Notices

I think it would be cool to craft a strategy game (or games) around the concept of the Prisoner's dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_Dilemma

Ok, I've already come up with an idea.

I call the concept Cartel. Not many details yet but what I have is below:

- 1 or more players are cooperatively invested as partners in exploitation of a commons resource (let's call it commonomium)

- Time, physics and the environment are constant adversaries, especially for single player.

- there is one resource processor per project and it must be maintained. Performance naturally degrades over time and is exacerbated by heavy loads processed.

- all players benefit from contributing to maintenance, but each player electing to participate in a maintenance cycle loses a turn. All players lose out if maintenance is skipped (performance degrades faster)

- each player selects the amout of resource he/she wants to see processed. Note that rules of supply and demand will be observed! All players benefit from moderately high demand, and are penalized by low demand or excessive demand that can't be filled

- resources replenish naturally, but players lose turns if they get ahead of the replenishment rate and have to wait for it to catch up to demand. They are also penalized by The Customer (or customers?)

- players can opt out of direct participation and become speculators (rather than partners). Speculators gamble on partners or project.

- length of game correlates to resource management

- more details about cooperation/competition penalties and rewards added as they develop


I think this would be extremely fun, especially if it could be virtual multiplayer. Connection to twitter and/or sms would also be cool (taunts, alerts, etc)

I may start coding this up in Visual Basic just to test the concepts.

Thoughts?

No interest, eh? Ah well... back to the drawing board...

The whole Spectators and gambling thing seems cool, but also unrelated and secondary to the rest of the game. Not recommending you scratch it out, but I'm just commenting.

Can you flesh out the relationship between commonomium (need a shorter name imho), the processor maintentance cost, and profits from selling resources?

Also, I'm guessing when you say "each player selects the amount of resources they want to see processed" you mean setting Supply like OPEC does.

If supply is drastically lower than demand then demand will decrease for the next few turns (along with profits). If it is moderately lower, then demand will fluctuate very little (randomly?) and profits will be maximized. If it is higher, then profits will decrease and demand may fluctuate slightly negatively. If it is way too high then there will be no profits and demand will nosedive.

It almost sounds like you want some sort of blind auction in the Supply setting phase. And if the Supply is set too high, then resource mining will outpace replenishment leading to forcibly lower supply over the next few turns.

Also, you keep saying players lose turns, but you don't really specify what else they can DO during a turn. So what are they missing out on? Presumably their choices on each turn are to Contribute to Maintenance, Mine Commonomium, and Process and Sell Commonomium. You may want to make it where every 5 or so turns they must all set Supply.

(EDIT: Separating the Mining and Processing phases may introduce some more strategy, whereby certain suppliers may hoard the resource until demand is very high but for some reason Supply is set low. Then they can exercise a strategic decision on whether or not to delve into their supplies to outsupply everyone else)

I'm a little fuzzy on the details. Please enlighten!

Also, since this is almost by definition a multiplayer game, how are you going to do matchmaking and that sort of stuff?

I'm interested, but like I said I need some clarification.

Absolutely I'll flesh out details... I was hoping though to get ideas from YOU GUYS!

As for the speculator aspect, it doesn't need to be incorporated and would be in fact one of the last things I would code in. However, I think it would add an interesting wrinkle and reflects real life.

The core point here is a game illustrating the dynamics between individual and social gain/loss and why it's not as black-and-white as some would like to believe.

Many of your assumptions about what I was saying (sparingly so as to provoke discussion) are spot-on. Nice job.

I do indeed see this as an OPEC sort of exercise (hence "Cartel") where the acts of individual members can indeed work against the whole, and group dynamics plus market reactions *should* serve to correct that over time. For me this sort of game is exciting because of the dynamics.

Reading the wiki article will go a long way toward explaining further details. And if there is actual interest, I will continue fleshing this out here. I have already started on a VB.Net version to develop a template.

EDIT: I see this as player vs Life and multiplayer "cooperative"-- but I have no idea how to make that work on the N900s.

I see three separate dilemmas. The Processor Maintenance dilemma (to contribute to maintaining or not), the Resource Mining dilemma (mining aggressively or conservatively), and the Setting Supply dilemma (setting personal supply high or low).

To make the Processor Maintenance Dilemma a prisoner's dilemma, the Processor should announce the total cost to fix, but only give players the choice to either contribute or not. If they contribute and no one else does, they will bear the brunt of the entire cost. If more than one player contributes, then the cost will be split evenly among all contributing players. Players who withhold from the maintenance when others contribute will gain all the benefits of having a working Processor without having paid any of the costs. However if no one contributes, the announced cost of repair plus some additional percentage will be split evenly among all players.

To make the Resource Mining dilemma a prisoner's dilemma while respecting the fact that all players will always want to mine since thats where their profits come from to act in the Resource Maintenance dilemma, players should have the ability to either Mine Conservatively or Mine Aggressively. Mining Conservatively when other players are Mining Aggressively will result in only 2 Units of Commonomium while Mining Conservatively when all other players are also Mining Conservatively will result in say 3 Units of Commonomium. Mining Aggressively when other players are Mining Conservatively will result in 4 Units of Commonomium, but if all other players are also Mining Aggressively, then all players will only receive 1 Unit.

