Let the Game Begin!

Let the game begin in 10…   9…   8…   7…   6…   5…   4…   3…   2…   1…

RRRrrrriiiinnnngggg!!!!!!!!!!!
           The sound of the alarm clock awakens you. It says 8:00 am. You immediately jump off  the bed 

           and hurriedly scamper to the comfort room. After a 5-minute shower, you put on your garments,

           brush your hair a  little,  run  off  to  the kitchen, grab toasted bread, wear your shoes and race to 

           the  door.  Now,  you’re   ready   to  face  and  compete  with  the  bustling  people  outside  your 

           house and accept the challenges that await your day.

Life is a game. Many people had developed strategies or ways on how to play it. You should make decisions wisely. Speaking of decisions, there is a study of strategic decisions where the results of strategies depend on other participant’s strategies, this is called Game Theory. 

To learn and understand game theory better, let’s take a look at a book entitled “Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory of Everyday Life” by Len Fisher. This book would be a very good book to introduce game theory to beginners, like me, to learn more about game theory. 

The example of game theory used in the book is the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, a theoretical situation, in which two suspects are arrested and imprisoned for a crime they probably committed. Each of them is questioned separately and offered the same deal. They were asked to confess and if no one does, both of them will be convicted for one year but if both of them confess, they will be again imprisoned, let us say, for at least 3 years. If one of them betrayed the other while the one being betrayed stay silent, the confessor will be freed while the one who remained silent will be put to jail, more than necessary. And then he introduced the Nash Equilibrium made by John Nash. Its idea mainly say that it is a position in which both sided have selected a strategy and neither side can then independently change its strategy without ending up in a less desirable position.

Game theory is everywhere. The author incorporated it with the common events that happen in everyday life. For instance is the wedding. A guy offered two pieces of cake, sliced unequally, to a person. That person chose the smaller one because he/she would feel bad taking the larger slice. The game theories call that sort of overall benefit “utility” in which all the factors had been taken into action. He also introduced the concepts of minimax and fair division. He highlighted it with anecdotes like how he got in trouble while he shooted fireworks when he was still a kid. Minimax means looking at a situation to see how much you might lose and then planning your actions so as to minimize that loss.

The book does not only discuss Prisoner’s Dilemma but as well as Tragedy of the Commons, Free Rider, Chicken, The Volunteer’s Dilemma, Battle of the Sexes, and Stag Hunt. He also associated the famous game played around the world, the rock-paper-scissors game. I was really amazed on how he used it in conflict resolution. I think the reason is that the game has no pure strategy that makes you dominate the others. Thus, situations and games which seem to be at a standstill can be solved by adding strategies and making them to rock-paper-scissors situations.

The rest of the book revolves about cooperation: how we can gain others trust, offer bargain effectively, and then changing the game to avoid being trap of the Prisoner’s dilemma and other unpleasing results.

As what I had said at the earlier part, life is a game. Its either you win or lose and winning depends on how you play it. You should make good strategies and decisions to live smoothly. And in every game that you encounter, you should have a weapon that will help you play it out well. To conclude this, I will leave a famous phrase that I think each one of us is praying for, “May the odds be ever in our favor”.