I've been failing to get around to doing this for a month now. London Meetup report for the Schelling Point Game.
This was based on my post, Schelling Point Strategy Training, which was in turn based on an actual attempt I made to coordinate with someone on picking a film from a miscellaneous selection of DVDs.
To give people a taste of this process before moving onto the game itself, I'd actually brought along two selections of DVDs, one with unambiguously alphabetisable titles, and one containing two films whose titles began with numerals and 'The' respectively. Passing these selections of DVDs round the table in a bag, participants had to coordinate on a film. People tried to coordinate on an assortment of criteria including title, colour of the box, and popularity or genre of film.
The first of two main insights from this meetup was made at this point: people will argue at length over the most appropriate procedure for selecting a Schelling Point. It's not just that your own procedure seems obvious, but other people's procedures seem inappropriate or even silly. This seems like an important observation when it comes to coordinating with other humans.
The game itself went as follows: two teams of five people were each given ten minutes to (a) come up with a set of objects that would be difficult for the other team to coordinate on, and (b) come up with a strategy for coordinating on arbitrary sets of objects given to them by the other team. Some constraints were in place: the objects were written on index cards (to avoid simple ordering); the objects had to form some sort of natural set; the objects had to be distinct, and distinguishable from one another by the team presenting them. One point would be awarded if an outright majority of the team managed to coordinate, and three points would be awarded for total coordination in a team.
We ran this for two rounds. In the first round, Team A presented "representations of the letter 'a'", with minor variations on font, serifs, etc. Team B presented Kanji characters. Both teams settled on a choice procedure involving the object's position on the index card. In the second round, Team A presented "Scribbles" (literally scribbling over the card, and distinguishing the scribbles with post-hoc identified idiosyncracies of each scribble), and Team B presented 2x2 grid combinations of the addition and multiplication symbols. Each team achieved partial coordination on both rounds.
At this point, the second insight from this meetup was apparent: artificial coordination problems have a "presentation layer" that's vulnerable to hacking. The index cards were an attempt to circumvent an obvious decision procedure in the "presentation layer" of a list (pick the first on the list), but they just present a new type of presentation layer, and the game becomes about finding an choice procedure for arbitrary objects presented in that manner. This is not a characteristic of real-world coordination problems. We thought of various ways of constructing the game that would do away with this, but they were technically cumbersome for a game in a pub.
The group was split as to whether to continue with the game, so we abandoned it for various other coordination experiments involving writing stuff on index cards. We then played The Resistance, primed up to the eyeballs with thoughts of coodination strategies.
In summary:
It seems like you might need a Schelling meta-point as an injunction: no meta-gaming, or Munchkining, the Schelling point game. This could be important because lessons about coordination problems, and how to avoid them, seem valuable to people who attend meetups to ostensibly learn such lessons, and this is helped by not creating additional coordination problems.
That is, unless, the meetup group actually wants to learn about how they might want to act in peculiar game-theoretic scenarios, where players have information and signaling powers they wouldn't normally have, in which case, don't mind me.
A month ago, a new type of thread was proposed: a monthly page for meetup reports. The idea is that meetup attendees, or organizers, who wanted to share information about how the meetup went could do so in the comments of this thread. This is so information is dispersed, but without the need for anyone, and/or everyone, to dedicate their own thread to the report. The idea worked for January, and nobody had objections. So, we'll do this every month.
If you had an interesting Less Wrong meetup recently, but don't have the time to write up a big report to post to Discussion, feel free to write a comment here. Even if it's just a couple lines about what you did and how people felt about it, it might encourage some people to attend meetups or start meetups in their area.
If you have the time, you can also describe what types of exercises you did, what worked and what didn't. This could help inspire meetups to try new things and improve themselves in various ways.
If you're inspired by what's posted below and want to organize a meetup, check out this page for some resources to get started! You can also check FrankAdamek's weekly post on meetups for the week