IE University, based in Segovia, has developed an online game that brings students from all over Europe closer to the interdisciplinary, international and cooperative nature of Science. Is namedThe International Lake Game Competitionand it is an interactive game in which participants experience the tension of deciding betweencooperate for the good of a community or defraud for more individual gain.
The game has as participants students from France, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain, among other European countries, who will compete today, November 12, to demonstrate their capacity for cooperation in a peculiar setting: aartificial lakeIn whose margin eight factories have been installed that necessarily need the clean water of that swamp to produce.
The mechanics of the game are apparently simple: twenty-four teams are spread over three lakes, so that each team is assigned one of the eight factories located on each lake. These facilities have to decide, throughout the game, whether to clean theWaterthat they dump into the swamp, in which case they will obtain less economic income, or they dump it dirty, with which they will obtain more profits. The production process of all companies stops in the event that the dirt in the water exceeds a threshold, so cooperation between them is essential for their own survival if they want to go to the final. The company that achieves the most profitability will be the winner of this contest. The teams – half of them will be international – will have two opportunities to communicate through a webcam with a microphone.
Jesús G. Ochoa de Alda, professor of evolutionary biology and project coordinator, argues thatscientistsform a densered who is constantly interacting in English to solve unapproachable problems individually. Eastcooperative characterand the need forcommunicate in englishthey are clearly conveyed in the game of “The Lake.” In addition, this game has an important componentinterdisciplinarybecause cooperation is key in areas such as sociology, psychology, economics and biology.
According to Ochoa de Alda, the new game is very timely as it addresses the subject of study of the last winner of theNobel Prize in Economics, the American researcher Elinor Ostrom, awarded “for her analysis of economic governance, especially of thecommunities“, which denies a theory developed thirty years ago in which it was postulated that the overexploitation of shared resources by a community could lead to their extinction. Ostrom rejects that possibility and favors an alternative that allows the game of” The lake “, as is dialogue between community members The IE University professor of Evolutionary Biology points out that “sometimes the individual has to earn less for the community to survive.”
