Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  Games of incomplete information, such as the game of thrones, are the most complex form of games. When invested in such a game, strategies for gaining information are of the utmost importance. In A Game of Thrones no single player knows all the players populating the game, what their payoffs are, and which strategies they are most likely to employ. Consider the situation surrounding Cersei and Jaime Lannister’s children, Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen. As long as the children are assumed to be legitimate, they are first in line to succeed King Robert to the Iron Throne. Everyone who assumes the children’s legitimacy is playing a game of incomplete information. The payoffs of King Robert’s death, for example, are very different for various players if it is known that Cersei’s children are truly Lannisters and not Baratheons. Lords Stanley and Renly, the king’s brothers, would benefit greatly from this information, as would King Robert himself.

  The information that players have, and their confidence in its reliability, make a profound difference to their strategies. The more complete a player’s information, the stronger that player’s strategy becomes. That is why in complex games like the game of thrones the strongest players may be those who are the best advised rather than the best armored, especially if one player has access to information that is unavailable to the other players. The advantages proffered by secrets and spycraft account for the rise of players such as Petyr Baelish and Lord Varys, whose power resides in their ability to broker information to more prominent players.

  The Dwarf’s Gamble: Non-Zero-Sum Games and Repeated Play

  Tyrion Lannister is one of the most gifted players in the game of thrones. Lacking the shelter of physical strength, stature, or beauty, Tyrion has learned that it is never to his advantage to avoid a hard truth. Denial is dangerous and leads to undue vulnerability. As the dwarf advises the bastard Jon Snow upon their first meeting, “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness.”17 This attitude is a key virtue, because substituting wishful thinking for reality always produces flawed strategy. Sansa Stark’s misplaced loyalties to Joffrey Baratheon and Cersei Lannister stand as excellent examples of the dismal failure of a damsel’s wishful thinking to produce sound results. Tyrion is a keen observer of the nature of others and uses that knowledge to both his own advantage and, if they will heed his advice, to the advantage of his friends as well. When Jon Snow challenges Tyrion’s wisdom, asking what the heir to Casterly Rock could possibly know of being a bastard, Tyrion replies, “All dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes.”18 This observation indicates Tyrion’s expertise in reading others’ signals and typing those players and their strategies to ensure his own survival. These strategies see him through many dangers and hardships and make this most unlikely hero a giant in the game of thrones.

  One of Tyrion’s particular strengths is his ability to convert either the strictly win-lose “zero-sum game” or an all-or-nothing one-shot game into a win-win situation; or at the very least, into a repeated game where he is likely to come out, if not ahead, then at least with his head. By forging alliances and reframing payoffs, the dwarf masterfully improves his position in the game, as the events that follow his capture by Catelyn Stark and subsequent trial at the Eyrie leave little doubt. Tyrion begins his long and perilous journey to the Eyrie as a captive. By reading the motives of his captors, Tyrion is able subtly to begin to lay the groundwork for coalition with Bronn, one of the sellswords currently serving Catelyn Stark. Tyrion understands that those of his captors who joined Lady Catelyn out of duty and honor will not offer him any aid, because any help given undermines their endgame of fealty. The sellswords, however, are another matter. Their endgame is reward, and that is a field of play on which Tyrion and his Lannister gold have an advantage.

  The Lannisters are known not only for being the richest family in the Seven Kingdoms but also by their motto, “A Lannister always pays his debts.” When Catelyn Stark’s tattered group reaches the Eyrie, Tyrion is able to transform what looked to be his immediate summary execution into a public trial by calling into question the honor of house Arryn. By introducing house reputation, Tyrion forces the game to move from a one-shot to a repeated-game scenario. Even if Tyrion is executed—the ultimate one-shot game for any player—Lysa Arryn is still left to answer for the events. Thus for her the game becomes a repeated one. Tyrion’s cleverness underscores why publicity is crucial to justice. What may be carried out as a one-shot game in private becomes a repeated game when a player is associated by name with those events each time they are mentioned by others.

  For her part Lady Lysa agrees to a trial without concern, as the judge will be her own seven-year-old son. Little Lord Robert has already declared his desire to “see the bad man fly,” indicating that any trial would be a mummer’s farce at best.19 Thus, Tyrion’s next play must take Lord Robert out of the equation. Having gained an audience for his maneuvers, Tyrion has improved his bargaining position and is able to demand his right to a trial by combat. On the surface this move may seem to have improved Tyrion Lannister’s position little or none at all. However, trading now on the precarious coalition he has cultivated with Bronn and the type of player Tyrion believes Bronn to be, the dwarf engineers a situation where both his own and Bronn’s positions improve dramatically if Bronn agrees to champion Tyrion—assuming he emerges victorious!

  Tyrion has typed Bronn correctly. The sellsword volunteers to serve as Tyrion’s champion and wins the day, thus ensuring both Tyrion’s freedom and a handsome payment for Bronn from Tyrion’s father. Tyrion’s maneuver turns out to achieve further gains as well, because in order for Bronn to collect his reward, the sellsword needs to deliver Tyrion safely to Tywin Lannister. Tyrion has thus earned not only a champion, but also an armed escort back through the mountains and to his father’s encampment.

