COOLNET: COOperation in Large-scale NETworks

Or for the Frenchies, CORESO: COopération dans les Réseaux de grande échelle, Expérimentation des Structures Optimales

The COOLNET project aims at tackling the core source of all environmental issues: the lack of cooperation (choosing actions that favour the group rather than the individual) at large scales. We address this by:

• looking for new and existing theoretical hypotheses for mechanisms that might promote cooperative behavior at large scales, and uniting them within a common formalism;

• designing a massively multiplayer game to be used as a platform for experiments on large-scale collective human behavior, allowing to prove or disprove the above hypotheses.

In Summer 2025, I started to lead this 5-year project, funded with 1 million euros by the Lopez-Loreta Foundation. We are building a hybrid and interdisciplinary team of academics and game professionals, within SOHAM (Centre for the Sociology of Humans and Machines) at TU Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.

We are hiring a game designer now, closing date November 7th! See this job posting, or apply directly here (Vacancy ID 038706).