The tournament definitely made for an interesting game, but more as a conversation starter than a game itself. I suspect part of the issue was how short this particular game was, but the constant cooperation got old pretty quickly. Some ideas for next time someone wants to run a dilemma tournament:
1) Bracket play—you play with another person until one of you defects while the other cooperates. Example round: both cooperate, both cooperate both defect, both defect, player 1 defects and player 2 cooperates, player 1 moves on. This has a trivial vulnerability in that always defecting always wins or ties, so there’d have to be some other incentive to encourage cooperation.
2) Factions—each person is part of a faction, you have some minor term for the total utility of your faction at the end of the game. You could go further with this and have a negative (even more minor) term for the total utility of other factions, or maybe add the option of giving points to other players.
Unrelated note: In the future there should probably be some coordination around walking to/from. While nothing happened this time, Civic Center did not feel like the safest place to be walking around alone late at night.
The tournament definitely made for an interesting game, but more as a conversation starter than a game itself. I suspect part of the issue was how short this particular game was, but the constant cooperation got old pretty quickly. Some ideas for next time someone wants to run a dilemma tournament:
1) Bracket play—you play with another person until one of you defects while the other cooperates. Example round: both cooperate, both cooperate both defect, both defect, player 1 defects and player 2 cooperates, player 1 moves on. This has a trivial vulnerability in that always defecting always wins or ties, so there’d have to be some other incentive to encourage cooperation.
2) Factions—each person is part of a faction, you have some minor term for the total utility of your faction at the end of the game. You could go further with this and have a negative (even more minor) term for the total utility of other factions, or maybe add the option of giving points to other players.
Unrelated note: In the future there should probably be some coordination around walking to/from. While nothing happened this time, Civic Center did not feel like the safest place to be walking around alone late at night.