Ways to make a cooperative King of the Hill contest
I generally think of King of the Hill contests as inherently competitive. However, I wonder if there is a way to have a contest that rewards cooperation. I would still want to see a leaderboard, with answers competing to get the highest on that leaderboard. In some sense, the answer at the top of the leaderboard would be the "most cooperative".
I'm not looking for ideas for specific games (those can be posted to the Sandbox). I'd like to see suggestions of general approaches that could be used across many games. This could be a way of measuring cooperation in an otherwise competitive game, or ideas for categories of game that allow cooperation to be part of the goal, while still allowing individual scoring for a leaderboard.
I don't have a preference on whether all answers compete at once in a single arena, or whether small groups of a fixed size are selected at random and scored based on their outcomes over many such games.
My measure of whether a suggestion fits here would be whether it results in contests where the main aim of an answerer is to cooperate towards some goal.
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One way is to make sure that an entrant cannot manage multiple functions at the same time, either because there are too many or because they are prevented from doing some tasks through game mechanics. Winning teams have to coordinate well to accomplish a task. Examples of this from the video game world include Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Regular Human Basketball, and the various Mario Party 2v2 mini-games.
One thing that a KotH host would need to decide is what communication is permissible between entrants:
- Are they only allowed to observe behavior and modify their own to respond?
- Or do you have a protocol for planning future action? (And how often is it allowed to be used?)
- Or are entrants left to their own designs to communicate?
A simple version of this could be a game of QBasic Gorillas, where one entrant chooses the angle and the other chooses the power. I worry a little that extremely passive strategies would make for the best partner entrants, though.
Another possibility is a Vector Racer with one player running the X axis and the other running the Y.
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What about the following rule: You get points, but your score is not your own points, but the points of the best player below you, or 0 if you are the worst player.
Obviously if you are the worst player, you want to increase your own points. But if you are the best player, you definitely want to increase the points of the second-best player, at least as long as you are not overtaken by that. Strategies by those in between are more complex because overtaking someone may give a bigger boost, but helping the next one below you will be sure to give you points, as long as he doesn't overtake you. And keeping the next one below close will protect against the effect of being overtaken.
Of course this needs to be combined with a game mechanic where you can actually help others. The simplest would be that you can donate some of your points to someone else. Other ways could be e.g. to remove obstacles for them.
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