Live Long and Prosper Game Instructions

Playing the Game

Players in this game are told to live as long as possible and reproduce. Your ability to survive and reproduce is influenced by your genome so figuring out what the genes stand for is critical in survival. Start the game by entering your name in the start screen (see the general instructions page). It is critical that everyone start the game at the same time, so after entering your name, wait for the rest of the class to start. When the game starts you'll see that you have a sequence of five genes (by default). Each of the genes stands for a trait. The shading of the genes (solid, striped and clear) somehow stands for homozygous recessive, homozygous dominant and heterozygous at that position. Your current age (which will constant increase), generation, and total score are also displayed.

You can mate with other players by lining up your Palms and having ONE player hit the Mate button (one person is the sender and the other is the receiver). At this point you will either get a confirmation that the mating was successful or a message saying that you were unable to mate. If you successfully mate, each of the parents will disappear and be randomly replaced by one of their offspring. You can think of these organisms as breeding in discrete generations. After the parents reproduce once they die. When you reproduce successfully and become one of the offspring, your age will go back to zero, your generation will increase by 1 and your score will increase by whatever you age was at the time plus a bonus (age 21-40 = 5 points, age 41-60 = 10 points, age 60+ = 20 points).

When you die, you will receive a message that tells you the age of death, your score and your current generation. At this point you have the option of looking at the data from this round (the matings and resulting offspring), or starting a new game. Unlike the other games, you may start a new game at whatever time you'd like. When playing the game, you may look at your data at any point or if you don't want other people to meet you, you can press the READY button, which will toggle to say LOCKED. In this mode you can neither send or receive meetings.

Game Parameters

The basic parameters that you set here are which genes are active and what they stand for. Gender is required, but the others are optional. The other genes are as follows:

• Longevity - live to age 50 or 80
• Childhood Disease - kills you at age 13
• Aging rate - age at the two different specified rates (see rates at the side)
• Fertility - whether you can reproduce to age 50 or 80

You can also enable junk genes at positions 1, 4 and 6 that don't code for anything.

Information for Instructors

While it may seem like this game requires a great breadth of genetics knowledge, it actually does not. Instead, it emphasizes deep basic understanding of genetics concepts as well as solid understanding of experimental methodology. The colors of the genes have the following meaning:

• Solid (dotted) = Homozygous Dominant (AA)
• Clear = Homozygous Recessive (aa)
• Striped = Heterozygous (Aa)

The default meaning for the genes are as follows:

• Gene 0 - Gender – you cannot mate with someone of your same gender (AA = female, Aa = male)
• Gene 1 - Longevity – how many “years” before you die (AA/Aa = 80, aa = 50)
• Gene 2 - Childhood disease – if you have this recessive gene (aa), you die at age 13 (regardless of your Gene 1 genotype), AA/Aa means that you have no disease (when you start a new game, you have a 10% chance of getting the disease initially)
• Gene 3 - Aging rate – how many seconds in real time corresponds to a year in game time (AA/Aa – 3 seconds, aa – 1 second)
• Gene 4 - Fertility – the maximum age that you can still mate – as soon as you reach this age, you are deemed infertile and can no longer mate (AA/Aa – 80, aa – 50)

The genotype of each gene (AA, Aa, aa) is assigned randomly when the player starts a new game (according to these rules: AA – 25%, Aa – 50%, aa – 25%, except for the childhood disease gene, which aa = 11.11%, Aa = 44.44 %, AA = 44.44 % since childhood diseases are much more rare but more detrimental than the other genes).

In playing the game, we usually just start the first round with the instructions on how to work the game and to get as many points as possible (remember when you die you lose all of your points). By the end of the round the game has quickly transformed into trying to figure out what the genes stand for. So after the first round we usually ask what they have figured out so far and what they would like to know. For the second round we don't coerce them too much to focus on anything in particular, but we do give them a data sheet which is just a blank sheet that has three columns saying Parent 1, Parent 2 and Result, where result can be anything from the resulting phenotype, mating capability, or age of death.

As rounds progress we sometimes start subtly focusing the group on particular traits. The traits were designed to have some that are easy to figure out and some that are more difficult. The order of intended difficulty (from easiest to hardest) is gender, childhood disease, longevity, aging rate and fertility. As with all of the games, the fun comes from figuring this out, so less is more. When you guide a group towards a particular trait, do it carefully. Suggest a question like "What might prevent two organisms of the same species from mating?"

There are a lot of great genetics and experimental design questions that come out through this activity. The difference between phenotype and genotype is a big point of discussion as are topics on mating crosses, data collection, population genetics (which are not modeled explicitly here), and probability.