A threesome

Just recently I read a book called Hunger Games which is the first of a 3 part series.  It was a book about a dystopian future with a very interesting 'death game' involved.  Here is the way the game works:

1.  24 people chosen mostly at random from the ages of 12-18 start in a large circle with no equipment whatsoever.  In the middle of the circle is the Cornucopia, which is a huge stash of weapons, food and survival equipment.  The contestants are then let go to do whatever they want but the catch is that only one can leave alive.

2.  The area they can move about in is large, perhaps 10 kilometers on a side, and each night they are told which contestants died the preceding day.

3.  The contestants are drawn from 12 distinct regions, 2 each, and anyone outside the game can spend a ton of money to send them gifts during the match so if you can be appealing to the people watching on TV you can potentially be handed really powerful advantages.

So what do you do in this sort of scenario?  The book presents the idea that normally half the people end up fighting over the Cornucopia and ~8 of them die right away doing so but the victors of that battle get supplies and control over the weapons.  The rest run away and some of those die to starvation, cold, bee stings, traps set by the gamemasters or whatever else.  The gamemasters have the ability and mandate to force a victor so there is no possibility of simply ignoring the others and living off the land indefinitely - you will eventually be forced together by fire, monsters or whatever else they please.

This is a pretty interesting thing to think on.  First off, obviously any alliance is extremely valuable but also short lived.  As soon as you get to the point where your alliance can handily beat the rest of the field there is a massive incentive to strike first and take out one of your allies.  My feeling is that the best strategy in this situation would be to set up a group of three.  In a big group you will quickly run out of anyone who could stop you and get right down to murdering each other in no time.  In a group of three though you have a really enormous advantage against any solo people because you can sleep safely (you hope!) as well as find food, water or shelter while having someone be a lookout.  Of course you also have the advantage that three vs. one in combat isn't much of a fight.  Three is also enough that if there is a large group you are likely to injure or kill some of them if attacked and almost certainly aren't a soft target.

I think three is also much better than two, but for different reasons.  In a three person group it is challenging for one person to decide to kill someone.  For one, the third person would have it easy in deciding who to assist (or to just kill/injure both) and it would be hard to know who would really back you up when you decide to backstab.  In a two person group whoever decides to backstab first pretty much is guaranteed victory so I suspect that alliance would be much more unstable.

Obviously all of this would be extremely random and depend on the personalities involved - young people forced to kill or die aren't exactly going to act predictably!

My personal plan would be to rush the Cornucopia to grab some stuff and try to get at least one nearby person to ally with me.  Hopefully a group of three, but any group is better than solo I think.  It is a risky play at the start but I suspect that my woodsman skills aren't remotely up to the task of surviving in the wild and risks must be taken.  Given the ability of people outside to influence the game I would definitely want to put on a show and act like a contender - it is possible that being up front and getting things done would be critical in keeping me alive.  The other contestants would be more likely to try to eliminate those that are a threat, I would think, but they might also be afraid of an overconfident show.  If you are going to bluff, bluff big would be my credo.

Picture from wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games

More on Gamifying Society

I found an interesting commentary on the recent trend towards Gamifying society.  This trend, championed by Jane McGonigal, among others, is dedicated to adding elements of good gameplay to other parts of our lives.  I talked a little about McGonigal's book earlier; in particular how I think a lot of her ideas are neat to talk about but I am highly suspicious of the conclusions she draws.  This slideshow that I linked talks a lot more about that and goes into more depth than I did but I think brings up a lot of similar points.

A couple of the biggest stumbling blocks to achieving utopia through Gamifying our world are the facts that an awful lot of what we do is exceedingly difficult to Gamify properly and even when something is Gamified well it almost always ends up being just a 'get more points' system which just doesn't hold our interest in the long run.  Tobold made a good post about the latter point recently - he points out that eventually everybody gets bored with bigger numbers and moves on to other things.  Even getting to that point can be a huge struggle or impossible though, which is easily demonstrated by looking at commission structures in sales jobs.

Back when I was in sales I saw all kinds of ways to construct commission structures, all intending to direct the salespeople towards making the company more money and being only vaguely successful.  This is a great place to start because it is precisely what Gamifiers are hoping to do to everything; attach numbers, goals and rewards to good behaviour to motivate it.  Companies pay salespeople bonus money to sell particular products so those products get sold more but often they get sold at the expense of other products.  Companies pay specific bonuses to sell items for specific amounts and they end up losing sales or losing money because the salespeople stick precisely to those targetted amounts instead of negotiating freely.  Every time a new commission structure was introduced where I worked it came along with company assurances of better pay and massive upheaval and dissatisfaction on the part of the sales force.  I watched companies introduce new "big bonus for selling Wingnuts" changes and then reeling in abject horror as the sales force responded with "given that, we will never sell Bolts again".  These changes were introduced in an attempt to improve revenues by experts in the field with years of experience and yet their implementation was regularly disastrous.

Even when management didn't screw up the system there were still constant problems.  Salespeople were paid only by sales, not by satisfaction, so often the people making the biggest money and getting all the awards were those who had neverending streams of complaints and problems... because those didn't show up on their pay stub.  This also created all kinds of morale problems among those who actually did a good job and ended up dealing with all the crap created by those who were getting paid well.  Designing a system that actually rewards the full suite of skills and behaviour you want would be so unbelievably complex and time consuming that even if we could get really simple stuff like "You sold X, you get paid Y" down it would be daunting but we can't even do that first step right.

There are lots of things we can do to improve productivity and job satisfaction that are taken from understanding games and how people enjoy themselves but we should be realistic about how much real benefit can be garnered from putting a +1000 points! on somebody's screen while they are doing their job.