 Alright, now it's actually 10.30, let's begin. I'm Scott. And we're the host of Geek Nights, the late night podcast radio show for Geek Geeks. We've been doing panels in taxes for many years now. We do a lot of panels, lectures, shows, games, rerun demos and everything. And we're here to talk about something that's very dear to me, and Scott. And Scott? And Scott. The name of the panel is Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design. Clicky clicky. Alright. Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design. You know, a lot of people, you know, they play games. I was going to talk about your fancy gadget. Oh, I forgot about the fancy gadget. The slide wasn't over here. Okay, so, in this box here, right, I actually have some advanced technology that we are testing out here today. Who has a device of any sort with Wi-Fi on you? They might take it out. This might ruin it, but we're going to test it out. Look for an SSID of GeekBox and connect to it. If you connect to it, you'll be able to get the slides to this panel and our other panels. You'll be able to download the Sample Geek Knights podcast. You'll be able to ask us questions. You'll also be able to upload files that other people in the room will then be able to download, if it works. This is the first real test with a big room of people, so have at it. Now, the reason we say that, because very specifically, we usually do not have time to take questions. So if you have a question or a comment or some anger or a molotov of us or something, either put the question on the GeekBox or grab one of our flyers after the panel and email us or come to our next panel and hope that we do Q&A at that one. I don't know if this is even going to reach to the back of the room, but GeekBox is what you're looking for. Alright, so game mechanics and mechanism design. A lot of people, we all play games. I mean, we're at PAX, right? There's not a single person here who's not a gamer. But people don't really think that hard about the games they play, right? And even if they do think really, really hard, they don't, you know, they never studied games in school or anything like that. So no matter how hard you think, you might come up with some stuff, you know, but you don't have the right words to describe it. Now, if you disagree, my example is Farmville. I mean, what do you do at Farmville? Nothing. But anyway, so, you know, one day I was in the RIT library, which is where we went to school, and I saw a book. It's a game theory, and I was like, I got to read that. So I took it, and it was full of economic, ridiculous crap. But I actually read it, I tried to read it. You know, and I realized that this is actually this entire study of games that most people who play games, you know, don't study at all. And then, you know, combined between the powers of that book and playing Puerto Rico five times a day for an entire summer, you know, I pretty much learned this stuff by osmosis. The book in a way is sort of a trap. Anytime you think you're going to study game theory, you think, oh, game theory. I would study this to get better at games. And then, like Scott said, it's just mad. Yeah. Lots of boring mad. So what, come on and click it. What are you doing? I told you to use my fancy clicker. I don't know. Anyway, so what is game theory, right? Game theory is an actual, you know, scientific, economic, sociological study. It goes across all, you know, academic disciplines. But primarily what it's looking at is how to make decisions when the consequences of your decision depend on a decision someone else is making. So, you know, you have a decision to make, right? You're going to choose between A, B, and C. And, you know, it's not just straightforward. It's not like A is one, B is two, and C is three. They're going to be different based on what RIM chooses. So if RIM chooses A, then A, B, and C are going to be this. But if you choose B, they're going to be this, and if you choose C, they're going to be that. So any board game, any video game, anything you're playing, you could break it down into a mathematical equation, into a construct, into a graph. You could sit there with tic-tac-toe, XKCD did this not that long ago, and graph out the entire game, every possible game that could ever happen. So, why do we care about game theory? Well, you're at PAX, right? If you're at PAX, you're a gaming person. At least, I hope you are. Otherwise, you should have given your ticket to someone else who cares, right? So, if you care about games, you should care about game theory and game mechanics and science. Learning is good, right? We don't want to be doodoo heads and derpy derps, right? I don't want to have to shoot slash slice my way to economic fortunes. You know, you want to be a smart person. You want to advance your mind, learn new things, right? So, if gaming is something you spend a significant amount of time doing, right, then it's something that you should be studying. Jane McGonigal has a degree in game theory, right? And look where she got. A little bit ahead of us. A little bit ahead of us. A lot ahead of us. Yeah, wait. You'll win more, right? Everyone likes to win. If you really like to win, come see our panel in about a couple of hours after this one. In fact, it's at 12.30 back in the Naga Theater. There should be plenty of seats for everyone. We're going to tell you exactly how to win a ton of very specific board games, like, oh, Stateners of Qatar. But anyway, if you study game theory, you're going to win a lot more games because you know what's going on. And other people are just, you know, they're not thinking too hard about it. You will make better games, right? The fact is, pretty much most of the people in game development, right, except for a few people like Dr. Hazard and Jane McGonigal and a couple other people, they have no idea they don't know anything about game theory. They don't know it existed, right? You know, I talked to some Blizzard guys after we did this panel at PAX West. Yeah, we were like, look at all this math of games, math, and look at what World of Warcraft does with the math, and Blizzard was like, yeah, you think about this way more than we do. Yeah, they were like, they were like, we don't do any of that math. We don't even know what the hell you guys are talking about. But at the same time, they make good games. So it's possible to do this stuff intuitively. You are probably, you've probably figured out a surprising amount of game theory in the course of playing games. You just don't realize that, oh, that's actually the Colonel Lotto game that I'm playing, or the Prisoner's Dilemma. Just iterate it. You might call it something else. You might have like, you know, you call it something when a certain combo happens, in particular game you play, not realizing that some PhD 100 years ago named that exact thing something scary in mathematics. And lastly, you want to get a better job, right? I mean, everyone wants to make more monies, or maybe they want to work in game development, maybe they want to work somewhere else outside of game development. Game theory can help you get a better job. I'm going to do my own hard. I make a lot of money. I work at Wall Street. Wall Street is just a game. They hire people with PhDs in mathematics and game theory to study the stock market and try to game it to make money. And they make a lot of money. As a result, I make a lot of money. And you know how I got that job? I wrote game theory on my resume. Even though he had no degree in it whatsoever. Because I've read these books at RIT and played a whole bunch of settlers. It worked. Yeah, a game theorist at the company who books my resume he's like, game theory, tell me about game theory. And I totally fooled him. You can still use game theory to boost your career because negotiating for your salary is a game, right? It's actually a very well-known game. And if you know game theory, you're going to win that game. Okay, so. We're going to skip all the hard math because if you haven't figured out, we don't know it. Oh, but see, usually what I say is that... If you know it, shut up. Because the math really, like the panel would feel boring and the math is too abstract and like we really want to get you guys down to the root of it so you'll intuitively grasp it. The real answer as we learn when we were on a panel at MAGFest with I think three PhDs in math and then us is that we don't actually know the math that well. Anyway, also, this is a warning. You have a chance to leave the room right now, right? Because this is going to ruin a lot of games. Sellers and Caton, that game, we can't play it. It's solved. I know exactly how to win it. I don't even have to play. I can make a robot to play Sellers. You know, it's sort of like looking at the man behind the curtain, right? As soon as you learn about certain games and how they work and what's really going on mathematically the games, they're not fun anymore. It's like, well, there's no reason to play this game. I see everything that's going on. It's like the curtain has been lifted, whatever. So if you don't want to ruin the fun of a lot of games you currently play, you might not