NG1 - St Francis Hospital - Game thread

[rho21]

It's interesting, though - I reckon that the blame for our relative lack of creativity lies with the fact that there really did seem to be a binary between 'unacceptable' and 'barely acceptable' / 'acceptable'. Like, why would anyone sign up for something that was unacceptable? Hence Gavagai's question - as soon as you start putting a number to things you start to realise that having something unacceptable in the mix is not the end of the world, and only actually represents a 5-10% hit to your overall score. But based on the fluff this did not seem to be the case - indeed for Parker and MacNamara resignation would seem a better prospect than any even slightly sub-optimal deal.

Mm, I was certainly reading unacceptable as "you should almost never accept a deal with this option in" rather than "this is slightly worse than the barely acceptable options". Something like these scorings (put together quickly, don't treat them as too accurate), relative to 0 for no agreement:
                             

I	II	III	IV
D +60	B +80	C +40	P3 0
C -6	C -8	A +32	P1 -2
B -100	A -160	D -4	P4 -4
A -120		B -80	P2 -40

In essence, I would be happy to accept "barely acceptable" options if I got one thing I was happy with. Note that the two plausible deals are CAD4: -174, CCD4: -22. Interestingly, your rough and ready first scoring attempt also gave me no possible deal that was better than the no agreement score. If I'd understood before the end that there was no plausible deal I would accept, perhaps I would have gone looking for a way to sabotage an agreement. I was definitely expecting more of a game where you give ground gradually and try to reach the best possible deal that's acceptable to you.

Obviously, the setup wasn't designed with anything like this reading of things. I still think we were right not to add scoring part-way through negotiations, but a setup with scoring provided from the start (or a good clarification of how we should read certain key words) would have been an improvement from a game perspective - though not necessarily from a teaching perspective. [N.B. I mean relative scoring of issues, not scoring for the debate result: knowing how well you're expected to do would give too much information on how strong your negotiating position is.]

Probably the most frustrating thing was not being able to talk to people when you wanted to - in some cases until almost the end of negotiations. This is where it feels it differs most strongly from how it would work in real life, and is probably the weakest aspect of playing a game like this asynchronously. I understand that a free for all wouldn't be ideal, but I'd like to see emails / PMs allowed between people when they aren't both online. On the flip side, it's good to know who's been talking. Not sure how else we could improve this aspect. Maybe it would be possible to have fixed debating sessions when everyone will try to be online; outside these times public thread messages only (possibly also messages to and from one specified character?).

The asymmetry was interesting and I think necessary for a good setup. With full symmetry, it would be possible to just exclude anybody the team wished to throw to the wolves from the final deal, which would be very disappointing. The possibility of something like Bennett's position also makes for all sorts of interesting bluffs, provided there's a reasonable number of deals that can be reached.

But the process point is interesting. Had I not been otherwise engaged for the first few hours, maybe I could have grabbed the bull by the horns in the role of CEO and acted as a self-appointed mediator.

Agreed that the process idea is interesting. I was anticipating from the build-up that your role would be the easiest. I could imagine a scoring system where "no agreement" is particularly bad for you, and much less bad for others. This naturally leads to your best role in the negotiations being that of mediator and facilitator. Might change the process a bit if this role can be established, though it would help if you were online at all times.


Anyway, regardless of my mostly negative comments above (hopefully they're actually constructive criticism), I enjoyed the game and would play something similar again.

[Jkaen]

Probably the most frustrating thing was not being able to talk to people when you wanted to - in some cases until almost the end of negotiations. This is where it feels it differs most strongly from how it would work in real life, and is probably the weakest aspect of playing a game like this asynchronously. I understand that a free for all wouldn't be ideal, but I'd like to see emails / PMs allowed between people when they aren't both online. On the flip side, it's good to know who's been talking. Not sure how else we could improve this aspect. Maybe it would be possible to have fixed debating sessions when everyone will try to be online; outside these times public thread messages only (possibly also messages to and from one specified character?).

From the outside I didnt think that was too bad. it makes things easier to follow, and if things are anything like they are in my workplace, actually getting hold of the CEO to have a 5 minute chat with him, or to get him to read an email is challenging and annoying, just as in this game!

[Bacchus]

On the "unacceptable", I did think that the only potential ambiguity was in cases where, say you are offered top option for your most important issue, decent things for others and unacceptable for the least important. In other words, from a position of "barely acceptable" on all issues, are you prepared to move "up" on the most important issues at the cost of moving "down" on the least important. Seemed to make sense to say "yeah, maybe, as long as you move up far enough".