[Kris comment: This chapter on cooperative games and the idea of a party contract and the role of “alpha players” echoes the trade-offs and design of the cooperative game of human governance. It recalls the timeless tension of equality/social cohesion with efficiency. It reminds us that incentives and design are inseparable. Balancing our instincts with our higher-order intellectual abstractions such as justice, freedom and safety is a delicate problem.
Education is also a metaphor here. The party contract of how much to pull up the bottom vs accelerate the top. Are laws and tax codes the practical expressions of platonic ideals of what the party contracts should be or are they just path-dependent layers of political wins and losses reflecting the desires (or illusions) prevailing at their inception?
This is just the beginning of the questions.
Where do party contracts come from? Philosophy? Rules about family leave also come to mind. What kind of society do we want? How do family leave laws affect women, half our population, and our conceptions of freedom?
What does meritocracy mean in theory? In practice? Many people smart in autistic ways have legible kinds of intelligence that society finds easy to reward today because the input/output function to efficiency and therefore value creation is easy to see. But is this because of our short-term accounting? A preference for [fake] meritocracy is usually self-serving because they are the best at finding the optimum if you give them the rules. But the design of the rules requires bringing in values that were never as legible as the autist likes to think. A real meritocracy would likely be far more progressive if it took the long (in time) and wide (in geography) view. Is the value of such a galactic view so widely distributed that it could never gather a critical mass of advocates?
In a similar vein, we wonder, to what extent are local optimums even avoidable? When does a local optimum become species-level quicksand? Is centralized top-down authority the only coordination system capable of avoiding paper-clip maximization? Are we forced to choose between the tyranny-violence cycle or the trap of local optimums?]
This is not an airport-rack business book to show you how to get the most out of your employees, improve staff morale, or reduce friction within your organization. But playing games really can provide important lessons for people running companies. In particular, cooperative games such as Pandemic teach us that group dynamics can get more complicated, not less when people are trying to cooperate rather than compete. This is important because most businesses, NGOs, government agencies, social clubs and even families can be thought of in some way as cooperative projects, even if real life tends to lack the well-defined rules and victory conditions you would find in a cooperative board game.
Like players in a cooperative game, close colleagues may end up struggling with the balance between the ruthless pursuit of short-term performance and the long-term effort to enhance their colleagues' skills and sense of engagement. Too much of the former, and the company becomes a haven for alphas but alienates everybody else. Too much of the latter, and the company might have trouble satisfying its clients even as it develops a great reputation for in-house vocational mentorship.
In most organizations, there are unwritten rules that govern the desired mix, much like the play contract at the tabletop. These rules go a long way toward defining an organization's culture. And if you are going to join up, you will probably want to make sure that your own values are congruent-whether it is a multinational corporation making widgets or just a few friends gathered around a game board, trying to save the human race from extinction.