want to stay in this room. I guess people don't care. Well, because they want to win. We're not lying. They want to win. I guess so. Good. All right, let's begin. Single player doesn't count, right? We talked about what the definition of game theory was, right? Game theory is about making decisions when the results of your decisions are affected by the decisions of someone else. If there's no someone else, then your decisions are always going to be the same. You might say, oh, I'm playing against an AI. Isn't the AI a person? Well, yes, you can view the AI as a person, and it kind of works. The thing is, in reality, that AI is an algorithm. And if you could just, if you looked at the source code of the algorithm and you pulled up Mathematica or whatever and you figured out what it was going to do, then it's no longer a person. It put the X in the middle. So that's the last thing. Okay, so what is strategy? A lot of people throw this word around, like, oh, this game's a strategy game. That's a strategy game. Or a strategy game versus a tactical game. A lot of game, like, ordinary people. This game is more strategic than that game. What does that really mean? Well, in game theory, a strategy is actually a noun. A strategy. A strategy is a thing, right? So here's the game of rock, paper, scissors. And this is what we call a payoff matrix. It's used a whole lot in game theory. I'm going to tell you how to read it right now. So in rock, paper, scissors, there are three strategies, right? Rock, paper, and scissors. Most games have a billion-gillion strategies, which is why I used rock, paper, scissors in this example. I mean, counter-strike. So one picks to the left, or two, or three, or four, or five. Yeah, those are all different strategies. Anyway, so in rock, paper, scissors, there's three strategies. Across the top, you've got one player, and across the side, you've got another player, right? And you say, well, if player one picks the paper strategy and player two picks the scissors strategy, then player one is minus one point, and player two is plus one point. Or did I get that backwards? It doesn't matter. The guy who picks rock over scissors is going to win one, and the other guy is going to be down one, right? So it's pretty easy. You look at the two strategies of all the players, and you figure out where they intersect, and it tells you who's going to end up with what. Now, what are the points here? We need to talk about this very briefly, please. Points are what you're going after in a game, which seems obvious, but isn't always. What happens when people grieve? They're really, they're going for something different than for what everyone else is going after. I'm playing counter-strike to get the most kills. They're playing counter-strike to get the most team frameworks. In that case, we're almost playing different games. Or like, I'm trying to lose paper, rock, scissors as opposed to win. So griefing is when players are seeking alternate utility. Utility is the game theory word for what people want out of a game. In game theory, you always abstract that down to something like points. That way, there's numbers, and we can count them. Alright, so here's a mixed strategy, right? If you don't play rock, paper, scissors just once, right? You're not going to pick the same thing every time. So a mixed strategy is when you've got sort of percentages associated with the different strategies. I'm going to do rock 10% of the time, and scissors 30% of the time, and paper the rest of the time, right? On the left, you can see that one of the players has chosen to do rock 100% of the time. That's known as a pure strategy, right? That can't lose. You can't lose. Six geo-dudes can't lose. Alright, okay. So one time, I was arguing with some people on an internet forum, as you like to do. And I was like, yes, that was a good time. Screw that game. I solved it. And the guy was like, you can't solve a game. There's no way you know what the other guy's going to do. It's not like a puzzle. Like a Sudoku where you find the answer, right? It's changing. Who knows what that other guy's going to do? Is he going to build a settlement? Is he going to build a stiffy card? Is he going to build a road? You have no idea what he's going to do. You can't read minds, right? So how can you possibly solve a game? No game can be solved when you're playing against other people. Who here thinks a game can be solved? Okay, most of you. Who thinks a game cannot be solved? You can't solve any games, okay? Only one guy. These people are too smart. You really can't solve a game. I guess I'm going to have to change this because there's no one to shock with the solve tic-tac-toe game. Well, we'll shock you with something else. Checkers is a solved game. There's a weak mathematical solution to checkers that was discovered in about 2007 by a massively parallel computer. I almost said massively multiplayer online games. That's fine. And the thing is, checkers is a perfect, complete information game. We'll talk about that in a second, which means you know what every other action that happened in the game was. There are a lot of possible strategies. You can see the entire game. So I could have a computer just try every combination. It turns out that the white player can always either lose or force a draw in the game. They cannot force themselves to win, but they can force a draw no matter what. And the black player can do the exact same thing. So if two players play optimally, there is no way to make yourself win. You will always draw. Now, the reason they solved it is that checkers only has about 10 to the 30. That's a 10 followed by 30 zeros. Some pads through the game, possible like states. Those are all the game. Chess has anywhere between 10 to the 40 and 10 to the 50. I say anywhere in between because it's a complex enough game to where we're not sure yet. But it's still a game that's perfect and complete. It will be solved one day. Someday in our lifetime, I guess within the next decade, we will absolutely know the perfect solution to chess. And if it turns out to be like a, you know, that it's like always force a draw or something like that, then all those chess players are gonna be really crushed. They spent their whole lives learning this game. That's been pretty exciting. But yeah, Go, Go is actually a game with, you know, the problem space of Go is so gigantic that we're probably not gonna solve it in our lives. But it is solvable in the same way that chess and checkers is because it falls into the same category. It's just so big that we, you know, it'll take forever to figure it out. Maybe we have a quantum computer we can do it. Anyway, so here is, you know, sort of a summary of the solution to tic-tac-toe, right? Player one can always force a winner a draw no matter what. And player two, you know, circle can always force a draw, right? So you can see, you know, if you look at the X1, right, that's a draw, you know, X2 is a win, X0 is a win, right? Whereas Y, all his options are always gonna result in either, you know, losing or tying. There's no strategy that player zero can choose where you can force the X player to lose. There's absolutely no choice, right? Everyone knows this. Now, I mean, you've played tic-tac-toe. I hope all of you have solved tic-tac-toe. You know exactly what to do to play the imperfectly. So you've intuitively figured this out, but yet you can take this matrix and do a little bit of math and figure it out absolutely without having to kind of understand the game. So you can approach game third from two exact opposite directions and come to the exact same conclusions. Alright, let's move on to another concept, right? So, tic-tac-toe and most, you know, two player games are what we like to call zero-sum games, right? A zero-sum game is where, if I win, you lose, right? If I'm playing poker with rim and I win 50 bucks, rim just lost 50 bucks, right? No matter which strategies people pick, right? The sum of any one box is always going to be zero, right? So, you know, it doesn't matter what strategy player one picks and what strategy player two picks. Whatever one guy wins, the other guy loses. And even if you make this a three-dimensional thing, you're bringing a third player and you have a big cube, right? You add up all three numbers in any one box. They're always going to add up to zero. That's why it's zero-sum. The sum of the numbers in any box is zero. This is why we skip the math, because if you have a four-player game, this is a two-dimensional, oh, very short slide. Two-dimensional matrix? Oh, three players, three-dimensional. Four, five, six players, four, five, six dimensions. You can't try it anymore. You can still compute it. You just can't see it. It's kind of a pain in the butt. All right. So, if there's zero-sum games, there also must be non-zero-sum games, right? I win. You also win. Hooray! Hooray! All right? Want to play again? Sure. We win a whole bunch. Here's an example of a non-zero-sum game. So, yeah, the Olympics, right? You think, oh, it's zero-sum. There's one winner and a bunch of losers. Well, one winner minus a whole bunch of, you know... It's not like I run 100 meter