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Gloomhaven seems, and describes itself as being a cooperative game. What competitive elements are you referring to?

When characters pick up gold and items, they can't be shared, so there's sometimes a race to get them, and players might not work for the benefit of the whole party at that point.

Every session/scenario/map, each character gets a secret goal with a small character progression bonus for achieving it, and pursuing those often requires making one to a few selfish choices.

Also for the lifetime of a character there's one secret goal, which again inspires some selfish choices on a longer timeline.

2mako yass9mo

That's interesting thanks, but I hope you can understand how keeping all of the individual goals secret would make it much harder to practice negotiation. It's okay (great, even) if there's some way of exposing the secret goals. In most games with secret goals that doesn't happen during the game, but since, iirc, it's a legacy game, maybe players tend to figure out each others' secret goals as the campaign goes on. Is that the case? If so, I'd be very interested in seeing that stuff, and the late-game.

Cohabitive Games so Far

sparr10mo30

fully cooperative: Hanabi, The Crew, The Captain Is Dead, Pandemic

partially cooperative: Red November, Betrayal at House on the Hill (original and Legacy), Dead of Winter, Gloomhaven

competitive [...] strongly mutually beneficial deals: Catan, Diplomacy, 18XX (and almost any other game where players own stock in each other's positions)

competitive [...] placement in each round matters: Power Grid, 18XX,

competitive [...] not usually permanent alliances are critical to victory: Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium (all of them), Cosmic Encounter

These are just th... (read more)

2mako yass10mo

(I'm aware of most of these games) I made it pretty clear in the article that it isn't about purely cooperative games. (Though I wonder if they'd be easier to adapt. Cooperative + complications seems closer to the character of a cohabitive game than competitive + non-zero-sum score goals do...) Gloomhaven seems, and describes itself as being a cooperative game. What competitive elements are you referring to? The third tier is worth talking about. I think these sorts of games might, if you played them enough, teach the same skills, but I think you'd have to play them for a long time. My expectation is that basically all of them end with a ranking? as you said, first, second, third. The ranking isn't scored, (ie, we aren't told that being second is half as good as being first) so there's not much clarity about how much players should value them, which is one obstacle to learning. Rankings also keep the game zero sum on net, and zero sum dynamics between first and second or between first and the alliance have the focus of your attention most of the time. The fewer or the more limited mutually beneficial deals are, the less social learning there will be. Zero sum dynamics need to be discussed in cohabitive games, but the games will support more efficient learning if they're reduced. And there really are a lot of people who think that the game that humans are playing in the real world is zero sum, that all real games are zero sum, so, I also suspect that these sorts of games might never teach the skill, because to teach the skill you have to show them a way out of that mindset, and all they do is reinforce it. This category is really interesting, because the alliances expire and have to be remade multiple times per game, and I've been meaning to play some games from this category, but they're also a lot more foggy, the agreements are of poor quality, they invite only limited amounts of foresight and social creativity, in contrast, writing good legislation in the real

Explaining the Twitter Postrat Scene

sparr1y10

Thanks. I only recently discovered the "follow a bunch of strangers" interaction paradigm on Twitter. I don't know that I'll use your list, but I'm at least going to peruse it a bit.

Explaining the Twitter Postrat Scene

sparr1y21

Most importantly, it doesn't have an outgroup

It seems like there would be a large outgroup defined by little to no following (or other interaction) from this group, and a smaller but more well defined outgroup of those blocked by many or most people from this group. The same and similar ways to how we would define the [huge] outgroup of any clique today or pre-internet.

Cohabitive Games so Far

sparr1y12

There are many fully cooperative board games, where all the players work together to win or lose as a group. There are many partially cooperative board games, which can only be won through cooperation and negotiation. There are many competitive games for 3+ players where it is common for two players to make strongly mutually beneficial deals, especially when the third player is currently winning. There are many competitive games that run multiple rounds, where placement in each round matters, not just who gets first place, so negotiating to end up in secon... (read more)

