Re: cells defecting by becoming gametes, I think you were maybe a bit too terse. I believe I’ve figured out what’s going on, but let me run it by you:
*Within the organism*, there’s no selection pressure for cells to become gametes—mutations are random variations, not strategic actors, so a leaf is no more likely to ‘decide’ to become a flower than the reverse (which would also be harmful overall). The organism *does* have an incentive to keep the random mutation rate down, but no reason to *specifically* combat cells ‘defecting’ in this way.
And actually, if flowers are especially costly, the organism might evolve specific “no accidental flowers” adaptations—but for reasons unrelated to coordination problems.
Meanwhile, on a species level, there might be a bias in favor of the flower-instead-of-leaf mutations appearing in the gene pool, since these can show up via gamete mutations or leaf mutations, whereas most mutations can only appear via gamete mutations. Intuitively this seems unlikely to be a big deal, but I do wonder if tweaking the parameters could make it significant enough to make a specific adaptation to fight it worthwhile.
I haven’t played this, but I’ve watched a video of Japanese comedians playing it, which actually does give a sense of how it works.
There’s a (IMO very obvious) algorithm for winning this with literally zero communication: play card N after N seconds have elapsed. I don’t know how easy it is to precisely count double-digit-second intervals, but it doesn’t seem that interesting to find out. It seems pretty clear that steelmanning the rules means not counting seconds.
So what you end up with is a game of reading precise system-2 information (numbers), translating it into nebulous system-1 body language, that the other players need to be able to process back into a precise number.