The book Co-Opetition
piqued my interest in the game theory. The game theory is a mathematical model. It is a game played by
“…perfectly logical players interested only in winning. When you
credit your opponent(s) with both rationality and a desire to win, and play so as to encourage the best outcome for yourself, then the game is open to analysis of game theory.”
In a nutshell, it studies choice of optimal behavior when costs and benefits of each option depend upon the choices of other individuals
and therefore is used in various fields such as politics, business, economics, gambling, artificial intelligence, etc.
Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone must be the best book on this subject for anyone outside of academia. It walks you through the story of how a brilliant Hungarian mathematician, John von Newmann, developed the game theory and how it has been applied since then in modeling various interactions among people (Prisoner’s dilemma being one of them).
No matter how many brightest minds have worked on the game theory (including John Nash, the protagonist of A Beautiful Mind), the best they could do was define optimal outcomes
(“equilibrium”) for players. And yet, people’s behavior remains impossible to fit into a mathematical model for one simple reason: irrationality. Human irrationality defies all models. Sometimes it’s the result of evolutional “wiring.” Sometimes it’s deliberate.
In The Brand Gap Marty Neumeier says:
“Our cultural distrust in creativity goes back to the Enlightenment, when we discovered the awesome power of rational thinking. The movement became so successful that rational thinking became the only kind of thinking—at least the only thinking you could trust. Yet in spite of our continuing reverence for rationality, we don’t really do many things by logic. Our best thinking depends more on the “illogical” skills of intuition and insight, which may explain why logical argument rarely convinces anyone of anything important.”
Which brings me to my point. Software development is a rational business. We spec out features (or stories) on the assumption of users’ rationality. But in reality, users are inherently irrational. They use your product in the ways that fits them, not you. The best you can do is to go along with it. Explaining to people that they use a feature in unintended ways would be embarrassing and useless.
Those “success stories” about Google and Flickr you hear? Their initial ideas were used in unintentional ways, but they had enough foresight to play along, and that brought them where they are today.
