Classic games still pretend you can optimize in private. Build your little engine. Stack your little tower. Win your clean, local victory.

Minister of Protocol is built for the system you're actually trapped in: shared constraints, hidden preferences, and collapse that punishes everyone equally.

The Old World (Gin Rummy): You curate your hand in secret. You build perfect sets in a sealed personal universe. Your neighbor can't touch your portfolio.

The Reality (Minister of Protocol): You have a hand, but it means nothing until it's on the table. And the table is shared infrastructure—exposed, contested, one swap away from sabotage. Your "winning position" is rented space that your opponent is actively trying to demolish.¹

The Verdict: You don't own value. You rent stability from people who hate you.

The Old World (Jenga): Risk is visible. The tower wobbles. Physics gives you warnings.

The Reality (Minister of Protocol): The tower is the Global Mandate, and it doesn't wobble until it's falling. Every placement is a trade: score points now, or keep the constraint intact so anyone scores at all. The Mandate doesn't care who violated it. If it breaks, everyone gets zero.²

The Verdict: It works until it doesn't. Then nobody gets paid.

The Old World (logic puzzles): The rules are stable, the clues are honest, the solution exists. Deduce correctly and reality snaps into place.

The Reality (Minister of Protocol): You know your Host's preferences. You don't know theirs. You are optimizing for a payoff function while your opponents optimize for different, contradictory payoff functions on the same shared surface. There is no "correct" arrangement—only a temporary ceasefire between incompatible demands.³

The Verdict: The puzzle does not want to be solved. It wants to be survived.

The Old World (Monopoly): Crush them. Bankrupt them. End the game.

The Reality (Minister of Protocol): Total domination is self-harm. You need your opponents strong enough to help uphold the Mandate and weak enough to lose the influence contest. You are handcuffed to the same bomb, arguing about who gets the better seat.⁴

The Verdict: In a coupled system, winning too hard is indistinguishable from suicide.

The Old World (most games): Conflict is priced. You pay a cost, take a hit, move on. Damage stays local.

The Reality (Minister of Protocol): Conflict spills. Duels burn capital. Ties create Scandal—and Scandal doesn't just punish the fighters. Both VIPs are removed. Both are replaced by Commoners. The table you were optimizing is now a different table, and everyone's carefully engineered structure is wrecked.⁵

The Verdict: The fight changes the terrain. Then you play on what you broke.

Gin Rummy trains hoarders: build privately, reveal when perfect.

Jenga trains engineers: trust your hands, watch the wobble.

Minister of Protocol trains technocrats: infer hidden preferences, negotiate shared constraints, and remember that the Mandate doesn't grade on intention.

In 2025, you don't win by playing better.

You win by keeping the system alive long enough to out-position everyone inside it.

¹ Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968). Shared resources invite exploitation. The table is a commons; aggressive play can destroy it for everyone.

² Normal Accidents (Perrow, 1984). In tightly coupled systems, failure is not an anomaly. It's a property.

³ The Stable Marriage Problem (Gale-Shapley, 1962). Mathematicians proved stable matchings exist—but only when preferences are known. When preferences are hidden and contradictory, stability is impossible.

⁴ Prisoner's Dilemma (Tucker, 1950). Cooperation is collectively rational. Betrayal is individually tempting. Mutual betrayal is the default ending.

⁵ The Dining Philosophers Problem (Dijkstra, 1965). Multiple agents competing for limited shared resources without central coordination. Deadlock and degradation are features, not bugs.

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