Game Theory Lecture 1 A Brief Reflection

I came into the first lecture expecting math and chess strategies. What I got instead was a new way of looking at everyday decisions. The core idea was simple but powerful: a "game" isn't just poker or Monopoly. It's any situation where your outcome depends on what others do. A price war, a traffic jam, choosing a restaurant with friends — all are games. Once you see this, you start seeing strategic interaction everywhere. We learned the three basic building blocks: players (decision-makers), strategies (possible actions), and payoffs (what each player values). Then came the Prisoner's Dilemma — two suspects, each better off betraying the other, yet both worse off when they do. The lesson hit hard: what's individually rational can be collectively disastrous. That one example explains arms races, environmental damage, and countless everyday breakdowns of cooperation. We also distinguished between simultaneous games (players move at the same time) and sequential ones (players take turns, watching each other's moves). Chess is sequential; rock-paper-scissors is simultaneous. This simple distinction changes how you should think strategically. The lecture ended with an assumption that gave me pause: all players are perfectly rational, and everyone knows everyone else is perfectly rational. Real people aren't like that — we're emotional, biased, easily confused. But the professor made a fair point: these simplified models give us a benchmark. We can see how real behavior deviates from pure logic, and that deviation itself becomes interesting. By the end, I wasn't just learning theory. I was learning to ask a new question in every social situation: "What game are we actually playing?"