Cohabitive Games so Far

The most fun I've ever had in playing a semi-cooperative game was playing Legend of Zelda: Four Swords with three friends. You all have to work together to beat levels, but players get "medals of courage" for collecting the most "force gems." But the way the game was structured, beating the level was (A) presented as the primary objective, and (B) at least moderately challenging. This led it to feel like a win for the team when we beat the level, and prevented too much sabotaging other players for force gems since that could put the team in danger of losing. But trying to see how much jockeying for medals one could get away with while still beating the level was very fun.

Marvelous! I loved board games when I was young. Then I stopped liking them when I decided they didn't usually foster interesting conversations. I think you've identified why that is. I've encountered just a couple of games with a cooperative/competitive dynamic.

One is The Bean Game, Bohnanza. It does have the most points win rule, but we played so everyone was interested in how they placed. We also relaxed the restrictions on card trading, at first by not remembering that rule. A remarkable thing emerged over sessions: the most generous and kindest player tended to win. People wanted to be generous back to them. They did more trades, so had better card sets.

Your game here seems marvelous. I particularly love the idea that the players aren't balanced, so you can't compare scores. This makes game design vastly easier and allows more creativity in tinkering with abilities, etc.

I want a copy!

I also think this could be commercially successful; a polished version sounds like it would be aesthetically pleasing, and the tag line of "teach your kids to negotiate in potentially adversarial situations" would be highly compelling for parents.

The pitch you've given is highly compelling to me as a rationalist, so I think you'd sell some to the rationalist community if you could get it even decently manufactured.

Update: I'm polishing up the game assets up a bit so that others can print a copy, and hopefully this iteration will generate workable scenarios more reliably with higher learning/setup efficiencies. Hopefully will be ready in a week. Then I'll get back to everyone who expressed interest in playtesting/developing.

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.

4X games and engine-building games have a lot of that. For instance, in Terraforming Mars, your starting corporations will have different start bonuses that radically shape your strategy throughout the entire game. In a 4X game, you might have a faction with very cheap military production that will focus on zerg-rushing other players; and a faction with research bonuses that will focus more on long-term growth.

Even in a MostPointsWin system, these differences can make different factions with very different "personalities" in both gameplay and lore.

Actually, I feel like a lot of engine-building systems could go from MostPointsWin to cooperation by just adding some objectives. Eg you could make Terraforming Mars cooperative just by adding objectives like "Create at least X space projects", "Reach oxygen level Y", "Have at least Z trees on the planet" and having each player pick one. Which is basically what the video game Terraformers did (since it's a single-player game, MostPointsWin can't work).

Some other game designs elements:

• One easy way to get players to cooperate is to give them a common loss condition. You mention having a Moloch player, which can be pretty cool (asymetric gameplay is always fun), but it can be environmental. Something like "everyone must donate at least X coals per turn to the communal furnace, else everyone freezes to death", or the opposite, "every coal burned contributes to global warming, past a certain cap everybody loses".
• Like you say, binary win/lose conditions can be more compelling than "get as many points as possible". (I think this is a major reason the MostPointsWin systems are so common.) You can easily get from one to the other by having eg "medals" where you get gold medal for getting 20 points, silver medal for getting 15 points, etc. Or with custom objectives, The Emperor's gold medal is having 12 tiles, the silver medal is having 8 tiles, etc, while The Druid's gold medal is preserving at least 8 trees, silver is 6 trees, etc.

Updated thoughts

Optimal Weave I played a trial run of a printed copy of Optimal Weave. It felt like it had a core of something workable, but needed polishing in order to be something I could pull others into playing with me and have them be satisfied by the experience. I should write up more thoughts on this.