  Tyrion uses this strategy and again meets with success when Conn and the mountain clans accost Tyrion and Bronn on their way home. Tyrion convinces the raiders that whatever they got by robbing and killing Tyrion in the woods would not be nearly so valuable as the new weapons and armor that Tywin Lannister would provide as reward for his son’s safe return. Tyrion thus completes the journey he began as a captive with a small army of his own. Each time Tyrion’s situation seems destined to lead to his demise, he is able to rewrite his destiny by recognizing the endgame of his opponent and offering a revised strategy, a strategy where it is in everyone’s interest that Tyrion stays alive, if only a little longer.20

  Through the Eyes of Love

  Alliances, temporary or permanent, are critical within the game of thrones. Tyrion Lannister demonstrated how temporary alliances based on mutual gain can dramatically improve a player’s position. The more players have invested in an alliance, the more important that alliance becomes, and perhaps none more so than those alliances forged through love or marriage. It’s just a happy coincidence when love and marriage go hand in hand in the Seven Kingdoms. More typically, marriages are arranged so that lords can unite their houses in order to strengthen the position and commitment of both families. In the marriage of Cersei Lannister to Robert Baratheon, the Baratheons gained the power, wealth, and prestige of House Lannister, while the Lannisters gained access to the Iron Throne. Their coalition seems mutually beneficial as both parties receive their desired payoff. Any children the king and queen have together reinforce the alliance, because as the legitimate heirs to the throne, the children ensure the succession, and therefore the success, of both houses.

  The marriage appears to King Robert to be a non-zero-sum game, but in fact it is not. There is game within a game. The Lannisters are playing to eliminate the king and sit a Lannister upon the Iron Throne. This subgame changes the nature of the original game from beneficial alliance to deathly trap. One of the reasons Cersei Lannister’s pronouncement “You win or you die” strikes the reader as particularly sinister is that this outlook reduces what is normally a much more complex game, with multiple payo
ffs and possibilities for cooperation, to a simple zero-sum scenario.

  King Robert and Queen Cersei’s alliance is based on mutual gain, and not on shared love or affection. Does the equation change when the players’ self-interest includes compassionate commitment to the best interest of another player? This question truly reaches the heart of the matter. The game theory one uses must be robust enough to accommodate a self-interest that privileges the interest of another in order to model many of our most important decisions—that is, the things we do for love.

  Consider the familiar game of “I Cut, You Choose.” The logic driving the game is that in the division of a limited set of goods, such as a piece of cake, each player will want the better portion. Thus it is in the cutter’s interest to divide the pieces equally because the chooser will have the first selection. Yet if we put that game to Septa Mordane’s test, we would likely come to a very different result. Practical experience teaches us that in social situations the choosers often select the smaller, and not the larger, of the offered pieces of cake. What deviant reasoning could possibly underlie such irrational decisions? Perhaps a guest takes a smaller piece because it is more important to be seen as polite than to enjoy the larger portion, or because she is watching her weight or wants to appear to be health-conscious. Or perhaps the smaller portion is chosen because the “chooser” knows how much the “cutter” enjoys cake and would like the cutter to enjoy the larger portion. None of these strategies is actually irrational, but all deviate from the mathematically predicted outcome. What we learn is that “I Cut, You Choose” may be an effective strategy for modeling fairness, but fairness is but one of many rational preferences. Furthermore, fairness understood as equality is only one of many rational models of fairness. These insights will take us far in adapting game theory to games ruled by love.

  Game theory has typically discounted strategies in which fairness is not paramount, but the logic of love may actually accept and promote them. Far from seeing her as a “free rider,” the chivalrous knight will assume all the duties of rowing his lady across the river and take satisfaction in allowing her simply to enjoy the ride. Parents regularly take on the greater share of work in a village so that children are not overburdened and still share in the benefits of living in a community. Lovers willingly sacrifice their own interests so that their beloved can have a greater share of something treasured. Allowing for the fact that love merges and binds our interests with our loved ones’, we can see that players may formulate multiple coherent strategies. This recognition compels us to assess which of a plurality of possible rational choices are in play.

  Recognizing multiple rational possible moves by an opponent demands that the successful player be able to sympathetically inhabit the other player’s position to determine which rationality is operative. It is not enough to know what you would do if you were in the other player’s position—you must understand what your opponent would do in that position. This sympathetic identification with another’s preferences in and of itself demands that we acknowledge and regard the humanity and potential uniqueness of that player. The ability to see other players’ outcomes as they see them, and not simply how we would see them, is the basis of “brotherly love” and is a prerequisite for honoring the dignity of other persons. The Golden Rule in game theory evolves from “Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” into the more discerning “Understand others as they understand themselves.”

  Games thus understood demand that we attend to each player as a uniquely situated person and not simply as an abstract rational agent automatically moving toward a predetermined rational end. Such insight improves our ability to predict, understand, and foster the actions of others, as well as to further our own ends as we play the expanded game of thrones we call the game of life. It is in heeding the call of love that game theory transcends its previous applications and becomes effective in the arenas of moral and social philosophy.

