This piece has more humor than usual, as a tribute to Professor Wuffle, a.k.a. some really prestigious professor at U.C.I. who has an alter ego named Wuffle that has a publication track that would earn tenure anywhere.

It is also quite serious as to the point about the nature of international relations, and the theories we use to assess such things.

Don't be scared by Games, and don't hate the player, hate the game (s).

I personally prefer to play Hearts, without human lives.

Game Theory, invented in its modern form by John Von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern, and massively advanced by the John Nash equilibrium concept, has a vital place in every international relations theorist and practitioners tool-box, with a catch-22.

As to practitioners, Volodya has a Great Game of Hearts, with Human Lives.

Game theory was well-described by Stergios Skaperdas at UCI, as the

"Theory of optimal inter-dependent decision making with two or more players."

What does that mean to dumb folks like me?

Unlike a standard economics problem of say, picking the best stock-bond-resources portfolio, or between chicken or beef with a Cobb-Douglas utility function and a twenty spot, in which one's welfare depends only on your choices, and maybe the play of chance, in Game Theory, we must model how our best decision(s) interacts with other people's decisions trying to maximize their welfare, given the structure of that interaction in terms of how you model payoffs, basically like the rules of Hearts.

Historically speaking, the rules of international relations have been a Biatch, which is my background as a Classical Realist (with Veblen and Eckstein for motivation)

Consider the following classic game, the Prisoner's Dilemma:

Read the payoffs as Player One on the left,  and then Player Two on top, given their joint choices in the following story. Higher numbers mean more happiness, in this case, less prison time.

               PLU                                      W   (Player 2)

PLU    5,5                                          0,10

W         10,0                                          2,2

PLU stands for Peace, Love and Understanding(PLU) and W for War, in a generalized mentality sense.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma, PLU means not ratting out your buddy to the f'n po-lice, while W does, and the existence of the Fuzz, the Man, John Law, you can take as an example of how the payoffs are assigned.

Now, the story of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game is that two prisoner's have been caught for a small crime, having a dope pipe, but the Fuzz, the Man, John Law, thinks that they did a big crime, like a Heat style bank robbery.

Since they are not at Gitmo though, the Pigs can't waterboard the suspects to get a confession, so they have to manipulate them into confessing by doing what your junior high school principal did when you set off the fire extinguisher.

First, you separate the suspects, and then, you tell them something along these lines:

"Yo, Player one, if you play PLU, i.e. deny that anything happened, your ass is going to prison, and your buddy walks clean. He is giving you up like a biatch ; five seconds to talk."

The pigs of course are doing the same thing in the other room, so Game Theory predicts that in a one shot deal, Player One will say, o.k. if iplay nice, I get goat-fucked, because PlayerTwo can then play War, i.e.. give my sorry white ass up to the cops, and get 10 in terms of happiness, while my sorry ass sits in jail, which is 0 fun (utility, if you must, Stergios.)

Of course, if you look at it from Player 2's point of view, you get the same kind of result, which is that no matter what the Player One does, Player Two is better off ratting out his friend, and so what we get is the Realist Theory of International Relations, which is, that we are all armed to the teeth waiting for the next war, since the lack of a world states gives us these same pay-offs.

Now, some people have always objected to this game as the fundamental model of Inernational Relations theory on the grounds that the predicted result, what Game Theoreticians call the Nash Equilbrium, ignores the fact that if Player One does what they like in the business to call Defect, i.e. fuck over his friend who says nothin to the Man while he rolls over like the bitch that he is, Player Two's cousin Vinny will break his kneecaps, and so therefore, they will in reality both tell the man to go f himself, take the small bit, and get back to taking more real scores like Heat, where next time, they lose the drugs, because if you smoke too much you become like Lewis in Tarentino's Jackie Brown, so the cops got nothin.

Other people have objected to the Prisoner's Dilemma on the grounds that with repeated play of the game, which is the cousin Vinny thing in a general (if not equilibrium, sorry, a bit o' geek humor there) sense, we develop Rules of the Game of International Relations about what is morally acceptable to do, and what is not, like World Trade Organization Rules, the U.N., blah, blah, blah, which in the "smart boy" speech, we call either the Liberal Normative or Constructivist approaches to International Relations Theory, depending on our tastes in such things.