Other Games I've been thinking about other games which could be modified to be cohabitative. It's fascinating how an iterated prisoners' dilemma naturally arises out of such patterns. For example, Go. Play it as a cohabitative game by giving every player a persistent record of territory won. The game ends when both players pass consecutively. You can examine your territory-per-game score. Two players who manage to agree to split the board perfectly evenly, and play against each other often, will obtain a good ratio. But the temptation to defect will be there. If you believe yourself to be a stronger player than the other, this temptation gets stronger. Struggle burns territory (intersections covered by either player's stones count for nobody, only empty points count for territory). Maybe you negotiate by telling the other player that you think you could win 60% of the board as territory, and if they believe you, then you both establish that boundary efficiently?

How about a similar iterated resource/territory score based diplomacy?

I think it would be really interesting to test AI on such games, over millions of iterations, and see which strategies did well.

I like the idea of Peacemakers. I even had the same idea myself---to make an explicitly semi-cooperative game with a goal of maximizing your own score but every player having a different scoring mechanism---but haven't done anything with it.

That said, I think you're underestimating how much cooperation there is in a zero-sum game.

If you offer a deal, you must be doing it because it increases your chance of winning, but only one person can win under the MostPointsWins rule, so that deal couldn’t be very good for me, and I’ll always suspect your deal of being a trick, so in most cases no detailed deals will be offered.

Three examples of cooperation that occur in three-player Settlers of Catan (between, say, Alice, Bob, and Carol), even if all players are trying only to maximize their own chance of winning:

• Trading. Trading increases the chances that the two trading players win, to the detriment of the third. As long as there's sufficient uncertainty about who's winning, you want to trade. (There's a world Catan competition. I bet that these truly competitive games involve less trading than you would do with your friends, but still a lot. Not sure how to find out.)
• Refusing to trade with the winning player, once it's clear who that is. If Alice is ahead then Bob and Carol are in a prisoner's dilemma, where trading with Alice is defecting.
• Alice says at the beginning of the game: "Hey Bob, it sure looks like Carol has the strongest starting position, doesn't it? Wouldn't be very fair if she won just because of that. How about we team up against her by agreeing now to never trade with her for the entire game?" If Bob agrees, than the winning probabilities of Alice, Bob, Carol go from (say) 20%,20%,60% to 45%,45%,10%. Cooperation!

So it's not that zero-sum games lack opportunities for cooperation, it's just that every opportunity for cooperation with another player is at the detriment to a third. Which is why there isn't any cooperation at all in a two player zero-sum game.

Realize that even in a positive-sum game, players are going to be choosing between doing things for the betterment of everyone, and doing things for the betterment of themselves, and maximizing your own score involves doing more of the latter than the former, ideally while convincing everyone else that you're being more than fair.

Suggestion for the game: don't say the goal is to maximize your score. Instead say you're roleplaying a character who's goal is to maximize [whatever]. For a few reasons:

• It makes every game (more) independent of every other game. This reduces the possibility that Alice sabotages Bob in their second game together because Bob was a dick in their first game together. The goal is to have interesting negotiations, not to ruin friendships.
• It encourages exploration. You can try certain negotiating tactics in one game, and then abandon them in the next, and the fact that you were "roleplaying" will hopefully reduce how much people associate those tactics with you instead of that one time you played.
• It could lighten the mood. You should try really hard to lighten the mood. Because you know what else is a semi-cooperative game that's heavy on negotiation? Diplomacy.

omg i just noticed there are 602 semi-cooperative games on boardgamegeek, I'd previously stopped looking after the top 6. I've got a lot of reading to do, and I know that almost all of it will end with disappointment (usually the disappointment will be seeing MostPointsWins again), and the few that don't will be games that, for whatever reason, never got big enough for me to hear about them q,q

I've just watched Disney's Strange Worlds which explicitly features a cohabitive game in its plot called Primal Outpost.

The rules aren't really shown, we just know that it's played with terrain tiles, there are monsters, and the goal is ultimately to create a sustainable ecosystem. The concept honestly looked really cool, but the movie underperformed, so I don't think we're going to see a tie-in game, unfortunately.

But it shows that the basic idea of a cohabitative game is more appealing that you might think!

(No but seriously, if anyone knows of a Primal Outpost knock-off, I need to know about it.)

Curated.

I quite liked this post, both from the perspective of "game design" and "coordination theory/practice." 

