Microsoft Research Launches Facebook Game to Research Game Theory on an Unprecedented Scale
(source: http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-research-launches-facebook-game-called-project-waterloo/)
Microsoft Research has recently unveiled a game that has been developed for Facebook, a popular social networking website trafficked by more than 800 million active users. The game is called “MSR Project Waterloo,” which, as implied by it’s title, is a war game in which two players allocate 100 troops among 5 different territories, attempting to control the most amounts of territories.
The rules of this game are quite simple in that all that each player has to do is to allocate the soldiers into the various territories and send the move to the other player, who doesn’t get to see what you played until he or she makes a move as well. This is a game that goes hand in hand with what we are currently learning in Econ 2040 regarding game theory. Each player cannot see what the other player is playing, yet each player wants to use the best strategy that will net them the most territories.
There are many strategies that a player can use, but from playing the game myself, I have found that allocating the troops as follows: 33, 33, 33, 1, and 0, the chances of winning are much higher due to the fact that most people would evenly distribute their troops 20, 20, 20, 20, and 20 or put an overabundance into two territories: 50 to 60, 40 to 50, 0-10, and 0.
Of course, there is not one clear way for a person to win all the games which makes this game a great way for Microsoft Research to look into how people think when presented a situation as in the game.
The goals of MSR is as follows:
The goal of this project is to build a platform for research in behavioural game theory on social networking sites which will enable experiments of unprecedented scale, resolution, interactivity and social embedding. We aim at testing the behaviour of real people in game theoretic interactions in social networks. How do people negotiate with one another? How can we aggregate opinions of individuals to arrive at high-quality decisions? In what ways do people reciprocate other people’s actions?
The goals of MSR are quite ambitious as not all of the users of Facebook will play this game and because of how new this game is on the Facebook platform, but there is a lot of potential. I feel that once more and more people play this game, Waterloo will show a lot of cool trends in how people think when placed into a game theory situation.
And once Waterloo achieves the goals that MSR has set, MSR plans on furthering their research on social interactions with game theory by creating a “Facebook Game Theory Lab,” in which they will make games where people negotiate and allocate resources in order to get a better idea of how people interact with each other.
To play Project Waterloo, you can go to http://apps.facebook.com/msrwaterloo/ (you must have a Facebook account to play).