dash in some amount of time, and that reduces his score. Or there's only so many seconds in the universe that we can use to complete the race. And if I steal all the seconds, then, you know, there's no more for Scott. I guess if I steal them all, I lead them to decide the most seconds. Yeah, I mean, player one wins a goal. Player two wins something. Player three wins a little bit less than that. And everyone else gets zero. That adds up to, you know, no one has any negatives in the Olympics, right? So it adds up to a lot more than that. Now, look at, say, board games, like Monopoly. There's infinite money that just comes from the bank. It's a non-zero-sum game because money just infinitely come in. As opposed to, say, a lot of German-style board games where there's a set amount of pieces and systems. Like, if you use all the resources, not counting the, I'm sorry, if you use all the settlements or all the roads or something, those are zero-sum for an individual player. And they're also zero-sum for the group, except you can't share them. Now, what if you made a game where there's a shared pool? What if there's just roads? And if you build roads that removes a road from the pool that other players have access to, you've suddenly drastically changed the game. You can also look at Monopoly if you consider winning to be one point and losing to be zero. It's not zero-sum, because if you add up everybody, it's gonna be one. You can do a lot of mathematical tricks in game theory. Kind of like how if anyone is in college and you're doing advanced mathematics, the most powerful thing you can do in the world is multiply both sides of an equation by one. That's pretty good. Yeah, all the math people are like, everyone else is like, Anyway, another concept is the symmetric game. A symmetric game is where both players have the exact same set of strategies available to them. So my strategy X is also your strategy X. They're exactly the same strategy. A lot of times you'll see this in games where there isn't a lot of player interaction, like a racing game, or the Olympics, what's your strategy? Run as fast as possible. What's your strategy? Run as fast as possible. I'm going slow. Really? There's only two strategies. Go fast and go slow. Everyone has the same possibilities available to them. An asymmetric game is when people have different strategies available to them. In fact, the most important asymmetric game in all of video games is this. Before Street Fighter II, you didn't really have choices of characters. Even if you did, they weren't really that significantly different. Street Fighter II was the first time that people actually was like, whoa, you have all these choices, and there's actually different strategies available to you. Now, depending on how you analyze the game, if you look at a fight between, you know, say, I don't know, Zangief and Ken, it's an asymmetric game. There are different strategies available. If you analyze the game as a whole, then it's a symmetric game because everyone has the same list of players to choose from. The first decision you make in the game is which player to pick. So then it matters if we choose simultaneously, or if I choose them, Scott chooses. Or if we choose randomly. There's all sorts of things going on. And remember, a strategy is incredibly specific. If we both pick Ryu, right? And I throw my Hadouken one frame later than you throw yours, that is a different strategy. It has to be exactly the same. So think about how many strategies there are in Street Fighter, right? How many possible things you can do if you consider all the frames of a fight, frame by frame, right? If they're exactly the same, that's considered one strategy. There's billions of strategies, probably more than there are in Go, especially in the newer fighting games that have way more moves available too. Actually, to make it kind of intuitive, a strategy, if you want to think about it from the time I'm playing a game, like when I play Stratigo, a good example of a game that I think is a good game, I don't make any decisions while I'm playing. I have a strategy. I've decided every course I'm going to take throughout the entire game because I know every possible situation I could run into and how I would react. So I'm not enacting strategies or tactics. I'm simply following kind of my own script. If you have a script to follow, you have a strategy. Even if you're not following a script at the very end of the game, we can look at what you did and we can say, ah, that is a strategy. That is strategy number three or four, right? Okay, so, perfect information. We're getting complicated now. Watch the hell out. So our perfect information game is a game where you know all of the moves that have already happened. So if you're playing chess, you saw the board at the start. You saw every move the other guy did. You can see all his pieces. You know exactly what has happened since the beginning of the game. There are no secrets. There's no hidden anything going on. There's no mystery. Now, think about this. We can take our turns at the same time. We can't have simultaneous turns because then I don't know what I'm making my decision. What decision he made at the same time that influences mine. That's why chess... Well, that's not why. But chess, because you take turns, is completely perfect. You can't hide anything. I guess I can kind of like cover my queen. Nobody doesn't notice it. Because you can try to distract him, make him look the other way, move some pieces around. I'm not sure about that. You know, but... So that's a perfect information game. What happens when you do not have a perfect information game, right? It's this. You get the final war, right? What happened over there? I have no idea. I don't even know if there is anything over there. Is there an island over there? Is there a giant army hiding there? I don't know. Now, people get very confused by this because perfect and imperfect has to do with how much you know about the state of the game, what other people are doing. Complete information is a very different concept. That's whether or not you know the rules of the game. We could make chess a perfect information game that is not a complete information game by giving ourselves different victory conditions. I win if I get my queen in the upper right corner and Scott doesn't know that. He wins if he gets his bishop to some other place, and I don't know that. So I don't know what he's trying to do. I don't know what his strategies really are. I know what his strategies are, but I don't know what the payoff matrix of those strategies is. Also, at the same time, it's, you know, imperfect and perfect information is about what has happened in the past and the state of the game currently. It's not about anything in the future, right? So even if I know every move that you've made, and I know what the game is currently, I have to also, if I want it to be complete information, I have to know all the moves that are available to you in the future, right? If I can't see all the possibilities out in the future, if there's some, you know, murky waters, oh, like a hand of cards would also be imperfect, because that's in the past. You know, any sort of thing where you don't know what the possible things they could be doing in the future, they have a move that you didn't know about, right? Then that would be not complete information, but it could still be perfect. Now think about this from a game designer perspective. Whether or not your game is perfect or imperfect, complete or incomplete, makes the game very different. And a lot of game designers they just kind of think, oh, I'll make this game like this, I'll do whatever. But if you think about the math, you can think, I want my players to play in a certain way. I should hide this information from them, because if that information is there, the game is too simple, the game is too easy, the game is too complicated. Sometimes you hide information because players will otherwise sit there in analysis for analysis, and calculating every move and they take four goddamn hours to take the turn in the matter. But if you made it imperfect and you hid their stuff, and the person couldn't sit there for five hours figuring out what their move was because they don't have all the numbers they need to add up. And think about when you're setting up the options for a game, especially like a miniatures game or a RTS, right? There's a lot of options to choose from, but the Fog of War option makes a huge difference in the game compared to any of the other things you could be setting. If you turn Fog of War on, now people are sending out scouts, people are doing all sorts of ridiculous stuff. If you turn it off, I see exactly what you're making, and I build the opposite thing and then you see that I'm doing that and you build the opposite thing. It's a completely different game when you change this one, one option. Here we go. It's time to play The Prisoner's Dilemma. As I just mentioned, have you ever heard of The Prisoner's Dilemma? It's one of the most famous board games. Game theory games. Now the thing with game theory games is that they're not fun. You don't