version of this, determined entirely by what you / other-players think is cool.
An issue is that I think the power-fantasy of conflict is very satisfying/primal. For any game that includes it as an option, players will tend to gravitate towards it and it’ll dominate. (not quite the right anecdote, but a story comes to mind from Raph Koster has a story where they put loads of effort into an intricate ecosystem in Ultimate Online, and players didn’t even notice because they just ran around killing everything)
I think the killer app for a really successful cohabitive game will be to somehow give players a power fantasy that is more compelling than pure competition, while having competition be a big enough theme of the game for it to be relevant to negotiation.
Commenting just to note that for anyone for whom the name “Jeff Vogel” doesn’t ring any bells, he’s the founder of… well, no. He is Spiderweb Software.[1] And Spiderweb Software is the creator of some of the best independent CRPGs that I’ve ever played: the Exile series, the Avernum series, the Geneforge series. And Vogel’s been doing this—making a living from creating computer games, almost entirely by himself—for close to 30 years.
In short, when it comes to “what games are”, Jeff Vogel has a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about.
He hires artists sometimes, to create various graphical assets, but aside from that I’m pretty sure it’s a one-man shop.
Yeah. (Exile was a pretty formative game for me in the 90s. I haven’t met many other people who’ve played it, though I’ve met someone who played Geneforge. I’ve always been a bit sad that Exile got renamed to “Avernum”, the original title was much more evocative to me.)
Fun fact, one of those artists is me! (right out of college with my computer animation degree, I messaged Jeff and was like “hey, I’m a poor desperate college grad artist who can probably make art for you at affordable rates!” and then I made these walls among others)
Was there meant to be a link there?
Yeah should be fixed now (not that, like, they are particularly great walls or anything that are particularly worth looking at)
Oh man, I know those walls, though. Those are pretty recognizable walls! Very cool that you worked on this!
So… as I’ve listened to people comment “why are these things counting as power fantasies?” over the past day, perhaps ironically it’s actually my Shoulder Said who has popped up in my head to say “Um, what do you mean by power fantasy, actually? This seems like it has ‘you-could-think-of-it-as’ syndrome. Sure, you can think of horror games as power fantasies, but should you?”
So I’m thinking through that a bit now and forming my own answers, but I’m curious about your own take on that.
It’s certainly a fair question. But… doesn’t Vogel’s post answer it fairly well? I mean, he has a whole section titled “What Do We Mean By “Power Fantasy”?” It’s not long, so I’ll quote it in full:
This is, as Vogel explicitly notes, not the standard usage (not that the standard usage has any agreed-upon formal definition, of course, but it has quite consistent connotations, and Vogel’s usage specifically does not share those connotations).
The question “you could think of [whatever sort of video game] as a power fantasy, but should you?” is, again, a good one. However, again, I do think Vogel’s answer is also a good one: we should think of video games in this way because it precisely identifies what makes them appealing.
(A corollary to that answer is: “We should think of video games in this way when we are thinking about what makes them appealing, trying to diagnose why a game isn’t appealing, trying to make a game be appealing, etc. In other contexts, we may wish to think of video games in some other way.”)
Ah, but that’s not the question you asked, is it? Your question (ascribed to Shoulder Said) was:
(Emphasis mine.)
Suppose, for the moment, that we agree with Jeff Vogel in general, about his claim that the essence of the appeal of video games is their power-fantasy nature (in his sense of the term). (Otherwise, there’s nothing further to discuss—he made a claim, we judge the claim to be false, discussion over.)
I think that it’s entirely valid to say “the framework is useful, and applies to most sorts of video games; however, does it apply to [this particular kind of video game]?”. We might answer that question in the negative, and the conclusion would be “the thesis is too strong, but if weakened is true”. Alternatively, of course, we might discover that the answer is, after all, “yes, this framework turns out to also apply to [i.e., to accurately explain the appeal of] that kind of video game”.
