Coevolutionary Gaming Facilitate Group Decision Making? Coevolutionary Essay

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coevolutionary gaming facilitate group decision making?

Coevolutionary gaming can help to facilitate group decision-making through its highly demanding and highly complex processes. As Cares and Miskel explain, this type of gaming can help one to navigate complex strategy landscapes in safe environments that feel like real-time, but which actually allow one the luxury of making mistakes and engaging in bolder forms of trial error (2007). These games are even played now at the highest levels of defense within the U.S. Department of Defense, with as many as four teams involved in highly competitive, intricate and strategic moves and counter-moves (Cares & Miskel, 2007). These games are multi-day affairs which force all the players to stay focused and to make plans for short-term objectives and long-term objectives: five moves and responses thus push the team on a faux multi-year trajectory that isn't directly controlled by either team and where it's actually not uncommon to engage in strategic horizons of several years (Cares & Miskel, 2007). It's not unique for strategic horizons of over 20 years to foster, allowing all players to be forced to think about the future with strong and serious consideration. The benefits of these types of games is that they don't directly cause strategy to be developed, but all players get a more nuanced understanding of the way that competitive dynamics which drive that strategy into development can harness these insights to engage in bolder and more intensive strategies (Cares & Miskel, 2007).

As Cares and Miskel explain, "The term 'coevolution' is not just a metaphor. Coevolutionary gaming mimics the dynamics fundamental to ecological competition in order to explore the effects of conflict and cooperation between teams. Teams start in the present day with existing assets and near-term plans, and perhaps some quantity of a scarce resource, just as species in an ecosystem exist in a current evolutionary state and compete for their niches under some kind of selective pressure.
One team imposes a shock to the system -- such as introducing new technology in a war game -- to increase the selective pressure. In successive moves, the teams fight for their futures through strategy adaptation and selection, just as generations of organisms coevolve in ecological competition" (2007). One of the overall benefits of this system is that it empowers teams to make bold moves and fail and then find a way to navigate through the initial failure. This can be one of the most tremendous learning experiences for all parties involved in that it pushes all members to see the clear consequences of their actions, and to examine the flaws and failures of other actions, and thus to work hard to overcome them. This puts all players in a clear situation where they have to learn from their mistakes in real time. As the writers of the article illuminate, sometimes these scenarios will cause all involved parties to uncover and develop initial strategies which can't help but assist them in future problem-solving situations in the future and for subsequent annihilation of all obstacles.

It's the component of the evolving of strategy that really is one of the biggest assets of coevolutionary gaming. This scenario is able to offer a strong theoretical framework for addressing the nuances of collective strategizing and related challenges. However, coevolutionary gaming is not a perfect answer at all times: "Recent advances point towards the fact that the evolution of strategies alone may be insufficient to fully exploit the benefits offered by cooperative behavior. Indeed, while spatial structure and heterogeneity, for example, have been recognized as potent promoters of cooperation, coevolutionary rules can extend the potentials of such entities further, and even more importantly, lead to the understanding of their emergence" (Perc, 2009). Thus, it's important to bear in….....

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