[MUD-Dev] Re: XP as gift (was: Attractive Grouping)

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:01:25 -0800
Eli Stevens <(WG.c)" <listsub at wickedgrey.com>> wrote:
> At the GDC dinner, JCL described an interesting, simple game:

I described two games that might be of interest.  Cites and descriptions
are below.

> The general idea is to give away two of your stones for one from
> everyone else.

No, not quite.  The game I described was a (poor?) retelling of the game
described at the following URL as "Gem Trader":

  http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/Strategy1.shtml

The specific description is:

  Game: Gem Trader

  Rules: Each player has a collection of gems in their own colour. On
  your turn you can trade one of the gems in your colour for any number
  of another player's gems (with that player's consent of course). At
  the end of the game you score 1 point for each "foreign" gem you
  possess. (Gems in your own colour are worthless to you.)

The addition of the limited number of rounds etc was my own invention to
better define the game.  The purpose of the game is to act as example
and thought toy for examining certain aspects of Game Theory.  The above
URL spends some time working over those aspects.  I've also found it
useful to use variants of this game to examine aspects of where zero-sum
and positive-sum games intersect.

Several popular and very good commercial games are based on the Game
Theory patterns described described by "Gem Trader".  For example Modern
Art and Medici are both simple, even trivial variations of same core
system and are both very playable and not calculable/solvable.  Its also
worth noting that Gem Trader as described is a degenerate form of Shubik
et al's "So Long Sucker" game:

  http://www.lucs.lu.se/Courses/Spel/Parlor/Sucker.html

A beautifully nasty game is that!

> Of course, as soon as everyone realizes this, it turns into an arms
> race and I suspect there is an optimal strategy that makes the game
> not very much fun at all.

As described Gem Trader is mostly calculable and relies heavily on the
intersection of player count, gem count, and turn order.  Adding almost
any small change, changes the game hugely, and the change can be very
very small.  For instance changing the turn order each round changes the
game massively.  For instance each of the following small changes
produce a very different game:

  1) Turn order is randomly decided in each round via a shuffled card
  deal.

  2) Bidding order is randomly decided on each round via a shuffled card
  deal.

and a little more interesting:

  3) An auction for determining playing order each round.  One of the
  ones that appeals to me, in no small part because I like auction
  games, is:

    Players may bid their stones in order to select the actual playing
    order.  The auction form would be once around, must bid a different
    value than other's bids, in descending order of bigs each player
    picks where they want to be in the playing order, bid stones are
    removed from the game.

  4) Ditto to #3, except that the auction is held to control bidding
  order, not playing order.  (I suspect without examination that this is
  the more interesting form).

or changing the stone distribution pattern:

  5) Give each player a different number of stones.  Make the ratios of
  stones numbers messy.  The more rare stones are worth proportionally
  more, but are also of course less fungible.

Or make final stone distribution significant:

  6) For scoring each stone of another player's is worth one point.
  However the triangular number (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, ...) of the total
  number of players who have stones of that type is then subtracted from
  your score.  Triangular numbers:

    http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TriangularNumber.html

  Thus, for example, your 7 yellow stones are worth one point each, but
  if five other players also have yellow stones you lose 15 points,
  meaning that in sum you lost 8 points by having yellow.

Or we can go whole hog and actually wrap the beginnings of a real game
about this:

  7) Make all the player's stones the same and call them "currency".
  Take some known distribution of stones of various colours and toss/mix
  them in a bag.  On a given player's turn they pull stones from the bag
  one at a time up to a max of N.  They can stop at any point after one,
  having stopped, they then pay the triangle of the number of stones
  they pulled to the bank (ie out of the game).  The set of stones they
  pulled is then auctioned: once around, starts to the left of the
  auctioneer and ends with the auctioneer, bids must be higher than the
  previously highest bid, highest bid wins, winning bid is paid to the
  auctioneer, auctioneer may elect to take the lot for free.  Game ends
  when one player goes bankrupt or the bag is emptied of stones.
  Scoring pattern is identical to #6.  Highest score wins.

=-=-=-=-

The other game the I described at the dinner, also a Game Theory toy, is
Shubik's "dollar auction":

  http://www.heretical.org.uk/games/dollar.html

  A dollar bill is auctioned with these two rules:

    1. (As in any auction) the dollar bill goes to the highest bidder,
    who pays whatever the high bid was. Each new bid has to be higher
    than the current high bid, and the game ends when there is no new
    bid within a specified time limit.

    2. (Unlike at Sotheby's!) the second-highest bidder also has to pay
    the amount of his last bid - and gets nothing in return. You really
    don't want to be the second-highest bidder.

  Shubik wrote, "A large crowd is desirable. Furthermore, experience has
  indicated that the best time is during a party when spirits are high
  and the propensity to calculate does not settle in until at least two
  bids have been made."

  Well, it's a dollar bill, and anyone can have it for a penny. So
  someone says 1 cent. The auctioneer accepts the bid. Now anyone can
  have the dollar bill for 2 cents. That's still better than the rate
  Chase Manhattan gives you, so someone says 2 cents. It would be crazy
  not to.

  The second bid puts the first bidder in the uncomfortable position of
  being the second-highest bidder. Should the bidding stop now, he would
  be charged 1 cent for nothing. So this person has particular reason to
  make a new bid - "3 cents." And so on

  Maybe you're way ahead of me. You might think that the bill will
  finally go for the full price of $1.00 - a sad comment on greed, that
  no one got a bargain. If so, you'd be way too optimistic.

  Eventually someone does bid $1.00. That leaves someone else with a
  second-highest bid of 99 cents or less. If the bidding stops at $1.00,
  the underbidder is in the hole for as much as 99 cents. So this person
  has incentive to bid $1.01 for the dollar bill. Provided he wins, he
  would be out only a penny (for paying $1.01 for a dollar bill). That's
  better than losing 99 cents.

  That leads the $1.00 bidder to top that bid. Shubik wrote, "There is a
  pause and hesitation in the group as the bid goes through the one
  dollar barrier. From then on, there is a duel with bursts of speed
  until tension builds, bidding then slows and finally peters out."

  No matter what the stage of the bidding, the second-highest bidder can
  improve his position by almost a dollar by barely topping the current
  high bid. Yet the predicament of the second-highest bidder gets worse
  and worse! This peculiar game leads to a bad case of buyer's
  remorse. The highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for a dollar,
  and the second-highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for nothing.

Sadly, I had no takers to buy my dollars at the dinner.  Obviously I
must try harder.

> To encourage the assignment of XP, have a player not recieve XP from a
> play session until they assign their share to others, with penalties
> for waiting too long.

> A player's level becomes derived from how much XP they have from other
> players.

Ohh, that's positively delightful.  I can hear the screams now,
especially if you then add a half-arsed (ie deliberately underfeatured
and poor) reputation system on the side.  Say, something like a simple
vote tally which gives each player a simple single number "trustworthy"
value based on the votes they've received for prior XP distribution.
(You want something just good enough to be useful, but not informative
enough to actually create transparency)  As such it also plugs in nicely
to the "resource economy based on human attention" thought experiment I
posted about on 10 Feb 2005.  Oh yeah.

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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