That is one aspect of the analysis. Another aspect is that games appeal to different people for different reasons (cf. GNS theory, “Eight Kinds of Fun”, “Timmy/Johnny/Spike”, etc.). We can (and should) ask: how does the view of games as “power fantasies” (in the Vogel sense) interact with these other frameworks? There is obviously a great deal to be said about that, so I won’t even try to answer that question, except to note that “what about horror games” could have an answer along the lines of “horror games are a place where the ‘power fantasy’ framework interacts particularly poorly with any/all of the ‘multifaceted appeal’ frameworks”, or it could have an answer along the lines of “horror games have multiple forms of appeal (as predicted by the ‘multifaceted appeal’ frameworks) and some of those forms fit perfectly well into the ‘power fantasy’ framework”, or the answer could take some other form still… we really can’t say, without actually doing that analysis in detail (and, probably, some empirical investigation to go with it).
Needless to say, a healthy helping of examples (of horror games, e.g., or of whatever else is involved in any objections or doubts we might have about Vogel’s claims) would be necessary in order to actually get to any useful answers we might want. (For example, Vogel says that “give you the power to survive, no matter how horrible your surroundings are”; how well does that describe horror video games? It certainly sounds plausible, but I’m not actually a big fan of the genre, so I couldn’t say. And without some concrete examples, we’re not getting anywhere with this!)
This links to a Wikipedia page that does not currently exist.
This seems false to me. Though the article’s link to the most popular games was broken, I found these lists:
Wikipedia: List of best-selling video games - #1 is Minecraft, #2 is Grand Theft Auto V, #3 is Tetris
Wikipedia: List of best-selling PC games - #2 is Minecraft, #3 is Terraria, #4 is Diablo 3
Wikipedia: List of most-played mobile games by player count - #2 is Candy Crush Saga
Steam: Top Sellers (All Products) - #3 is Baldur’s Gate 3, #4 is Cyberpunk 2077
Board Game Geek: all board games by rank - #2 is Pandemic Legacy, #3 is Gloomhaven
Good point. (I’m not sure that this counters the overall point of the essay – the top games all still seem pretty power-fantasy-ish to me). Many of them also involve some kind of combat that isn’t “PVP” but is still some flavor of “violence.”
But, yeah seems probably Just Wrong to say that the top games are PVP-y.
I got curious and made this spreadsheet where I attempted to estimate how much PvP was in each game in the Wikipedia best-selling-videogames. I’m not actually sure which games are PvPy so was just guessing based on some titles. Feel free to add your own columns, but by the time I got bored it did look like PvP was maybe 1/3rd of the games by sale.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_Hsmxxs-ifsIdMQituYZ8huFjIVx2N5tl1aLyCMD3yI/edit#gid=0
I wasn’t trying to counter the overall point of the essay. I agree with a lot of it, though this isn’t quite how I usually look at things.
I think of goals and agency as being critical ingredients in games (without agency you have a movie; without goals you have a toy; sandbox-y games like Minecraft are pretty close to the game/toy boundary and reasonable people might disagree about which side they fall on).
The “power fantasy” stuff seems like it’s basically pointing towards the fact that using your agency to accomplish a goal tends to provide a feeling of power, but I have an intuition that goals & agency are more central/fundamental to games. I think that an activity with goals and agency would seem like a game to me even if I didn’t get feelings of power from it, whereas an activity that gives me feelings of power without using goals or agency would not seem like a game.
“Power fantasy” also feels like it is somewhat getting at player motivations, but...well. I’ve seen several proposed models for player motivations—for example Bartle’s Taxonomy or the “player types” used by the designers of Magic: the Gathering—and mostly I feel like they’re situationally useful as fake frameworks but haven’t managed to reach the “ground truth” of what’s really going on. (Not that I have a better model to give you.)
Yeah I definitely agree that goals/agency are more central to what it means to be a game. The article is more claiming “games will be more successful if they are make you feel a sense of power.”
But yeah the Bartle Taxonomy is useful/relevant. In particular I agree “games as social experience” is particularly orthogonal to power-fantasy.
