2 22 am pst   [ I got sucked in. ]

I got sucked in. I began reading a /. article in which someone asked for suggestions of Non-Zero Sum Games. Then I read the 12 highest rated comments. One said:

I've seen a lot of posts here by people who are apparently confused about the meaning of zero-sum. "Basketball isn't zero-sum," they say, "because the sum of both team's points is not zero." Or "Diplomacy isn't zero-sum, because players can cooperate and help each other out."

Neither is correct. A zero-sum game is one where an improvement in the standing (which I'll deliberately leave vague, but you can think of it as "chance to win") of one player necessarily results in a worsening of the standing of another player. Even though, when one team scores two points in basketball, the other team does not lose two points, it is still zero-sum because that score reduces the chances of the other team. And even though two players can cooperate in Diplomacy to improve the position of both, they can do so only at the cost of another player.

OTOH [On the other hand], all those people pointing out that RPGs [Role Playing Games] are non-zero sum are entirely correct. It is possible to perform actions which improve the position of all players in the game simultaneously. Even if you count the gamemaster as a player, it's still non-zero sum. The gamemaster's ultimate goal is neither coincident with the players' (if, above all else, he wanted the players to reach their goal, he could make it insanely easy for them to do so) nor opposed to it (if he wanted to stop them from achieving their goal, he could do that as well). The gamemaster's goal is to create an interesting game, and that is neither directly coincident with nor directly opposed to the players' goal.

Is this fascinating to anyone else?

I must admit I preformed very poorly at playing The Prisoner's Dilemna. "The idea behind the game is to try out win/win, win/lose and play/play strategies under simplified conditions."

Next I had to check out Nomic -- a game where payers change change the rules (including the rules about rules can be changed). The game can be changed so that there is no way to win or so that there is no longer any way to change the rules. Like I said, fascinating...

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