(Now, we get to the meat of the matter, which is the meta-level question of, if, which is the case, there are an infinity of twice differentiable utility functions that can collected in convex combinations that would generate for a countable number of players at least one fixed point of the game, i.e. an equilibrium, under the appropriate mazimizations subject to linear and non-linear constaints, how do I know which Game to pick to model international relations?)

(In other words, for the non-mathematically inclined, Games like Bruce Buono de Mesquita uses are nice to use as models of international relations, to a point, unless you got so lost in the math, that you didn't pick the right game for the model, which is a qualitative matter of judgment, not a hard math problem.)

I personally as a Classial Realist, i.e. you really study history as a matter of life and death, think that unless one state/player can, with Probablity One, eliminate the other states weapons of mass destruction at acceptable, say 15 per cent of the civilian population, casualties (social cohesion limits and Russia in WWII), then it is the case that if one state, say Russia, but there are others, one in particular that has hideously bad acceptance issues, then, they can force the other players to play the bad game, the nasty version of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

If this meta-hyothesis was correct, which is based on knowing your history, then we are right back to good old fashioned realism, unless the boys at STRATCOM have a really, really good day, which given American risk-taking aversion with respect to trading cities, at least until the first nuclear weapon is detonated on American territory in say a "terrorist attack," even on a stadium, and where the point would be as a Demonstration of Resolve, if you want to understand International Relations right now, study the Congress of Vienna, or at least don't crush the life out of people that do.

That leads to my last example here, which I had a nice talk about with someone.

Just strangers in a bar who like navy stuff.

Maybe the Village People growing up?

Anyhoo, we were talking about the collision between the British and French nuclear ballistic submarines in the Atlantic last winter.

Everyone was real, real quiet about that.

In terms of Game Theory, some would say there was the following bureaucratic inertia game being played.

As a bureaucrat, I have to rationalize my budget, so I bury bad stuff, unless I am caught, like the subs bump in the Deep.

At a lower level of this game, the French and British captains were playing the training game Stalker.

In other words, the British ballistic missile submarine was being followed by the French submarine in its baffle, the wake, where you can't hear anything.

So, to counter that, you pull a dead stop right,like a Crazy Ivan in Red October, in order to expose the other sub to a killing aft torpedo shot: Bang, you're dead, or, they turn, and I hear you, and say "Cheers, Froggy."

Of course, every now and then in peacetime conditions even, things will go Bump in the Night, and the bureacrats will try to cover up the rather expensive training exericise.

But, that is life and death among the Great Powers.

Of course, there is a catch, which is this.

In terms of the evidence, amidships was where they went bump, if you were your Naval Accident Investigator type of person, hypothetically speaking, you might think odd.

In other words, the momentum of the British ship should have carried it either to the bow or stern, it would seem, in terms of going: bump under the water, if the subs were going fast enough to generate the kind of observed damage.

And then, there is the curious fact of the velocity and type of collision.

The French sub was crushed almost following a Boomer, i.e., the subs that have the nukes.

Those subs go slow, quiet, like four knots, lurking with their Extremely Low Frequency Antennae trailing miles behind to get an order we hope never happens.

So, if they were playing the training game, why twenty knots, and a why a French boomer, instead of a fast attack?

That, it seems to me, would make you want to consider other games, of the Great Power sort, just in case, lik the, You Can't Beat us so Join Us Game, which would be feasible if someone was planning on launching a war.

As another example of a signaling game in International Relations, of a realist sort, consider the Shut the Opposition Up Game, and Alexander Litvinenko.

I could make him swim with fishes in chains quietly, which sends a signal of a discreet and relatively weak sort.

Of course, if I put Polonium 210 in his tea, then I make more of a statment, and as a correlated signal, do it in London, to maybe through out a hint that You Want to be on My Team Game, like the French are when they ram the source of your national survival, i.e. the Trident Missile.

In any event, there are all sorts of possibilities of applying games to international relations, and I just hope that first, people think about the meta-level question of knowing which game to use in the model, which is very important, and that the Volodya's of the world think more carefully about which games they want to play.

I personally like Hearts, without human lives.