Interplanetary Initiative's 'Port of Mars' serves as test bed to study social dilemmas

Space: the final frontier, and one that humans are rapidly becoming able to explore in more depth and at greater distances. As exciting as that may be, we’re also still figuring out how we’ll navigate the inevitable social issues that come along with expanding our reach into the vast unknown.

In an effort to answer the question of how we can sustain healthy human communities in space, Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative Associate Director Lance Gharavi conceived of a game called “Port of Mars” in 2017, as part of the initiative’s Big Questions method.

The idea for the game was to have players take on the roles of different characters, such as “researcher” or “politician,” in a simulated Martian community and work to try to successfully govern themselves. All the while, the team behind the game would monitor play, collecting data and looking for key traits of successful communities.

At the time, it was a five-player card game, with three people administering it and collecting data. Soon, the data-collecting team realized they needed a larger sample size than the game was giving them. That’s when “Port of Mars” evolved into the online game it is now – one that is open to the general public and allows for unlimited simultaneous game play and automated data collection.

It’s the next step in the evolution of the game from an Interplanetary Initiative seed-funded project to a fully-fledged, grant-funded research platform.

Commons dilemmas

While the game designers set “Port of Mars” on the Red Planet, the patterns they see are universally applicable.

“The Martian setting is a fictional shell around the core experiment, but what we’re learning is how people navigate social dilemmas under conditions of high uncertainty and high risk. That’s as relevant for space as it is for Earth,” said Gharavi, who serves as project lead.

Marco Janssen, professor at ASU’s School of Sustainability, joined the project due to his expertise in commons dilemmas, or social dilemmas, which explore the idea that everyone benefits if everyone behaves in a certain way, but behaving that way comes at a real or perceived cost to the individual.

“I never thought about a situation on another planet, but when I learned more about it, I realized that this is similar to the situation I am seeing in a lot of places around the world. They have to cooperate to maintain a system; the only difference is that if you are on a habitat of Mars, you cannot leave. You have to cooperate or you die. It’s even more difficult because the stakes are higher,” Janssen said.

Ultimately, the "Port of Mars" team wants their game to become a platform for social dilemma research in which researchers can adapt the parameters to test different variables. They want to experiment with artificial intelligence playing the game to see what sorts of solutions they come up with. The team also plans to add new capabilities to the online game, including voice communications, expanding on the current option of chat communications.