Coevolutionary Gaming Facilitate Group Decision Making? Coevolutionary

¶ … coevolutionary gaming facilitate group decision making?

Coevolutionary gaming can help to facilitate group decision-making through its highly demanding and highly complex processes. As Cares and Miskel explain, this type of gaming can help one to navigate complex strategy landscapes in safe environments that feel like real-time, but which actually allow one the luxury of making mistakes and engaging in bolder forms of trial error (2007). These games are even played now at the highest levels of defense within the U.S. Department of Defense, with as many as four teams involved in highly competitive, intricate and strategic moves and counter-moves (Cares & Miskel, 2007). These games are multi-day affairs which force all the players to stay focused and to make plans for short-term objectives and long-term objectives: five moves and responses thus push the team on a faux multi-year trajectory that isn't directly controlled by either team and where it's actually not uncommon to engage in strategic horizons of several years (Cares & Miskel, 2007). It's not unique for strategic horizons of over 20 years to foster, allowing all players to be forced to think about the future with strong and serious consideration. The benefits of these types of games is that they don't directly cause strategy to be developed, but all players get a more nuanced understanding of the way that competitive dynamics which drive that strategy into development can harness these insights to engage in bolder and more intensive strategies (Cares & Miskel, 2007).

As Cares and Miskel explain, "The term 'coevolution' is not just a metaphor. Coevolutionary gaming mimics the dynamics fundamental to ecological competition in order to explore the effects of conflict and cooperation between teams. Teams start in the present day with existing assets and near-term plans, and perhaps some quantity of a scarce resource, just as species in an ecosystem exist in a current evolutionary state and compete for their niches under some kind of selective pressure. One team imposes a shock to the system -- such as introducing new technology in a war game -- to increase the selective pressure. In successive moves, the teams fight for their futures through strategy adaptation and selection, just as generations of organisms coevolve in ecological competition" (2007). One of the overall benefits of this system is that it empowers teams to make bold moves and fail and then find a way to navigate through the initial failure. This can be one of the most tremendous learning experiences for all parties involved in that it pushes all members to see the clear consequences of their actions, and to examine the flaws and failures of other actions, and thus to work hard to overcome them. This puts all players in a clear situation where they have to learn from their mistakes in real time. As the writers of the article illuminate, sometimes these scenarios will cause all involved parties to uncover and develop initial strategies which can't help but assist them in future problem-solving situations in the future and for subsequent annihilation of all obstacles.

It's the component of the evolving of strategy that really is one of the biggest assets of coevolutionary gaming. This scenario is able to offer a strong theoretical framework for addressing the nuances of collective strategizing and related challenges. However, coevolutionary gaming is not a perfect answer at all times: "Recent advances point towards the fact that the evolution of strategies alone may be insufficient to fully exploit the benefits offered by cooperative behavior. Indeed, while spatial structure and heterogeneity, for example, have been recognized as potent promoters of cooperation, coevolutionary rules can extend the potentials of such entities further, and even more importantly, lead to the understanding of their emergence" (Perc, 2009). Thus, it's important to bear in mind that coevolutionary gaming is not a stagnant method nor is it immune to change and evolution: the rules and dynamics can have a strong impact and ripple effect on the way that people interact, the ability of players to reproduce, their overall reputation, age or mobility (Perc, 2009). Thus, as a tool for business or for even defense, it's something that needs to be treated with a fresh approach and perspective from time to time, so that all involved parties can adequately deal with it in the best possible manner and with the highest amount of relevancy.

Ultimately, leaders in business and in defense and in all other relevant fields need to determine how this strategic planning tool can be used in the best possible manner so that decision-making is improved -- individually and collectively. Scientists have long viewed the condition of cooperation within social conflicts of interest as an intriguing topic as in arenas like business, there's a desire for individuals to make their own profit but also the tendency of human beings to collaborate and to cooperate. In a research study which used the Prisoner's Dilemma Game to test out these exact dynamics they found: "If once every group adopts this corrected decision, he/she achieves mutual cooperation of high level in the sequential prisoner's dilemma game in case the number of strategies (= players) is within the definite range. We also note that this game can effectively describe the property of evolution of strategy only with a small number of players. When each group has many players, in contrast to previous research, the decision with correction also has an effect on the suppression of prevalence of defection. In addition, we also show that the decision of this model is analogous to the system of redistribution of revenue, which provides balance of strength between several teams in professional sports" (OhDaira & Terano, 2011). Thus, this research was able to demonstrate that ultimately a higher level of communication and cooperation can occur with coevolutionary gaming as it forces all members to reach a more cohesive level of communication. Even when groups make a poor decision, they have to acknowledge it and then work through it collectively. Even when group members work through their own failed decisions, they are able to learn individually why those decisions failed and the exact nature of their flaws.