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Learning to Cheat Without Breaking the Rules, Part 3: Schooner or Later

[After a 2 year gap, this finally concludes the story begun in part 1 and part 2 …]

When I was a kid, I couldn’t lie, I was terrified of breaking rules, and I was determined to be perfectly honest and perfectly trustworthy, not realising the two are incompatible. Years passed, and then in October 2011 I played Schooner or Later, and I flagrantly cheated and betrayed a complete stranger, much to my own surprise. Perhaps even more surprising, I found that I was actually okay with this.

Right after that I started a series of posts on the subject of lying and cheating, how both are important and justified in some situations, and how games helped me learn to do those things when necessary. But I stalled on the final post, which was intended to examine the specifics of my betrayal in Schooner or Later. This is hardly satisfactory, especially considering I actually interviewed one of the main creators of the game, Josh Hadley, for the purposes of that write-up.

So, it’s time to face up to my past: this is the final part in the series, describing what happened that night, alongside commentary from Josh, which I think endorses my actions.

Of course, I may be wrong about that.

So, long ago, on the 13th October 2011, there was a Sandpit event at the National Maritime Museum, with a bunch of maritime-related games.

One of these was a variant of Perudo (called Filthy Lying Liar’s Dice, by Gareth Briggs), in which everyone rolls their dice (which in this case corresponded to parts of a pirate ship), and then plays a kind of cumulative variant of Cheat. Losing a round means you lose a die, reducing your ability to understand the state of the game. Thanks to my training in lying-related games (as detailed in part 1), I did pretty well, making it to the final showdown, albeit with a single die.

Playing the game with strangers, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before when playing similar things with friends: despite everyone bluffing / lying and generally trying to harm everyone else’s chances of winning, a sort of camaraderie developed, and by the end we felt somehow unified. If you administered some sort of trust test, I imagine we would all trust one another much more than we had at the start, despite playing a game that hinged on misleading one another. Perhaps this is related to the fact that you can only trust someone with a secret if you know they can lie if asked about it.

Anyway, at the end of the evening, most of the players (about 35 of us) were funnelled into the final game: Schooner or Later (SoL) by The Haberdashery, in particular by Josh Hadley and Casey Middaugh. In part 2 of this series, I argued that moderated games played for fun were the best type to let players explore cheating. Various aspects of the game design and the running of SoL meant an entire spectrum of cheating was available, and even implicitly encouraged. By my count, we saw 7 levels of cheating that night, each more flagrant than the last – and when I asked him about it later, Josh said he was happy with all of these bar one.

Schooner or Later – the basics

At a base level, SoL is a trading game. Players travel between three ports – England, India, China – buying and selling commodities and trying to turn the greatest profit within the set time limit. But that’s just the framework: the actual execution of the game encouraged cheating of every type.

Josh on cheating

When I asked Josh his thoughts on cheating, he answered immediately: “I try to make games where cheating is an interesting and viable approach – it’s something I consciously try to involve in every game that I game.”

He dates this back to when his family used to play Monopoly (which he characterised as “the worst game ever inflicted on humanity”), in which the only way they could make it tolerable was by introducing a house rule: “anything is permitted so long as you don’t get caught out” – just like “Extreme Cheat” that I mentioned in part I.

(Incidentally, the history of Monopoly’s development is quite illuminating).

Even against this backdrop, Josh thought SoL was special: “This game encouraged cheating, almost as a design principle.”

He also thought the theme was appropriate, and was what encouraged him to add in ‘cheating’ elements: as part of the East India Trading Company, “everyone was a gigantic bastard”.

I think that’s very interesting. How do you make a game in which everyone is supposed to be some kind of oversized bastard, given that it will be played by players who may not personally be any kind of bastard at all? Here’s how.

SoL Cheating, Level 1: Opium smuggling

The primary twist on basic trading in SoL is a mechanic that feels illicit, but you are expected to do it (like lying in werewolf). Players can choose to ‘smuggle’ opium, manifested in-game as balloons, from India to China. Two moderators took the role of coast guards trying to prevent the opium trade by popping the balloons of players they could catch.

The layout was excellent for this: there were three smuggling routes to choose from, and two coast guards, so you could usually find a way.

Because of the sneaking necessary, and the compelling stand-in for real violence of balloon popping, choosing to smuggle had the feel of being illicit – but the rewards for success were so substantial that it was hard to resist. Besides, when playing for fun, you want to try everything out. Perhaps at the start of my personal journey – before I had played Extreme Cheat – I might have tried to go ‘legit’ and trade only the regular goods. But as a result I wouldn’t have stood a chance of winning, and I certainly wouldn’t have had as much fun.

