Let’s say you arrive in Paris and you have to meet a friend, but you have not agreed on a place and you can’t communicate with them. Where do you go to meet? This problem should not be solvable, you should be doomed to miss your friend, but you find them on the first day. Both of you meet at the base of the Eifel Tower, probably at noon.

Games where participants are given incomplete information and are asked to coordinate with other players are called Schelling Games, after Thomas Schelling, a pioneer of economics and game theory.

User Experience design is a Schelling Game. More…