play a game theory game to learn about games or game theory. Game theory games are the method of the concert except you're designed to illustrate a point or to explore some fast human behavior. And the original purpose of game theory was to look at the way people act and the way animals act and the way things act and figure out the optimal course of action to take. Game theory assumes two very important things. That everyone is rational and that everyone acts in their own best self-interest. And the world is true to them and neither of those is true most of the time. But these games remove all of that by making them very simple to where you can have computers to iterate through the games. You can do the math very simply. You can prove the concepts without having to do something more complicated like let's run a stock market for 100 years and see if the rich get richer or not. They usually want to use these really simple games. They use them a lot when they're doing scientific studies, especially psychological studies. It's like, okay, here's a good example. They did one where they have a bowl and every minute or so they put a dollar in the bowl, right? And they're going to do it forever. Absolutely forever. So the thing is they're actually going to double the amount of money every minute. So if there's a dollar in the bowl and you wait a minute, they'll put two in and if you wait another minute then they'll put in this they'll put in six and then there would be nine in the bowl so after another minute they would put in eight. It does not take long for there to be trillions of dollars in that bowl. Unless some jackass takes it all. So every time they play, people play this game almost universally, right? People sit there, money, money, money and as soon as somebody makes a grab for it everybody's grabbing it and it's all gone, right? And they use, this is a very simple game. It's not a game you would actually play with your friends, right? Unless you're Bill Gates and you just like, your friends are rats to you or something like that. But the importance of these games if you want to win a game if you want to understand games is that you'll play bigger, wider games that are much more complex than things like The Prisoner's Dilemma or the Colonel Blotto game and you'll start to notice that, oh, this thing that just happened in the game is almost the same as The Prisoner's Dilemma. We had to be both basically choose whether to cooperate or defect even though the game itself is much more complex. So what is The Prisoner's Dilemma? The way The Prisoner's Dilemma works like this, all right? We robbed the bank allegedly. We robbed you of your one-hour lesson there. You know, and, you know, if we work together and both of us work together, you know, we can escape from here, all right? It'll be pretty cool. Yep. So we're going to go inside and the cops talk to me and say, are you going to confess or not and do the same thing to Scott. I don't know what he's going to do, but if I cooperate and he cooperates, we both confess, then we both win. We both go to jail for a short term. We both go to jail for, say, five years. If I totally rat Scott out, and he totally cooperates, I don't go to jail at all. He goes to jail for 50 years. And vice versa. If I say, oh, man, Rimm, he totally did it. He was like the worst. He robbed the whole bank. Here's his address. Here's where the money is, right? And Rimm's like, nope, we didn't do anything. Well, now he's going to go to jail for 50 years and I'm going to get off Scott free. Now, if we both defect, if we both, if we both try to betray the other person, we both go to jail for like 20 years. Yep. So obviously, if we both cooperate, we're best off overall. But if I defect, I totally screw him and I make out like a bandit. But he knows that so he's probably going to want to defect. And then we both go to jail. So what do you do? If you try to cooperate, there's a chance that all of you will be, will be, will be okay-ish, right? But if you dick over the other guy and he doesn't dick you over, then you're going to be making out way better than you can make out by cooperating. That's the best possible result. Unless he also dicks you over. It's also very important whether I play this game once or iteratively, meaning you play it again and again and again. Because yeah, because then the first time you play it, you figure out whether the other guy's a dick or not. Yep. There are famous competitions where they'll run AIs or strategies or computers against each other for a number of rounds to see like which computer strategy is the best. It turns out the best one is something called tit for tat, where you cooperate as long as the other person is cooperating. If they defect, you just defect, defect, defect against them for a while and if they start to cooperate again, then you switch your tactic back. So what kind of games have we played that are prisoner's dilemma? Here's a perfect example. The Advance Wars. Whose play Advance Wars? We'll write plays Advance Wars every morning. I play Advance Wars every day. Alright. So in Advance Wars, a lot of times you'll see the cooperate and defect go on in a three player game. Three player games are evil. Yeah, important aside, three player games are almost universally broken in this particular way. Any three player game you play. Almost any three player game. Yeah, almost any three player game will have this particular problem in it. So what happens is you've got, you know, you've got three people. So, you know, everyone could form a nice triangle, right? Where you attack one guy to your left and you defend from the right or something like that. But Scott and I play to win. Right now it's three players. We have a 33% chance of winning assuming we're all smart. I can go to Scott and say, hey, let's just both re-croll that guy, tanks and tanks and then we'll fight it out after we beat him. That's good. That's both of us cooperating. If we do this, now we both increase our chances of winning to 50%. And his chance of winning is now effectively zero. Any three player game is going to devolve to the two smart players beating the crap out of them. And no matter how good that third player is, he can be the best advanced player in the world. If we're good enough, you know, there's no way he's gonna beat two on one. That's just if it's an even symmetric map and an asymmetric map, maybe not. But in a symmetric map, you know, he's going down. If we team up. So if we cooperate, we both win-win. However, let's say Scott agrees to cooperate and I defect. Defect is, right? So in that case, I lose big. I completely lose. I just completely lose the whole game because Rim hit me from behind because I left my back undefended because he was going to cooperate with me. He were my buddy. And instead, now Rim has basically nearly a hundred percent chance of winning because he has the resources. He has a 66% chance of winning. He's got two whole bases. He's got all my stuff and all his stuff. The win is basically guaranteed because I cooperated and he dicked me over. Now this actually brings up and it doesn't mean what you think it means. If we're played at Vance Force and we agree, hey, we'll have a truce for this many rounds or you take that city outside this city. The game doesn't enforce that. It's not like we lodge our agreement in the game and it makes sure we don't violate it. I can totally just violate it. If I say, yeah, if you land a monopoly, I'll give you your money back, I don't have to actually give you money back. That's a non-cooperative game. The real world is effectively non-cooperative because if you want to force someone to follow through on an agreement, you have to get someone to enforce it in the real world with, you know, laws, police, maybe guns, militaries. Now a cooperative game is a game where there's some external structure that will enforce agreements. A good example of this is the game Dune. In Dune, which is a board game that has two decks, Spice and Treachery. I guess no one reads Dune books. Usually they go, I'll woo when I say that and no one did. Anyway. Don't play the boo game. I like the boo game. So in Dune, Dune is a game where, you know, we're gonna have battles that we've been. But if I make an agreement, it cannot be violated. Agreements are golden by the rules of the game. If I agree to give Scott a dollar in exchange for something later and he doesn't do it, he's cheating. The game says he has to do it. Now diplomacy is a game that's not really cooperative, right? You go into the other room and you make up all sorts of treaties and fun stuff like that, but no one's forcing you to actually do what the treaties say, right? Oh yeah, I'll support the Rhineland share. Now think about this in the real world. The stock market, for example, is effectively a cooperative game. A lot of our economic structures end up being cooperative games, because if I sign a contract with one of you and I told you that you over and violated, police will come and courts will come and sort it all out and make sure the contract gets enforced. It's just sad that they don't do a good enough job anyway. So you have to think about