The Theory of Games

by Ezra Sidran

  The first days of a project are the headiest. All is fullness and promise. All is tall grass and steaks for Bill and booze for me. I don’t care what the Shinto philosophers say; the setting out is the best part of the journey. Every journey starts off with hope; and naiveté.

  And so, we – Bill, Kate, Nick and my A-Team students – set off for a dark, distant horizon. It’s not that I can see it as if it was only yesterday - it was only yesterday – or just a few weeks before yesterday.

  Those were the good days: there is nothing like waking up to the smell of a Midwestern Fall knowing you have a purpose and a project; Bill snoring away on my right and Katelynn wrapped in her dreams on my left.

  All was perfect and then all was gone.

  “Pill time, Bill!” Katelynn announced and our day began. Bill snuffled awake and stretched. Kate playfully hit me with a pillow and bounded out of bed – no need for modesty now – and I caught a tantalizing glimpse of Kate’s backside before she pulled on her jeans. Bill dragged himself off the bed and I – carefully trying to suck in my paunch and look studly while not being obvious about it – got up and put on some clothes. We were not prepared for what was waiting for us on the other side of the bedroom door.

  Bill, tail wagging and happy jumping, got about two feet past the door before he pulled up short and let out a puzzled yelp. Shelby Taylor, my top graphics student, was asleep in the hallway. The three of us – Kate, Bill and I – gingerly walked around the snoring girl. As I looked into the living room I could see students crashed out on every piece of furniture. Laptops were open and glowing on the coffee table, the floor and every other horizontal surface. Zoë Eingraben, our lead game engine programmer and resident alpha geek, was slumped over the dining room table; her computer was running a screen-saver of her own design drawing 3D representations of trig functions. Peter Felix, my GUI guru, was sleeping in Bill’s favorite chair - he looked like a kid with his legs curled up underneath him - which, I guess, he was. They were all just kids. But that all changed by the end of the day.

  Bill looked up and shot me a puzzled look when he saw Pete in his chair. Bill doesn’t like change. I just shrugged and Bill followed Kate into the kitchen to get his morning pill out of the refrigerator (along with that nasty Braunschweiger). His tail was wagging and a stream of drool leaked from his dewflaps and down to the worn kitchen linoleum in anticipation.

  I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been) to see Nick Constantine still awake and working at the little two-person breakfast table under the window in the kitchen. He turned to me with bloodshot eyes and muttered something.

  “Rough night, Nick?” I asked.

  He mumbled something again which I couldn’t hear over Bill’s gulping down the Braunschweiger and antibiotic breakfast combo.

  “What’s that, Nick?”

  “Syphilitic idiots. I said that whoever devised this abortion of a data structure were syphilitic idiots.”

  “Uh, huh,” I answered.

  Bill walked over and put his head on Nick’s knee. Bill believes that most programming problems can be solved by being scratched behind his left ear. Nick absentmindedly began scritching Bill while forlornly staring back at his laptop’s screen. The strange thing about programming bugs is that you can stare at the code as long as you want but it never spontaneously changes on its own. You know that a programmer is well and truly fucked when they start muttering, “This should work. This should fucking work.” And then they go back to staring at the same code that still has not miraculously changed of its own volition.

  “This should work. This should fucking work,” Nick muttered.

  “Okay everybody let’s get some breakfast,” Katelynn cheerfully announced.

  “This should work. This should fucking work,” Nick continued to mutter.

  Bill was momentarily torn between scritching and breakfast. Breakfast won (no contest, really). Kate reached over and closed the lid of Nick’s laptop. “Bill wants breakfast, the client is buying, let’s go.” Bill began the happy doggy dance as Kate and I put him in his harness and Nick rubbed his eyes. “You know, this should fucking work, Jake” Nick told me.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard,” I answered. The four of us headed out the back door of the little yellow house and piled into Kate’s VW.

  “Where to?” Kate asked.