Josh noted that there is supposed to be a tension between the opium and standard economic game, with an emergent strategy on when to switch – but he was also curious: as a player, do you think about what you’re doing, in an ethical sense?

With opium trading explicitly written into the rules and briefed, I’m not sure many players spent that much time worrying about this. However, that ambiguity is certainly present in the many further layers of cheating that the game’s design encouraged. For example…

SoL Cheating, Level 2: Cotton dumping

The second twist was somewhat surreal. England wanted to trade cotton (represented by cotton wool balls), and any time you made a trade of goods there, they would insist that you take a handful of cotton wool and try to sell it to India or China. Furthermore, any cotton you were left with at the end of the game would count against your score.

But India and China didn’t want the cotton – they certainly wouldn’t give you money for it, at best they might grudgingly accept it. The cotton wool balls also take up room in your hands, making it harder to get on with the real business of trading tea and pepper, or smuggling Opium.

This means you’re incentivised to “lose” your cotton en route – but the rules don’t say anything about that. Can you just drop it? Do you have to hide it? Give it away to non-players? Having a quirk like this built into the rules is an effective way of making the players aware that they should be creative.

Josh confessed that this broke the rules for a Sandpit game, in that the game design encouraged littering (“I’m fairly sure there’s still wads of cotton wool bunched up behind exhibits in the National Maritime Museum”), and while they paid lip service towards telling people not to do it, they knew it was inevitable.

As well as meeting his goal of encouraging ‘cheating’, Josh also noted that this is actually a historic truth – the majority of the captains did pitch their cotton overboard because they had the same incentives as us! (I’ve not found a good citation for this, sadly).

SoL Cheating, Level 3: Haggling

Haggling was not mentioned in the verbal briefing, but explicitly encouraged in the instructions. Any player not noticing this would quickly cotton on (ho ho) once they heard the haggles going on at the various ports.

What are the rules of haggling? Only what you can propose, and what the other will agree to. There seemed to be a little flexibility in the price, but it seemed you would do a lot better with a more creative approach – for example, pointing out that making it a round 100 would mean they could hand over a single 100-worth token instead of counting out the 90 in the asking price. In this way, the moderators (as the operators of the ports) were actively giving the players cues on how to play, and proving that the game was flexible.

SoL Cheating, Level 4: Co-operation

The fourth twist (in my somewhat arbitrary ordering) was co-operation. The results of haggling suggested that greater quantities of a good yielded bigger discounts. This created an incentive for players to work together, pooling their resources to get a bigger pay-off. Of course, where co-operation is possible, so too is defection.

Why I’m a big cheater, and that’s okay

Having enjoyed the “cheating” of dumping cotton wool (I bestowed it upon a friend who wasn’t playing), smuggling opium (surprisingly frightening but very rewarding), and haggling, I was getting the feeling that the boundaries of the game were open to question.

When I realized both I and another player at port in China had 47 gold and we would each be offered 6 tea in exchange, I proposed we pool our resources to better haggle for more. With this plan agreed spontaneously in front of the port moderator, we were offered 13 tea rather than 12. We pointed out that 14 would be much fairer as then we could divide it by two.

“Not my problem,” came the reply. “You’ll have to work it out between you.” We looked doubtful, not sure how to resolve this fairly.

“Put your hands out, ” said the moderator, and I did. He put the 13 tea bags in my hands.

Then he looked me in the eye and said: “Run!”

This was the magic moment for me. When you’re playing for fun, and taking your cue from the moderators as to what’s allowed, how do you react to a direct prompt like that? How would I?

I said “I wouldn’t do that, I’m an honourable trader,” and turned to my compatriot: “Here’s 3 tea for you. Bye!” and to my own surprise, I made off with the other 10. “That’s not honourable!” my former compatriot replied, “Come back here!”

We both made port at England, at which point my former compatriot attempted to seek restitution from the authority there. Upon understanding the situation, England’s port moderator simply said “I’m sorry, this is clearly an internal matter. I can’t help. I’ll give you 95 for your 10 tea.” Another endorsement – I felt like I’d been bad (which I had), but somehow within the spirit of the game, if not within the letter of the rules.

As I wrote in part 1, I started out in life so determined to be a ‘good’ person, I wouldn’t cheat even in games where cheating was the point (like “Cheat”). The fact that I cheated another player so brazenly here really shocked me, and that’s why I started writing this series of posts: to understand what sequence of events – actually, games – brought me to this place.