I think some of the claims here are overstated – some commenters have pointed out other board games that meet the technical description of cohabitive, and I think there are a fair amount of games that have some cohabitive nature to them (i.e. I think kids playing on the playground, improvising various roleplaying games, often have some of this nature to it). I roll to disbelieve on "Every single board game rulebook contains the line "The player with the most points at the end of the game wins." 

But,  still think it's quite interesting and important that you can look at "cohabitive" games as a class, and notice that they seem less fleshed out than competitive games. I think this is an interesting vein of "fun" or "experience" to explore. And I agree with Mako that this is relevant to people being able to train skills, and relevant to theorists being able to crisply articulate important problems in cooperative bargaining theory.

I like that it both laid out a bunch of background theory, and explored a concrete example that Mako had put a lot of thought/effort into.

Some bits that stood out as important to me.

I think one of the things that made it difficult for new players to connect with the premise was the continuous payout scoring. There wasn't a crisp objective, at the end of a game, the game wouldn't unambiguously tell you whether you had done Well or Poorly, it wouldn't tell you which player was most skilled (because everyone was essentially playing a different game (some goals may be harder to pursue than others, and some characters may be generally stronger, or may score more easily than others)) The game wouldn't even reliably tell you whether you'd improved on your own previous score, since conditions varied so widely between sessions that a mediocre score in one scenario would be impossible in another.

That worked for me, I found a lot of the ambiguity and openendedness of multiplayer outcomes delightful and refreshing, the game didn't tell you how to feel, you had to figure that out for yourself, as it always is in life. (But it is still all clearer than life ever is.)

But I think it's important for learning players to be told what it is they'll learn and how to tell they've learned it. That's what a crisp, binary goal does.

A simple fix for this would be to find a particular score threshold that players will achieve with and only with practice, and tell the player "If you score this high, you've Succeeded (now move onto the next game module)"

And:

P1 was a bit of a sandbox of generic Peacewagers parts. I don't know if that can work. It requires players to learn a lot of arbitrary information about random glued together characters before each round.

A game designer's job is to find the fun and signpost it, so we should probably hand-design scenarios that're reliably dense with our best finds.

I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there's a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer's got a vision they're attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn't quite resonate with players. They're not paying enough attention to player psychology or wants, and they're too preoccupied with their clever idea. It seems here like Mako is aware of this pitfall (passages like the ones I highlighted above showcase Mako attending to the tension between their ultimate goal and the needs of players), so I feel optimistic about this path ultimately working out. But I suspect it'd work out faster if Mako leaned more into thinking "what do players want" relative to "what do I want to teach them?".

...

Somewhat minor note: I found the non-stardard formatting difficult to parse (I talked to Mako and they'd deliberately avoided paragraph breaks to convey that some groups of paragraphs were more tightly connected. I'd personally prefer just having more section headers or something, but, do appreciate them deliberately trying other formatting styles)

I do quite like your overall idea and background theory here. Having more cohabitive games (sorry, I like that name [LW · GW] better) seems probably important.

Something feels off about "just try to get as many points as you can". I don't know if this is just 37 years of competitive-game propaganda talking, but if you give everyone a score, the only way I really have to tell me "how good is this abstract number?" is to compare myself to other players, and that naturally puts me into somewhat of a competitive mindset.

The things that actually put me in a collaborative mindset in multiplayer games is when we're trying to build something or accomplish something other than "get points". Minecraft is maybe the best example (although admittedly people often feel like it's "not a game, it's a toy/sandbox"). Maybe in Magic the Gathering where people get invested in pulling off a "cool move", especially in multiplayer games.

Here's a cooperation game people haven't mentioned yet: Galerapagos.

The base idea is: you're all stuck on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe style. You need to escape before the island's volcano erupts. The aesthetics are loosely inspired by Koh Lanta, the French equivalent of Survivor.

Each player can do a certain number of actions, namely fish, collect water, help build an escape raft, and scavenge for materials. Each player has an individual inventory.

