Intro: I believe The Ultimate Advantage Game may be our best contribution to players, teachers & learners, particularly in certain Tournament frameworks offered, the most comprehensive of which offer the chance for experimenting with comparative tweaks &/or interventions.
Once the templates for the simple point matrix, individual matches & our adapted tournament designs go up, these can be copied for your own matches & tournaments. Though the simple, four-box scoring matrix for The Ultimate Advantage Game is exactly the same as provided by the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, the mind-set is not. Nor are its tournament frameworks the same as those in the original classic tournaments conducted by Axelrod & others.
In Axelrod’s classic, computer programs were submitted to play matches with each of the other submitted programs, at the end of which the least successful were dropped & most successful replicated for another round, the process repeating for a very large number of rounds. Our tournaments, by contrast, were always face to face affairs, with match-ups of actual people playing round by round. Although the research by Axelrod & others goes far beyond the conceptual limits implied by the original premise (two prisoners, each faced with a possible plea bargain), I believe the original frame confused the issue, which is essentially the choice between partners in an enterprise or relationship cooperating &/or going for a personal advantage at the other’s expense.
Without diminishing Axelrod’s findings, the original metaphor confused the choice between maintaining cooperation with a partner & cooperating (or not) with the police, blurring an exercise about “cooperating or not” into one simply about with which to cooperate. Other assumptions beside the metaphor also seemed worth challenging, like what does it really take (or mean) to “win”?–& at what level or scale is score kept? What about not just comparing individuals within a group, but for comparing groups as a whole with other groups? (Nor do our rules prohibit “passing enlightenment along,” with some groups even intentionally pre-primed to do so.)
Freed from the confusingly misleading metaphor, the real choice of participants in each case is simply between cooperation & going for an advantage at the other’s expense. There’s no need to corrupt the exercise with imagined prisoners, implied by making players imagine themselves as criminals. By eliminating the , partners-in-crime aspect, matches are automatically reframed into a far more generally relevant context in which potentially competitive self-interest is all one needs for a more realistic connection with the kind of social relations simulated.
In any case, The Ultimate Advantage version has usually been played in matches of 5 rounds each. At each round, players choose whether to “cooperate” or “go for an advantage, revealing their choices at the same time, and filling in their scores for that round accordingly. At the end of their 5 rounds together, each totals up the scores on their own scoresheet, and both move on to play with other partners. (Note use of the term with rather than against.) Tournaments can be structured such that each player has a match with each other player; or players can be assigned to sub-groups of six, say, within which each plays 5 round matches with each of the other five. Either way, all players should play the same number of matches, & so, of rounds.
Note that the implicitly assumed goal of accumulating the most points isn’t ever explicitly stated, so at the end of scored play, it’s possible to surprise participants with alternative ways of processing the results–e.g., defining scores to be totaled up as truly total, i.e., the sum scored by each pair in their match, rather than only the part scored by oneself. With multiple sub-groups of six players each, for example, a sub-group might be declared “winner” for having the largest total of all scores in all matches!
Different results tend to exist on each level, in other words, i.e., for individual players, for pairs & for sub-groups–the last raising the possibility of comparing not just randomly assigned groups with each other, but groups with different strategic guidance, or even specific instructions.