The premise of Deep Sea Adventure is that as you dive for treasure, you not only deplete your own oxygen, but the oxygen of your players. This mirrors the idea behind “credit” tokens in my group’s game 404: Alignment Not Found, where individual goals may contrast with team objectives.
Both games run on the tragedy of the commons premise. Greedy actions are transparent in both games, but in 404, you can obscure greedy actions as simply trying to get yourself enough credit.
In MDA terms, Deep Sea Adventure hangs almost entirely on one mechanic — the shared, depleting oxygen tank — crossed with individual reward and weight. The tension is stark: the resource (oxygen) is communal, the objective (treasure) is private, and the conflict is those two facts colliding.
The dynamic that emerged was a race to control the clock: whoever turns back first from the best position decides when the countdown ends. My play stopped being about managing air and became about weaponizing it — turn back early, bank treasure, and let the oxygen run dry while the opponent struggled to get back. The intended aesthetic of shared fellowship never arrived: what I felt was the cold satisfaction of stranding someone. The game punishes the player who takes its cooperative fiction seriously.
But I think that’s what makes the game really fun. Similarly, by stepping in to the role of a self-preserving AI researcher in 404, you too can understand how your personal goals can come into conflict with the commons. While the goal is not to screw others over, you can still win by being uncooperative. In Deep Sea Adventure, this feels harder to tweak: it feels baked in to the game. In my team’s game 404, however, this is easily tweak-able by changing the amount of personal credit as an aligned researcher is required to win. You can almost see yourself filling in the role of the accelerationist in real-time. It almost feels like that Dark Knight quote of “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Overall, this analysis provided a key insight for future playtests: rather than focus on news elements or the doom track, the critical feature to test is how increasing the credit required to win changes the dynamic of the tragedy of the commons. I would be really curious about if it takes too many credits to win on your own, do you decide instead to band together with the rest of the aligned researchers? At what point is the low-hanging fruit of winning on your own no longer low-hanging fruit? Is there a way to teach players that aligning with the collective is the better option?