  “Good question,” I answered, “not a lot of places that want to keep their licenses are going to let Bill in.” And then Kate and I looked at each other and then over our shoulders to Bill smooshed up against Nick in the backseat. “Drive-thru!” we announced simultaneously. Bill knew drive-thru, too. The drool really started flowing from Bill’s dewflaps now. “Oh, jeeze, Bill! Oh, man!” Nick began wiping himself like he was covered in mosquitoes. “Hey! The back windows don’t open!”

  Kate put the bug in first gear and we rumbled over the gravel driveway and into the street. I’m not going to tell you what franchise we went to because I’m not doing endorsements.

  “You went to the Burger King on Brady Street,” the Authoritarian Man said, “We found the receipt in Ms. O’Brian’s Volkswagen beetle.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I continued. These guys don’t miss a thing. So why am I still strapped to this gurney? What the hell do they want from me?

  From the Burger King we drove down to the levee by the ballpark where the sprinklers were on and the infield grass was soaking in the cool water. Andy, the groundskeeper, was driving a green John Deere 220B (did you know they make them right here in town?) and mowing an intricate design of the team’s mascot, Roscoe Rat, into the outfield grass. He had placed untwisted coat-hanger wire with strips of red cloth to mark the lines that he would follow and with an artist’s precision was now sculpting Roscoe’s insolent jaw that clenched a stogie. Later Andy would add some chalk from the line marking machine to simulate smoke from the cigar.

  Kate parked the bug in the shade of the bridge that crossed the Mississippi and we all tumbled out and walked over to a gazebo that had been built on a manmade mound from where we could see Dynamite Island and a bit further downriver.

  Bill was hanging on Kate’s every move – well, she held the greasy bag with the breakfast omelets and the hash rounds. I had the cardboard tray with the three large black coffees (Caution: contents are hot!) which was already disintegrating back to its component parts and was leaking caution-hot-contents scalding my fingers. Carol Montheim, perhaps the greatest game programmer of the late 20th century, once said to me, “America is addicted to the three ‘ines’: caffeine, nicotine and gasoline.” Hey, can I have a smoke?

  I think I heard the Authoritarian Man chuckle before he answered, “You know I can’t let you smoke. The three ‘ines’. That’s pretty funny. Go on.”

  Has my life become some sort of twisted Arabian Nights? Maybe what I need to do is keep on entertaining the Authoritarian Man until he lets his guard down. I didn’t get a benzodiazepine injection today. And my brain was beginning to un-fog.

  Hey, you want to hear another great Carol Montheim story?

  “Yeah, sure,” the Authoritarian man answered.

  Carol Montheim used to be a man, Liam Rochemont. See it’s an anagram. Liam Rochemont = Carol Montheim. No kidding; look it up. He had a string of hits, L.I.O.N., The Lost Golden Aztec Cities, Rascally Robots, Going Fishing (man that was a weird game, I never thought that it would sell, he was like 20 years ahead of all those Deer Hunter games). Anyway, he was, like, 6-5, 280, had this thick beard. But what none of us knew was that he felt like he had been trapped in a man’s body all his life. So we’re at the Game Developer’s Conference banquet, up at the main table on the dais, and I notice that from the little card in front of the water glass I’m sitting next to Liam Rochemont, except when I sit down, here comes Carol Montheim, and she’s still 6-5, 280, but she’s – he’s – she’s had a sex change! But, it’s obviously Liam and I’m trying to be cool so I say, “So, ahh, Carol, what’s new with you?” And she said, “Not much, what’s new with you?”
Isn’t that a scream?

  “It’s not funny,” said the Authoritarian Man.

  Jeez, what I was thinking? Of course Authoritarian Men in black suits, white shirts and black ties wouldn’t think the story was funny. If you think you’re born into the wrong body you’re just supposed to pray harder. Duh!

  “Sorry,” I apologized, “I guess you had to have been there.”

  So, Kate is throwing these greasy lumps of flattened processed potato ovoids in the general direction of Bill and he’s snarfing them down, along with great gulps of air (no wonder he has a flatulence problem) and I’m thinking, Bill just had a CardioTronic 413 pacemaker implanted up in his neck, this can’t be good for him. But, hey, look at Bill. Look at what he’s been through in the last two weeks. I guess Burger King hash rounds are okay. Maybe they’re the breakfast of champions.