But given that I also interviewed one of the key designers of the game, and that I put off writing this particular moment up for 2 years, I’m suspicious of my own motives. These posts could all be read as one big attempt to excuse my decision that day, and talking to Josh may just have been a subconscious attempt to have my actions endorsed.

Fortunately for me, that is exactly what happened.

Josh’s comment was “That’s a great story – I’m really pleased by that!” – and he reaffirmed that he had hoped players would think about the ethics of what they were doing, and question their decisions in just this sort of way.

He also particularly praised the Haberdashery crew for creating the environment that made this work: “We could only give the players freedom if we also gave the crew freedom. So long as you have a good crew – and we had an amazing crew – you have a huge amount of leniency to encourage and permit that kind of behaviour.” Crucially, he pointed out, the Haberdashery crew know how to “manipulate rules without necessarily breaking the game.”

But cheating in SoL didn’t stop there.

SoL Cheating, Level 5: Syndicates

Other players went much further. Beyond short-term co-operation, a few players actually formed syndicates: they pooled their resources, ran interference to facilitate smuggling, and declared a collective score at the end rather than an individual one.

I had the impression that the players that did this already knew (and trusted) one another outside of the game, but I didn’t feel hard done by: it felt like a logical extension to the game. Josh in particular was really pleased by this development – it’s something he had hoped would emerge, and this was the first run of the game where it actually happened (perhaps because the scale was so large, with 35 players).

SoL Cheating, Level 6: Role-play

As another clue that this was no ordinary trading game, one of the moderators running trade at China began to act as if she was succumbing to an opium addiction. I heard from Josh that a player took advantage of this by withholding opium in order to secure a ridiculous bulk discount on tea, allowing them to actually buy All the Tea in China. When the player presented this haul to England, they received what Josh described as a “frankly insulting amount of money”, but nonetheless profited from their wilyness.

Josh considered this another example of the Haberdashery moderators knowing just how much they could bend the rules: they had been specifically briefed that they were empowered to deliver whatever they thought was a good experience, so long as it didn’t break the game. In particular, he admired the way the moderator at India (Ruth) could appear out of control while actually being fully in control, and the moderator at England (Nick) could give the appearance of being inflexible while actually bending the rules as much as anyone. This extreme event briefly impeded normal trading of tea, but this was swiftly fixed.

SoL Cheating, Level 7: Stealing!

The final level of cheating was achieved by a player who flat-out stole some pepper from India when the moderators were distracted. I’m not sure Sandpit players would usually stoop to that sort of behaviour, but in the context of everything else that was going on it must have seemed reasonable.

But this was where Josh drew the line – crucially, with this type of cheating, the moderators were no longer in control of the game. When this happens, “it stops being a game, and becomes a free-for-all”. Fortunately, this didn’t generate a substantial advantage, unlike the syndicate of three players running their Opium smuggling ring who ultimately “won” the game.

Epilogue(s)

One player decided to “corner the market” in cotton wool, and had been collecting it at every available opportunity, storing it in his hat:

He was duly congratulated as the “true winner” and received a round of applause. After all, he had played for fun, and he had certainly succeeded at that.

While the scores were being collected, I overheard one player lamenting how it could be a perfectly reasonable game if it weren’t for all this “cheating”, and that people should just trade according to the rules. Most unfortunately, this turned out to be the very player I had betrayed earlier. I introduced myself, and apologised, but tried to defend myself by saying “Of course, once you saw how the game could be played, I’m sure you went ahead and did similar things yourself,” to which he replied “No, I traded entirely by the rules.”

This was difficult. I felt as if I had to justify my decision somehow, but rather than try to explain the entire argument put forth in this series of posts (which I was only vaguely perceiving), I simply passed the buck: “Well, you saw what happened – I was encouraged to do it. He just shoved the tea in my hand and told me to run. At least I gave you some.” At this he grudgingly admitted that that was true. Only at this point does the role of the moderator end: when their judgements are used by players to justify their decisions.

Finally, one pair of players had to leave before the final scores were counted up – and they happened to have been playing the Liar’s Dice variant with me earlier that evening. For whatever reason, they chose to bequeath their accumulated in-game wealth to me.

I like to think that they felt they could trust me, even though I’d been proved a liar.

Of course, I may be wrong about that.

[Update below added 8th May 2022 – T.M.]

Postscript, 9 years later

The definitive conclusion of this journey came in 2022. As part of the panel in a work recreation of ‘Would I Lie To You’, I was required read out loud a card with part of a story or anecdote, not knowing in advance what it would say, and then justify to the opposing panel and audience that this was a true story from my life.

