It’s Game Theory

What it all comes down to is what Russell Crowe as John Nash was on about in A Beautiful Mind.  Watch this clip — it’ll only take a few minutes — then come back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk

Okay, so that’s a game theory concept right there, but it’s also a big underlying current in the stuff I’ve been talking about.  This is Friday, so I’m going to be quick about it with this one.

Commenting on Wednesday’s post, Scott Acker said:

You know, at the beginning of this it was a bit like seeing the ‘trick’ behind the magician. Like where you learn how they saw the lady in half and what not. A little weird and deflating. Not because I didn’t know how this stuff works but I guess its strange having it pointed out and its you, me, etc that [you're] talking about.

And I replied:

You know, it’s easy to read this and employ the advice and do it for completely mercenary reasons only. But that’s not the magic trick, really, that’s just capable sleight of hand. For the actual magic, you have to employ all this with absolutely genuine intent to *be* that peer, to *be* respectful — not just to act like it. If you’re not authentic in that regard, that will become apparent at some point. You’ve got to mean it and live it. I’m not sure I can teach that part; some days I feel like I’m still trying to manage it myself.

At the core of all of this is that game theory idea that “Nash” was on about: doing what’s good for the group (the community) and what’s good for the individual (the community organizer).  Consistency in picking the best options in front of you — where “best” is defined as the greatest aggregate good for both you and your community — pays out.

If you constantly prioritize your community without giving any heed to your own needs in the formula, running the community is going to wear you thin and leave you resentful. It’s going to kill the reason you got that community going in the first place. In the long term, that’s not only bad for your personal joy but also for the community.

If you constantly prioritize your needs over the community’s, at best you’re going to drop the ball a lot and end up feeding into a trend towards stagnancy.  At worst, you’ll come off as a tyrant, and it won’t be stagnancy you’ll be dealing with — it’ll be mutiny.

So what you do is prioritize both.  And in doing so, you’re in easy grasp of that authenticity, that genuine intent I’m talking about.  If the things you do are good for you and good for your community, then there’s no conflict between a selfless motive and a self-interested motive.  And that makes it much easier to be positive about the whole enterprise — for everyone.

You could see someone saying this about the whole Dresden Files Disclosure Pledge thing I talked about on Wednesday: “Sure, Fred’s going to make a few extra sales because he’s doing this — but he’s also giving the fans out there a chance to get at all sorts of information about the game that they wouldn’t normally with another company.” The move both serves the self (Evil Hat) and the community (fans of the Dresden Files and fans of Fate). So it works, and works well from what I can see.

I’m shading over to talking about the Evil Hat side of things, here, and that’s for a reason.  “The individual” and “the company” are pretty similar when you talk about community building strategies, as is “the community” and “the customers and fans”.  One and the same, really, for these purposes.  So all the stuff I’ve been saying about community building applies equally to customer building, to fan building.

Which means you can apply these things as sales techniques.  And that sounds pretty mercenary … until you zero in on the game theory lesson again.  Applying that, it becomes clear that the trick isn’t just to prioritize the company — i.e., the maximized profit motive — when making decisions as a game publisher. And it’s not to prioritize the customers either. The trick is to prioritize both.

And so, at Evil Hat, we have the Disclosure Pledge for the DFRPG, we have PDFs bundled for free with print products, we have the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee, we have our general effort to participate with our customers as equals rather than as voices-of-authority, and we have an orientation towards maximum possible transparency as a business.

And, sure: if I factored out the customer angle in the business decisions I’m talking about, and just looked at the company’s, it might well be that I’m making a number of decisions that are less than optimized for the company’s best interests.  I’m certainly investing more work in making those things happen than I “have to”.  But add the customer angle back in, and I think Evil Hat is managing to strike pretty close to the greatest good, there. And long-term, I think that the community-focused benefits form a big feedback loop that makes it actually even better for the company’s “self interest”.

As a publisher, you’re not selling to faceless customers — or at least, you shouldn’t be.  Make those personal connections.  Pull them up on stage and make them awesome with you.  Organize them together in a way that best suits growing as a community.  Because they’re not your customers, they’re your community.  Don’t hold your community at a remove.

Participate.  Deputize. Celebrate. And they’ll celebrate you back.