Spectacularly non-obvious, 2: threeness games
I suspect my threeness game could be paradigmatic for cooperation and competition, in that each player at any given moment is either “top guy” or “member of the opposition” — and thus plays either “sole defender” (competing without a trace of collaboration) or “team attacker” (cooperating to compete) at any give moment, but with a very rapid turnover between the two.
The kids seemed to enjoy the in-the-pool version yesterday, until it the water-play got a bit too rough after about forty minutes or an hour of enthusiastic splashing and dunking.
And finally:
As a game designer, I want to think through this mode of play, two against one with switching, in a number of media — water play, three-person tag, possible card-game instantiations, board games, a chess variant perhaps, a variant on my own HipBone Games, etc — and as a conceptual matrix for game-theorizing, modeling, understanding conflict and conflict resolution, etc.
I wonder what ideas and possible uses the basic idea might trigger in others…
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Grurray:
October 30th, 2015 at 7:37 pm
“the way people win is by detecting sequential dependencies in the various choices that their opponent makes – so learning about the opponent over time, particularly their choices of what they’re going to field, is a very useful heuristic, is a very useful educational gesture”
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It sounds like, and the image of the 3 components in a cycle looks like, a feedback loop.
When I think about it, I get the image of the non-linear feedback of the three body physics problem, where entities of unequal power and influence rather than equals end up grouping together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_system#Hierarchical_systems
Also, brings to mind Lynn C Rees’ piece on the far powers and near powers in ‘The Arthashastra’.
This might be a better model of the global system of your “king of the pool” game instead of the actual game.