While it's possible for everyone to escape alive, there's some incentives to defect from the group (eg keep your own stash of food while other players starve to death). From what I heard the "tragedy of the commons" elements really start to matter when you have a large (>6) number of players.

I'm glad I encountered this post! This comment is a bit of a brain dump, not much time taken to edit: A month or so ago I attempted a first pass at designing a semi-cooperative board game and it ended up having some pretty similar elements. I got bogged down in a complicated-to-work-in mechanic that allows games to become arbitrarily large which I won't go in to. I'm not attached to owning any of the ideas I was trying to work in and would love to see somebody do something clever with them (especially if I get to play better games as a result).

The most interesting to me was to reduce the incentive to be maximally self-serving by implementing abilities, conditions, or other game mechanics which use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance/random dictatorship style partial/scaling 'reshuffling' of resources or positions. For example, if players are sufficiently disadvantaged by an equilibrium, they could (attempt to) acquire (possibly chaotic) opportunities to reshuffle resources or other circumstances in a scaling fashion. It seems amenable to games where players have influence or control over a common set of characters, where they have choices about how much information to give away based on which actions they choose (such as in war of whispers). Compatible with that is the ability to, over the course of a game, align one's win conditions with a particular character on the board or a broader coalition, with varying degrees of visibility of loyalties.

The flatness of most points wins suggests some degree of decoupling of "I win you lose", i.e. a two player game could result in any of WW, WL, LW, LL. Part of the excitement of games is frequently having an outcome be very close/otherwise uncertain up until the end, with the extremity of winning or losing typically being far more exciting than whether or not one gained additional points on a personal score on the last turn. This doesn't seem to necessarily trade off against higher dimensional goals like trying to satisfy a set of interesting general or role-specific conditions. Quite a few games have a lot of their fun down suboptimal pathways relative to gaining the most money or points, and that can be reflected in optional goals to satisfy, e.g. sewing chaos, cute opportunities to roleplay one's position through gameplay, stealing the most points from other players or otherwise getting their goat, achieving a very difficult board configuration, being able to satisfy rarely attainable goals, or otherwise achieving things that make the game possessive of an interesting story about how everything went down.

There are lots of interesting gameplay features that could come from including negotiation/game theoretic phenomena such as overlapping and changing coalitions, arbitration/mediation, binding precommitments or contracts with various means of enforcement, scaling pressures to cooperate such as veil of ignorance/random dictator sorts of reshuffling, hidden goals and opportunities/uncertain loyalties where people give away some amount of information pursuing those, and providing more granular opportunities for sanctions or more direct conflict.

My favorite cohabitive game (in case you have not already thought about it) is hacky sack. Its the team against entropy. Not as directly parallel to diplomacy but still great game. 

Sometimes in games there is the opportunity to disrupt the zero sum aspect and this is fun as it is a hidden differing goal way to play. In both Monopoly and Pit it is possible to collect an anti monopoly: one of each color. This makes the average traversal around the board positive EV.

I'm reminded a bit of the Discworld Ankh-Morpork game, where the players can be pursuing entirely different (secret) win conditions that only partly intersect with each other (drawn from a set of cards containing 3 with "gain control of X territories", and 1 each of "place at least one minion in X territories", "put X territories into a state of conflict" "accumulate X amount of money" and "finish the deck of cards without any other player achieving their goal")

But it's still a single-winner game where you have to be alert against other players potentially reaching their goals so that you can block them.

I do now wonder how it would play if it allowed for multiple winners. You'd have to modify some of the values of X (they already vary according to how many people are playing), remove the "no-one else wins" goal card, and maybe change the size of the deck so that time pressure is the obstacle rather than opposing action. But it could be interesting.

This is really interesting work, and I hope it will be of value to educating people about negotiation. I agree with many of the things you say here, and many of your design decisions, but I think there's a few minor points where I see things differently.

I think it's valuable to player motivation to give them the ability to track their own performance between games. I think this could look like having a set of pre-designed maps, with a certain difficulty score assigned to each role. Then players could track how well they did against a difficulty score. Having deliberately unbalanced maps, with some easy roles and some hard roles could be good for uneven matches (experienced player vs new player).

