Game Theory 101

First of all the title "game theory" is misleading - Von Neuman's obsession with poker started it - but it has long ago escaped the confines of games. Better would be "interactive theory" perhaps.

Anyway. Very basically the theory studies individuals or groups of agents - active objects with the ability to make 'choices' or at least implement strategies, even if they are rigidly confined by either biology/genetics, society or programming in the case of simulations. I'd argue you can also apply it to interactions between anything and anything as long as the two systems are reactive - ie having effect upon each other - but that might just be me.

Anyway. It cuts the various acts of reciprocation down into two basic responses:

Co-operation: This means things like fair trading practices, fidelity in relationships, alliance in war, adherrence to social contracts, sticking to the rules and not punching your opponent straight in the gonads in boxing matches - that kinda stuff.

Non-co-operation: This can mean anything from sticking a spear or putting a bullet into someone at one extreme, to not quite pulling your full weight in a group endeavor - Imagine 6 guys shouldering a coffin full of very fat guy for example. Bearers 1 through 5 are all putting their backs into it, but bearer 6 is just pretending - at the other end of the scale.

Let's shorten them to co and no to save my tendons.

There is also an abstracted pay-off scheme, for each outcome ie:

co-co // no-co // co-no // no-no.

Usually, **but not always, the pay-off (individual) is highest for no-co, (for the 'no' individual) and lowest (individual) for co-no (for the co individual). Co-co gives the highest group pay-off, and no-no the lowest.

** this 'not always' is the problem. Some social conditions create arenas of moral hazard - this is when the benefits of co-co (or punishments of no-co // no-no) are low, or marginal - raising the temptation of exploitive action. Blacks in ghettos for example have little incentive to co-co the social contract, since it soon becomes apparant that the second player - society/government is kinda playing a co-no strategy, through discrimination or prejudice.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

So, anyway - social progression.

Let's start with the big old verdant and fully fauna'd world of our ancestors ze goddamn far-too-much-talked about hunter-gatherer groups.

Let's assume they are fairly tightly bound by genetic lineages and inter-coupling - that way we can call them a superorganism and count them as a single effective unit - like an ant colony. They are self - everything else - bears, trees, other people - is not-self.

The important thing to remember is at this stage is the world is large, punishments from outside forces are absent and the group is few in number. These are the conditions which sponsor exploititive no-co strategies.

If you count the enviroment as an interactive partner, the whole human race has been playing no-co for pretty much its entire history. Anything that moved got speared and eaten, anything that didn't, got cut down/dug up and burned, turned into tools or building materials or food again. Slash and burn baby burn. It is only now, now that the ecosystem is finally beginning to fall into a state that punishes humanity that we are beginning to foster co-co strategies: fell a tree, plant a tree etc.

Anyway. Living space is also a resource. Game theory really kicks off when two ungenetically related players or groups of players come together. I think you can still see examples of the initial state in some tribes in jungle somewhere - fucked if I can remember the details. Basically, you're out in the jungle/forest/plain wherever, tracking a pig with some mates. (You have the friends, not the pig). When suddenly, you bump into another bunch of people that - jeepers - you do not know.

Imagine how scary that would be. If you'd been going around believing you were the only people left on the Earth. Imagine every "the Aliens have landed" film you've ever seen. What's mankind's usual response to Aliens..? Yay. It's the "Well, bullets didn't work general, we'll have to go for the nuclear option."

Somehow it's never the "Well, they didn't like the cheesecake general, we'll have to go with the croissants."

[snicker]

So: Tribe A / Tribe B

Ano/Bno - War or constant attrition. Either way, both groups stay isolated, stay small.
Aco/Bno or Ano/Bco - A/B gets completely fucked over, and/or turned into just another passive resource - producing a harvest of worker uniits or reproductive units.
Aco/Bco - the two tribes unite into a larger superorganism, for as long as the alliance holds.

It must be remembered however, initially - the no-co option ie. "automatically exploit" - is the safest, and the best for as long as your opponents are few enough in number to completely erradicate without major losses inflicted on your side. Now, intuitively, you'd think this automatic-exploit behaviour would eventually come to an equilibrium state - ie. peaceful - with one huge genetically related super-organism/tribe dominating any given area over time, but, this is not the case.

Due to monkeysphere constrictions on coherrent group sizes - 150-200 in our case - natural factionation occurs, even between related sub-groups, and there is never any peace, even if intially one single group dominates the entire area. Running out of external enemies just means you'll create some more, but this time from within the group.

Automatic non-cooperative strategies ensure small isolated group sizes.

Over time - assuming there are or eventually will be - a lot of sub-groups all living interactively, the larger co-co groups will begin to dominate the area. And will continue to do so for as long as they can maintain co-operation.

This is where eye-for-eye strategies spring from. Primitive social contracting. Honour codes. Basically they mean "I won't attack first". This is where old-time religion - as I said in "God of War" - and biology (sexual attraction) kinda fucks things up. If everybody knows the rules, knows where the lines are, eyeforeye works just super. But it only takes one 'Helen of Troy' or one 'don't work on the sabbath' or maybe even just a 'I misunderstood what you said but I'm too damn stubborn to admit it and back down you son of a bitch' and the whole thing comes falling down, and you are back to the old no-no / co-no situation of isolated groups all at each other's throats, either in smaller interfamillial vendetta or full fledged society vs. society war. And it is conflict without escape because eyeforeye disallows forgiveness in that this strategy only repeats whatever the other player did in the last round of the game. If A went with no, then B will go with no too in the next. Each feeds off the other's enmitiy producing a spiral back into primitive conditions, and if no recourse is found, death or exploitation for both at the hand of another superorganism still running a co-co strategy.

Strategies which allow for initial tolerance of infractions enable the players to maintain co-co relationships. ie. Instead of just automatically hitting the poor foreign ambassador who looked at your girlfriend in a funny way, or actually said "You have the head of an dung-beetle" when really he was just enquiring which way the latrine was, you stop and ask "Er, why are you looking at my girlfriend in a funny way..?" Or "Er, I think you mean 'where's the toilet', and if so, it's over there, just follow your nose."

The other cheek. A useful appliance.

So in a long enough time-frame, areas become dominated, by definition, by super-large tolerant social contractors. This is only at the local level btw. I'm not talking about the Ruler/ruled version so much. You can have a society loosely co-co with a despotic no-co ruler, if not for very long (because the moral hazard of rewards for exploititive behaviour - ie. positions in the aristocracy/governing body vs. the lesser if more global rewards of remaining a part of the co-co proletariat - becomes too tempting for the majority of the public to resist and society gradually implodes through lack of trust - as each member begins to back-stab his aquaintances in order to scramble up the rungs of power).

When tolerant societies become established and entrenched, then, like the 6th coffin bearer who sneakily refused to carry his full share of fat guy to his own benefit (though not to the point where the whole operation of "transport fat dead guy from point X to point Z" was jepordized and his laziness discovered - this is an important distinction) - some people choose opportunism. Actually, to say 'some people choose' is wrong, better to say "society reaches a point where it can support a substantial proportion of opportunists without losing equilibrium".

You can see the same pattern reflected in trading and business too - In the progression from some guy with a wheelbarrow hawking stuff on the street, all the way up to vast multinationals.

The inevitability of "to be this, requires it to have acted thus" - the linkage between defined and definition - is king.

...Continued...