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.'"

Comments

Not related

[andrewman327]

The Eco Challenge does not have anything to do with TFA. The Challenge did not have people voted off thus it does not implement Nash's Theories.

Anyway, back on topic. Nash created ways of describing so many behaviors but he did it so simply. In addition to his mind, his theories are beautiful. Whether competing in an outdoor gameshow or trying to pick up ladies at the club, game theory works wonders. (And no, I am not suggesting that you walk up to a girl and start talking to her about math. It doesn't work so well. Trust me.)

Re:Rubbish

[Mongoose Disciple]

Here's a link to one of a series of interesting articles written by someone who would disagree with that.

Survivor is not an original idea

[bigmouth_strikes]

The concept and the format was created by a British production company. Mark Burnett simply purchased a license to it. The first show produced using this format was the Swedish Expedition Robinson.