I think that being able to violate a contract (at some cost, perhaps reputational) when the motivation is sufficiently high gives some spice to the dynamics of negotiation. Also, seems like players should be able to mutually consent to dissolving a contract. So I think future versions should have some thought put into non-omnipotent contract enforcement mechanisms. Not letting any single player become so powerful that they can afford to ignore all contractual obligations is a pretty important lesson.

I'm not sure that having hidden agendas makes a negotiation game not work. What if you have a hidden agenda, but you are allowed to proclaim (but not prove) it? This adds a layer of complexity which might be undesirable, especially for less advanced players, since you have to track whether another player's claimed goals match up with their behavior. I think this is pretty key if you want to have an 'evil' player, who all the other players can only 'win' against by eliminating them. Like in the social Werewolf game, the 'evil' player would be motivated to claim not to be. In order to not get ganged up against, they'd have to try to manufacture situations in which it seemed justified for them to eliminate another player. Others would have to detect them by noticing the unnecessary and unprofitable conflict. This would teach the important real-world negotiation lesson of keeping an eye out for true values conflicts versus lying troublemakers with hidden agendas who should be punished. Then you'd have to negotiate things like, 'if I pay a cost to eliminate an agent of player X, who we suspect of being evil, then I want concession A as a reward.'

Or a partial information style of game, like Stratego. Maybe if you can prove someone violated a contract, you can call them out and they must pay the forfeit, but if you only suspect it then you must just be wary of them.

It could also be interesting to have rounds of the game with and without omnipotent contract enforcement, and with/without hidden agendas, and with/without the game being a partial-information game, so people could learn how each of those elements changes things. I think it would quickly become clear that a world with trustworthy contract enforcement is a less violent, more positive-sum world to live in.

I think it's worth thinking about what makes cooperative games fun, and what makes creative games like playing minecraft or legos with friends fun. What if you were playing minecraft with other people in a very space-limited minecraft world, and had to negotiate over resources? Being able to build what you wanted to build would require negotiation. I was trying to think through a design of such a game with the intention of using it as a testing ground for AI alignment. In my hazy undeveloped thoughts were mechanics like: blocks get harder to destroy every time they are placed (so the more times a specific block is moved, the harder it gets to move in the future), players can tag a limited number of blocks as 'theirs' making it much harder for other people to destroy them. Imagine if each player had a different goal they were trying to achieve in a limited time, such as making the coolest waterfall or the coolest castle or treehouse or cave dwelling. When the time in a round ran out, the blocks would all get frozen and players could then take their 'final result' screenshot from whatever point of view they thought best showed off their work. Then some other group of players, playing their own version of the game, would vote on the anonymous submissions. Or maybe a ML model could be made to judge the competition. In any case, seems like something that a minecraft mod could encompass.

An interesting thing about this, is that there wouldn't be an omniscient overview judge. So players could try to get away with sneakily stealing resources they'd agreed not to, and then face consequences if they were caught. So you could more easily trust agreements made about resources that were easier to monitor.

What if you catch a player violating a contract, and then they also decide to refuse to pay the agreed upon penalty? This sort of thing is a common cause of conflict escalation between nation-states. Would the other players come to the assistance of the wronged party, or choose to gang up against them or simply refuse to intervene since they'd have to pay a cost to intervene...

I think there's a lot of room for thought and game design here. 

I really like cohabitive games. I enjoy playing this one. I'm somewhat mixed on this post in particular being in the Best Of LessWrong collection. Cohabitive Games So Far looks like it's doing two things; it's outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting, and it's describing one specific cohabitive game but not in enough detail to play it. 

For the first part (outlining what a cohabitive game is and why it's interesting) I prefer Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive [? · GW]. (Though I wrote Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive, so I might be biased here.) I think it would be good to get "Cohabitive" into the general rationalist lexicon via some means though, and would vote in favour of post explaining the concept for the Best Of LessWrong collection. Overall Cohabitive Games so Far sprawls a bit in a couple of places, particularly where bullet points create an unordered list.

