[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.