7Dweomite1y

But these do not involve bargaining or compromise, because all players are aligned. (They may involve strategizing about which goals to prioritize, but this is not the same thing.) Based on my experience in the board game hobbyist community over a number of years: * Games that describe themselves as partially-cooperative are a very small percentage of all board games * They have a reputation in the community for being terrible * Mostly they are just typical MostPointsWins games except that there is also a possible outcome of "everyone loses" * Their payout functions are often so loosely defined that players cannot even agree on whether they are zero-sum or not (and then players get mad at each other because each of them thinks the other is intentionally throwing the game). In particular, it is usually not clear whether "everyone loses" is different from a "tie", and if so how. * My model says that approximately all of these are designed by people who are interested in the partially-cooperative story but aren't particularly paying attention to the strategy of the game That said, I surely haven't played every game in this category. I'll add my name to the list of people who would be interested if you can point out specific games that do this for real and do it well. Yes, but with the possible exception of some games from the previous category, these are all zero-sum. This really colors things quite a lot. Typically these games are primarily about convincing your enemies to attack each other instead of you, which in turn is primarily about misleading your enemies about how well you're doing. (I've found I can get a surprisingly large advantage just by pointing out every time something goes badly for me, fueling a subconscious impression that I'm not a threat.) These can be viewed as a single long game that is still zero-sum.

3wslafleur1y

I'm not a board game buff, but I think their critique applies to video-games as well, where I feel much more confident asserting that there is a dearth of such games as do not fall into some sort of zero-sum or adversarial paradigm. Where they do not, they are increasingly strapping on extrinsic reward frameworks that are almost equally harmful to effectance motivation in the sense of being diametrically opposed. I too would be interested in any examples you have to the contrary, mostly to see what you think constitutes a contradiction here. This is a pretty undernourished subject and the way that people think about these concepts is often fuzzy to the extent that it's worth exploring common definitions before exchanging conclusions.

2mako yass1y

I doubt most of these "many"s. If you've seen more than one of all of these things, you're using very different discovery channels than I (or most people) are. You're welcome to name these games if you wish to substantiate your claims. I've played them. The agreements made in such situations tend to of poor quality.

"Rationalist Discourse" Is Like "Physicist Motors"

sparr2y30

You can describe metrics that you think align with success, which can be measured and compared in isolation. If many / most / all such metrics agree, then you've probably made progress on discourse as a whole.

2tailcalled2y

Has anyone done this? Because I haven't seen this done.

1M. Y. Zuo2y

Metrics are only useful for comparison if they're accepted by a sufficient broad cross section of society. Since nearly everyone engages in discourse. Otherwise the incentive will be for the interlocutor, or groups of interlocutors, to pick a few dozen they selectively prefer out of the possibility space of thousands or millions (?). Which nearly everyone else will ignore. The parent comment highlighted the fact that certain metrics measuring motor performance are universally, or near universally, agreed upon because they have a direct and obvious relation with the desired outcome. I can't think of any for discourse that could literally receive 99.XX% acceptance, unlike shaft horsepower or energy consumption.

Basics of Rationalist Discourse

sparr2y40

When you say "straightforwardly false", do you intend to refer to any particular theory of truth? While I have long known of different philosophical concepts and theories of "truth", I've only recently been introduced to the idea that some significant fraction of people don't understand the words "true" and "false" to refer at-least-primarily to correspondent truth (that is, the type of truth measured by accurate reflection of the state of the world). I am not sure if that idea is itself accurate, nor whether you believe that thing about some/many/most others, or what your individual understanding of truth is, so I find it hard to interpret your use of the word "false".

7Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)2y

What I mean by false is not something I have pinned down in a deeply rigorous philosophical sense. But here are some calibrating examples: * Everybody loves Tom Hanks! * The sky is often green. * God does not play dice with the universe. * This is the best book ever written. (← It is an unfortunate side effect of this sort of common hyperbole that in the rare case when one actually means to make this claim literally, one has to say many more words to make that clear.) * I'm certain we will be there by 5PM. * There's absolutely no other explanation for X. * You're not listening to me. (← Here there is both the trivial and somewhat silly layer in which you're clearly expecting the person to parse the sentence, but also the deeper layer in which you are asserting as if fact something about the other person's internal experience that you do not and cannot know (as opposed to having high credence in a model).) Absolutes are a pretty good way to achieve the "straightforwardly false" property in a hurry, and I suspect they make up at least a plurality of instances in practice, if not a straight majority. In short, though: I don't expect that I'm capable of catching all of the instances of straightforward falsehoods around me, or that I could describe a detection algorithm that would do so. But I've got detection algorithms that catch plenty anyway; the airwaves are full of 'em.

Boston ACX Board Gaming

sparr3y10

Start date/time seems to be in error?

1delton1373y

Thanks, it's been fixed!!

LESSWRONG
LW

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