Two thoughts on this:

1) I have been trying on and off for about a year now to make a game that makes strategic and tactical decision-making feel more collaborative and less contentious (but coming at it from totally unrelated motivations – more here, if you are interested https://plus.google.com/+JasonTocci/posts/4fE3SynyEFV). After trying out many different approaches, I feel like I haven’t been able to build anything I like better than just already well established incentive systems like “keys” in The Shadow of Yesterday/Lady Blackbird, or the token economy in Dream Askew (especially in the hack Henshin!, which is geared toward teamwork and playing out the tropes of interpersonal conflict more than actually putting players into conflict). Because players have incentives to act certain ways built into their own characters, rather than pressed on them by other characters, it ends up feeling less coercive to my mind.

2) I only end up thinking coercion is inherent to RPGs if I end up thinking about this tautologically. If we define any attempt to use game mechanics to influence the world so it lines up with the goals of a player or character as “coercion,” then every meaningful action with a game-rule hook is necessarily coercive. My understanding of coercion as a concept, however, is that it necessarily implies imposing upon an unwilling participant (and the first couple dictionaries I checked seem to agree). This means that making deals with willing participants is not at all coercion; bouncing ideas back and forth during the planning phase of a game is not at all coercion. Lots of games can use the same systems either coercively or cooperatively – e.g., consider using the “create an advantage” action in Fate Core to set up your buddies with a bunch of aspects that will benefit them later if allies choose to exploit them, vs. using the same sort of action to bully people into doing what you want. (Carrot vs. stick, I guess, though the “carrot” in the first example is more of a gift folks can choose to take or leave.) I would be interested to learn if there are more games with systems that are inherently collaborative and supportive, though, that can’t be turned toward coercion. (I should probably get around to reading Golden Sky Stories….)