I am reflecting a bit on “okay, how much work is the ‘power fantasy’ frame actually doing here?”, and whether other ways of making the same point would be as-helpful or more.
Nitpick: pvp tetris exists, is quite popular, and I think a majority of the tetris fanbase in the modern era
Though tetris definitely wasn’t designed to multiplayer and it really shows. You can be good at it without looking much at your opponent at all, and even at high levels of play it is much less interactive at high levels compared to, like, Catherine (which admittedly also wasn’t designed for pvp)
Why do you think so? I’m not sure that good data on this exists, but my prior is against it, and the best my Google search turned up was this article on tetris.com opining that single-player is probably the more common form.
The thesis seems wrong to me. Horror games meet the same kind of need as horror movies do, and horror movies aren’t a power fantasy. Puzzle games meet the same kind of need that puzzle toys do, and I never heard of anyone calling them power fantasies. Esport games meet the same kind of need as sports do, and sports doesn’t work as a power fantasy for most people. Adventure games meet the same kind of need as listening to a good campfire story, which isn’t always a power fantasy either. And then there are driving simulators where you just drive across the US and sightsee. You could say they provide the power fantasy of driving and sightseeing, but then you could say any game provides the power fantasy of experiencing that game, which is just vacuous.
I do think he’s explicitly arguing that ‘power fantasy’ applies to more things than you generally think of. And he’s specifically arguing that games which don’t give you some kind of feeling of mastery aren’t actually fun enough to sink dozens+ hours into, which has implications on what sort of product you’re building.
( also I think of the things you list, sports seems pretty explicitly a power fantasy to me in a way that exactly maps onto the things we normally think of re: ‘adolescent power fantasy’, and feels like an actively good intuition pump for ‘yeah it’s useful to notice the expansionist definition of power fantasy applies’)
That said I notice I am pretty fucking confused about what’s going on with Trucking simulators.
I think a thing that games do (and yeah this includes puzzle-boxes) is to make ‘interacting with the world’ a lot more streamlined and manageable than usual.
Like, in real like inventing a sword takes a hundred thousand years of trial and error. In Minecraft it takes about a day. In real life puzzles often stymie you for years and there’s no clear sense it’s even possible. In Baba Is You they come in bite sized manageable chunks, optimized to give you a drip of eureka spikes. And I do think this has important shared structure with ‘you can be a strong barbarian who can kill things easily’.
That’s not why I play solitaire card games on my iPad: I do it to dissociate, and dissociation is desirable because it quickly reduces mental tension and quickly removes most of my awareness of the pains and the signs of fatigue in my body. (I’m not saying its good for me: I might spend too much of my time dissociated, and there might be better ways for me to reduce mental tension that I can learn.)
The main motivation tempting me to play chess on the other hand is the experience of power as described in the quote in the OP.
With such a vague and broad definition of power fantasy, I decided to brainstorm a list of ways games can fail to be a power fantasy.
Mastery feels unachievable.
It seems like too much effort. Cliff-shaped learning curves, thousand-hour grinds, old PvP games where every player still around will stomp a noob like you flat.
The game feels unfair. Excessive RNG, “Fake Difficulty” or “pay to win”.
The power feels unreal, success too cheaply earned.
The game blatantly cheats in your favor even when you didn’t need it to.
Poor game balance leading to hours of trivially easy content that you have to get through to reach the good stuff.
Mastery doesn’t feel worth trying for.
Games where the gameplay isn’t fun and there’s no narrative or metagame hook making you want to do it.
The Diablo 3 real money auction house showing you that your hard-earned loot is worth pennies.
There is no mastery to try for in the first place.
Walking simulators, visual novels, etc. Walking simulators got a mention in the linked article. They aren’t really “failing” at power fantasy, just trying to do something different.
There is a game that sort of does what you are looking for here: Eco. Imagine Minecraft, except: The world and resources are limited in size, players can specialize in skills and trade with each other using player-made currencies, logistics matter, and you can create a government and arbitrary laws. On top of all that, a meteor is threatening to destroy the world in 30 real-world days, unless you can progress technology enough to build lasers to shoot it down. And you need to do all that without destroying the world due to pollution and global warming.
