optimal weave 0.1

A good game facilitates experiences that are difficult to get anywhere else. Optimal Weave offers experience in the social rhythms of cooperative bargaining, experimental peace-craft, negotiation amid anarchy. We hope it will inspire further cohabitive games, a new genre of semi-cooperative (or cooperative but spicy) multiplayer games that confront the realities of conflict without contriving zero-sum dynamics. When done well, this kind of game will facilitate a richer variety of relationships and dynamics between player characters, as well as having much livelier, more open table dialog.

Collective decisionmaking is mostly about negotiation. Skilfull negotiation renders the exposure of difference and disagreement harmless, improving political outcomes, building peace, untying dysfunctional relational knots and converging towards the optimal weave. Negotiation failure is centrally implicated in every tragedy. Every demonstration of force and will that was measured in wasted lives can be traced back to negotiation inefficiencies. So, we think there is probably a craving, out there, that these games can sate.

When negotiation problems pop up in daily life, the stakes are usually high, so we tend to approach them in avoidant and conservative ways that aren't conducive to learning, so most of us never get an opportunity to develop this infrastructural social literacy. To lower the stakes of experimental practice here, we need a learning context that lets us quickly and efficiently trial lots of risky strategies in a diverse range of scenarios and then forget and forgive what didn't work, which is to say, what we need is a game!

Optimal Weave presents two levels of play, and an additional simpler cohabitive game that can be played with the same pieces. The components of P1 can also be thought of as a modular toolset for exploring the cohabitive game space. Cohabitive games are so underexplored that I'd expect players to find something interesting wherever they land.

Let's embark!