More specifically, if it was a lie I had to make it seem truthful, and if it was true I had to make it sound like a lie.

Each participant had two cards, and these were mine:

Either or both could have been true or false; as it happens I got one of each. Most amazingly, and with only a little luck, I convinced the opposing panel that the lie was true and the truth was a lie.

My journey to become a person who you can trust to lie if necessary is now complete!

Tim Mannveille tweets as @metatim, and has previously managed to blog about a sandpit event much more quickly than this.

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Learning to Cheat Without Breaking the Rules, Part 2: Frameworks for Cheating

For the same reason as in Part 1, these posts are illustrated using the Hand of Fate: Comic Strip Playing Cards by Karen Rubins. This is Part 2. Part 3 is here.

In the first part I explained how a sequence of games taught me to become comfortable with bluffing and even lying outright, from a position of not being able to do either. That’s simple. The harder question is this: what kind of games can teach you to bend or break rules?

To tackle that, we should probably step back and ask how games teach us anything. And to tackle that, we should probably make sure we have a working definition for a game.

Here’s one provided by Greg Costikyan (emphasis added):

A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.

Yes, something like that. From there it seems clear that playing with decisions in a game is how we learn. So the question becomes instead: what kind of game could let us play with the decision of whether or not to break rules?

Form or Content?

I don’t know of one, but I imagine you could make a game about cheating (in the rule-breaking sense, not just bluffing or lying). Perhaps players take the role of political factions within a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, with in-game costs and benefits for following or breaking in-game rules. Or it’s Moon colonists with competing sets of societal rules, struggling for domination while following or breaking the rule sets of the competing factions. Or, I wonder, do football simulations these days give you the option of going for a risky tackle, knowing that you risk a red card if it goes badly? I don’t know, but they certainly could.

But in the process of abstracting away the costs and benefits of cheating, it feels as if something gets lost. Just as making decisions in poker has a very different feel when real money is on the table, a game with a cheating theme seems far removed from the potential power of a game that is about cheating the very rules of the game itself.

So we want a game whose rules somehow give players interesting decisions to make regarding whether or not to follow those rules, which sounds like an almost Gödelian paradox. So let’s take a step to one side and look at exactly what it is that drives whether or not rules are followed in a game.

Game frameworks for cheating

There are two key dimensions to consider here, I think:

1) Do people play the game to win, or do they play it for fun? Perhaps more accurately, does the pleasure come from winning – or striving to do so – or just from taking part? There’s a spectrum here, of course, and players of the same game could be at different points along it. For the sake of simplicity we’ll assume it’s binary.

2) How are the rules enforced in the game?

  • By design. In video games this is simple: the game should only let you do what you are allowed to do. Other kinds of games can also facilitate enforcement by their design – for example, playing a piece in Connect 4 makes a distinctive noise, so it’s hard to secretly take an extra turn if your opponent is briefly distracted.
  • By the other players. In most well-defined tabletop or party games, it’s understood that the players are watching each other to ensure they all play by the rules.
  • By a moderator. Generally speaking, if a game can’t work with either of the above approaches, it resorts to some kind of moderator who enforces the rules.

Let’s take a look at how cheating works across the 6 kinds of game this framework implies, and in particular whether choosing to bend or break rules is an interesting* choice for the players to make.

I should probably define ‘interesting’ here. Let’s say that an interesting choice is somewhat balanced (one choice is not obviously better than another), not damaging to longer-term goals, and is fun. And then let’s not try to define ‘fun’ or we’ll be here all day.


Games Played to Win

Play to Win, Design enforced (e.g. PvP video games)
The rules are enforced by the design of the game. As a corollary, anything you can do ought to be allowed, since cheating is theoretically impossible. In reality, it’s not that simple.

A reasonably notorious example is ‘snaking’ in Mario Kart DS. By performing a particular manoeuvre when cornering you get a speed boost. For certain karts, you could perform this manoeuvre almost continuously, alternating left and right – ‘snaking’ – and you could gain more from those speed boosts than you lost by taking a wiggling route. This takes some skill and practice, which makes the benefit seem fair. And since it’s possible in the game, it should be permissible, even if it’s not clear it was the designers’ original intent.

In practice, however, snaking gives such a big advantage that a player that does it will almost always beat a player that doesn’t, no matter how skilled. People are playing to win – that’s what usually makes a race fun – but if even one player is snaking, anyone that can’t snake can’t win, and so, implicitly, can’t have fun. For that reason, the London DS meetup group I played with had a no-snaking rule, and I see on the internet that other groups did as well. Snaking was considered a kind of cheating, and nobody would want to play with you. So no-snaking becomes an informal rule, and this becomes effectively the same as Player Enforced Play to Win.

