The Next Big Dream

Okay, so I had a Lost Weekend.  :-)  So shoot me already.  This one was good enough that I just might go do it again sometime.  

I may talk about it later, but right now, I am supposed to be ::drum roll:: …working on something else.  What a shocker.

But I had an outrageously weird dream last night, and although I’m certain that I won’t forget it, I just wanted to record it for posterity and maybe change my blog template.  If I do not change my template now, I might later on.  I need a change.  Change is good.  

Not that I should be doing something else, or anything.

In my dream (and at the end, it should be obvious why I do not mind going months and months without remembering my dreams—if they’re not flat-out nightmares, they are *so* involved, and filled with these horrible intractable problems!), there was no Eviljob or Job II; I was hired by a company that makes new casino games as a consultant on the design of a multi-player strategy-based table game that they wanted to be the Next Big Thing.  The development group had decided that they wanted to take advantage of Human Nature in an elaborate game that had the appearance of having divided the players into specific teams, and augmented house odds by utilising a “Prisoner’s Dilemma”-type of interaction where it appeared that the players were pitted against each other as well as the dealer, when in reality the players would have to re-form their teams and take acceptable losses in order to come out ahead at the end, luck permitting (and luck could only factor in after the players first cooperated, and then willingly re-formed their teams, and even then there would be losers, so the concept of the “team” was exceedingly labile, and had to be seen as such for it all to work).  And goodness, aren’t I just paring this down to bare bones and leaving out scads?  Snicker.

Butsoanyway.

Unburdened as I was by any kind of regulatory oversight on my part of the project, and failing to have any luck with test groups (whom, I felt, were not taking it seriously ‘cos it was a game), I set off on my own to run some game-independent scenarios, and do a kind of top-down analysis.  It was a lot like Saw.  

Oh, I am not ever a sicko…I’m a scientist; there’s a difference.  Pfft.  

Plus, this was all a dream.

Butsoanyway.

So I hole myself up in one of those proverbial run-down abandoned warehouses, and set off on kidnapping people and placing them in situations where they have to cooperate and then defect in order to live, the idea being that if I can find the conditions suitable for this to happen, I can then start looking at those conditions to determine exactly what it is about the scenario that is successfully conveying the message to cooperate, defect, re-form, and so forth.  And I try everything—all kinds of elaborate traps, tricks, murderous accoutrements, even stooping to leaving hints of all kinds, thinking that perhaps the game might require a script.  And I try all kinds and combinations of people; different ages, races, genders, familiar, and strangers—two-player, four-player, six, eight, ten, twenty…

Have you any idea how hard it is to abduct twenty people, all within hours of each other so as not to confound the ‘speriment with things like holding time?  Especially when one is working by oneself?

Sigh.  Yes, even in my dreams, I have budgetary issues.

Butsoanyway.

So I have changed everything humanly possible to change about everything I am doing—more people, less people, hints, time limits (both strict and lenient)…*everything*.  And what do I have in the end?  A ginormous pile of dead bodies, that’s what I have.  They’re just not cooperating in the first place.  Drat!  Or if they are, they’re not open to re-forming at a later point.  Double-drat!

And so I think (as I am dragging bodies around and digging out in the woods in the middle of the night, which I did a *lot* in this dream—my arms were buff as hell—before I had to resort to just dumping the bodies all over the place ‘cos it took too long to dig night after night) that maybe I am going to change this, that, and the other for the next group (too involved to detail), and I go back to the warehouse to work the fifty-billionth iteration out on paper before I go round up some more people.  Sigh.

Then the phone rings, and it’s one of my professors.  How they knew I was at the warehouse is anybody’s guess, but in my dream it was totally normal and a bit annoying, ‘cos I was working.  This person told me that they had accepted a “damage-control” type of grant that on the surface was to study how to make the mines safer, but in reality was simply to offer suggestions on minimising human losses when an event like the Sago mine disaster happened again, to avoid bad press.  And this person wanted me to go do the work, ‘cos they thought that mines, disasters, and dead bodies were just totally yuck.  

I did not have a choice, so I said okay.  With things like that, if you’re asked, you go do.  Simple.  So I put what I was doing on hold and went over to Whereverinthehell to study their mines, training, safety protocols, and everything else.  That part of the dream I do not remember too much about.  But I do remember writing up this HUGE report that explained in detail how losses of this kind may not ever be minimised, because in such a situation the group that was trapped would have to immediately reformulate their conceptualisation of what was occurring independently of any instructions (because, things being as they are, you could never put this situation’s equivalent of “women and children first” into a safety training of any kind and not be completely skewered by Public Opinion on *some* level), assign acceptable losses, and pool their available resources, thereby reorganising themselves into two new groups—those that will die, and those that will (probably) live.  In other words, they’d not have to see things as “us” (company workers), but be open to reorganising into an “us” and “them”, then voluntarily figuring out who should live, and those that shouldn’t would hand over their supplies; after that reformulation, the survivors would have to look out for themselves in the event of an extended entrapment by being alert for those who were not (or should not based upon a new demarcation) going to make it out of their new group, and taking over *their* supplies.  The damn report was the size of a phone book, and I just knew that no one was ever going to read anything but the cutesy little table of recommendations I put at the end.  Very demoralising.  

And *then* it occurred to me (in my dream) that this was essentially the issue I had been working on with the Next Big Thing game, so I phoned them to tell them to forget it—it’s not going to work, ever.  At least not how they wanted it to work; I explained to them that the behaviour they were hoping to elicit just wasn’t going to ever manifest reliably with more than two people, and maybe not even with only two people.  Communication allowed, communication not allowed…doesn’t matter.  And they were really, really pissed off at me for not finding a way to make it work, especially since they’d shelled out all that money on Rohypnol, barbed wire, chains, power drills, and all kinds of other things.  And my salary.

Pfft.  Fuck you creeps.  Go clean out my warehouse.  

:-D

And this all made me wake up wondering…how in the hell did societies ever come about?  I mean, we’re cooperating, but we stop doing that sometimes when it is appropriate.  And then we re-affiliate with others.  And no one has handed us any cheat-sheets, payoff matrices, or anything.  And it doesn’t always work right, but the overall trend must be working, else we’d not be progressing.  Maybe we have enough people that avoid situations where this reasoning is necessary, and so it just *looks* like things are working out okay.  Not that I care, or anything.  :-)  So I stopped thinking about it.

Okay, well, I kinda care; I just don’t know.  

And no, I would not ever in reality go offing people.  DURR frowns upon that.  

And I am not trying to in any way belittle anything that anyone has ever gone through; it was just a dream.  I solve problems even in my dreams…it’s what I do.  Sheesh.