  “Is the client for this project the same as for the Baghdad wargame?” Nick asked and took another bite of his bacon-egg-cheese croissan’wich then wiped the corners of his mouth and the thin wisps of hair that he fancied were a moustache with a paper napkin that was more cardboard than tissue.

  The Baghdad wargame was an offer that had come my way (in mysterious circumstances, though not quite as mysterious as Stanhope’s project) a couple of years ago but I had turned it down and took the teaching position at Mount Mary instead.

  “I don’t know, Nick, but I would guess that they’re not the same clients,” I answered.

  “Jake, you never really explained why you didn’t take the gig. I mean, it’s your business, if you don’t want to talk about it…” Nick’s question trailed off at the end and he went back to examining the contents of his breakfast; lifting the croissant that was glued with the cheese-like substance to something that purported to be bacon.

  My career as a teacher was over but Nick was still my student. “We all know what’s going on in Iraq now. It was easy to win the war but the peace is killing us. The idea for the project was to create a four man game, i.e. the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds and the Coalition, and work out a game theoretic solution to the problem of governance. The problem was that I didn’t buy into their model; in fact, I didn’t think there was a solution.”

  Nick stared at me, confused, “But, Jake, you taught us in Game Theory that there was always an optimal solution.” Nick scrunched up his eyes and quoted me from last semester’s lecture (probably verbatim), “In zero-sum games involving two or more players the Nash Equilibrium is an optimal strategy where no player can gain by changing his own strategy.”

  “Nick, I already gave you an ‘A’ for the class. That is correct, of course. But what are the basic assumptions of Game Theory?” I asked. Before Nick could answer I started ticking them off on my fingers, “One, each player has a discrete set of choices; two, each sequence of a player’s moves results in a known end state with a known payoff; three, in a zero-sum game the more one player wins the less there is for the other players; four, every player has perfect knowledge of the game, the rules and the opponents’ moves; and, five, the players are making rational decisions based on maximizing their own payoffs.”

  Nick nodded. This was painfully obvious stuff and Nick did get an ‘A’ for the class.

  “Okay,” I continued, “that’s Game Theory. Now I’m going to tell you about the Theory of Games. You remember ‘The Prisoners’ Dilemma’?” Nick nodded again: of course. “All right, but let me go over it again for Bill.” Bill was camped out in front of Nick, drooling uncontrollably at the thought of getting ‘lasts’ of Nick’s breakfast.

  “Bill is a dog!” the Authoritarian Man growled. I’ve already warned you about your jokes.

  “Okay, Jim,” I replied, “let me go over it for your sake, then. Do you know the ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’?” The Authoritarian Man shook his head ‘no’.

  “Here’s the setup: there’s two prisoners. The jailor tells them, ‘if one of you confesses and the other doesn’t I will sentence the one who confesses to five years of hard labor and the one who doesn’t confess I will set free. If neither of you confesses I will sentence both of you to ten years of hard labor. And if both of you confess I will sentence both of you to one year of hard labor.’ So, Jim, what’s the solution?”

  “Jailors don’t sentence people; judges do,” the Authoritarian Man replied.

  Okay, okay, they’re in front of a judge; it doesn’t matter. It’s a Game Theory problem.

  “They both confess and only get one year of hard labor,” the Authoritarian Man answered.

  “They both confess and only get one year of hard labor,” Nick answered.

  “That’s the difference between Game Theory and Grant’s Theory of Games,” I said, “Because in the abstract world of Game Theory both prisoners make the best rational decision. But in the real world, the world of the Theory of Games, they both cut each other’s throats. They’re both terrified that the other guy is going to sell him out. So what do they do? Neither confesses and they both get sent up for ten years when they both could have gotten away with just a year if they had only cooperated and trusted each other.”

  Nick threw most of his breakfast into Bill’s gaping maw. Snarf, burp, wag. Nick scritched Bill behind his ear.