The Setting Supply dilemma should give players the choice of either Set Supply High or Set Supply Low. Setting high when other players are low will result in the highest profits. Setting low when others are high will result in the lowest profits. Everyone setting low will result in moderately high profits for everyone, while everyone setting high will result in moderately low profits for everyone.

I think that each player should have to decide on all 3 of these every turn, and the whole losing turns thing should be done away with. Managing these 3 dilemmas using 2 different resources (commonomium and money) should be sufficient for the strategy.

In the Processor Maintenance dilemma, if no one contributes, to keep in line with your originally proposal, the Processor could in fact deteriorate, forcibly reducing all profits recieved for both choices in the Setting Supply dilemma. At the same time, the cost to repair the Processor would increase. After some period of turns with no contributions to repair the game would end with everyone losing.

In the Resource Mining dilemma, if everyone continually Mines Aggressively they will outstrip the replenishment rate like you proposed and their profits would thus be reduced. You could say that at some point all resources will be exhausted and the game would end, or you could just let the reduced resources in turn reduce the profits gained from selling them which in turn would cause the Processor to at some point fail since no one would have the required money to fix it. This might take some time though.

Setting Supply implies the selling phase, so at the beginning of each turn players would receive profits in accordance to what Supply they set in the previous phase.

Great ideas, thanks!

The difficult part in a game like this is making it complex enough to be interesting but simple enough to avoid frustration. Some rules should be simple background processes that are out of a player's control (weather, etc) while some need to be as close to 100% their decision as possible.

The bottom line is a game that revolves around the fine-but-fuzzy line between cooperation and competition. The dynamic I get the biggest kick out of is the one that has to do with maintenance:

If I decide to participate in a maintenance cycle (should that be subject to majority vote?), that's downtime for everyone dependent on the equipment-- and only those who opt for maintenance actually pay (share) the costs, while others who elected not to receive the benefit without any expense. If enough players beg off, that discourages others from spending their money, which in turn increases the likelihood of severe downtime. ie, if a maintence cycle costs 1 turn, then a repair cycle costs at least 2 (like you say, ALL pay). The prisoner's dilemma comes in strongly here; players will try to remember how others acted and change their approach accordingly. So there could be social penalties (I have not explored this aspect) against players who never participate in maintenance. EDIT: you got where I was going with this very accurately!

I am looking at the Alaska model for resource management. Every citizen in Alaska is a shareholder in oil production, and it's seen as a singular resource. If the citizens had more direct say in management, that's where things could get really interesting-- so that's where I went with this idea.

I really appreciate the input mmurfin87-- you re-encouraged me.

One thing to clarify:

I'm not looking for a "Maemo Starcraft" sort of thing here. I don't think that translates well to such a small, mobile form factor.

Instead, I see the scope as much more limited. Players are forced to draw from a single resource and run through a single processor-- but all other aspects are more fluid.

However, IF this is actually developed and becomes popular, maybe subsequent versions could expand the themes. Maybe enough co-op profit means funds for a second processor-- which would certainly add to the dynamics.

Also, maybe this needs to be server-based. There could be web versions and mobile versions that could connect to the same hosted game. To that end, maybe Flash is the best development environment-- since the Maemo series' Flash support is fairly unique, that's an advantage. I've decided to start learning Flash, btw.

If it turns out we need a lobby, then *maybe* I could talk Nokia into providing one via maemo.org. Maybe...

Right, I didn't expect that this would an RTS of any sort.

I guess there should be clarification on the "resources". I assumed you would "mine" commonomium, process it, and then offer it for sale where it would be automatically boughten and you would recieve some sort of currency. From that currency you would order repairs of the Processor. So there would be two resources, commonomium, and currency. I'm not advocating this, only explaining how I read things. I'm not quite understanding the whole losing turns thing. I'll address this below.

I didn't realize you had wanted the Processor out of action during repairs. I had assumed it would continue to function every turn regardless and only fail if it wasn't repaired for a streak of several turns. You're talking about a single player choosing to repair it on his own accord, which has consequences for other players since they wouldn't be able to process during the repair turn. This is interesting.

Can you clarify the role of the player? For instance, I had assumed the player would act out the role of a CEO of some company that was mining commonomium. So all players in the game would be CEOs of competing companies forced to deal with the opposing ideas of competition in business and cooperation in protecting the natural resource they all depend on. It sounds as if you have a different direction in mind.

Also, can you flesh out exactly what the player would be doing each turn? On each turn they decide whether to participate in maintenance, but what else do players do in a given turn? I haven't quite grasped the point of losing turns yet.

As far as the maintenance cycle goes, how often does the Processor need maintained? If it is every turn, then what if one turn everyone decides to maintain it? If they all lose their next turns, then the next turn nobody will have that turn to choose to maintain it, which will result in it automatically needing a repair cycle.

Not to get ahead of ourselves here, but it would be nice if Nokia and Maemo.org could provide a server where any multiplayer game for Maemo devices could be hosted (with a small fee of course...unless you can convince Nokia otherwise). Then instead of asking Nokia for space for your individual game, you could ask for just a generic server(s) that the entire maemo community could use to run game servers from. Or something along those lines.