It was frustrating to play this game, to say the least. Having to figure out on the fly how to play the game while also being dependent on another player for my own success was a challenge that I did not anticipate when my partner and I played BOKURA: Planet. While my partner was a person I already knew, we still had to build a level of trust in each other to play the game it was intended to be played. As we eventually discovered, her player had their own agenda and my player had their own agenda, yet we had to take multiple leaps of faith in order to successfully play the game. I argue that we cooperate not because we understand each other, but because we have learned that reaching across the gap is more worth it than staying safely alone inside it.
Nagel, BOKURA: Planet, and The Evolution of Trust converge on a single truth: we never truly know the inner life of the person we are cooperating with, and yet cooperation remains not only possible but necessary. The three works together suggest that trust is not a product of mutual understanding, but rather that it is a leap of faith taken across an unbridgeable subjective gap. All three imply that acknowledging this gap, rather than pretending it does not exist, is the more honest and ultimately more productive foundation for cooperation.
Nagel’s core argument is that every conscious being has an inner life accessible only from its own point of view. No amount of external observation, behavioral analysis, or imaginative effort can fully close the gap between my experience and another person’s. He uses the bat example because their strangeness makes this subjective gap quite visible. We can clearly see that we cannot access what echolocation feels like from the inside. But he is careful to point out that the same gap exists between any two people. Even between two humans, subjective experience is only ever partially accessible. Nagel describes the permanent condition of all cooperative relationships between conscious beings. Every time I trust someone, I am trusting an interior life I cannot directly see.
Nagel laid the philosophical foundation of this experience, but BOKURA: Planet actually forced me to live it. The game’s design is built entirely around how ultimately, I cannot live through the other person’s inner experience. Each player is given a hidden objective that is concealed from their partner and I had to cooperate with my partner. However, I could never fully know what they know or how they “feel” as the player. Something I noticed while I played the game that I think is important to note is that the game does not frame the state of unknowing as a temporary obstacle to be overcome. It is the permanent condition of the game from start to finish. I never saw my partner’s screen and technically, I was to never know their full objective (even though I did find out what that objective was eventually). Yet, we had to work together to escape the planet.
What is explained by Nagel and experienced in BOKURA: Planet is formalized and gamified further in The Evolution of Trust. The Evolution of Trust completes the argument by showing that cooperation is still rational even under these conditions. The game is built on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is a situation where two players must make decisions without knowing what the other will do. This is a formal model of Nagel’s gap: I cannot access the other player’s intentions, only their behavior. And yet in iterated games where neither player knows when the last round will be, fair and cooperative strategies still win out in the long run. Thus, I will never know with certainty what my opponent will do, but it shows that the most successful strategy is not to exploit that uncertainty, but to build a track record of reliability across it.
What all three works share is a refusal to pretend the gap is not there. Instead, they answer with a somewhat concrete and applicable answer: cooperation is key. Not because the gap closes, not because I can finally understand the other person, but because the alternative is worse. Cooperation led me to the conclusion that beyond selfish reasons of me wanting to succeed and finish the game, something real and valuable can be built across the gap even when the gap remains.