whether or not you want your game to be cooperative or not, because a game where you can enforce contracts versus whatever you can do. All right, so who ever seen the movie, A Beautiful Mind? Anybody? Oh, almost everybody. I haven't actually, but this is the guy that the movie was about. This is John Forbes Nash, right? He was a genius. He came up with something called the Nash Equilibrium, which is one of the most important things in all of game theory and it appears in a lot of the games you play, even though you probably don't realize it when it happens. This is what a Nash equilibrium looks like, right? So look at all the green squares. The colors, right? You have a situation. Let's say player X, you know, player 1 chooses strategy X and player 2 chooses strategy Y2. Now they're both plus 2. If anyone changes their strategy, they're only going to make it worse for themselves, right? So if the player switches from Y2 to Y1, they just went from 2 to negative 10. If they switch to Y, they're going from 2 to 1. They can only make it worse for themselves by switching. Player X can also only make it worse for themselves by switching. Player Y1 or 0, there's no way that they can change their strategy on their own without having player Y also change their strategy to make it any better for themselves. The result is it's an equilibrium, right? It's the highest number for both players in the same column in the same room, right? So what happens is it's an equilibrium. Nobody is going to move. It's like, and this happens a lot too when you're playing a game. It's like, I know what I'm doing on my next turn. You know what you're doing on your next turn? I'm not changing because if I change, I'm only going to say sometimes games are broken for us, we've solved them. That our game, the game has come down to all the total Nash equilibrium. I know every move I'm going to make from the start and so does Scott. Why even play? Let's just say, alright, my strategy would have won. Let's play a game. Yeah, usually, a Nash equilibrium, I see it as a problem usually in games that don't know that have bad ending conditions, right? You'll play a game and you'll say, this game is already over. I can see exactly what's going to happen. I know I'm not, I know what I'm going to do with my last of my turns. I can do about it without just losing by even more than five points. This game is over. So if the game is over, it should be over now. Why should we have to spend another hour determining that it's over? Because you've all played Monopoly. The game comes down to two people going around forever and everybody else wants to go to bed and actually someone flips the board over. The thing is, but you know who's won already, right? Even she's the Nash equilibrium. There's no decisions that I can make that are going to help me win. It's just, the dice are in there. It had to be extreme, extreme luck for me to be able to win. And likewise for the other guy, right? The best time I noticed the Nash equilibrium, we were playing this game called Chicago Express, right? And there was this crazy weird situation at the end of the game where to end the game, you had to buy this one train. But in order to buy that train, you had to spend money, right? And basically, there was one guy every turn his score was going up by a lot. And every, for all the other players, their score was going up by a little every turn. But buying the train cost money, the final train. And he didn't get you any points. It got you less points than it cost. So he wasn't going to buy, the guy in front wasn't going to buy the big train to end the game. I'm not going to buy the train. I'm in second place. I'm not going to end the game and go into last place for nothing. I'm going to stick out to the bitter, faster end. So we already knew the game was going to be first, second, third, fourth. But nobody had any interest in ending the game. So it just continued and continued and continued. Now they had a meta interest much like when you play Monopoly and it goes on forever. You don't want the game to go for four more hours. But at the same time, you don't want to just give up because if Scott's winning Monopoly and I just sit here and sit here and sit here, he might eventually go to bed and then I win. It's also a good strategy. I mean, you know, we always yell at people for not taking their turn. We're like, take your turn or we'll hit you. We expect quick turns. But if you really need to win a game, right? Let the other person, you know, hang there. It's like, I can take forever. Playing Advance Wars, right? All mechs. So yeah, nice eucalyptium. Look out for it. Okay. Metagame. People talk about metagame a lot. They're like, oh, you're metagaming, right? You're thinking about the... You're thinking somehow outside the game. Usually they do this when they're talking about RPGs, right? It's like, oh, you're not being in character. You're looking at that number and realizing that your skill is real good. So you're purposefully using it, right? People think that that's what metagaming is. And you know what? That's the colloquial definition of metagaming. That, you know, if someone says metagaming, that's usually what they mean, especially at a place like PAX. Yeah, they mean they're bringing something into the game from the outside that isn't contextual in the game. A good example of this, and this is a game theory talk, but it kind of relates, the game of chicken is a game where we're in a car and if I swerve and the other person doesn't, then I lose. He swerves, I don't, I win. If we both swerve, we both lose. If neither one of us swerves, we both die. So a meta aspect of the game, if I bring in an outside, you know, a decision that wasn't really part of that decision matrix, but I look at the other guy, I grab my steering wheel, I rip it off and throw it at him. I can't swerve now. Singing game theory, right, is that's not the definition of metagame to a game theorist, right? A game theorist, the definition of metagame is actually a game where you make a game, right? Any game where in the course of the game you create a new game is a metagame. So this creates the, yo dog, let's play, yo dog, let's play, yo dog, let's keep recursion. Well, it could be, yes, if you could make a metagame in a metagame if you wanted to, but you don't necessarily have to. So mechanism design, which is in the title of our panel, so it must be important. How many of you thought we were just going to talk about like game mechanics and stuff because you didn't read the description of the panel? Okay, that's all right. Mechanism design is actually incredibly, incredibly important and relatively new, right, years old. The guys who invented mechanism design won Nobel prizes, right? That's just how serious this business is. So what mechanism design is, it's a metagame, right? You're playing a game where you make a game. There's one difference. You care what behavior the player is going to exhibit in the course of the game, right? Now think about that. Doesn't that sound a lot like a video game? I mean, if I'm a game designer, I care how my players play my game. I want them to have fun. I have a vested interest in the outcome of the game they're playing. And yet almost no one in the game industry has any idea what this is. No, no, no. So, for example, let's say, you know, I'm going to make a game. All right, Rem, here's the game we're going to play. All right. We're both going to make games and our goal is to get the player to dance really well. Oh, I got to go. I'm going to have these arrows just fly by, and I'm going to reward him carrot stick by giving him points every time he steps on an arrow. Really? That's a good way. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a dance central with a little connect going on, right? It's actually going to show people how to do the dances instead of just using arrows on the floor, right? And I think that they will look much better if they play that one. It's a simple example. But they won't get less exercise. It's a simple example, but we've designed the game to encourage a certain kind of behavior. You can play dance-dance revolution like this if you really want. You can play like this if you really want. But it's designed to make you want to dance and the rules of the game encourage that. If you watched our friends' panel earlier in the convention, game design is mind control, right? That's what mechanism design is the science of that, right? We want to control what the players do, so let's design a game in such a way to get that behavior to happen, right? All the MMOs are like, hey, we need to make a game that gets the player to keep their subscription for ever and ever and ever and keep playing and keep playing and keep playing and keep playing. Farmville, yeah, we need to make a game to where the player really wants to take more turns and more actions, and they end up giving us more money to get more things. I don't even know. Now, I keep going back to the stock market, but think about the stock market again as a game. Regulation from governments is effectively the rules of the game with the stock market. The governments of the world have