For the second part, I'd like to see a writeup of how Peacewager works in enough detail to play a couple games. That writeup exists, but this post has a link to a website that has a link to a .zip file with the rules. I get that Peacewager is a prototype and the rules are likely to change in the future, but if I'm going to review a post on the basis of the game itself, I'd like the rules to be in the post where it's easier to comment on them. It'd be awkward if five years from now the Best Of posts had a dead link to an important part of the post. If I imagine I'm voting on the Peacewager rules themselves for the Best Of LessWrong. . . eh. I think I'd tentatively vote for their inclusion if the game succeeded at what it was trying to do, and against if I thought it was missing the mark. Right now the game is rough enough around the edges I think it doesn't quite get there for me.

(Mako Yass does get the points for being the idiomatic man in the arena though- It's been a year and I haven't yet published either of my cohabitive games.)

Where does that land? I think Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive is better for explaining the concept, but one of the two is worth putting in the Best Of LessWrong collection and if you like Cohabitive Games So Far then vote for it.

I think there's a decent chance this post inspires someone to develop methods for honing a highly neglected facet of collective rationality. The methods might not end up being a game. Games are exercises but most practical learning exercises aren't as intuitively engaging or strategically deep as a game. I think the article holds value regardless just for having pointed out that there is this important, neglected skill.

Despite LW's interest in practical rationality and community thereof, I don't think there's been any discussion of this social skill of acknowledging difference, and efficiently converging towards ideal compromises. Past discussion of negotiation has often settled for rough [LW · GW] schelling equilibria [LW · GW], arbitrary, often ossified resolutions. People will and should go to war against (excessively) arbitrary equilibria (and in the information age, they should start to expect more agile, intentional coordination processes). After Unifying Bargaining [? · GW] I'd say we know, now, that we can probably do a bit better than arbitrary.

For instance, in the case of abram's example of national borders: The borders of a territory need not be arbitrary historical features, under higher negotiation efficiencies, the borders correspond directly to our shared understanding of who can defend which areas and how willing they are to do it. Under even higher negotiation efficiencies, borders become an anachronism at their fringes and the uses of land are negotiated dynamically depending on who needs to do what and when.

To most laypeople, today, the notion of a "perfect and correct compromise" will feel like an oxymoron or a social impossibility. At this point, I think I know a perfect compromise when I see it, and I don't think that sense requires an abnormal cultivation of character. I don't know if I've seen anyone who seemed to be impossible to look in the eye and negotiate with, given a reasonable amount of time, and support. Humans, and especially human organisations have leaky, transparent cognitions, so I believe that it's possible in general for a human to tell whether another human is acting according to what they see as a fair, good faith compromise, and I believe all it would take to normalise and awaken that in the wider world is a mutual common knowledge of what the dance looks like and how to get better at it.

New SU&SD review of a negotiation game: Zoo Vadis, a game where players have to make deals to secure the votes of others and progress upwards. It's MostPointsWins, of course, but there seems to be a second tier goal of becoming a star animal, that can accommodate more than one player.

For online cohabitives, you have to ask how you make agreements binding. People will be less honorable with strangers, especially if you take advantage of the linear returns of persistent score to model utility payouts.

We talked a bit about having temporary recording and arbitration processes for contract violation reports. Obviously, that has a bit of overhead, in implementation complexity and probably as an ongoing running cost.
In many cases, players might be so familiar with the rhythms of the game that it isn't necessary for the contract system to be so explicit or flexible as that, instead, bounties for detectable events, "kill this guy over here and I'll give you 10 credits", "occupy this period soon and I'll give you 5 credits" and the like. (Credits would be a debt currency, players are supposed to earn about as much as they spend. Offers from players who haven't been repaying their debts would be clearly marked as such. Hoarded credits might decay.)