The dynamics of the game give people different options for what kinds of goals they want to pursue. I tend to ruthlessly pursue whatever is most profitable. Most people just like getting enough resources to build neat houses and interact with the economy. Some like building a functional government, or creating infrastructure (roads, mostly). It’s still basically a sandbox game, but one where it’s easy to create your own varied goals and see how well you’ve achieved them.
It’s a game that’s both utterly unique and very compelling for certain kinds of people.
Yeah I’ve actually played Eco. I wasn’t sure whether to count it as cohabitive because the meteor makes it in some ways explicitly collaborative, and the semi-competitive part wasn’t that different from Minecraft’s sandbox. But I agree it’s a pretty important game to have thought about a bit if you’re exploring this space.
There’s an equivalence between having some quantity of power and just being able to do things, so “power fantasy” is also just a paraphrasing of “games are interactive media”.
In order for a game to be interesting, it has to be about a type of activity that you don’t usually get to do, or else you would be able to just do it irl.
All very inescapable.
None of this is what people mean when they complain about “power fantasy” (domination simulators). But that doesn’t seem worth discussing, to me, since I’ve never seen a single gamer who didn’t very quickly grow out of those and move towards authentically challenging games, usually PVP, where winning more than half the time is impossible.
Then you haven’t seen many gamers, because most of the people I’ve ever played with (and it’s not a small number) have little or no interest in what you (quite tendentiously) call “authentically challenging” games, especially PVP.
“Tendentious” is kind of a rude way of inquiring into someone’s assumptions.
Inauthentic challenge (eg, enemies who look very strong but who are actually at a huge power or ai disadvantage to the player that’s easy for the player’s lizardbrain to not notice and to feel like they’re being very skillful) pretty much is the bad thing people are pointing at when they complain about power fantasy.
You could also accuse sadistically crushing visibly and obviously weak enemies of being a toxic power fantasy, but I actually can’t think of any games irl that are like that. There’s usually a false pretense that the player is some sort of underdog.
I guess it’s possible that a lot of people would still enjoy these things without the pretense, but I don’t see evidence of it.
What are some examples of “inauthentically challenging” games, and some examples of “authentically challenging” games that aren’t PVP?
Halo presents elites as equals or superiors to Spartans. Superficially, they look to be. In reality the AI is hamstrung. Mostly, they shoot less, with predictable inaccuracy. I have not come across a lore reason for it. Players often don’t consciously notice it. This is a very normal type of inauthenticity about the challenges of the game.
Spelunky is mostly just is what it looks like. It’s actually harder than it looks, because it forces the player to reckon with very tight safety margins as a result of disjunctive sources of risk, which is something most of them wont be used to. It’s very honest about how it works. It is authentic about its challenges.
Suppose that the AI opponents actually shot more, with superhuman accuracy. (Are there difficulty settings in Halo?) Would the challenge then be “authentic”?
Is playing against bots in Unreal Tournament “authentically challenging”? How about in StarCraft?
Are high-level PVE encounters in World of Warcraft “authentically challenging”?
When something’s harder than it looks, we tend to notice, because we usually have to figure out what’s going on in order to overcome it. That’s mostly what difficulty is for, as an instrument of the art, it’s a way of saying “don’t move on until you’ve figured this stuff out” So surprising challenges are usually ‘authentic’ (eventually).
I guess there are also games that’re hard due to factors that aren’t what people were really interested in, and the player never consciously figures out what’s going on (“fake difficulty”?). I can’t think of a great example of this off the top of my head, I think the games that do it tend to be identified as bad or unfair, and we mostly don’t have them any more.
I’m not sure why examining this terminology would be interesting to you.
Note after OOB debate: this conversation has gone wrong because you’re reading subtext into Said’s comment that he didn’t mean to put there. You keep trying to answer an implied question that wasn’t intended to be implied.
If you think playing against bots in UT is authentically challenging, just answer “Yes, I think playing against bots in UT is authentically challenging.”
