Gaming the System
A friend contemplates getting wood for sheep
In my day job– when I have a day job*– I’m a facilitator of positive sum relationships. Translating that from pretentious into English: I’m in politics. By inclination and culture, I’m also a gamer. Video games, board games, word games, whatever. I really enjoy pulling the system apart and seeing how it ticks. If you think that’s not a useful skill for a public servant, you’ve been voting Republican for too long.
Most animals have their survival strategy mapped into their biology. Tigers have claws. Gazelles run very quickly. Giraffes are so big they can eat things nothing else can reach, and also apparently can kick a lion to death (I asked a zoo keeper about this one). Humans have none of these things. What we do have** are the means to cooperate with one another. Being very explicit: the song of human progress has been repeated playings of mutually beneficial games.
Of course, we rarely call interpersonal issues “games”. When management and labor sit down, they don’t say “it’s time for the contract negotiation game! The goal of this game is to maximize shareholder value by equitably dividing company revenue.” In practice, management offers a deal and the union threaten to withhold their labor.
The structures of resolution may be formal or informal. It’s rare that we think of going to Best Buy to buy a DVD player as part of a game, but there are circumstances in which our behavior is best thought of that way. And you thought you were just buying a CD.
In the long run, and Keynes’s warning not withstanding, playing non-positive sum games will lead back to the dust from which humanity sprang. Oddly, nearly every time a group of friends gets together to play games, the game has a discreet “winner”. This makes all interactions within the game zero sum affairs.
Take a game like the classic Settlers of Catan. The goal of the game (thematically) is to build the most advanced society possible. In the real world, resources are generally plentiful enough that if one society creates an advanced meme, other societies are able to replicate it fairly easily– China’s creation of a cheap, CO2-less energy source would benefit America. England hit the industrial revolution first– but the rest of the Western world got their soon, and Humanity as a whole got it within a couple centuries.
Catan has an endpoint, though. And that endpoint can only be reached by one player. This alone makes it different enough from reality that it ensures a Zero sum mindset. Players are encourage trade with one another, but each trade is a calculated gamble on behalf of players. Each player may be able to score points based on a given trade, but because only one player can win, the trade itself is zero sum. It is impossible to assume goodwill on the part of the person who proposes a trade. Remember, though: hostility is created by the rules. A different system would alleviate animosity.
What if, instead of a single player needing to reach 10 points, the game was played 3 player– with a dummy hand. Players might cooperate to get this 4th, phantom player, to 10 points. The goal would be to do this in as few turns as possible. I’m sure there are other variants that can be created to turn this game into one of cooperation. Leave your ideas in the comment section below.
Rules create competition and cooperation. Because positive sum interactions are the way that society advances, grows, and prospers, it must be the goal of a responsible government to create as many opportunities as possible for these sorts of interactions. More poetically, in the immortal*** words of the US Constitution: governments are institution to “promote the general welfare”. We just need to keep a sharp eye on the rules; everything else flows naturally.
*Resumes available on request.
** We also have the ability to create and propagate memes, but that’s not the point of this post.
*** I hope!
