War and Peace

The Games People Play

Oh the games people play now every night and every day now
Never meaning what they say, yeah never saying what they mean
First you whine away your hours, in your concrete towers
Soon you'll be covered up with flowers in the back of a black limousine

Since people play games, what is your best strategy for winning those games?

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, each prisoner can cooperate with the guards or not cooperate with the guards.  ( this is often called “Cooperating”  with your fellow prisoners and “Defecting” to the guards, but this is only a difference in perspective of with whom you are cooperating.)

If a Player cooperates with the guards and his Opponent chooses not to cooperate with the guards, then that Player gets two years off his sentence and his Opponent gets no years off his sentence.  If both Players do not cooperate with the guards, then they both get no years off their sentences.  If they both cooperate with the guards,  then each Player gets one year off his sentence. 

This basic game is used in Game Theory to illustrate that there is a difference between a series of two-player games played with only two players, and a series of two-player games played with more than two players.  In a series of two-player games with only two players, the winning strategy is to cooperate with the guards in every game.  If your opponent ever chooses not to cooperate, then you get two years off your sentence.  Even if your opponent also chooses to cooperate, neither of you get anything or “All or Nothing at all”. 

This is not the best strategy for more than two players.  When there are more than two players, the best strategy is for a player to  choose “Not cooperate”  in the first round but that player should choose whatever his opponent did in their previous encounter.  This is often called “Tit for Tat”, “Nice but Tough”, or “Something is better than Nothing”. Or in the song by the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”  This is a Nash Equilibrium, named after the mathematician John Nash, who was the subject of Ron Howard’s Oscar Winning Best Picture, “A Beautiful Mind”.  As John Nash observed in the film, “If everyone goes after the Blonde, no one gets the Blonde.”

If the choices are changed from “Cooperate” to “War” and from “Not Cooperate” to “Peace” and society is a non-playing party, the outcomes are same for each player, but society also wins or loses based on the outcome. The outcomes are:

Choices		Outcomes
Player One	Player Two	Player One	Player Two	Society
War	War	0	0	0
War	Peace	2	0	1
Peace	War	0	2	1
Peace	Peace	1	1	2

 

This can be explained as: 

• In "War" neither player makes a contribution to society.  
• If one player plays "War" and his opponent plays "Peace", then the player who plays "War" get the value his opponent would have kept for himself.  
• If both players play "Peace", then they each make a contribution to society and a contribution to themselves.  

The best outcome for society is identical to the More than Two‑Player Strategy.  "War" is an advantage to a Player ONLY in a two-player game.

That is why those predisposed to "War" prefer bilateral, not multilateral games.  Changing “War” to “Steal”, “Lie”, “Cheat”, “Covet”, “Kill” or any negative choice and changing “Peace” to “Not Lie”, “Not Cheat”, “Not Covet “, “Not Kill” or any positive choice, is merely changing the names of the choices.  It does not change the outcomes.  The best outcome for society is if everyone makes positive choices.  This is identical to the optimal strategy if there are more than two players.  Negative choices are only an advantage to a player only when there are only two players in all games. I hope that this changes how you play the game.