But what about public goods... in overwatch there's a situation where there's a payload that needs to be pushed, but often people will pursue kills instead. You can't expect individuals to place a bounty on pushing the payload for the same reason you can't expect them to push it.

So say you propose a 'public commission' where If anyone doesn't sign, then no one has to pay, but everyone signs everyone has to share in the paying. Everyone has an individual incentive to sign, because they'd prefer to live under the order where it passes even if it means they have to pay a share. This solves the collective action problem for rational citizens.

I guess this is one example of how quickly these games become testing grounds for economic mechanisms.

These three cooperative games don't give players a hidden agendas:

• Pandemic
• Forbidden Desert
• Forbidden Island

You don't need VR for board games, you just need to transfer the entire board game into a user interface, which very doable since board games are 2D. That said, Tabletop Simulator is a full physics-based board game playing environment, often played on desktop.

I think Among Us (though competitive) has shown that voice chat is all you need. Alternatively, you can lean into limited communication channels as a source of conflict, like Hanabi
 

Hum. The existing games that most make me think of this approach/style are

• City Council (semi-cooperative city management game. Still falls to the MostPointsWin rule because only one player gets elected mayor, but you do need to coordinate throughout in order to keep the city from collapsing into crime, pollution and/or taxpayer flight. I bought this game with the intent of playing it with my kids in order to teach them the sort of social coordination concepts you cover above but I think what you've outlined might be better from that perspective)
• Dead of Winter (semi-cooperative where there is potentially a traitor. The collective can win together, but it's also possible for some players to win on their own if they manage to sabotage the rest in a goal-specific way. This is probably the only main-stream game that fully fits your idea of a cohabitive game I can think of)
• Pandemic (in particular, the bio-terrorist module gets closest to it, since that prevents the game from being fully cooperative)
• Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky, Spirit Island (AFAIK, purely cooperative, but players still have unique strengths and weaknesses that can get played up interestingly in ways that emphasize coordination)
• Root (not cooperative at all, and does the MostPointsWin thing, BUT - each faction has wildly different ways of gathering points, and as a result each player has an extremely different play experience. There's also a faction that has the option of playing to a cooperative victory with another player, but the conditions under which this happens are pretty constrained)

Free Radicals also seems like it might rhyme with some of these ideas, but I haven't actually played that one yet.

Peacewager seems interesting and unique in a few ways; I'll definitely try to get in touch to get a playtest copy for my group.

Interesting post. One small area where I might have a useful insight:

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.

Role-playing games, including online multiplayer RPGS ("MMORPGs"), often achieve this. In SWTOR, when I play my Empire-hating fallen-to-the-dark-side Jedi Knight, versus my heart-of-gold bounty hunter, or my murderously-insane Sith Inquisitor, I make very different choices even when faced with the same content. This is most-obviously manifest in the dialogue tree choices for the main story, but extends to other aspects of gameplay as well. Whether I take a stealth route or go on a murderous rampage; whether my character does all the side missions or jumps straight to the main objective; which companions I choose to bring along; and even what clothes I wear.

This role playing mostly does go out the window in the "most intense" parts of the game (PvP and raids). Although sometimes over voice chat we'll briefly slip into character for fun, or compliment each other on a particularly on-point use of abilities. ("Just like a smuggler, to stun all the trash.")

One key ingredient here is strong archetypes from an existing background (e.g. the Star Wars galaxy in my case, or the Warcraft universe in others, or maybe just fantasy in general). Another is the long-lasting investment and relationship one builds with their character, from design onward; I feel a lot more connection to my SWTOR characters than I do to the random personalities I pick up in any given Betrayal at House on the Hill session.

Anyway, maybe there's something to learn here for your game design!

Have you looked into new angeles? Action choices are cooperative, with lots of negotiation. Each player is secretly targeting another player, and wins if they end with more points than their target (so you could have a 6 player game where the people who ended with most, and 4th and 5th most win, while 2nd, 3rd, and 6th lose.)

I approve of this.

I have several thoughts.  I think I'm going to try writing several replies to myself here, so people can discuss (& vote on) them separately.  (If you find this objectionable, I'm willing to consolidate.  I also considered making each a top-level comment but that feels spammy.)