  “Here’s how my Theory of Games works,” I explained, “Each of the stupid, shortsighted, greedy prisoners thinks: ‘There are only two possible outcomes; either I go to jail or I don’t go to jail. And the only way that I don’t go to jail is if the other poor motherfucker altruistically confesses and I don’t. Therefore, I ain’t confessing.’ And that’s how they both end up breaking up rocks for ten years of hard labor. In other words, Grant’s Theory of Games says: ‘In the real world people will usually make stupid, shortsighted, greedy decisions.’”

  “And that’s what you think is going on in Iraq?”

  “That’s what I think is going on all over the world right now,” I answered. And being strapped down to this gurney only reinforced my world view.

  “So who do you think we’re working for on this new project?” Nick asked.

  “The Department of Homeland Security,” I answered and I looked out past Dynamite Island where a 16-barge tug was trying to maneuver into the channel against the current.

  “So why do their coders suck so bad?” Nick asked.

  I fumbled around in my shirt pocket for the cigarette pack and lit one – the memory of the taste of an after-breakfast cigarette with a cup of coffee outdoors - but I knew better than to ask the Authoritarian Man; there were no sales at that doorstep, and I concentrated far too hard on the distant tug struggling against the river. “Nick, I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said.

  Nick leaned in closer over the concrete table under the gazebo.

  “Nick,” I said, “you are one of the best coders alive today. In fact, gathered around this table are three of the top ten coders alive today.” Nick was on my right, the eastward side, so I squinted into the sun when I turned to look at him.

  Nick recoiled at the thought of what I told him. He knew his weaknesses, his shortcomings, his failings, “Naawwww, Jake, you’re putting me on.”

  “No, Nick,” I answered sincerely, “you really are that good. Or the rest of the world really is that bad – you take your pick – but that’s the reality of the situation.” I turned and looked back downriver; the tug had finally made the channel and had taken one of its engines off-line to conserve fuel. Another twenty-one days – and fourteen more locks and dams - and it would be pushing those sixteen barges into Minneapolis. River pilots are better than programmers. One fuck up and your career as a river pilot is over. One fuck up as a programmer and it’s just another morning before your first cup of coffee. No, I take that back, the really lame coders drink Pepsi One or some such crap.

  Kate said, “I’m going to take Bill for a walk,” and she and the big dog started off in the direction of the rising sun. I smoked and looked downriver and Nick looked downriver, too, probably not seeing what I was seeing but squinting v
ery hard to see it, too.

  I took short, hard drags on the cigarette and held the comforting smoke deep in my lungs before I let it curl out about my mouth. The smoke, the river air with the scent of big catfish deep within, the sunlight, Katelynn and Bill vanishing into the distance, the taste of Katelynn from last night, the gazebo, Andy sculpting the outfield into Roscoe Rat – I could hear the Deere 220B purring behind the right-field fence – this was it. This was my last best day. This was my high-water mark. This very moment. This was all that I ever wanted; and more than I ever dared hope for. This was the high-water mark of Jakob Grant’s life.

  Nick went home and worked on the database all day.

  “And then?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

  And then Kate went home and ran herd on the all the kids working on the project and wrote some front-end code herself.

  “And then?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

  And then Bill and I went to the ballpark, watched batting practice and caught the first half of a double-header.

  “And?”

  And then Bill and I went home and we had a good day and we got a lot of work done and…

  “And?”

  And then the phone rang at 3:35 AM; I can remember swimming up from the deep warm pool of a wonderful dream to answer the phone. It was the police calling. It was the police and they wanted to see me immediately.

  CHAPTER 3.O

  We were sleeping - Katelynn in my arms - Bill snoring away. It was the end of a good day. It was the end of a good day goddamit!

  And then the phone rang. At first I wove the phone into my dreams; but it wouldn’t turn off. It became insistent. So, I awoke. Katelynn was sleeping. Bill was sleeping. Out – beyond the bedroom door – all my students were sleeping. I answered the insistent phone.

  “Hello, Mr. Grant? This is the police dispatcher. Can you please come to 2475 Appomattox Road, apartment 3F?”