Cohousing-L Mailing List: Tragedy of the commons

[Yusuf Pisan (yusuf.pisan]

[ Apologies for the long email. At least no animals were hurt in
writing or reading it :-) ]

I am a computer science academic who has been teaching and researching
computer games for the last 8 years. It is a fun job. Students are
highly motivated to learn about games; I love teaching. There is lots
of money in games, so the research can aspire to be industry relevant
forcing some collaboration between academics and industry.

My partner and I have been exploring cohousing options. We attended
the New England Cohousing gathering, visited a number of cohousing
communities (special thanks to Robert at Eno Commons and Steve at
Takoma Villa for hosting us and giving us a tour; Megan at Eastern
Creek and Ray at Arcadia for giving us a tour). We will be attending
the California Cohousing bus tour on Oct 27 and hope to visit Pleasant
Hill, Berkeley, Temescal Creek, Temescal Commons and Yulupa as well.
(We are starting to fix our dates and contact each place, but if you
can host us in your guest room or have a common meal around those
dates when we can visit your community, please do email me)

Back to "Tragedy of the Commons". For those who are not familiar with
the terminology, it is often heard in economics, political science,
law, and game theory circles and dates back to Aristotle who said:

        "For that which is common to the greatest number has the least
care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at
all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as
an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more
inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill"

It essentially comes down to "how free access and unrestricted demand
for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource
through over-exploitation"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>

At a recent games conference, DIGRA 2007, one of my colleagues ran an
informal experiment in the form of a game about shared resources and
its use. Alas, I was not attending the conference, but another
colleague reported it in her blog
<http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2007/09/26/commonsthinking/> He
experimented with Anarchy, Dictatorship and Democracy and in that game
Dictatorship with a benevolent dictator featured the best outcome.

This is by no means a "scientific result". It served to demonstrate
his point at the conference, but it got me thinking about a couple of
issues. First, would a "consensus model" be plausible for conference
attendees who are together for a short time and know that they are
playing a game. Secondly, how do cohousing communities avoid the
"tragedy of the commons" problem.

One factor is that people self-select to live in cohousing and they
have already consciously made the choice to maintain the commons.
Another factor is unlike problems like over-fishing, a typical tragedy
of commons example, where people can overfish and then move on,
cohousing is an explicit choice to choose to live in a particular
location. The last thing you'd want is to use the
resources/facilities, run them down and then move.

These are important factors, but not factors that can be implemented
in a game. I am interested in designing a game (as part of the serious
games effort) that teaches people how to be unselfish, to be
protective of and contributing to the commons rather than just seeing
them as a resource to be consumed.

If you can think of additional factors that work in your community
that enable commons to prosper and grow rather than dwindle and die,
please email me and I will try to see how it can be designed into a
game.

For the politically inclined, I strongly recommend "The Redistricting
Game" <http://www.redistrictinggame.org/> to see how games can be used
as teaching tools.

Cheers,

Yusuf


-- 
Yusuf Pisan
University of Technology, Sydney
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Visiting)
Interactive Media and Game Development
http://staff.it.uts.edu.au/~ypisan/
http://ramblingonthisandthat.blogspot.com/

Meryl McQueen
http://meryl.mcqueen.googlepages.com/