The Future of Cohabitive games, Selected Ideas

Cohabitive games are games that reckon with the social challenges of coexisting with other agents by maintaining a productive balance of competitive and cooperative relations and by allowing (but not guaranteeing) mutual wins.

Here we compile concepts for games or mechanics that we think are promising and hope some game designer soon deploys. They're mostly board game concepts, for reasons that are explained in the video games section, which also exists, and there are some video game concepts as well.

Actually, a lot of ideas are mentioned in this section of that above linked article, iirc, so read the ones in there.

And here are some more:

• Game where each player has a set of vulnerabilities, and their win condition is to have successfully built preparations against the corresponding threats that could be pulled from the endings deck. Many players have overlapping vulnerabilities and will work together on those.

  • The reason we randomize which threats end up manifesting is to give players a sense of buildup to an interesting and clear climax while still making their outcomes a continuous function of how many preparations they managed to instate, which allows continuous win-win negotiation and compromise to take place. Sophisticated players will learn to just value each preparation based on their prevalence, while new players may see outcomes as "unfair", they will still be able to access the fun.

    • The end events that get drawn can also interact in interesting ways, creating a really rich distribution of possible outcomes.

  • The endings deck can be visible for the duration of the game, then shuffled and drawn from just at the end. Two of five will be drawn or something.

• simultaneous moves, so that everyone can negotiate with whoever they need to in parallel over the course of a minute. The discourse will be so chaotic and vibrant! Players in separate parts of the board will be able to work in parallel without worrying about what's going on in distant lands that they can't effect. The challenge of efficient communication will be centered! Players place an action card marked with one of their special paperclips or standee stands onto the land they want to affect. At the timed end of the phase; the actions fire.

  • You should use micro deck cards if you want them to stand up. Full size cards will be too prone to being blown over.

  • Different kinds of abilities will be needed, the onld ones have no clear logic for what happens when they aren't idempotent - the order in which they play out matters gets different outcomes. Some examples of idempotent abilities:

    • Flip every surrounding land of field/forest regardless of what its current orientation is

    • From land that was a mountain before or after this round, flip the card in front

    • From land that will be mountain after this round, flip the card in front from to volcano.

      • Wait, will be abilities produce atemporality. Consider mountain adjacent to mountain, with two of these facing each other. Only one can become a volcano, which will it be?

        • These issues don't occur if you condition exclusively on how things were before the round, or on whether something would be flipped that way at any point (I think).

• Collect cohabitive themes, kinds of situations that cohabitive games can model better than traditional purely competitive or cooperative games. Seek mechanics only after digesting those themes.

• Collect character ideas! Here are some:

  • San-hime and Madame Eboshi from the classic Princess Mononoke, both possess deeply sympathetic motives (burn-it-all-down vengeful ecoterrorism vs person-affecting liberal humanism, or more anciently, forager and aggrarian) while still being violently opposed to each other, simply by presenting these characters in the context of cohabitive games, you demonstrate the necessity of cohabitive games: We are reminded that people we love sometimes fight and we need to get better at building compromises and finding the best tradeoffs.

  • For players who feel like being wrathful teachers, it could be fun to have a character who represents coordination problems, division, strife-amplifying magics, temptation towards war. It is good to give the universal common enemy a face. You can name this character Moloch.

  • Some archetypes that can only exist in cohabitive games: Character who is stronger than everyone else but has no desire to dominate (name it Shepherd). Character who players are tempted to give more and more power due to their usefulness but who will tend to take a sinister turn once their power passes a certain level and so this needs to be kept in check (Tempted to name it Capital).

• Discuss the construction of the infrastructures of peace from the flawed material instruments of our cruel earth: Fences (good fences make good neighbors), monitoring, arms control, dynastic marriage, that kind of thing. A very interesting question to study here is whether the mechanisms we discover over the next century will trend towards international transparency and accountability over time, whether the arc of history points towards harmony.

  • Optimal Weave 0.1 skipped this whole topic by just having a rule that players die and score zero if they lie about their future actions, which is the ultimate coordination infrastructure, it can facilitate any deal. The real world equivalent to this would be an omnipresent system that punishes broken promises with torture. Okay, a nicer version of that is a system that allows us to provably make alterations to our values or preferences so that we want to keep the promises (so that we would be unhappy if we failed). I believe that future societies will have the means and the will to build such systems, but not everyone believes, so it would be nice to have a ludic demonstration that the cruder mechanisms of cooperation that we have can, when connected together, form a pathway there.

    • How about restricting the punishment for breaking contracts to finite, moderate amounts of points (and only allowing the formation of one contract per turn/the addition of extra penalty points to one thing per turn).

  • Let us build a strand-type board game, where war is boring and laying the infrastructures of flourishing is interesting.

Cohabitive games that aren't board games (Cohabitive Video Games)

The physical board game format is less limiting than a video gamer might expect. A boardgame requires the rules to fit in the players' head, but that's also just a pretty decent account of good game design: accessible strategic depth, the laws of those arenas of maximum fun, where we can most easily learn to generate complex strategies, must necessarily be able to fit into the player's head. Physical boardgames also require players to physically get together around a table, but that's also currently the only way to get top quality conversations. Both of these things are really well suited to cohabitive games, conversation is crucial, and negotiation is far more tractable when the rules of the world are simple and legible.

But the board game medium is still somewhat limiting. It imposes constraints on board size, setup procedure duration, and cleanup, and upkeep, and the number of calculation steps involved in scoring rules. This all makes it harder to model real systems. Physical presence isn't the only option, too: VR does promise a quality of shared presence and conversation that digital experiences haven't had before. But VR won't be good enough for this for a few years (it's currently too low-res, or too expensive), and I don't expect it to become ubiquitous enough for VR tabletop games to see wide popularity until a few years after that.

And if we start thinking more in the domain of video games, we can imagine very different kinds of cohabitive games. A lot of online multiplayer games rest on the appeal of their character design. Think of Smash Bros, Overwatch, or League of Legends. Characters' unique abilities give rise to a dense hypergraphs of strategic relationships which players will want to learn the whole of. But in these games, a character cannot have unique motivations. They'll have a backstory that alludes to some, but in the game, that will be forgotten. Instead, every mind will be turned towards just one game and one goal: Kill the other team, whoever they are. MostPointsWins forbids the expression of the most interesting dimensions of personality. So imagine how much richer expressions of character could be if you had this whole other dimension of gameplay design to work with. That would be cohabitive.

When there are VR immersive role playing games, which will be especially intense (for what I consider to be a preview of this, see the Chinese Jubensha scene), it's likely that they will be cohabitive, simply because most interesting relationships between characters are cohabitive, navigating the tension between mutual need and interpersonal difference, trust and betrayal. There needs to be trust before there can be betrayal. If you study cohabitive games, you'll be very well prepared for progress in social games in general.

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If you've thought of a neat way of implementing any of these ideas, come talk to us about it in the cohabitive games element channel. We're eager to support you.