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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Peacewagers so Far, published by mako yass on September 29, 2023 on LessWrong.
A peacewager is a partially cooperative, partially competitive multiplayer game that provides an anarchic dojo for development in the art of negotiation, or cooperative bargaining.
Applied cooperative bargaining isn't currently taught, despite being an infrastructural literacy for peace, trade, democracy or any other form of pluralism. We suffer for that. There are many good board games that come close to meeting the criteria of a Peacewager today, but they all miss in one way or another, forbidding sophisticated negotiation from being practiced.
So, over the past couple of years, we've been gradually and irregularly designing and playtesting the first peacewager boardgame, which we'll call Difference and Peace Peacewager 1, or P1. This article explains why we think this new genre is important, how it's been going, what we've learned, and where we should go next.I hope that peacewagers will aid both laypeople and theorists in developing cooperative bargaining as theory, practice and culture, but I also expect peacewagers to just be more fun than purely cooperative or purely competitive games, supporting livelier dialog, and a wider variety of interesting strategic relationships and dynamics.
A salve for strife and wasteIn these primal landsIt can be found
Motivation
We all need it
In our formative years, we make many choices, but we hold no power, so most of us don't receive experience in negotiation until we're well into adulthood. Natural experiences of conflict tend to be messy, ambiguous, with high stakes, forbidding free experimentation. It's very much not conducive to learning. So let's make games that foster clear, low-stakes scenarios where negotiation can be learned.
Democracy requires this of us. When we are not taught to recognize acceptable compromise, we wont be able to recognize legitimate political outcomes either. Most suffering comes from that.
A person without negotiation skills will lack faith in the possibility of peaceful resolution of conflict. They will consummate either as an eliminationist, or they will live in denial of conflict, they will hide it, hide from it. They won't have an appropriate sense of when to stand their ground or when to capitulate. The social norms of their cliques will expect and demand passivity, compliance, and avoidance. Conflicts will fester. When conflicts inevitably play out, the less acknowledged, the messier they will be. Instead of words and deals, death or withering and waste. We cannot live together like this.
We must teach negotiation, the graceful reckoning with difference. We must make it fun, approachable and learnable for so many more people. We must enter this uncharted genre and find the fun and signpost it so that it is easy for those in need of it to recognize the fun in it. (That is all good game designers do.)
Theorists might need it too
I also hope that Peacewagers will be helpful to game theorists or decision theorists, to build intuitions about embedded negotiation. Negotiation is reified cooperative bargaining theory, which drops hints about the ideal shape of preference aggregation. It also might be relevant to extortion resistance and averting extortion races.There's a really interesting open question: Will advanced technological agencies, starting as separate beings without transparent cognition, converge towards merger, or towards war? I think we really might stumble onto a lot of relevant intuitions in our travels through Peacewagers.
(Also, I just expect them to be good games, this is discussed throughout)
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