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The Game Design of Survivor
Wired has an article looking at a game designer working in a fairly unique space: reality television. Clive Thompson discusses the game design of the show Survivor , done mostly by the show's creator Mark Burnett. From the article: "While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash's game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season's finale. 'What Nash's theory predicts is that whenever you have a group of people competing, they collude to squeeze one guy out, again and again, until there's only two guys left,' Burnett notes. 'Yet when there are only two of us left, we're surprised when one of us [screws] each other over. That's the fun part. It surprised John Nash himself, but it happens every time.'"
Next month, we'll see if Burnett can top these tricks, because he's launching his next game -- Gold Rush. He has hidden a dozen $100,000 stashes of gold (and one $1 million one) around the country, and sprinkled clues to their location inside various Time-Warner and CBS media properties such as Entertainment Weekly, the Netscape homepage, The Opie and Anthony Show and, of course, CBS' Survivor. Playing the game thus forces you to engage in a level of media synergy that leaves advertisers thrilled and me kind of dizzy.
This doesn't sound like a bright idea. If there is literally $1 million just laying around somewhere, I think we're going to end up with a few arrests for damage to property, plus some homicides before the game ends.
Stay away from girls who don't like to talk about math, or whatever it is your into. The ones who like the same things are less likely to intoduce you to fractions like (1/2) down the road.