Running a SXSW Session as a Cooperative Game
by Thor
For our South by Southwest Interactive session on cooperative games, Health Month’s Buster Benson and I decided to try something different. We turned the talk into a game.
We named it Heat, a Cooperative Game in Three Parts. The scenario was inspired by a Twilight Zone episode called The Midnight Sun that haunted me as a kid. Our story starts like this:
The earth has begun to move closer and closer to the sun, leading to blistering temperatures and causing all kinds of mayhem. The polar icecaps are melting at an alarming rate, flooding continents and sending the world’s populations into panic as their homelands are submerged underwater.
The first stage of the game is The Lifeboat.
To survive the rising waters, each person in the session must find a spot on one of twelve lifeboats before they depart. There are only two rules: find a seat next to someone born in the same month, and the person to their left must be born on the same day or earlier in the month. Other than that, it is every person for themselves.
Oh, and one more thing. The attendees have exactly five minutes to find their spots.
I admit I was a bit worried when we walked into the conference room and saw that it wasn’t 75-150 people as we expected, but closer to 500. It was always a bit ambitious to expect that many people to get up and re-organize their seating arrangement in a cramped room in such a short period. Doing so in a standing room only situation was risky at best.
I pushed play on Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life and the 5 minute race was on. It was instant pandemonium. People started shouting for their month (“April, April over here!”). Some people began to write their month’s name on paper with markers. Others created ad hoc signs using their iPads. Quickly, people began to converge into groups, and the the sorting by date began. By the time the five minutes were up the room was about 98% sequenced by birthdate. Those who didn’t quite find their spot? The became zombies, of course.
The Lifeboat demonstrated that individual self-interest, combined with a few simple rules, would lead to wide-scale emergent cooperation. It’s perhaps the simplest form of cooperation–that which requires little forethought, where wriggling towards the light is enough to form co-adaptive behavior. This simplicity is its power, however. We see similar ordering patterns all through nature, from the formation of crystals and nucleotides, to the sociobiology of ants, to the computational models known as cellular automata. It only takes a few well balanced rules to conjure a remarkable system.
The second stage of the game is called The Island.
The twelve lifeboats have reached separate islands, each containing its own supply storehouse. All the food and water needed for survival are in the storehouse which is protected by a security system. To unlock the supplies, each group needs to crack the code before time runs out. The code is a multiple of the number twenty-one made up of as many of the birthdates in each group as possible.
To make this game even more interesting, we brought out a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon as a prize for the group that produced a key that included the largest proportion of its’ members birth dates. We were surprised when all twelve groups (each with dozens of members) formed keys that included 100% of its members. The game was easier than we’d expected so we adapted our winning conditions on-the-fly. The bourbon was awarded to the group with the largest number.
It was again amazing how quickly the attendees self-organized, this time with a strong team dynamic. We’d engineered the game to show how small group goals can be engineered to supersede individual interests. Yes, we’d added a competitive element with the bourbon, but what stood out was how a shared victory condition and a stretch goal turned a group of people into a single directed unit. Critical to this was that the fact that any solution required every member’s contribution.
The Island stage didn’t scale as well as the Lifeboat in one regard. While every member of the group shared their information, the solution itself was often calculated by a few leaders, leaving the rest of the group to stand by. It was only a few minutes long, but if I was to try this again I would tweak this part of the game to maintain the involvement of all members through to the solution.
The third stage of the game is The Final Countdown.
The earth is now so close to the sun that it’s clear that the end is near. There is only one hope–to escape earth before all life perishes. This means building a ship big enough to transport all the remaining survivors. To do so, each island must produce a part to be used to construct the whole by collecting a full set of resources.
Each island begins with twelve of one kind of resource, recovered from the supply storehouse in The Island phase. Each Island may trade one resource for another with an adjacent neighboring island (e.g. January can trade with February and December). The goal is for each island to end up with one of each of the resources through a series of trades within the allotted time.
Unfortunately, we didn’t actually get to this last phase of the game–ironically, the session ran out of time. I’m dying to know how it would have turned out. Would each group have organized themselves into hyper-efficient trading units with a trader for each neighbor, a treasurer to tabulate resources as they came in, one or more de facto economists watching the flow of resources as they percolated across the island chain, a communications specialist who coordinated plans with island neighbors? Or would the whole thing have collapsed on itself, desperation and chaos defeating any semblance of coherence?
These questions will have to wait until the next time I get my hands on five hundred willing subjects, er, players.
Read Buster Benson’s account of the panel for a great summary of many of the topics we covered.”