Games with Funny Names

Shall We Play A Game? How about this one?

Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: This game took as its subject the student riots at Columbia University and was originally published in the 11 March 1969 number of the Connection, a supplement to the Columbia Daily Spectator, near the date of the first anniversary of the riots. Jim Dunnigan, then aged 25 and described in the game's "designer's notes" as a history major in the School of General Studies, had already designed 1914 and Confrontation and was at the time working on Origins of World War II, but was asked to take time out to work on this design.The game is for two players, Radicals and Administration. The map features eleven tracks for each of the political subgroups in the game (e.g. Black Students, Moderate Strikers, Alumni, Harlem Community). The objective for the players is to have the most influence, determined by the positions of markers on these tracks, for their side by the end of the twelfth turn. During a turn, players deploy abstracted units representing their political leverage onto the tracks to 'attack' the other player's units (as tokens, Dunnigan suggests small pieces of paper coloured red or marijuana seeds for the Radicals, and blue bits of paper or capsules of Seconal for the Administration) and so move the markers towards their 'end' of the tracks. The 24 Contingency Cards add some randomness by taking or giving units of wherewithal to one player or another.

Or the ever so pleasant nuclear war?

Nuclear War: A comical cataclysmic card game for 2-6 players of all ages. A humorous confrontation between touchy world powers as each player attempts to sway his opponents' populations with diplomacy, propaganda, and finally nuclear weaponry. Little old ladies defect in electric cars and the dread SUPERGERM spreads devastation! Takes about 10 minutes to learn and about 30 minutes to play. Invented by Doug Malewicki in 1965, this game has remained popular for over 20 years. Anyone who ever had to participate in a "civil defense drill" by hiding under his or her desk in grade school, or ever had a bomb shelter in the back yard should play this game. One of the few games where it is possible to have no winners (often everybody loses!). You have to play it to believe it. This game's a blast!

And this post wouldn't be complete without the token crazy economist game: Fuck Your Buddy:

Here's a description from another site:
One interesting tidbit from the book by Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, is from when Nash was a graduate student at Princeton in 1950. Students Nash, Shapely, Shubik, and McCarthy, along with another student named Mel Hauser, invented a game involving coalitions and double-crosses. Nash called the game-which was later published under the name ["So Long, Sucker"]-Fuck Your Buddy. The game is played with a pile of different-colored poker chips. Nash and the others crafted a complicated set of rules designed to force players to join forces with one another to advance, but ultimately to double-cross one another in order to win. The point of the game was to produce psychological mayhem, and apparently it often did. McCarthy remembers losing his temper after Nash cold-bloodedly dumped him on the second-to-last round, and Nash was absolutely astonished that McCarthy could get so emotional. "But I didn't need you anymore," Nash kept saying, over and over.

And finally, if you REALLY want to be popular, try the Dollar Auction (by Shubik, one of the guys mentioned above) Also has information on Fuck your Buddy

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Wired News Again:

In 1933, Herbert Hoover vacated the White House and took up permanent residence in the annals of cluelessness. During his one term, the stock market crashed and the United States slid into the Great Depression. But, as history has it, Hoover looked on blithely and did little. Some scholars have argued that this portrait of the president is unfair - that if he was indeed clueless, it wasn't entirely his fault. Back then, the US didn't track many of the vital signs it now uses to monitor our economic health. For example, the federal government didn't begin trying to measure unemployment until 1930. As Stanford University's David Kennedy puts it, Hoover didn't realize he was flying into an economic storm because "he was flying by the wrong instruments."

The main point of this article is that President Hoover din't know what the heck he was doing, because at that time, the study economics was truly in the boonies. He didn't realize he he was flying into an economic storm because he didn't have the right instruments, indicators, or smart economists telling him what to do.

Consequently, the Great Depression happened, where everything sucked for a long time until the first world war. Everyone was depressed, and prozac hadn't been invented yet.

