Game Shows and Game Theories

Hey Yall,
Winter has come quickly. A two weeks ago the weather was in the sixties, and I was walking in a tshirt during the daytime. But on Monday came the earliest snow in a generation. The leaves on the trees were still green, but they became heavy and glazed in white with the southern snow. The streets became a cocktail of muddy slush and trash. Still, life goes on, class continues.
Another note, thanks to yall’s help (yall checked out my pictures which sent me up in the rankings on this website), I won second place in a contest on Mapvivo.com . My journeys for Nepal and Southeast Asia were selected at some of the best on the web site. Unfortunately, I did not get first place, a prize of $1000, and instead, I only get two travel books, but you take what you can get and keep going. If yall want to see the ‘prize-winning’ journeys and didn’t see them, go to these sites:
Nepal: http://mapvivo.com/journey/8588
Southeast Asia: http://mapvivo.com/journey/8746
Also, I have just added some of my pictures from Korea and Qingdao in journeys. Here are their sites:
South Korea: http://mapvivo.com/journey/10276
Qingdao: http://mapvivo.com/journey/10162
I don’t know if yall have been checking out the blog, but I have been putting some of those journal entries online. If yall want to read everything I love and hate about this country (mostly hate), check it out. I’ll add some of the journal entries to the end of this email.
Finally, I also participated in another TV show. The good news is that I hope to get a DVD of this show and the previous one, and bring it back to the US. The bad news is that it won’t air until December or so, so they haven’t put it online yet.
The show is basically the same as the one that I had participated in September. They have changed the name to “Happy Foreigners” and the changed the games around. This time everyone got to participate in a game, making it fairer than the last one.
For my game, I had to dress up in a crab suit with a friend and try and pop balloons in between us by hugging each other (without using our hands). To make it a little harder, they have a bungee cord attached to our backs and they had two people pulling on each of the bungee cords, trying to hold us back. We won this game easily, because the other contestant was deathly afraid of balloons popping.
It didn’t matter that I won. We had already rigged the entire gameshow before it started. You see, this game show took the six players and, through elimination, choose one player to play for a final prize of a thousand dollars. This final player did this through a high jump. So I convinced everyone that we would all be better off if we choose the person who could jump the highest and let him win, and afterwards we could split the money.
That’s exactly what we did. For those of yall who don’t know, this is a problem in Game Theory (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory ), and I’m listening to a podcast on Game Theory. Making sure everyone was going to buy into our rigging this game show was a little experiment in Game Theory. I thought it would be a little difficult, but it worked out in the end. Every one threw the games that they were supposed, and the guy who won was still willing to split the money.
We got to the end of the show, and the guy we had rigged to win did win. After the show was over, we all split the money and ended up with about US$240. Not a bad.
A little richer and a lot wiser.