Real life is full of games such as contract bidding, gift exchanging, and national voting — a topic that I’ve previously touched upon in a few different posts about “real-life mechanics”. These real-life games are no less competitive than the board games that we play around tables, and in fact might be much more important. As I wrote in my “Burning Freeways” article on blind bidding, the winning bidder earned $800,000 more than Cal Trans expected and could have made as much as $3.5 million over costs.
In that article I also briefly touched upon how the blind bidding of house sales can be affected by just the teeniest bit of external information from a realtor. At the time I hadn’t sold a house. Now I have, and I’ve learned a lot more about the various parts of house-selling, and as usual they offer up new possibilities for the designs of These Games of Ours. Continue reading