I enjoyed The Three-Body Problem books, and recently enjoyed the first series of the Netflix series.
In Plunderstorm, if you land near another player, we have an interesting game.
If we both ignore the other, we both benefit by getting at least our quest done, and likely each racking up a few hundred Plunder afterwards.
But whoever attacks the other first has a big advantage. If the other ignores me, and I attack, I am likely to win (modulo RNG factors like who got the better first ability and whether one is also being attacked by mobs.)
Similarly, if I ignore the other, and he attacks, he is likely to kill me.
The payoff for killing a level 1 who hasn’t even got started is small, but the negative payoff for wasting the time it took to get a game without a reward by letting yourself get killed is middling.
This is, of course, an instance of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, around which so much theory has been developed. And this Prisoner’s Dilemma is not iterated.
So what’s this got to do with The Three Body Problem?
In The Three Body Problem the central thesis is what one of the characters calls “Cosmic sociology”. If a civilization detects another, they can hide, if they believe they haven’t been detected, or they can launch an attack to destroy the other. That attack doesn’t benefit them at all, except to remove the risk that the other will detect and destroy them.
Having watched the series just a few days ago, I thought it was interesting to see how relevant the same concept is in this game.