{"id":388,"date":"2007-10-15T16:22:49","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T15:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=388"},"modified":"2007-10-15T16:22:49","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T15:22:49","slug":"setting-up-rules-so-that-all-parties-have-the-incentives-to-act-in-the-way-the-designer-prefers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2007\/10\/15\/setting-up-rules-so-that-all-parties-have-the-incentives-to-act-in-the-way-the-designer-prefers\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting up rules so that all parties have the incentives to act in the way the designer prefers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another year, another <a href=\"http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/economics\/laureates\/2007\/\">Nobel Prize in economics<\/a> that sounds immediately relevant to multiplayer game design.<\/p>\n<p>Quoting <a href=\"http:\/\/freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com\/tag\/nobel-prize\/\">Steven Levitt&#8217;s description<\/a> of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson&#8217;s work awarded:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The prize was \u201cfor having laid the foundations of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mechanism_design\">mechanism design<\/a> theory.\u201d Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, or parent can set up rules so that all parties involved have the incentives to act in the way that the planner\/manager\/parent prefers. This Nobel is not for the idea that you can design incentives this way, but rather for coming up with ingenious proofs that simplify the task of proving that, indeed, all parties have the right incentives \u2014 a task that can turn out to be awfully difficult.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That is, I am sure it <em>is<\/em> relevant, but my personal experience with game theory is that anything more complicated than the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Prisoner%27s_dilemma\">prisoner&#8217;s dilemma<\/a> tends to become so fantastically complicated that designers just design from their own intuitions anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Is anybody actually using game theory for designing video games?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another year, another Nobel Prize in economics that sounds immediately relevant to multiplayer game design. Quoting Steven Levitt&#8217;s description of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson&#8217;s work awarded: The prize was \u201cfor having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.\u201d Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2007\/10\/15\/setting-up-rules-so-that-all-parties-have-the-incentives-to-act-in-the-way-the-designer-prefers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Setting up rules so that all parties have the incentives to act in the way the designer prefers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}