[S5 Planning] Games

[frnsys]

dump all your cybernetics-y games here!

[denisnazarov]

Game theory/Nash equilibrium in this weeks economist:

The Economist | Game theory: Prison breakthrough
http://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21705308-fifth-our-series-seminal-economic-ideas-looks-nash-equilibrium-prison?frsc=dg%7Cc

[frnsys]

I have some more general-game related stuff here:

https://www.are.na/francis-tseng/world-games

the games there are mostly video games though.

i have analog strategy games here:

https://www.are.na/francis-tseng/analog-strategy-games

a couple noteworthy ones are hex and so long sucker (nash contributed to its development)

I'm really interested in trying nomic too.

Debord's game of war (kriegspiel) is interesting but maybe only because it seems to be a precursor to a lot of modern strategy gaming (e.g. civilization)

I've also looked a lot for really good mobile strategy games but haven't been able to find any that I really like

[urcades]

I've been plumbing the depths of my game-related bookmarks, and while I come up with a better collection, I'd like to leave this here:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

I'm sure a few of you are already familiar with dwarf fortress, but when I think of world games, this particular one come to mind, both for its incredible depth and ridiculous learning curve.

Probably no need to play it, but it would be great to talk about!

A particular mechanic I've been interested in over the years has been the idea of procedural level-generation, which became developed heavily in the roguelike genre.

Minecraft is the game that probably springs to mind when procedural generation is mentioned, but there's lots out there that showcases the mechanic in really spectacular ways:

https://itch.io/games/tag-procedural

—

I also recall we mentioned potentially throwing fiction into the mix, for the next meeting or otherwise, and I think this is a great cybernetics-related short story:

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-garden.html

[michaelpace]

Two really great iOS puzzle games are SPL-T and 868-HACK. The former is completely deterministic which is kind of interesting in puzzle games, and the latter is a roguelike.

[frnsys]

oo those are great @edouerd, i love dwarf fortress - not to go off-topic but one of the coolest things around dwarf fortress is the practice of sharing forts. so one person will start a fort, play it for an in-game year, upload the save file, someone will download it and play it for another in-game year, and they'll all post stories of their year to a shared thread. so there's this collaborative narrative building on top of it's sophisticated simulation. (I don't think this practice of save-game sharing started with DF though)

the most notorious of these is probably boatmurdered

one of the neatest procedurally-generated games that i'm looking forward to is Home Free where you play a lost dog in a procedurally-generated city

@michaelpace those games look great, bummed that they are only for iOS :(

another possibility is simcity 5 or cities: skylines...I read about people doing city-building tournaments (e.g. first to get to 100,000 residents wins) which sounded like fun. but they are pretty demanding hardware-wise.

[melaniehoff]

Dear Cybernetics Club aka The Church of Cybernetics Sunday School Chapter,

This paper by Camerer is a great overview of behavioral game theory. He invented the term and in the paper discusses a game called the Beauty Contest.

The Henrich paper is (I'm told) a famous short paper from the American Economic Review by an anthropologist. It's about how fairness is enculturated and discusses the Ultimatum Game, which we could play next session with real money if people are interested.

Two other social economic games are the Trust Game and the Public Goods Game. For the latter, it would be especially challenging to keep everyone's actions anonymous without building a web app to moderate and manage gameplay. This is something I'm really interested in doing in the coming months but possibly not before next session. In any case, we can play one or two of the simpler games anonymously with envelopes and plastic game tokens which I have 2 lbs of.

Camerer on behavioral game theory.pdf

henrich--UG--Amazon.pdf

[frnsys]

it could be fun to try and take these "low-level" games (Ultimatum Game etc) and try and develop them into something a little bit more substantial. that might also be too much work to prepare for a session :\

a couple of other things that could be fun to try:

• there's a tradition in dwarf fortress of sharing a fort - one person plays for an hour, saves the game, emails it to someone else who plays it for another hour, etc.
• competitive city-building, like mentioned here:

The thing I didn’t predict was that, in the first week, two StarCraft players—that’s a very fast-paced space action game, in case you’re not familiar with it, and it’s fairly common for hardcore players to stream their StarCraft battles out to a big audience—decided to have a live-streamed SimCity battle against each other. They were in a race to be the first to a population of 100,000; they live-streamed their game; and there were twenty thousand people in the chat room, cheering them on and typing in advice—things like “No, don’t build there!” and “ What are you doing—why are you putting down street cars?” and “Come on, dude, turn your oil up!” It was like that, nonstop, for three hours. It was like a spectator sport, with twenty thousand people cheering their favorite on, and, basically, backseat city planning. That really took me by surprise.

but this is maybe logistically complicated (we'd need a few computers powerful enough to run simcity or cities: skylines)

[frnsys]

Session 5 readings:

• Adam Curtis' The Trap: Part 1: Fuck You Buddy - overview and a bit of history on game theory, the political context in which it developed (maybe we can watch this together or find ways to share copies)
• http://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21705308-fifth-our-series-seminal-economic-ideas-looks-nash-equilibrium-prison?frsc=dg%7Cc (Denis), intro to game theory/prisoner's dilemma
• Behavioural studies of strategic thinking in games - "This paper by Camerer is a great overview of behavioral game theory. He invented the term and in the paper discusses a game called the Beauty Contest." (Melanie) (https://github.com/learning-gardens/cybernetics-club/files/435521/Camerer.on.behavioral.game.theory.pdf)
• Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon - "a famous short paper from the American Economic Review by an anthropologist. It's about how fairness is enculturated and discusses the Ultimatum Game" (via melanie) (https://github.com/learning-gardens/cybernetics-club/files/435187/henrich--UG--Amazon.pdf)
  Some classic game theory games:
• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bestiary_of_Behavioral_Economics/Trust_Game
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game
• https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bestiary_of_Behavioral_Economics/Ultimatum_Game

Games to play:

• So Long Sucker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long_Sucker)
• Nomic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)
• Durak (https://www.pagat.com/beating/podkidnoy_durak.html)
• others?