red

[aunter]

R E D > You enter the door and find yourself in a glass box, suspended in the sky. Bright blue skies, white fluffy clouds, even birds pass by in the air around you. One look down and you see grass fields and sprawling lakes as far as the eye can see. Some wild horses running across the fields, some cows, just exactly what you'd expect. It's idyllic as fuck. Then the words appear:

Comments

[wheatcake]

Exactly! So- God, I wish I had some paper.

The way this game is set up is meant to punish cooperation and reward defection. In a normal game of Prisoner's Dilemma, the missing option on there is double defection. I'd posit this is because it doesn't want us to know what defection counts for.

But it still actually rewards generosity, if not cooperation.

My working model would be... we spin the wheel. If we land on someone not in this room, it's in our best interest to give the most generous thing possible. If it lands on someone who is in this room, we should work on figuring out what counts as a double-defection.

[He spreads his hands a little, as though he's just finished a long powerpoint presentation.] Does that make sense?

[cutlery]

Then we should hope that it is one of us, rather then the other group. They seemed fine enough people, but who knows how their own trials have been going?

[ like. sara especially? fuckin rip ]

[wheatcake]

No! Don't you see? None of the options reward selfishness.

Look at it like: give a big gift, and the only punishment is the possibility of giving something equal. Only one out of three options is bad.

Give a small gift, and two out of three options are bad.

Giving a bigger gift is the best choice. Statistically.

[lost_first]

[ It's a difficult thing. Harder than Peter knows; there's centuries of having trusted someone, someone who seemed to have the answers, who always knew how to make him believe time after time after time even as countless boys died all around them. His fingers tighten on the wheel.

It doesn't feel right. He's certain there's a trick, not to winning but to losing.
Some way to make even Peter's plan fall through.

But he closes his eyes, nods... and spins the wheel.]

[cutlery]

[ ...this is definitely a continuing conversation while the wheel is spinning ]

I believe I do understand? My point was more that while we are thinking this through, can we assume the same of the other side? Statistically, that is the optimal choice, but simply more optimal if the gifts remain in this group where it has been reasoned out.

[ As the wheel starts to slow, he waves his hand dismissively. ]

...Well, regardless, let us see.

[wheatcake]

It doesn't matter, because... oh, God. That kid's like thirteen.

[lost_first]

[ Jamie grits his teeth and it's hard. He doesn't really have much.

But he'd always been taught: from the least, what little you have is more for it.

Which is why he offers the last piece of Sal he really has, what was born on that moonlit night as they walked together through the trees, on the night where he'd realized what he might feel for her that he'd felt for no other beyond Peter.

His hope of escape.]