(You can dive much further into this topic with Sirlin’s “Playing to win” archives)

Play to Win, Player enforced (e.g. Chess or Go)
As noted by Kirk Battle in this Kill Screen article, players can apply a certain level of flexibility to how rules are enforced in a game like Magic: The Gathering, and get a better game as a result. But this is not a situation in which such ‘cheating’ represents an interesting choice.

In it’s more blatant form, cheating in these games will always be considered bad form, and if discovered can have bad social and future gaming consequences. Chess or Go (when played without an audience) fall into this category. A player would only choose to cheat if they thought the short-term advantage would outweigh the risk of long-term negative consequences if they were found out. That’s not a very interesting choice either, according to the criteria above.

Play to Win, Moderator enforced (e.g. Football, Tennis)
Cheating outside of the moderator’s sight gives an advantage, and can’t be stopped in this system. You’re playing to win, and if you don’t exploit this fact, maybe the other guys will.

We see this in competitive sports like football or tennis, and it seems to be (I say this as an outsider) a key part of the entertainment: arguing about whether something counts as a foul, which side of the line the ball bounced on, and in general whether or not the moderator’s decisions are accurate.

Does this mean there’s some scope here for a game that could teach us about cheating? It seems close, but if people are playing to win, it gets dangerous – some degree of violence attempted outside of the moderator’s views seems likely, so I’m going to disqualify this on the grounds of encouraging non-fun behaviour.

Games Played for Fun

Play for Fun, Design enforced (e.g. Endless MMOs)
If you (and everyone else) is playing for fun, things change. If something is possible, and makes for more fun, few can blame you. If you were (somehow) playing Mario Kart just for fun, and through a streak of bad luck found yourself in dead last by some margin, perhaps it would be okay to snake your way to 7th place – that would be more fun for all concerned.

In Kingdom of Loathing, a kind-of MMO in which fun is primarily derived from exploration, an ‘exploit’ was discovered to generate more meat (the game’s currency). Who could resist such an exploit? Why resist it? Could you really begrudge those that used it?

In the case of online games like this, the rules are enforced by design, but there’s also some moderation in the form of game updates and code changes in response to things like this. In this particular case, the exploit effectively crashed the game’s economy, which impacts everyone’s ability to have fun. (Brilliantly, this was fixed with the addition of some entertaining currency sinks, rather than some kind of hard rollback).

So cheating is kind of interesting here, but again becomes more about player- and moderator-enforcement, so strictly speaking this category is ruled out.

Play for Fun, Player enforced (e.g. Mornington Crescent, DDR)
At this point, what constitutes ‘cheating’ is massively dependent on the players: having fun is more important than the rules. We’re right on the edge of what constitutes a game here and it’s an area I think most adults struggle to give themselves permission to enter. The most well-known example I can think of in this category is Mornington Crescent.

Less directly, this arises in Dance Dance Revolution (aka Dancing Stage), in which (for the benefit of the one person reading this that doesn’t know) players must step on specific directional arrows in time to the music. On the arcade machines, a raised bar is supplied behind the player, ostensibly to prevent anyone from falling off the dancing platform backwards. At a high level of gameplay, working out how to shift your bodyweight between feet while meeting a high-speed series of instructions is part of the challenge. However, some players realised they could lean their weight back on the bar and tap away with their feet without worrying about this issue; this also uses less energy. Is this cheating? As could be expected, that depends on who is playing.

In both of these cases, the decision of whether or not to cheat tends to have very little riding on it, so is unlikely to be interesting.

Play for Fun, Moderator enforced (e.g. Schooner or Later)
The Moderator’s role is to ensure people have fun, arguably as a higher priority than ensuring that people follow the rules. In this context, you might ‘cheat’ but do so with the moderator’s implicit or explicit blessing; or you might try to cheat by hiding your action from or misleading the moderator, and since people are only playing for fun this shouldn’t lead to anything particularly harmful. With the right set of incentives and approach by the moderator(s), this could well provide a framework in which a decision to cheat is actually interesting.

In conclusion, returning to our grid of possible games, here’s what the options for learning to cheat look like in each:

This final category is where The Haberdashery’s Schooner or Later comes in, the game that led me to cheat in a manner that could only be described as brazen, and shocked me into this whole line of thinking. I’ll describe how exactly that came about in the third and final part of this series.

Tim Mannveille tweets as @metatim, and has previously not cheated in order to earn stickers he made up at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.