How to create new dilemmas

Creating New Dilemmas

Creating a customized dilemma for your own prisoner's dilemma simulation is straightforward.

The Dilemma Creation screen may look daunting, but we will step through each section, break it down, and it will all make sense by the end of this document.

Section 1: General Information

The first few fields gather up general information for your simulation, which will be presented to students / participants as they login to their part of the simulation.

• Your Institution: The name of your organization, typically a business name, school, university, or training academy.
• Project name / Class: The training session, course, class, or project you are providing that will use this dilemma
• Name of the Dilemma: This is the name you will assign ot th dilemma, it will be shown to students but also used in your menus for referring to the dilmma for updates, etc.
• Description of Dilemma: This is the storyline behind your dilemma.  The typical "Prisoners looking for reduced jail time" text which will be presented to participants as the background / context / storyline for your dilemma
• Instructions for participants: These are the specific task instructions for your partipants.  Include anything you want them to know except for the scoring table (that will be generated and provided automatically)

Section 2:Information about the Dilemma

The next section alloows you to tailor your dilemma to better match your storyline and descriiptions for your simulation.

• Cooperate Title (optional): This is how you want to refer to the option to cooperate ("agree", "stay silent", "cooperate", etc.) If you leave this blank, it will default to the standard "cooperate"
• Defect Title (optional): This is how you want to refer to the option to defect ("disagree", "speak up", "betray", "lie / rat out / snitch", etc.) If you leave this blank, it will default to the standard "defect"
• Suspect Title (optional): This is how you want to refer to the participants ("suspect", "prisoner", "participant", "bank robber", etc.) If you leave this blank, it will default to the standard "prisoner"

Section 3:Mechanics of the Dilemma

The next section alloows you to tailor the structure of dilemma to better match your courses.  Here you will set the number of teams, rounds and point values

• Number of paired teams Each paired team consists of two sides (side A, Side B).  They will compete against one another as part of the simulation.
• Number of rounds: This is how how many rounds in the simulation you wnt.  Typically, 5-10 rounds are sufficient for the teams to find their rhythm.  However, you control whether or when they are able to communicate with the other side, which makes for more interesting outcomes.
• Scoring table / default point values: This is the standard prisoner's dilemma matrix where you can enter the point values for the four possible outcomes: both teams cooperating (upper left corner), both teams defect (lower right corner), Team A cooperating and team B defecting (lower left corner), and Team A defecting while Team B cooperates (upper right corner).

  Note: This is the default template.  If you wish to change the values in the later rounds, you wil be given the chance to do that when you edit your simulation.  These values are used to pre-populate your new dilemma, but you can further refine it using the instructions below in the "Editing your Dilemma" section.

Once you have entered all of your information, click "Create New Dilemma" and you will be provided the link to your newly created dilemma.  It will automatically be added to your list and is available for use or editing at this point.