Post the deals you made and things you did here. Let's recap for the history books.
The most obvious strategies that came to mind to win a prisoner's dilemma involve strongarming the opponent. Basically what you do, is that rather than trying to convince the other player you will cooperate, you say you are going to steal no matter what. You say you will split your winnings with the other player if you win, and so capitulating is the only hope they have of walking away with anything, since if the other person also steals then you both get nothing.
The trouble with that strategy is I thought it just wouldn't be funny enough without some extra angle. Whenever I plan something on Manifold, I have this idea theory that a plan will be more likely to succeed if success would be the funniest outcome. And so with that in mind, I suspected that if I came in with a standard strongarm tactic, something would go wrong to mess with me. The idea I came up with to 'punch up' my strategy was to lean even farther into strongarming, to an unreasonable extent. I decided I would talk up my desperation as a debtor, and say I need ALL of the mana so that I could flip it into more to pay my debts, and the other person would have to settle for me owing them if they want anything at all. Seemed like a funny starting point to go from.
Roman leaned into a more classic strongarm strategy, but with a market-based twist. Right as the game began (or possibly beforehand) they bet 20k that they themself will choose to steal. Their idea was that this huge bet effectively locked them into the decision, thus making their opponent lose any hope of convincing them to change strategies and making the strongarm approach gain credibility and thus effectiveness.
What both Roman and I overlooked while planning is that if both players steal, the whole pot goes to the host, so any strongarm tactic can be circumvented by negotiating with the host! It's actually a three way negotiation, the host has almost as much bargaining power as the contestants! Not only that, but there was a mystery twist included in the rules. The twist turned out to be that all YES and NO shares in the market are reversed, which completely flipped Roman's strategy on its head and ruined his bargaining position lol.
There was a lot of frantic and complicated negotiations between myself, Roman, the host Quroe, and members of the audience. In particular an audience member Conflux (the host of the jeapordy game from earlier in Manifest) loaned me 31k. This loan may have partly occured because Conflux was in a good mood after a speech I gave in Conflux's honor, a speech I promised to them during the Jeapordy game (one of the questions from the 'chaos' category was simply "bribe the host", and my promise of a speech in their honor later was the highest bid).
I walked away from the show with something like 62k in loans due at the end of the weekend. Poor Roman somehow managed to walk away with like 40k less than they had at the start of the day, almost completely broke besides a 40k debt from me (5k of which was immediately paid of by @crowlsyong just for fun). Basically in the end I got roughly what I wanted, to walk away with all the mana with a promise to give it back later after flipping it into more.
Also a very small child in the audience bribed me to choose share with a stick of gum. The gum was yummy.
For those following along from home, Tumbles Shared, and Roman Stole.
Even though Tumbles was technically robbed of the pot, he managed to pull some negotiating magic off with side deals and totally, unironically fair market manipulation to somehow come out of this game show with more in hand than he went in with, if I'm following the mana correctly. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
@Tarl You found the dead-drop. How did it feel when you found it? Explain what it physically was.
@Quroe the second I heard of a dead drop being in the room I stood up. A couple of other spectators started looking as well. Made a dash for the papers left out for "just making notes" and noticed a QR code being taped to the back of one of the papers with the heading "This is a dead-drop". Ripped it off, turn myself around to stop others from seeing it and then crumbled up the paper. Quickly afterwards I figured that getting an on QR Scan off the crumbled paper was quite likely so I just ripped the QR code off the page and stuck it in my mouth
For added context, this was the dead-drop. The QR code was taped to the front page with double-sided tape, with the QR code hidden and sandwiched between the 2 pages.
Flip the Script - When this Twist is publicly revealed, for each of this game's Contestants' choice markets, the choices represented by the market answers of Share and Steal shall be exchanged for the other.
I wasn't at Manifest, so couldn't do anything.
I know. I'm sorry, I did the best I could to keep you guys in the loop while Tumbles was wheeling and dealing with me live.
The game show was recorded from at least 2 different angles, so I should be able to piece together what went down so anybody can relive it.
Are you planning to continue the series?
I would love to! I'm enjoying the economic data I'm getting from the information encoded into the market. I enjoy watching what people do in Prisoner's Dilemmas.
However, only if I can keep interest in it. I'm not sure if interest increases or decreases with time.
I at least want to see if a week long version of this game is viable. 1 hour to set up and play was waaaay too short for this.
I was too afraid of being caught on Tumbles's financial complex to accept the offer to loan him mana. I am very conservative with my bets, and I felt like I was gonna get gotcha'd if I accepted it.