Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Social Norms Go Astray, and Why Game Economy Needs Math
Chuck E. Cheese is still alive, and so is the analytics-to-product pipeline.
Amanda Cesario (analytics lead turned product leader) joins Phillip Black, Eric Guan, and Christopher Kaczmarczyk-Smith to argue for embedded analytics, sharper language, and game systems that produce cooperation instead of a cosplay community.
We talk about:
- The missing vocabulary for economy design in live service, and how it has harmed the industry
- Why office ball pits beat startup ping pong tables
- The analyst's real job: explaining "why," then realizing the only way to fix it is to own the lever
- Embedded analytics vs centralized service orgs: who wins?
- Roblox as a laboratory: aspirational visibility, server "neighborhoods," and system norms that communicate more than art
- Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Axelrod's tournaments, and why tit-for-tat is a design principle
- Monopoly Go partner events as rare, genuine cooperation-through-repeated-interaction design
- Why Discovery Zone died, but Chuck E. Cheese prints money anyway
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