Read Along: Hunger Game Theory

When the Girl Who Was on Fire was originally released, we took a deeper look at each of the essays found inside the anthology. With the release of the Movie Edition, we will be analyzing the three additional pieces.  This is the first in that series.

If you’d like to check out our previous read along essays, click here.

Hunger Game Theory

by

Diana Peterfreund

*Note this essay contains spoilers*

“…I’m more than just a piece in their Games.” ~Peeta Mellark, Hunger Games

Have you heard of Game Theory? Here’s a brief lesson: it’s not about games.

Then, what’s it about? Strategy. More specifically, it’s “a mathematical approach to the study of decision-making. It’s about strategy, about how people are programmed to respond in various social situations, and about the forces that can predict the ways in which living things, companies, communities, and even nations will act.” Yeah. So basically, The Hunger Games is all about game theory, and Diana Peterfreund gives us a few examples of how in her essay that’s part of the The Girl Who Was On Fire: Movie Tie-In Edition.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is one of the classic problems in game
theory. In short, it posits the following: Two people accused of a
crime are captured and questioned separately. They are each told
they have the option to confess (“defect”) or keep quiet (“cooperate”),
but their punishment will depend not only on whether or
not they confess, but whether the other prisoner does as well. For
instance, if neither prisoner confesses, they might both receive a
year in prison. If both confess, they’ll both receive five years in
prison. But if one confesses and the other doesn’t, then the confessor
will be free to go while the secret-keeper will receive ten
years in prison.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is popular in game theory because it touches on its central question of self-interest vs. cooperation. Basically, the best outcome would be if neither prisoners confesses. Then they’d both be back out partying in a year. However, the best strategy for a person’s individual self-interest is to confess. Because if I confess and my buddy confesses, then we’re only there for five years. Even better, If I confess and my buddy doesn’t, I’m out of there! BUT if I make the choice NOT to confess and my buddy does, then I am not in a good place. So this good strategy of me confessing because it will turn out best for me regardless is called dominant strategy. Katniss Everdeen is all about dominant strategy in The Hunger Games.

Katniss’ dominant strategy is to assume that Peeta is trying to kill her. Admittedly, it’s hard for her. He seems so genuine and he’s so easy to like, but then she will see him do something like wave to the Capitol citizens from the train and she’ll fall back on it — “…kind Peeta Mellark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.” Even if Peeta really does love her, like he confesses in the interviews, and is teaming up with Careers in the arena to save her life — well, at the end of the day there can only be one Victor. So Katniss’ dominant strategy is believe that his own self-preservation will kick in…and he’s trying to kill her. This strategy only changes for Katniss when the rules of the Game change to allow two Victors.

Game Breakers

Peterfreund’s next point is that games change over time. This can even be likened to the Carrie Ryan’s “Panem et Circenses” essay, in which she describes how Reality TV competitions like Survivor have become more extreme as time has gone on. In this case, though, it’s more about the players changing the game to their winning advantage as opposed to the Gamemakers changing the game for the audience. Throughout her time in the arena, Katniss bases a lot of her actions on what she learned from watching the games throughout her life. The concepts of the Careers, alliances, and having a certain strategy (like Foxface, for example) are all based on knowing how the Hunger Games work and using that knowledge to your advantage.

But there’s a slight difference between what I’m describing above and this:

Katniss (and Peeta) don’t just change the Hunger Games — they break them. Katniss is compared to Ender from the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. At the end of the day, both protagonists stumble upon the fact that, “if your strategies are good enough, they can not only change the game beyond recognition, they can break it entirely.” “…both protagonists realize very quickly that their real enemies aren’t the other children on the playing field, but the game designers who seem determined to break them.” This too, is in game theory:

If you examine the notes that the players took the first time game theorists studied the effects of a multiple-round game of the Prisoners’ Dilemma in 1952, you can see their dawning realization that the true opponent is not the other player, but the game designer. One of the players, John D. Williams, makes it explicit only halfway through the game as his opponent persists in trying to get him to “trade” rounds of cooperate and defect, writing: “[He] doesn’t realize we’re playing a third party, not each other.”

A Little Cooperation

Katniss and Peeta end up defying the dominant strategy with the berries. Then in Catching Fire, Katniss goes in with the mind not to try to kill Peeta — but to save him. That becomes her strategy. And when we actually get to the arena, we see that several of the tributes have agreed to try to save both Katniss and Peeta at all costs — even if it means their own lives. Gone is the self-preservation, the dominant strategy. And it turns out, this is not uncommon in game theory, It turns out that, “evidence from other researchers revealing that repeated games of the Prisoners’ Dilemma resulted in human cooperation. Subsequent studies of large, multiplayer tournaments revealed that players possessed a decided preference for cooperation, following a specific set of rules (including ‘be nice’ and ‘reciprocate’).” Computer simulations came up with similar results: when the players cooperated, the game was better for both of them.

The cooperation between Katniss and Peeta changes the
Games completely—not just how they are played, but how they
are won. For the first time, the winner of the Hunger Games
doesn’t only triumph over the tributes from the other districts;
they triumph over the Capitol itself. Finally, the players can see
the true dilemma they, as prisoners, face: they are not fighting
against each other, but against an outside force. The Hunger
Games are a form of psychological torture the Capitol uses to
keep the districts in line. After Katniss and Peeta symbolically
break the game in The Hunger Games, and the victor tributes
explicitly break it—by destroying the arena and escaping—in
Catching Fire, the Capitol is forced into outright war to keep the
rebels in line.

So, yes, Peterfreund concludes, game theory is not about games. It’s about politics, psychology, strategy. War. Life. Death.

May the odds be ever in your favor.

Let’s Discuss

1. Can you think of any other examples of how dominant strategy is exercised in the Hunger Games Trilogy? What about game theory in general?

2. Peterfreund discusses the Nash Equilibrium and how it relates to game theory in this essay. She summarizes: “Nash equilibrium occurs when there is no value to changing your strategy when you know the strategy of the other player. It’s an “equilibrium” because there is no benefit to change.” What examples of this do you see played out the in the Hunger Games?

3. The Hunger Games and Ender’s Game are two books where the characters use the ideas of game theory to govern their actions. Can you think of any other books where game theory comes into play?

For more of our read along, check out our archive here.