a vested interest in using mechanism design to create a game that encourages whatever behavior they want. We want a stock market, for example, that distributes well and equitably reliably values assets and doesn't screw people over, doesn't make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, doesn't cause all these problems like you might have noticed in the news for the last decade. One place to see mechanism design is that whatever genius came up with achievements, right? Hey, we want people... I'm not an achievement fan. I don't know why I clap. Basically, it's like, hey, we want people to buy games and then actually play them a whole lot instead of playing them for five minutes and putting them down. Let's put these achievements in the game, right? So now every game has to have achievements in it, right? But on top of that, there's even these a few crazy people out there they'll play and buy crappy, crappy games but they do not have fun playing just so they can get achievement points. Now, my people with achievements is not this. I mean, this sort of mechanism design of drinking players and doing things they wouldn't otherwise do is great. My problem with achievements is that they're unsubtle. They're like the laziest way to do that. Hey, if you run through the whole game holding this gnome, I'll give you nothing. A more subtle way would be at the end. If I talk with the thing on the screen, you'll feel like it's something. Now, think about a more subtle way. Say you want players to try this gnome quest. Instead, what if at the near the end of the game there's a spot where there's a line of garden gnomes and there's one missing and a player just notices that. Very subtle, very different, but it's the same mechanic fundamentally. It's just used in the game elegantly as opposed to tacked down by lazy game designers. It's almost new work to add an achievement to a game. That's why they love doing it, right? It would be a lot more work to have the gnomes dance when you put the one in the missing spot or something like that. You get to make all sorts of animations, right? Also, look what achievements are doing. If you make it a contextual reward in the game, I bring the gnome back and that changes the story a little bit. It gives me an alternate ending. It's contextual. That was part of the game directly. Achievements aren't part of the game. Instead, it just pops a thing up. It's so meta. It's so outside of the game that's not even there. If you're playing the game immersed, you're part of the game. The game's contextual. You're in the context of the game. As soon as that achievement pops up, it's this outside thing saying, hey, you're still playing a game. Don't forget. We already discussed this a little bit, but the MMORPGs are kings of mechanism design, right? How do exactly they trick you and to keep paying for your subscription and to keep playing day after day, hours and hours and do it, right? Well, first of all, they make a game that has a significant time investment, right? If you look at a game like Mario, exactly a really skilled player could beat Mario 1 very, very quickly and then it's over. In MMOs, it doesn't matter how much skill you have, the game takes a long time just by design, right? So if you play it, you already have a time investment into it, and thus the sunk cost fallacy will keep, you'll be like, oh, I already put so much time into this game. I can't give up on it now. Otherwise, all that time I spent will have been wasted. The game is stateful as opposed to state less. Counter-Strike is a state-less game. Every round of Counter-Strike is completely discreet. It's not like I leveled up my TMP, I don't want to explain the lightning bolts. If they ever do that, it's pretty good. Oh, like they did in Team Fortress 2? Oh! Look at what they did with Team Fortress 2. They turned what was a state-less competitive game, actually technically a sport, and turned it into a pseudo-MMO. Even though I already said in our other panel, we shouldn't call anything MMOs. The other things MMOs do, right, is they've got the carrot and stick going on, mostly carrot, right? And this is what almost all the games are doing these days, is they keep giving you little carrots very often. It's not like, you know, some old RPGs, but they didn't really think about how much XP should you get for the next level. No, they purposely, you know, either through trial and error or calculation, trial and error according to some Blizzard guy, right? You know, they figured out, aha, the players will, you know, every time that they're just about to get tired with the game, that's the time that they're going to get a level, right? So the time it takes to get a level is the time it takes for your brain to go, um, boy, oh yeah, I got a level. Oh, now I can go to this new place. Yeah, let's keep playing. Now, this is why World of Warcraft is so popular compared to a lot of earlier MMOs. I mean, MMOs were around. Like, I played the realm, the first MMO. It was pretty awful. Oh my God, someone else played the realm. It's still running. It is still running to this day. There's scary people in there. But old MMOs, you might remember, if you died, they hit you with the biggest stick ever. You'd lose, like, your pants and your sword and, like, 10 levels and, like, 100 hours worth of play. And in the realm, for example, to get from level 60 to 61, I needed 1,000 experience points. Because I was very high level, I got 1 experience point for killing the biggest monster in the game, the King Kilrog. So I would kill the King Kilrog a thousand times to get to the next level. So the carrots were very sparse and the sticks were massive, so only massacres played MMOs back in the day. World of Warcraft, now, they didn't do the mag behind it, as we know because we've talked to them, but they still, they know what makes it a game. They tweaked it and tweaked it until it was fun for all of them. The carrots are just big enough to make you feel like you did something not, you know, dangling too far out of reach where you give up. The sticks are just big enough to make it sting, but they don't take away, like, all your levels and your mouth if you die in a raid. The last clever thing that they really did to make people keep playing MMOs, right, is they came up with the idea of the raid, right, so it's like, hi, in order to beat this guy, you need a bunch of friends, right? And the thing is, not only do you need a bunch of friends, but everyone actually has to do a good job and everyone has to be there for the whole time. So now you feel socially obligated to keep playing this game. And if you have at least one friend and it's like, no, screw you, I don't want to play that anymore. He'd be like, what? Now I can't do it because I want to do it and I can't because you won't help me. Have any of you ever done a raid you didn't want to? Yeah. Oh, you got owned just like when I made you do the wave. Got owned. They told your monies, all right. And, you know, of course, one of our favorite genres, the rhythm game, right, which is sadly dying, right? How do they control you and get you to do certain things, right? Actually, it's not so much about the mechanics of the rhythm game. It's more about, you know, the physiological things that they do, right, through music and visuals, right? People who play DDR don't often realize unless they're advanced and they really care about it. I'm really old, I've been playing DDR for over a decade. But basically, the enros are all the same colors set and they cycle through the colors in rhythm with the game. But when they hit the top where you step on them, the color will be different based on whether it's a quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, you know, third, whatever. So there's all these subtle things all the numbers, those perfect 16, 17, 18 combo going on. They pulse slightly every time you step. So the whole game is in rhythm with you the whole time and it gets you pumping. Even if you don't like rhythm games and you're a terrible dancer, you'll want to keep playing. But I first saw DDR, I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen in my life. And my friends, I just played, let's see, and I played it and I was like, this is stupid. And then I kept playing for like four hours. I'm like, Scott, play this stupid game. He's like, no, I'm like, just die of course. And then I'm like, all right, I can't, you know, because we have a policy. You can't knock it if you haven't tried it, right? And I'm like that, I wanted to make fun of it. I'm like, that's the stupidest game. Oh wait, if I say that, they'll say I haven't tried it and everyone else is trying it. So if I just start, you're ragging on it, everyone's going to say, Scott, you haven't even played it, you can't talk. So I'm like, oh, I have to play it to be able to make fun of it. I'm going to play it once and then make fun of it. Ah, shit. Yeah, so the rhythm games, they totally get you, you know, through light and sound. And you know, notice if you ever look at a DDR machine, it's got two gigantic bass speakers on both sides of it. Doom, doom, you know, and you can feel the vibrations through the