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Another "more advanced game" is the collaboration game. In this game, the players determine their common ground. The players evaluate each other and think, "Hey

• chrisweekly 7y ago
  Great points! Tangent: I wish more games were explicitly collaborative. Some competitive games can easily be adjusted, others not so much. Games like "Forbidden Island" represent, for many, a completely foreign paradigm where everyone's in it together. Shame that's not more common.
  • majos 7y ago
    +1, I used to play random DotA pub games and got a huge kick out of the occasions when a team of strangers would click and work together. I sort of replicated that with pick-up basketball but topped out at below average. If anybody has team game recommendations like Forbidden Island I'd like to hear them.
    • chrisweekly 7y ago
      DotA?
      • majos 7y ago
        Defense of the Ancients, originally a Warcraft custom map, now it's own game. Two teams of 5, you level up and train and try to kill the other team's base, a good game is maybe an hour. "Pub game" is short for public game, just groups of strangers matched to play online.
  • eindiran 7y ago
    There is a fairly large number of collaborative board games: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2023/cooperative-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/2023/cooperative... Some interesting ones: * Gloomhaven * Spirit Island * Pandemic (or any of the other games in the series) * Codenames Duet * Arkham Horror (or any of the other games in the series) * Mysterium
    • Evgeniuz 7y ago
      Kind of a smaller ones, but "Hanabi" and "Grizzled" are also nice. The good thing in these two games is they're not feeling like group solitaire (and I love a good game of Spirit Island, but point stands), you actually have to cooperate with another people, you can't win them by yourself.
      • funnybeam 7y ago
        And then there is Diplomacy, where you have to cooperate with everyone to get anywhere - right until you stab them in the back
  • mjevans 7y ago
    Betrayal at the House on the Hill is _supposed_ to be like this, at least most of the time in my experience.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I'm with you on the collaboration game. WRT. hierarchy, I don't know what exactly Aristotle meant (I need to get off my butt and read about his work one day), but taking the expression "see human political organization as fundamentally hierarchical" - well, it kind of is. Bottom-up hierarchy is still a hierarchy. The way I see it, people create a level of governance once their group crosses the Dunbar's number. Below it, it's easy for a group to self-police, enforcing coordination and resolving prisonner's-dilemma-like problems (tragedy of the commons, etc.). Above it, when people don't generally know everyone else in their group, you need some power delegated to a single authority to enforce coordination. And now if you take a lot of such groups, they'll have problem coordinating at an inter-group level, so another level of governance is needed - and now you have a two-level hierarchy. Repeat recursively as groups grow. (There's also a point somewhere above Dunbar's number, where governance of a growing group becomes untenable, so that group gets effectively or explicitly split into many smaller ones. This feeds the creation of the second layer of governance, and thus the third, etc.) WRT. the following who you respect and not who you're told to, I think a lot of problems with governance start in the second generation. When a governance is formed, the group may have chosen it out of respect, but the people born into that group after that had no say in the matter, and are just told to obey by everyone else.
• kerkeslager 7y ago
  > I don't know about most people, but I'm definitely more interested in playing the collaboration game. And, I tend to overlook people who aren't into it. Hm, but the way you're describing it, that's just the Importance Game. All you're doing is measuring someone's importance based on their intent to play the Collaboration Game. Don't get me wrong, I think that's one of the best forms of the Importance Game, because it sort of approximates the Collaboration Game. But I think you can do better at the Collaboration Game by acknowledging that the Importance Game is unavoidable, and that you're playing it. First, I think you're overestimating the importance of other people's intentions. Even if someone's intent is to play the Importance Game, not the Collaboration Game, you can still collaborate with them. You just have to figure out how to get them to collaborate: either by playing the Importance Game or by playing the Leveling Game. If you only collaborate with people who are trying to play the Collaboration Game, you're missing out on most opportunities to collaborate--that's a losing strategy in the Collaboration Game. Second, I think you have to view mastering the Importance Game and Leveling Game as necessary prerequisites to mastering the Collaboration Game. This is the only way to actually step outside the Importance and Leveling Games: if you pretend you don't have to play them, you just play them unconsciously and they control your behavior. Instead, if you learn to play these games consciously, you can chose to play them when they are appropriate tools for winning in the Collaboration Game. This is, of course, easier said than done. I don't buy that human political organization is fundamentally hierarchical, but I think that there are deeply-ingrained evolutionary mechanisms in humans that make it very hard for us to avoid viewing others and ourselves hierarchically. A final note: the Collaboration Game still isn't the ultimate game: collaboration is only useful toward a goal, and that begs the question: what goal? That's a deeply personal question, and the Collaboration Game becomes dissatisfying if you are collaborating toward other people's goals, and never achieving your own goals. The Collaboration Game, if you focus on it too far, is called codependency. In short: the Collaboration Game is still just a sub-game in the Self-Actualization Game.
• elil17 7y ago
  I think I engage in a similar thing, but I think the “collaboration game” doesn’t quite describe it. When I meet someone new, I want to hear about a topic they know a lot about that I’m unfamiliar with (recently topics have included the Spanish monarchy, the difference between hot dogs and sausages, and Costa Rica) - we don’t collaborate on anything, so I think I might call it the “Interesting Difference Game.”
• CalRobert 7y ago
  The collaboration game is easier to play when you've already had a crushing victory in the importance game, though. It's a lot easier to give information away when you're not worried about competition.
• awinder 7y ago
  The fantastic part about the collaboration game is that people who are into it are people who are around to get things done. You can all share that core tenant, and it can remind you of what is important along the road. I’ve found that drama really gets cut down or eliminated in these types of groups as well.
• m463 7y ago
  I think you have to play the status game first (even if you don't realize you're doing it). If you meet a stranger, you have to figure out if they are crazy/dangerous before proceeding to collaboration.
  • funnybeam 7y ago
    That’s playing the Trust Game. People often see the Status Game as a proxy for the trust game which is a big mistake