Game Theory and Pokemon Go
The Niantic produced game Pokemon Go, the new craze in the augmented reality world, is one of the fastest growing phone apps, reaching 50 million downloads worldwide in only a little over two weeks. Not long after its release, online forums and threads were overwhelmed with complaints about server issues caused by the max capacity of players trying to sign into their accounts. This came as a surprise to the Niantic team, who did not predict such a high number of downloads. They pleaded for players to instead try logging in every hour rather than every couple minutes. This would abate the congestion in the servers; however, according to game theory, Niantic’s plan is not likely to work.
Assume there are two players, you and everyone else. The two strategies for both players are listen to Niantic and don’t listen to Niantic. Also assume that in each situation we know the probability of succeeding to log in to your Pokemon Go account. If everyone, including you, agrees unanimously to listen to Niantic’s plead, the probability of logging into your account will be 0% at the moment; no one will be trying to log in. For the situation that everyone is listening, you also have another choice: don’t listen. You could quite possibly be a selfish person and take advantage of this opportunity when the servers are not overwhelmed and attempt to sign in. This would give you, hypothetically, a 100% chance of logging into your account.
In the next situation where everyone else does not listen and all try to log in to their accounts, the servers would obviously be congested, but a small amount of users will be able to successfully log in. Let’s say this probability is 10%. If you choose to listen, your probability will be 0%. On the other hand, if you also don’t listen, your probability is the same as everyone else’s, 10%. Therefore, not listening is a strictly dominant strategy since whichever strategy everyone else uses, not listening is the strict best response for you. By this reasoning, Niantic’s plead is futile.
Game theorists know this as the Tragedy of the Commons. The problem is based on the hypothetical situation where there is a large group of people who are all to share a piece of common grazing land. The optimal situation is where individuals restrain the number of animals they put on the land to avoid overgrazing. However, people are greedy and will all have the incentive to set as many animals as they can on the land whether others do or not by the reasoning given above. They will take advantage of the opportunity that others are being responsible, or they will be as irresponsible and greedy as the others.
http://mashable.com/2016/07/26/pokemon-go-75-million/#q070LEbFKaqL