[bduerst]

There are several options to play (and win) peacefully if you so choose, even while other nations battle it out around you.

If anything it teaches temperament, resource management, and how to turn failures into learning experiences - the last of which is considered important for being successful in business.

[6stringmerc]

I once participated in a Civ-style, turn-based, global game for a Political Science class, and, full disclosure, I was easily the most controversial person to have participated up to that point.

The way the professor set up the game it actually had grade-implicating consequences. The class before mine essentially sat down in a giant circle and worked together to solve the 'built in' problems so they could maximize their collective points for the exercise. My class...not so much.

By the end of our game, my country, as ringleader of a small coalition of willing and semi-willing participants were on the verge of total global domination (just needed one more turn). One country had been completely destroyed and all of its students received zero points for the exercise.

The professor and I met a few times in private and he was absolutely stunned at the divisive difference between the results. The 'cooperation' class taught him nothing, and the global warfare class was a ton of work (both calculating results and managing the social dynamics of college kids/semi-adults).

What we discussed at the end was how the flaw in the game seemed to be the 'ideological survey' initially used by him to group the teams together. I landed in the most "passive" group based on the survey results, but ended up being a much more hands-on, active leader and joined up with an "aggressive" collaborator. We agreed the passiveness meant that my team essentially didn't put up any resistance to me taking power, setting the scene, and letting them know they'd get the grade points just don't make waves.

Come to think of it, I still have the whole saga in mind as a long-form write-up so maybe I'll get around to that haha. As Megadeth pointed out, "Peace sells, but who's buying?"

[coldcode]

My high school world history teacher ran a game like this for the class. He booked a whole week for it. After two days we had destroyed the world in a nuclear war. He made us sit quietly in class for the rest of the week as punishment! What a great lesson though in how terrible people can be.

[invalidOrTaken]

I upvoted you, but really it's meant for your teacher. It takes guts to follow through on stuff like that.

[rdtsc]

That reminded of a network security class I took. The goal was to hack the protocol of a game server and win points (we could run a packet sniffer or something like that). Instead I hacked the game server itself, got root on it, and injected a hack in the game server source to give our an advantage. Some people were upset, however we still won. I argued, that is how real security works. It is some seemingly unrelated backdoor or weakness that lets the attacker in.

[bduerst]

Actually sounds like a problem with the class scoring system.

Rational actors will maximize their returns, and in a game that has a set number of rounds, the equilibrium won't be met unless there are returns and costs associated to each round.

Your professor should have graded on a running score, per turn, so that there would have been a reason (other than reputation cost with class peers) for the teams to collude up until the end. It would have also been more realistic for the course, since a decade of continued existence is considered more of a win for a political nation than some final tally at year 2050.

[notahacker]

The odd thing is that from what I remember of International Relations classes, the core debate in that subfield is whether states avoid cooperating to achieve absolute gains if there's any risk of compromising their relative strength (and whether game theory is the right analytical framework to use, and whether models of iterative games which penalise defectors are the best explanation for why international cooperation is possible). So I'd have thought a PolSci professor would be far more likely than most people to have designed a game to penalise somebody trying to enrich themselves at the expense of much of the rest class. (if it had been an economics professor, they'd have designed the game so that somebody trying to enrich themselves and their allies at the expense of the rest of the class nevertheless made everybody score higher...)

[bduerst]

That's the problem with game theory in politics - unlike hypothetical scenarios, the game never really ends in the real world. There are typically unseen (or ignored) consequences to actions made during engagements, that come back years later. When I said rational actors, I was referring to the students themselves and the scoring system put in front of them.

But you're right - it seems odd that a poli sci professor would give a team zero points if they were wiped out. What if they had previously used trade of luxury goods to maintain peace on a continent for centuries?

[6stringmerc]

I'm really quite excited to write out the experience, though I have to admit over 10 years have passed so I've got to focus to dredge back up the memories.

The 'wiped out, zero points' actually makes the most sense from a pragmatic standpoint. Figuratively speaking, you get zero points when your culture/society/etc is annihilated, wiped out. So there was an incentive to behave in a way to avoid being destroyed.

Just to sum things up, during the conflict & negotiation stage with the "victim" country, the coalition had them surrounded in one tiny town, otherwise taking over the rest of the country. When negotiations failed, the last holdouts were destroyed. It didn't have to end that way - the coalition was okay with letting them have a little compound and stay out of the way...but they didn't like that, made all sorts of demands and noise, and were eliminated out of convenience (my convenience, not necessarily the entire world's).

[bduerst]

Right, but rewarding continued existence is already incentivization to not being destroyed.

If the class is graded on a curve, then by making annihilation equal an instant 0 points, you've incentivized the teams to wipe each other out.

[zcdziura]

Should you ever write about that experience, I'd be very interested to read it. That sounds awesome!

[6stringmerc]

Looking back it's absolutely thrilling and I can't believe things worked out the way they did. I was a Uni Senior at the time wrapping up my 'electives' so taking intro courses was my plan to pad up the GPA a little (another example: Intro to Piano simply to re-learn to read sheet music). Almost all the other classmates were Freshman level or close to it, being an intro course, which I think went in my favor. There were a lot of personalities and some fair doses of immaturity (I'm a former hardcore Half-Life DM multiplayer gamer) but the professor did an admirable job of keeping it working for the full semester.

I think I need to map out ways to tell the story, rather than just blurt it all out kind of like the above. I've been working a lot on Medium so stay tuned I guess haha

Edit: I've reached out to the professor from the course to see if he'd be interested in reading/critiquing my write-up, should I put one together. We'll see!