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Game Theory and Politics: What Mario Kart Can Teach Us About 2016

The article elaborated on the recent trend of the 2016 presidential election, and drew an analogy to people’s strategy for playing video games.

Donald Trump was once getting 40 percent of the vote, and the other 60 percent was divided evenly among all other candidates. While the 40 percent is still less than half, but it becomes a huge advantage when every other candidates only share a very small portion of the rest. The article raised the following analogy.

When the first place player is leading by a little bit, all players would attack each other, and would try to pull him back, so that the first place positions will fall into others’ hand quickly. However, when the first place player is leading by way ahead, the other players would only attack on themselves and seek the 2nd place, which is the highest position they could possibly get. Consider you are playing in such a game and not the person leading far ahead, the payoff for attacking on the first place player would be small, because your attacks may not be effective at all since the player is so ahead. You would thus have a feel that you are merely wasting energy and money on such an attack and would start targeting other players that are closer to you. All the other players besides the leading one may think in similar ways, and therefore start attacking among themselves and leaving the first place along. Without others’ interruption the first place player would simply lead further and further.

Such analogy simulates what was happening in the presidential campaign, where Donald Trump is the only first place player who is leading way ahead. The other candidates were not seeking to take over the first place, and thus granting Trump more and more advantages.

Many games implements schematics to counter such a phenomenon. The article gave an example in Nintendo series Mario Kart, where slower karts have higher chances to gain a blue shell that could hit the first place directly and stun the player for a decent amount of time.

The article further discussed on what weapons do the republicans have that could function as the “blue shell”, and mentioned that recently an older video where Donald Trump explicitly voiced supports for his opponents nowadays was found.

This topic relates to Game Theory, which has been the subject of the lecture recently, by elaborating on that, in a game like Nintendo’s Mario Kart or the presidential election campaign, players do not usually have the seemingly best choice, always competing for the first place, as their dominant strategy. Players’ actions largely depend on how others play the game. Their payoffs may vary according to other candidates’ choices and performances largely.

 

Read the original article here: http://utahpolicy.com/index.php/features/today-at-utah-policy/7006-game-theory-and-politics-what-mario-kart-can-teach-us-about-2016

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