Link: An online game about trust

[sonia]

A game about trust by Nicky Case, July 2017. Playing time 30 min.

During World War I, peace broke out.

It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man's Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games.

Meanwhile: it's 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at trust. Surveys show that, over the past forty years, fewer and fewer people say they trust each other. So here's our puzzle:

Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?

I think game theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust – and how we can fix it! So, to understand all this...

I liked the game, the music, and the underlying message. Recommended!

Comments

[elainegrey]

That was a fun game to play. It underscores how the "gig economy" will fail us.

[sonia]

Oh, good point! :-(

[silveradept]

A very good game, and I recognized at least some of what was supposed to be optimal from the studies I had done on game theory. It's interesting how much more optimal trust and cooperation is, with appropriate punishments for those that break that trust, and yet we still seem to have all kinds of people who play by the rules of taking everything and giving nothing back.

[sonia]

I thought it was interesting to play all the different strategies against each other, and to change the rules and see how that affected winning strategies. I honestly don't understand why some people are anti-cooperative, although it does seem to be benefiting them in the short to medium term. Long term sucks for all of us, though.

[silveradept]

I think it's that - the short term is all they want to think about, or they think that if they can keep the short term going for their own lives, they'll escape the consequences of the long term by virtue of being dead. (Or resurrected at the very end in a perfected world reborn from the ashes of this one, but mostly, they intend to get theirs without a care for anyone else.) As the game points out, so long as the conditions favor always cheating, it will push out plenty of others with better long-term strategies.