  NOTES

  1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 32, ¶67.

  2. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 488.

  3. Ibid., pp. 123–124.

  4. Ibid., p. 82.

  5. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 841. Thank you to Henry Jacoby for reminding me of this quotation.

  6. Ibid., p. 16.

  7. In a game of complete information, such as chess or its Westerosi cousin cyvasse, all players are aware of each move up to the current point of the game. In games of incomplete information, however, one player has private information that is relevant to her game play or strategy. For an excellent introduction to game theory, I recommend Ken Binmore’s Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).

  8. Plato, Phaedrus, 249d5–e1.

  9. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 662.

  10. Ibid., pp. 662–663.

  11. “The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war.” John Lyly, Euphues, 1578. This quotation is believed to be the source of the nonlogically equivalent popular adage, “All is fair in love and war.”

  12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Reading and Writing,” part 1, Chap. 7, trans. Alexander Tille (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1896).

  13. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 135.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Reverse induction is the process of reasoning backward from a conclusion through a sequence of actions to determine the most likely starting point.

  16. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 136.

  17. Ibid., p. 57.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid., p. 437.

  20. The technique of generating a change in strategy in which one player is better off and no payers are worse off is called a Pareto improvement, after the Italian sociologist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923). Pareto optimal outcomes are outcomes in which Pareto improvements are no longer possible. In other words, there are no possible outcomes to be sought that would not cause at least one party to be disadvantaged.

  Chapter 20

  STOP THE MADNESS!: KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND INSANITY IN A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

  Chad William Timm

  “I am no maester to quote history at you, Your Grace. Swords have been my life, not books. But every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. Your father was not the first: King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.”1

  —Ser Barristan Selmy to Daenerys Targaryen in A Storm of Swords

  In A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin introduces us to a world full of murder, brutality, and death, a world seemingly full of insanity. At one time or another more than a dozen significant characters have their sanity questioned, from the Mad King Aerys to Patchface, the lackwit fool in Stannis Baratheon’s court. Upon closer examination, though, the actions of those labeled “mad” are not much different from those assumed to be of sound mind. As a matter of fact, the line between sanity and insanity in Martin’s books is so blurred that it barely exists at all. Ser Barristan Selmy, former knight of Robert Baratheon’s Kingsguard, claims madness is hereditary, as it apparently runs in the Targaryen family right alongside greatness. But why are one person’s actions deemed great while another’s are labeled mad? Who gets to determine insanity and decide what is done with the mentally ill? The French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) can help us answer these questions with his investigation of the relations among knowledge, power, and madness.

  The Archaeologist and the Mad Fool

  While traditionally philosophers have sought knowledge of universal truth, Foucault and other postmodern philosophers have questioned the existence of universal truth and have sought instead to uncover the circumstances that lead to thinking somethin
g is true.2 Foucault called his method of historical excavation “archaeology.” In The History of Madness, he worked to show how the definition of madness, as well as the knowledge used to determine sanity, has changed historically, depending upon who had the power to define and determine it. According to Foucault, “One simple truth about madness should never be overlooked. The consciousness of madness, in European culture at least, has never formed an obvious and monolithic fact. . . . Meaning here is always fractured.”3 Instead of madness having a universal definition or absolute truth, the way European society defined madness changed constantly depending upon social, economic, and political circumstances. As we shall see, much the same is the case in Westeros.

  According to Foucault, knowledge of insanity has depended upon those with power to name it, whose power in turn increased with their ability to designate certain people as insane. For example, both Stannis Baratheon and Joffrey Lannister surround themselves with entertainers known as mad fools. Patchface, the fool in Stannis Baratheon’s court, is a boy who was lost at sea for two days before washing up on shore “broken in body and mind, hardly capable of speech, much less of wit.”4 Everyone except Shireen, Stannis’s daughter and only child, sees Patchface as “mad, and in pain, and no use to anyone, least of all himself.”5 The fool in King Joffrey’s court at King’s Landing, Moon Boy, is described as a “pie-faced simpleton” who often acts strangely.6 On one occasion he “mounted his stilts and strode around the tables in pursuit of Lord Tyrell’s ludicrously fat fool Butterbumps.”7

  So what’s the big deal? It’s obvious that Patchface and Moon Boy deserved their label as mad fools, right? But what if they aren’t crazy? What if it’s just that the kings are powerful enough to label people mad and force the named to comply with the king’s decree? By labeling the fool mad, the king creates an identity for the person as insane. Because of the king’s power and authority, everyone associates madness with the person named mad. This clearly occurred when King Joffrey named Ser Dontos Holland a mad fool. Within a matter of minutes Ser Dontos went from being a knight in the king’s tournament to a crazy fool in his court. In A Clash of Kings, after being late for his joust and making King Joffrey wait, “The knight appeared a moment later, cursing and staggering, clad in breastplate and plumed helm and nothing else . . . his manhood flopped about obscenely as he chased after his horse.”8 Dontos, too drunk to get on his horse, sat down and said, “I lose . . . fetch me some wine.”9