War of Whispers is a semi-cooperative game where you play as cults directing nations in their wars. The reason it's cooperative is because each player's cult can change the nation they are supporting. So you can end up negotiating and cooperating with other players to boost a particular nation, because you both get points for it. 

Both times I've played people started on opposite sides, then ended up on the same or nearly the same side. In one of the games two players tied. 

There is still the counting of points so it doesn't quite fit what you are going for here, but it is the closest game I know of where multiple players can start negotiating for mutual aid and both win. 

I think there could be an interesting game that leaned even harder into the creation and testing of contracts and rules. What if players each controlled a state within a nation, and had to agree on Federal laws. They could also make state laws. After a round of law making and voting, a computer simulation of economy and population growth and whatnot would play out. The effects of the interplay of all the laws would become obvious. Then, another round of law making.

I have thought some about making a cohabitive card game, where people’s utility functions are randomized in the beginning. There is definitely a problem where you play, and complete the game, and have no clue how you did. So you feel less of a sense of accomplishment.

After thinking about this a bit, I think a good solution is to have two games with identical utility function distributions played at the same time, and players must try to beat their causally isolated counterparts.

I know of at least one game in which instead of there being only one winner, there is instead only one loser...

If you're adamant, message me, and I can give you a copy of the makeplayingcards project and you can have a copy printed.

I'd be really curious to try it, but I don't have a group for it. Maybe an online session of some sort could be organised? Heck, we could probably whip up a crude multiplayer version of it to test it.

Another interesting possibility is the oncoming ACX meet up. I don't know if I'll manage to be there but last time there were "unconference" style tables and it would be easy to organise a few playtesting sessions if they're short enough (less than 1 h).

My finding is that as soon as you show a gamer any scoring system, their eyes turn red and they start machinating under the assumption that the MostPointsWins rule is in play, it's close to hopeless.

Point numbers are only meaningful in context. I wonder if you're giving people points but not giving them anything to compare to, so the only option is to compare to the other players? Maybe give people some targets to shoot for, like 25 points is good, 50 points is great, 75 points is amazing (and calibrate them so it's basically impossible to get the mid- and high- scores without cooperating).

Super glad I landed on your post! Just ordered the game. 

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Impressed by the ideas and also very much by the writing. Nice!

What a great read. Best of luck with this project. It sounds compelling.

This is really cool to see. I've had a design in the works for a mixed-motive strategy game ever since I read The Strategy of Conflict a couple years ago, but it remains on the "Later" pile for now. I'm glad to see someone else exploring this niche so I won't have to break too much new ground. 

There are many fully cooperative board games, where all the players work together to win or lose as a group. There are many partially cooperative board games, which can only be won through cooperation and negotiation. There are many competitive games for 3+ players where it is common for two players to make strongly mutually beneficial deals, especially when the third player is currently winning. There are many competitive games that run multiple rounds, where placement in each round matters, not just who gets first place, so negotiating to end up in second instead of third has value in the long run. There are many competitive games where short to long term, but not usually permanent, alliances are critical to victory, and many mutually beneficial decisions are negotiated in those alliances.

As a rationalist, I don't put much stock in the conclusions reached from what seem to be extremely faulty premises.

As a gamer, I don't expect to find a well designed game when you seem to have missed or ignored so much prior art that could better inform your design.

Competition is bad! Ooooh thats going to get some goats. Competition is only legitimate when there are true shortages of necessary things, in other words when times are in crisis. This does occur in nature obviously and we as humans have observed it.  A dog will indeed eat a dog but only in extreme conditions.  The problem is that we then optimized and structured civilization in favor of that behavior. 

Humans do not need that kind of motivation in order to do all of the wonderful things we are capable of. Competition elicits all of humanities worst behavior such as greed, envy, avarice, cheating, killing….

We know that humans are capable of such behavior but we are also Homo sapiens sapiens, we put the term “wise” in there twice which means we should try and act that way.