That’s fascinating, but it seems like your reply to my comment answered none of the questions I asked. Was that intentional, or an oversight, or… what? To clarify, those questions were not rhetorical. I would like to know what your answers are.
I think it answers them: Is the player (supposed to be) fully aware of the reasons this is as hard as it is?
So: Yes, player’s sensitivity to bot quirks probably depends on the difficulty level they’re playing at, and I haven’t played WoW but from what I’ve heard Yes.
I’m sorry, perhaps I’m being dense, but: yes, playing against bots in Unreal Tournament or StarCraft is “authentically challenging”? Is that right?
In Unreal (or a game like it that I played) I felt like I understood what kind of challenge I was actually facing, and it felt quite different to playing against humans.
With starcraft, I’m not sure. I think at high levels of play people are fairly aware of how the bot thinks.
Another interesting example is Network Wars, the bot AI is flawed, but to dig into it at all, the player has to become aware of that (and to enjoy it, I think we have to recognize that the flaws analogize interesting vices that people have in the real world (nearsightedness/greed, cowardice), though turned up to a inhuman extreme)
Look, I have to ask: is there some reason why you’re refusing to give me a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer to a yes-or-no question?
I ask because this is making it very difficult to follow what you’re saying. I would like to understand your comments, but it would really be much easier for me to do that if the commentary accompanied the direct answers, rather than replacing them!
I did, each answer was in sequence.
But the reason I was reluctant initially was:
If you understand my reasoning, you can infer my answers.
If you don’t understand my reasoning, I would not actually want you to know my answers.
This sometimes leads to a style of writing that keeps things abstract and indirect and as a result is able to tell the truth about any issue, because it means that the author’s positions on things will only be clear to people who understand why they think that (and can thus empathize with it, speak to it, and probably agree with it).
Games are designed so that success is possible.
I’ve been gaming some 35 years and I don’t play any multiplayer games at all. I don’t think I remember the ten or so people in my social hangouts who regularly talk about what they’re playing talk much about PVP either, they seem to be playing single-player simulator, grand strategy and CRPG games or cooperative multiplayer games mostly.
This talk about puzzles by a puzzle solving master might be interesting to you. Recommendation by Jonathan Blow (who made Braid and the Witness): https://youtu.be/oCHciE9CYfA?si=9ZtETH1_a8pM3l8e
I recommend watching the full thing but I associated the post above to this interesting idea from the beginning of the video:
(1) Eureka moments are the atoms of puzzles. Eureka: A sudden, pleasureful, fluent, confident feeling of understanding. Insights
…
(6) Interesting truths are the root of surprise.
(7) Eureka is not Fiero. Fiero: the emotion of overcoming a tough challenge
…
(9) Eureka is sharable (don’t need fiero to have eureka necessarily)
Not directly comparable to the post above but maybe relevant to the part about if competition is needed.
The explanation of PvP games as power fantasies seems quite off to me, since they are worse at giving a feeling of power than PvE games are. The vast majority of players of a PvP game will never reach the highest levels and therefore will lose half the time, which makes playing the game a humbling experience, which is why some players will blame bad luck, useless teammates, etc. to avoid having to admit that they’re bad. I don’t see how “I lose a lot at middling ranks because I’m never lucky” is much of a power fantasy.
A PvE game is much better at delivering a power fantasy because every player can have the experience of defeating hordes of enemies, conquering the world, or leveling up to godlike power.
You’re missing the thrill inherent in leveraging power over another person. The article briefly mentions this:
The appeal of playing dota is the victorious thrill when you kill another person. Not a mindless, stupid NPC. A person. Someone who is your equal, who you aren’t guaranteed to win against. Having the potential for failure makes victory so much more real and so much more enjoyable. Losing half the time sucks, but those moments of genuine victorious conquest are what make pvp appealing.
All the more so if you know the other players. Killing someone you know and dislike is ten times more satisfying than killing a stranger from matchmaking.
Mowing down hordes of soulless NPCs just isn’t the same.