However, this horrible horrible situation might just happen again:

Since the time of Adam Smith, we've used the wealth of nations as a proxy for the well-being of nations. We measure whether life is getting better by checking whether the good numbers (GDP, personal incomes, and so on) are going up and the bad numbers (unemployment, inflation, and so on) are going down. However, over the past half century, something strange has happened. The US's per capita GDP - the value of all the goods and services a nation produces divided by its population - has nearly tripled, but American well-being hasn't budged. We've grown almost three times richer but not one jot happier. There's ample evidence that in all postindustrial societies, material wealth and broader happiness are no longer closely in sync...That's why two prominent social scientists, Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Martin E. P. Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, have proposed creating a national index of well-being.

All we need to do is collect the data. For instance, we can now tabulate how much cell phone sales add to GDP. But have these phones made us more stressed out because we can no longer elude our evil boss or annoying brother-in-law? Or have they made us feel more secure because we know we can call for help if we're stranded? Let's ask. Some people wring their hands over how much the US spends on health care. But what if we measured to what extent new drugs and medical technologies improved the quality of people's lives? Maybe the expense would look like a bargain. Assemble measures like these into a national well-being index and, in tandem with revamped economic indicators, it could generate a higher-res picture of the national condition.

The first question i have is: you may not be happy if you get what you want, but will you be happy if you don't get what you want?

The second question i have is: i think an indicator for happiness is silly, not to mention impossible to implement. I can just imaging reporting to the president, "Mr. President, people's happiness levels are down from a month ago. More people were unable to elude their evil boss, although less people reported being stressed out by phones. If we leave out the eluding the evil boss sector, happiness levels are up." This isn't a question is it?

The main gist is, economics is a study of relative happiness. If you get more stuff, you will be relatively happier. If you get less, you will become more unhappy. It does not guarantee absolute happiness. Our national indicators are there to study the aggregate ability of the people to get more stuff. They are relatively more happy. Imagine if God just dumped everyone here onto the moon, where there's no stuff (or air). They would be relatively unhappy. Simple.

The article concludes with an ominous warning to the president:

Without some new measurements - of both the modern economy and the modern predicament - you may find yourself drifting, Hoover-like, into unexpected airspace and onto the least flattering pages of history.

At least the president wouldn't have to worry about drifting hoover-like through unexpected airspace when he's in space. har har har.

By the way, for happiness, here is a helpful link

Borrowing Constraints

Hard times have hit Ephraim, Utah, thanks to the collapse of the local bank, destroyed after a cashier embezzled $5 million and a polygamist Mormon sect defaulted on a pile of loans. For years, the Bank of Ephraim profited by providing the sect high-interest loans on a series of dicey operations, such as a watermelon farm with no melon plants. Unbeknown to bank managers, members of the fundamentalist sect had vowed to borrow as much money as possible to prepare for the end of the world. The sect's reclusive leader, Warren Jeffs, takes a share of members' business profits. He is buying ranches in Colorado and Texas; authorities believe he may be planning a getaway. Wired.com

Polygamy, fugitive and watermelons. What's there not to like... Interestingly enough, this little reflects a little thorn in the side of economists known as the final period problem. Specifically, before The-Final-Period, when you're going to DIE, you will paa-rty-like-craa-zy. In order to party-like-crazy, you will borrow-like-crazy. Well, since everyone is doing this, and everyone knows everyone's doing this, no one will lend to you. This also has side-effect that no one will trade with you, and also, that you CANNOT party-like-crazy.

So how do we fix it? We put in borrowing constraints, which have the unintuitive result that they only bind on rich people... why? cuz when you're rich, you can run away with everything you've borrowed cuz you never ever have to borrow again.

There are other fixes that can be done, but it's always hanging ominously in the background.

And so that's why we use assumptions! "What problem? There is no problem. PARTY TIME"

Testing, Testing One Two Three

Has it been so long? I remember when blogs were just starting to happen, and this new interface on blogger is just so much better!