Hearts as Microcosm

Anyone who wants to talk about game theory should really play a game of Hearts.

For those of you who don't know (and why should you), Hearts is a card game played between four people where the object is to get the fewest points. Each heart in the deck is worth one point, and the queen of spades is worth thirteen. The trick is that if one person managed to capture all the point cards, they score no points and everyone else gets twenty-six (the sum total of the possible points). I won't describe the rules any further, because that pretty much sums up my position on the subject.

You could look at Hearts as a metaphor for all sorts of things; indeed, any time a group has something undesirable and must parcel it out, you could draw a Hearts analogy. The capture of all points (Shooting the Moon) is harder than it might at first seem, because as a player you need to be on the lookout for people who seem to be getting all the points. The ideal situation is to engineer it so that multiple opponents each take points, but at the end of the day, there is often a situation where it's up to the individual to prevent the opponent from taking that last point and sticking everyone else with the bill.

What do you do? You see the other players all around you, snidely expecting you to save them from defeat by scoring a point yourself. They even seem to be laughing at your situation. How unfair. If they were in your shoes, you wouldn't be snickering behind your cards at them, waiting for them to take the plunge. You are a civilized person, unlike your enemies who want you to save them in return for nothing. And that's what you'll get: nothing. They won't remember that you saved their butts from that twenty-six point kiss of death. They'll just congratulate themselves for taking no points at all. Maybe they'll even go on to win by just a few points, points they would have taken if it weren't for you being a sap.

Can you see what I'm driving at here? I can get extremely angry at opponents in a computer game of Hearts who have no minds, who aren't snickering because they don't exist as anything more than numbers in a machine. I begin to ascribe personality traits, or imagine that they are ganging up on me to ensure that one of their number wins. Imagine how I am when I actually play Hearts with real people.

So you can keep your prisoner's dilemma, because Hearts will teach you everything you want to know about human nature. In the end, we're all selfish, and only one of us can shoot the moon.