I think this is an important contributing factor for why squad-based multiplayer games (like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch) are far more popular than 1v1 multiplayer games.
Here’s a followup post where Jeff Vogel explored a recent God of War game through the lens of power fantasy. Notably previous God of War games leaned heavily into the most standard power fantasy of violence, but the more recent God of War games were trying to focus on the themes of fatherhood, with mixed results. (not really related to cohabitive games but showcased an individual application of the ‘power fantasy’ game analysis)
Myself included. I can’t play Minecraft; it’s far too open-ended, and makes me feel anxious and overwhelmed. “Wtf am I supposed to do??” I want a game to give me two or three choices max at every decision point, not an infinite vector space of possibilities through which I cannot sort or prioritize.
This post though is about one of my big obsessions: trying to figure out how to design a game (computer or tabletop or both) which makes cooperation fun. And I mean, fun in the way Diablo is fun. Addictive, power fantasy feeling, endless sequence of dopamine hits, sexy. The problem is that the only way to produce that Diablo-flow is to enable people to act automatically, reacting to signs and triggers with preprogrammed responses so that they can sink down into the animalistic part of their brain that hunts and stalks and pounces on things to tear them apart without thought or simulation.
But learning to negotiate with others is the exact opposite of that, and is the main reason we have the effort-intensive simulation system to begin with—so the problem of making a game that is simultaneously compelling on a primal level, and centers on conflict resolution rather than just conflict… is hard.
The only thing that seems to have the same kind of flow in it to me is dance and other group rituals (such as those in religion that hasn’t ossified to mere passionless false beliefs yet), which don’t really help with the whole “training negotiation” thing (though they do induce people to align with one another on an emotional level) and also cannot easily be turned into video games or TTRPGs.
I think (not that anyone is saying otherwise) that the power fantasy can be expressed in a coop game just fine.
We all know the guy who brokenbirds about playing the healer in D&D, yeah? Like, the person who it is real important to that everyone knows how unselfish they are.
If you put a ‘forego personal advancement to help the team win’ button in a game without a solo winner people will break their fingers cuz they all tried to mash it at once. People mash these in games WITH a solo winner (kingmaker syndrome, home brew victory conditions, etc).
Note that we’re not talking about co-op games. We’re talking about games that involve both cooperation and competition, where choosing when to do either and, how to negotiate, is a key skill.
The problem is not making cooperation exciting. The problem is making the choice-of-whether-to-cooperate exciting.
The world might have become a very different place if the coordination theorists were the ones who got the empirical sandboxes 10 years ago. Some people were thinking that legal prediction markets would be the way to dath ilan, and funnily enough it seems like the SBF trial/book might have brought attention to prediction markets. But very few people are aware that there exist firms and government/military agencies that have access to orders of magnitude better human behavior data than anywhere in academia, and that in the last 10 years human civilization gained vastly more powerful capability to understand the human mind than any point in the last 10,000 years of human civilization. The games and empirical sandboxes that Raemon describes already exist, but were hijacked by moloch; by default they got twisted into what we now understand as social media, which hijacks the human impulse to pursue social status in the maximally profitable way. And, unlike conventional war, information warfare is winnable, but in order to outperform ineffective ads and 20th century propaganda, and actually cause overwhelming victory like in communist East Germany, they need a superior understanding of the human mind to what people had in the 20th century. And then AI got caught up in it, because AI is great for processing and utilizing data, and now AI is so thoroughly entrenched in that clusterfuck AGI alignment just gets crowded out by default because it’s oversaturated with corporate executives and natsec folk who assume that it’s just another power grab, when in reality it actually is the engineering problem that the fate of the universe hinges on. If this post existed 20 years ago (or even 10) then maybe things wouldn’t have unfolded like this.
I didn’t understand from this comment what the referent was for “the games/sandboxes exist, but were highjacked.” What things are you counting as games/sandboxes of this type?
(minor aside: the lack of paragraph breaks in your comment made it feel harder to read to me)
Social media and user data, possibly including IoT sensor data to some unknown extent.