dance pad. Oh, it's so awesome. Where the 4th plus machine's gone, I don't know. All right, so one kind of genre of the game where there isn't enough mechanism design going on is the RPG, at least the tabletop RPG, which is why you've got to play the indie RPGs where they do do smart things. Our first PAX panel ever, we run this like three packs as we eventually retired it. Though if anyone's going to be in King of Prussia in Pennsylvania next weekend, we'll be at Sank icon doing that panel rewritten. But we did a panel called Beyond Dungeons and Dragons where we talked about all the math and all the theory behind why Dungeons and Dragons is a good game for one particular specific kind of role-playing game and is terrible at everything else. Absolutely terrible. We did it right after the Wizards of the Coast played our D&D panel. I thought that was hilarious. So let's talk about the RPG everybody knows D&D, right? What mechanism design is going on in D&D? Well, they give you rewards when you kill monsters and find, you want treasures and you want XP. That's what you want, right? It's the rewards. When do you get them? And remember, I'm not talking about any sort of modification of D&D. I'm talking about what is in the rulebook, right? Yeah, I mean, you're an awesome DM and you bring something to the table and you have an awesome story. That's not the game that's viewed. We're just talking about the game itself. Yeah, if it's not in the rulebook, then it doesn't count. So what does D&D give you rewards for? Killing monsters, right? Now, some of the books, different editions of D&D said things like, oh, if a guy plays really well, give him a couple hundred XP. If he accomplishes his story goals, give him some XP. Like, there's all these rules. Give a little rewards here and there. But think about what that does to the game. D&D is designed to be balanced. If one guy is four levels higher than everyone else in the party, the game totally breaks down in every version of D&D ever. They're either useless in combat or something's broken. So as a result, the Game Master has to keep everyone around the same level, which means individual player rewards are completely meaningless because you have to give them evenly or the game breaks. But at the same time, right, everybody wants to advance together, even if they don't care if they can break away from anyone else, right? And the only way to do that is to fight monsters. So if you're walking around in D&D and you see a monster and you think you can kill it, you're gonna kill it, right? Because that means XP. It doesn't matter if it was a good monster or an evil monster or whatever. It's even going a little more subtle. Look at the way D&D, if I want to argue with the guard, like, guard, let me in. My aunt is not a best. I need to get into this place. All right, I roll with a diplomacy check or if the DM's cool, maybe he'll, you know, role play a little bit. If I role play really well, I'll convince him. Look at that. If I role play really well and convince him, it's my role playing skill. My character has a charisma of like three, but I'm really eloquent and it's really easy to trick the game master into forgetting that your charisma is three. You're supposed to be all dirt to dirt. If you just roll, now say we just do it mechanically. I roll the diplomacy check. I get to roll one die to determine this jump here in the game. If I try to kill that guy, I get to roll, like, a hundred dice. And it's so much more fun to use all the weird dice. No one wants to roll this one. I'll, like, I'll just play them spear on them, take a five foot step back and hit them with my mace. Yeah. So what if you made a game of role playing game, Burning Real does this, where there's social conflict as well as sword conflict. If you want to argue with the guard, you roll just as many dice. You fight with words. I rebut. I obfuscate. I try to incite you. Now, what does that do to the game? It encourages people to have these epic debates in the context of the game. The great Dwarven King arguing with the great Elven King about whether or not they should go and fight the Orcish Hordes or not. You do that in your team, but that's just you role playing. If you make that part of the game mechanically, even people who aren't good at role playing will start to do those things and your games will become better. So if everyone sucks, but the game is good, the game will trick you into being good at role playing, if the game sucks and you're good, you can role play well. If the game sucks and you suck, there's no hope. Yeah. I mean, everyone have, you know, I don't know, some people have told me that they really do enjoy the combat and D&D and the fighting and all that stuff, and, you know, good for them. It's not my thing, right? I like second edition, like Hackmaster's style, you know, beer and pretzels and everything. Even though it takes so long though, I would like it if it took less time. Like, I could like a good net hack because it's quick, you know, on the computer, but actually rolling it takes too long. Anyway, you know, but, you know, I'm pretty sure most people agree the best parts about playing tabletop RPGs, no matter which one it is, is those totally awesome moments when something crazy happens. Now, it doesn't have to be good or bad. I mean, you might think, oh, winning is when I have the most fun. Like, oh, we got the McGuffin and we saved the L. Sometimes it is. It's like, oh, man, the way, the epic way, we totally took that dragon down. Let me tell you about it. You owe. Oh, don't tell me about it, please. You all have that story there where you, like, got the McGuffin and you're trying to escape from the evil city through the sewers and you're fucked up and you drop the McGuffin and then you set, like, the sewers on fire and the whole city blew up and half the party died. It was crazy. Those stories get told more often than the stories when you win because those are usually the more fun stories. Yet, the mechanism design of most role-playing games like D&D, Gerbs, all those things pushed you toward this and eventually you're going to win. I try to find the theme skill. You don't find it. All right. Take 20 on the gathering information. All right, you find them. Let's continue. As opposed to, you don't find the theme skill. All right. You didn't fucking find the theme skill. Now what? All right, Ram, let's play another mechanism design game. All right. Okay, so we both have to make a game, right? And what we want is we want to get the players to tell awesome stories that are epic. What if I made a game? All right. Where when I rolled the dice, like, the player rolls the dice, like he says, I want to kick in the door and shoot all the mafia guys in the hay. All right, roll your dice and he rolls really well. I turn him and say, tell me what happens. Oh man, I get to kick in the door. I've got to bring in two Tommy guys, no four Tommy guys. Right? And they auto reload and I bring in hose all the mafia guys down until there's nothing but little itty bitty bits. But, if the player rolls poorly, I narrate what happens. Well, the one, eh, you try to kick in the door and you end up facing it. So through the bloody haze of your broken nose you stumble into the room, drop your Tommy guns and you see, as far as I can tell, every member that's going to come off is standing there with gunstroke looking at you. Now what? That simple thing of giving the player's control of the narrative, they research the thieves' guild and they succeed. They make something up. They just make it up. Yeah, the thieves' guild is run by this guy named Joe and he lives in this place and if he rolls poorly, yeah, the thieves' guild is run by a goddamn elder dragon. All right. All right. Well, I'm going to make an RPG and my RPG is going to be one rule and the rule is say yes or roll the dice, right? And the way this is going to work is the GM can never, never, never say no, ever, ever. I want a pony. No. I don't want to give you a pony so you have to roll the dice. All right. All right. I'm going to roll a d20. What do I need to roll to get that pony? Oh, shit. How badly do I not want him to have a pony? But I can't make it impossible because that's saying no. It's the same thing. You need a 17 to get the pony. One. That's right. No pony. You know, it's like, you think about that. You can never say no. It's like, there always has to be some possibility. All right, Rem. You want to climb Mount Everest, I see. I do. I do. All right. It's going to be 18 to climb Mount Everest. I'm not going to roll that. But, oh, shit. He's not going to roll. But I want him to try. I want him to try. I want him to try. In fact, I'm guaranteed to fail because I'm only a d10 in this role. All right. If you fail, though, it doesn't matter whether you succeed or fail, your climbing skill will increase. Mount Everest, can we fucking come and roll to one? What happens to me? You die, but your climbing skill went up by one. Briefly, the best example of this week I've ever seen. The best example of game theory in the entire goddamn universe. I was going to talk about that. Oh, you are? I was going to talk about the casino. Oh, all