🦸 The Company of Heroes
Who is a Stranger?
Introduction: The Company of Strangers!
How many strangers do you “meet” everyday?
Why is the Human Species different from all others?
Those two questions are not unrelated !! The Human Species is perhaps unique in that we are able to cooperate with strangers
Yes! Do you think that designing things, building and conducting a business, or making art is something like that? No? Well, let us see a few quick stories!!
Story-1
Do you know who these four people are ?
The Hero’s Journey
This is the story of a young man who leaves home from Tarbes, in Gascony, France, to travel to Paris to make his fortune. He has two blessings,one each from his mother and his father. True to the instructions given by his Dad, and his very Gascon nature, he picks a fight even before he reaches Paris.
Classic Movie Time!
Let us watch a (very very) small part of this movie, The Three Pangas Musketeers-1973. Here is the IMDB page for film buffs.
This video ( if available ) : https://www.tcm.com/video/454255/three-musketeers-the-1973-movie-clip-we-are-only-three/
and this order version:
Classic Fiction Time!
Let us read aloud(!!) a bit of good old classic fiction !! This is the Conversation that occurs right before the duel scene we saw in the video above.Chapter 5. THE KING’S MUSKETEERS AND THE CARDINAL’S GUARDS.1
Keep an eye on the conversation! And an ear open for French-ified English, I beseech you!!
And here is the audio reading of this chapter from Librivox.org
Discussion-1
- Why are they TALKING, when they have come here to FIGHT?? “When have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk!” said Eli Wallach.
- Pardon,m’sieu, but why were they so polite to each other? (Oh, These French…)
- Were they talking as if they didn’t want to fight?
- But to “have fought already”?
- The Shadow of the Future on the Present
Story-2
What about this game ?
Discussion-2
What emotions or motivations are portrayed by the characters in the story? We can think of the “4Rs”:
- Reward
- Regret aka FOMO
- Risk
- Retribution/Punishment
Nice Guys Finish First
Wait, But Why?
- Many public behaviours require us to trust strangers
- We have Rule of Law based on this trust
- If there is no C at first, then everybody does a D
- That is the source of the Dilemma
- As Artists and Designers, and Creators, we need to practice our craft that in such a way as to induce niceness…
- So what will you make? A movie? An ad? A public sign-board? A street play? An illustration? A “spatial arrangement”? A policy or a law?
References
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Game Theory Presentation from fee.org
Game Theory Presentation from fee.org John D. Williams, The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy, RAND Corporation, ISBN:9780833042224. This is a very humourous and fun book on Game Theory ! It is available for free online at the RAND Corporation Website.
Ken Binmore,Playing for Real: A Text on Game Theory, ISBN:9780195300574, Oxford University Press, March 2007. Available here.
Avinash Dixit, Susan Skeath, David Reiley, Games of strategy, ISBN: 9780393124446, New York :W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Brams Steven J., 1994. “Game Theory and Literature,” Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 6(1), pages 32-54, January. Available here.
Alexander Mehlmann,The game’s afoot! Game theory in myth and paradox, American Mathematical Society 2000. AMS Bookstore
Steven .J Brams. (February 4, 1992). Game Theory in Literature Department of Politics, New York University, New York, New York 10003. Read the PDF
Game Theory Pop Music, Movie Clip, and TV ad Playlist !!
- Chris de Burgh: Don’t Pay the Ferryman! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-a5TAL-IXs
- Abba: The Name of the Game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Qf_7HM1cM
- Bachchan vs Warsi: Want a Pepsi - Tit for Tat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc6QZcxbMZE
- The Princess Bride - Battle of Wits - Which Strategy to Use here? (Asymmetric Information) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMz7JBRbmNo
- The Gods Must be Crazy (Brinkmanship) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LvViKftRnA
- L.A. Confidential https://criticalcommons.org/embed?m=pBXsAUvh9
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPun-5dtld0 (Sadly, dead link)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOFhfw-u5fg (Sadly, dead link)
- Game Theory in the movies. https://criticalcommons.org/search?q=game+theory
- https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Three_Musketeers
Assignment-1
Take a walk in the nearest urban area this weekend. Unobtrusively, observe what people are doing. Note these down when they seem to be visible examples of “Cooperate” or “Defect”. For or Against whom? Discuss the Actions, and the possible payoff values. Draw up a Payoff Matrix is possible. ( Some Actions will of course have to be “predicted” since you do not observe the entire vocabulary of Actions they might perform.)
No pictures.
Footnotes
Download The Three Musketeers e-book at ProjectGutenberg↩︎