The Gift

I feel pretty good about the "game of trust" model, a lot better than I've felt about any of its predecessors. I have some trusted advisers who've promised me their responses, so I won't say I've settled on it entirely until I've heard what they have to say about the idea, but I have a strong suspicion that something like that will make it through to the end of the game.

Right now, though, the part that bothers me most of all lies with the betting. The mechanic needs some way for relationships to affect it, of course, and to work as a game, it needs to introduce some separation between the character and the player playing the character, but all the same, the notion of forcing a character to trust seems ... wrong.

While turning this over in my head, I realized that the mechanic worked, but the verbal understanding of the mechanic missed the mark. What I had here didn't involve betting to force trust—I had competitive gift exchange.

Marcel Mauss' classic The Gift needs a lot of updating in a lot of ways, but the general idea remains: we give gifts to gain one another's trust. Anthropologists describe the hunter-gatherer economy as reciprocal, but this viewpoint comes from a domesticated viewpoint, where we have dislodged economic activity, often at great effort, from its underlying social foundations. A key point of wild—and by extension, feral—human society points us to the social fabric (and, I would say, the ecological, as perhaps an even better term, in that it extends the social beyond the merely human) as the ultimate basis of everything else that goes on in life. Reciprocity rules their "economy" becomes their economy exists only inside their social network, and gift-giving earns trust.

So, when you bet three beads, you move three beads from your bowl directly into the Other's bowl. You make a gift of three beads. You'll have to describe what kind of gift you've given; since the beads represent "power," or the capacity for change and movement, the gift can take any number of forms. You could offer a gift of praise, a story, or simply attention. The Other can then either accept your gift, and turn over to trust, or he can return your gift. If he simply returns it, the exchange ends there, meaning he did not accept your gift. If he gives you back more beads than you gave him—if he returns four beads, instead of three—then he has made a counter-gift. Now you must either return four beads to him, make an even larger counter-gift, or accept the gift and choose to trust.

We will need to use the beads for other parts of the game to make this interesting, of course (right now, I look at the beads as "potential energy," that a character can use more fluidly, or store more permanently by investing it in a relationship, which may give the player enough reason to want more beads right there).

A Game of Trust

I think I might have it! At first I thought I should make the Fifth World a game of awareness, and then I thought that it should follow a game of movement, but now I think it should follow a game of trust.

Despairing over how the lack of a core mechanic has kept me from going anywhere with the Fifth World, over lunch today I started to go over again with my wife what we really needed to accomplish with such a dynamic, and I began relating Ingold's take on domestication (1994). The usual gameplay mechanics of overcoming a challenge reflect the "domination" mindset Ingold identified at the heart of domestication. Any mechanic that comes down to counting successes means that you must succeed by domination, by overcoming challenges by force. Even if the game fiction maintains the typical beliefs of, say, a Cree hunter that deer offer themselves and that no violence occurs in the act of hunting, the fact that the hunter took the deer by gaining more successes than the deer says otherwise. It pats our fictional animist on the head condescendingly, while affirming that whatever he might believe, we know how it really happens. That doesn't relate us to an animist lifeworld, that just reinforces our cultural chauvanism.

But Ingold introduces much more nuance than the contrast of "domination vs. trust" might seem to infer. It does not simply demarcate "trust good, domination bad." Trust brings with it a nerve-wracking dependence. The hunter must trust that the deer will offer himself. To trust means making yourself vulnerable, and the fear and trepidation that comes with that. The Other might not reciprocate your trust; they may take advantage of you, or leave you helpless. The game mechanic should follow the challenges that appear in that life: the challenge of approaching the Other, each track drawing you closer, the building tension, and then, finally, the revelation.

As I described it, the moment of revelation hit me. We have a game just like that. Ready-made to become a resolution mechanic. Quick, easy. Other games have already used it. The prisoner's dilemma.

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?

We would want to skew this a bit. Take the example of hunting. Both hunter and prey must trust each other; the hunter must trust that the deer will offer himself, and the deer must trust that the hunter will make proper use of that gift, offering the correct rituals in thanks, sharing with all members of his community, and so on. If the hunter betrays that trust but the deer does not, he can take the deer and keep the meat for himself, or not share it out equally, or not give the proper thanks. If the hunter trusts but the deer does not, the deer lives and the hunter goes hungry. And if neither trusts, then the encounter never really happens at all.

When we had the gambling mechanic, some people said it needed some resolution behind it. What if characters bid to try to turn the other person to trust? You still don't know if they trusted themselves, or if they just want to screw you over. But you could bid your beads, or begin burning through your relationships, to compel that trust when you really need to (think of the energy invested in tracking, to gain greater empathy; or, if you need that moment of mutual trust to convince someone of your argument, the energy you put into persuasion or consensus-building). Then, once all bets come in, you have the dramatic moment of the reveal, when you find out who trusted, who betrayed, and who screwed over who.

At first, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, this encourages betrayal. But you don't play once; as a resolution mechanic, the game requires an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where other players punish betrayers. The same play pattern emerges: you learn (usually the hard way) that you won't get anywhere without trusting each other.

Other games have used this to great effect; Diamant and its English cousin, Inca Gold, rely on the prisoner's dilemma. I got to play Inca Gold earlier this month, and it made for a rollicking good time.

I don't know if this mechanic entirely works just yet, but I have a good feeling about it--something I haven't had for quite some time now. What do you all think? Does it sound like something worth pursuing?

• Ingold, T. (1994). From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations. In Animals and human society: changing perspectives, eds. A Manning and J Serpell. London: Routledge, pp 1-22.