right, let's talk about the casino. I guess you disagree. Hey, Rem, let's make a game where I empty your wallet. All right. This obviously works very well. You cannot beat the casino. They have designed a game that you can't win that you will play anyway. Now, the casino thing is the casino works on multiple levels, right? Not only does it work in the game mechanics level, every game is random, but there's a good enough chance that you could maybe actually win something like 49% a roulette of doubling your money. That's, you know, I can make a game just to go to the casino. I'm not going to actually run it because we're running out of time, but I could auction off this $5 bill to this audience right now and make a profit. The way I would do it is I would make my own rules. The rules are, whoever wins the $5 auction gets the $5 bill and they pay me whatever they bid. You pay me a dollar, you get the $5 bill. Whoever was second place in the bidding also has to pay me what their last bid was. So you think, all right, I'll bid $4.99 and make a profit of a penny. Scott looks and says, $5. All right, Scott gets no profit and he just dick that other guy over. And it's fun to run this for a big room because people get really into it and then there's this moment where everyone goes, oh shit, oh, what if we just do it? See, the casino, right, not only are the rules of their games, you know, tricky to get you to empty your wallets for them, right, but they also have the DDR aspect. You know, they get the lights and the sound and the visuals and the, you know, the atmosphere. They got all the way down to the temperature control, right. They've got everything completely controlled to psychologically affect you. Even shopping malls do this. They purposefully make the halls sort of windy to keep, to make it longer for you to get out. You have to walk past a bunch of stores on the way out. They make the parking lot big and far away as opposed to a close-up parking garage most of the time because that way you walked a long way to get to the mall. You're not just going to come in for a quick shot, you know, a quick shot, one, two, three. You're only going to go there for a big deal. A guy's just starting to get up like he's starting to lose some money at a blackjack table just before he gets up and waitress walks over and offers him a free drink. You know, yeah, hey, for 10 bucks, I'll keep your wild character alive for another year. That's the same thing. All right, so, you know, is there anyone who uses game theory to make more money than casinos? Do you think anyone? How about these guys? This is what I do for a living. I'm a production engineer on Wall Street. And to put it bluntly, there is a lot of goddamn money flying around. And it's all a gigantic game and every big investment bank, every trader, everyone out there is trying to play this game to get the most money possible. That's their utility. Individual dollars. And it's messed up as a result. I can clearly talk about a lot of the details of it because due to the nature of my work, I am unable to mention names of companies or stocks in any sort of context that could imply that I in any way have an opinion on how well they will do. So stock A and stock B and community. But there's a stock out there that is not, it's very low right now. It's not worth a lot because that company didn't do that well due to various reasons. But that stock trades a lot. Basically, people are constantly trading it. Like, I'll trade you this. I'll buy, buy, sell, buy, sell, buy. Ten to fifteen, twenty million shares a day and it moves a penny because everyone's playing around there with their algos. They're playing their games there in this kind of agreed upon playground to test out all their trading. And they might trade a billion shares over the course of a week and make a penny share. A penny times a billion is a lot of money. And that's the just, that's not even them trying to make money. That's their fooling around figuring out if they're money making computer books. And think about how complex this game is. Let's say I think a stock is a good bet. I want to buy a million dollars worth of that stock or a million shares of that stock. As I'm buying it, people can see that I'm buying it. So they know, oh, he's trying to buy it. They'll push the price Oh, perfect information. They'll push the price against me and profit on the fact that they know the price is going to go up because I'm trying to buy the goddamn stock. Me buying stock messes up my own strategy. So it's kind of like the rocket fuel equation where to figure out how much rocket fuel you need to send a rocket into space, one of the variables in the rocket. That equation sucks. All right. So let's wrap this up. So what you got to do when you're playing games, I don't care what game you're playing. It's easiest with board games. Really think about what's going on. Say, aha, I see some perfect information here. I see some prisoner's dilemma here. And then think, what would I do in the prisoner's dilemma? Would I cooperate or defect? And then translate that to decisions that are in the game. And if you do that, hopefully more often. All right. Unless you're done. I hope not. All right. Trying to win is very important. You can come see us in a couple of hours. We're going to tell you all about trying to win. 1230 in the Naga Theater. We will be telling you exactly how to win every goddamn game. Almost every goddamn game, right? You know, because what's the point of playing if you're not playing to win? You're just going, eh, whatever. And then it's like, oh, the other people are trying to win. You just ruin the game for them. You are. If you are not trying to win a game that other people are playing, I don't even want to try to beat you. I'm just going to play this game for the hell of it. It's like, if you go up and you want to play Street Fighter, and the other guy just goes like, poke, poke, poke. It's like, what? You're not even playing, dude. Get out, you know? Resist mind control, right? We've showed you a lot of ways with people controlling your mind, getting you to play MMOs, getting you to do this, getting you to do this. One example of this in a lot of panels is the whole game. Very briefly. When I try to get you to do the wave, right? Resist that. You don't want people to do wave. Also the fact that due to the laws of causality and quantum mechanics is entirely possible that there's a causal change stretching all the way back to the big bang. If you don't have any free will, it doesn't matter. But try to resist. Regardless, you should try to resist mind control because if there is free will, you know, you have to grasp every possibility of it there being, right? And also use mind control and others to get what you want. You want a better job. You want more money. You want to be up here and set it down there, right? You know, think about, aha, I want to do this to get that person to do that. But do it ethically. Right? You know, there's a certain line to where you can make, you know, games to get people to do things that are not cool. Like, aha, I will trick all these people into torturing. It's like, don't do that. Well, you might have seen there's a famous movie called Ender's Game. Don't do that. Also, if you do see someone, you know, making games that you think are unethical, you know, I think this is a discussion that, you know, the gaming community really isn't having. You know, people are all at the farm bill and stuff like that. And they're getting people to empty their wallets for nothing. And it's like, is this ethical? Right? I don't know how ethical, and people aren't really discussing whether it's ethical or not. They're mostly discussing here's how to do it to make my monies. Go, go, go. Consider this, you know, our brains are physical. There's electrons moving around and neurotransmitters. And if you're imagining a mild little pony right now in your head, there's a physical manifestation of that pony that you're imagining in your brain. So you have to figure out that picture. As a result, if you're playing a game and it's causing you to think and do certain things, that game is physically affecting you. It's the equivalent of a game punching you in the face. It's just punching you in the brain. It really hurts. Actually it doesn't hurt at all because the brain can't sense pain. But anyway. And of course, have fun, right? And if you're not having fun, whether you're trying to win or lose, then go do something else that you do think is fun, right? And if you're not a gamer, I don't know. If you don't enjoy it at all, feel free to grab a flyer and we will answer your question via email. If you send us a question to the Pirate Box, we will answer your question via email if you gave us your email address or a post-net line somewhere. Come to our panel at 12.30. Let's see what the Pirate Box says. Just to be curious. How to win at games. We will tell you how to win at games. And I'm afraid we're not going to be able to hang out at the front of the room and talk to you much because we have to go to the other panel in an hour and set up the game. Hey, we got questions. How about that?