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The Dark Knight Plays Game Theory

In films, we often get a chance to see things from real life taken to an exaggeration. Throughout Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise, game theory was utilized to dramatize the situation beyond the audience’s mental scopes. For instance, The Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger starred as a criminal mastermind called The Joker who used games to cause chaos in Gotham city. The Joker’s climactic act as a criminal mastermind occurs when two ferry ships carrying people have detonators to explode the other ship. If neither ship blows up the other one, then they will both blow up after a certain amount of time.

 

Cinema does a wonderful job of putting people in the actor’s shoes. We as audience members fear for the lives of the on-screen characters for about two hours until the story resolves. The Dark Knight explored game theory in a cinematic context unlike ever before. The audience truly empathized with these people in danger on the ferries. A factor like the quality of the people on each ferry also came into conflict. Although the audience may believe the prisoners harmed society and should be blown up before the civilians, they still empathize for these people because they are still people. There is a moment in the scenario where the ferry full of innocent people are about to blow up the prisoner’s ferry.  However, neither ferry blows up the either despite the fact that detonation was the dominant strategy for both parties. The Joker expected one of the ships to blow the other up. He wanted to cause this chaotic situation for each ship but due to external factors (like Batman saving the day) both ships cooperated and survived!

This exemplifies the simplicity of game theory and dominant strategies and how they cannot apply to complex situations (even in real life)! Applied game theory is great for people because each ship needed to calculate the cost of mortality minus the cost of punishment and the cost of the other ship defecting. Overall, it is exciting to see the economics of cinematic decisions because like in real life, they drive the story forward.

 

http://www.quantitativepeace.com/blog/2008/07/the-dark-knight.html

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