First, I strongly encourage you go to go through the demo. It is about ten minutes long. Beware that it does auto play sounds. “Spoilers” are below.

My wife and I are like a broken record player. Whenever we are in some setting to give people advice (generally a wedding where you write notes for the newlyweds) we give the same advice. “Communicate early and often. It sounds cliche but is very important. Better to risk a small fight now than a big fight later. Don’t let frustration fester into resentment.” This advice was not directly inspired by this demo but having just replayed through it now I see a lot of the similarities.

I remember when I first did this demo. I was on the train going to work. At the time I naively suspected that the Always Cooperate strategy would win. Once I was able to look at it more critically and less emotionally I thought something like the Detective might be better to figure out who you can exploit. It was interesting that something as simple as the Copycat wins out.

And once they introduced miscommunications and your little dude trips on the way to the machine!? I was devastated! Watching those two little dudes cheat each other back and forth forever over something so petty. It gets me emotional. I know it’s that sad guitar doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard though lol. But seriously, so many times in life it feels like people just get stuck in these cycles of revenge over utterly petty bullshit. Escalation over escalation over escalation.

So yeah, that’s pretty much all I have to say. It’s just interesting looking back on this thing that had this big effect on me at the time and seeing how it indirectly influenced very specific advice I give folks today.

What are your thoughts? This creator has many other cool demos like this but this is the one that I remember the most.