I saw a trailer for 'The Box' today and it got me thinking about how a storyline like that could work. The trailer is linked here, and given what I've seen of it, I can see how that would predictably play out as a movie, but it was more the idea of Game Theory. I don't know how many of you know about Game Theory but the idea of it is basically predicting the best solution to various scenarios for all the players involved. It's used in various fields ranging from economics (figuring out who to loan money to, for example) to psychology (predicting how people are going to act), and the list goes on.
But basically, the question comes about how to apply it to a Shadowrun setting. I was thinking at first something like The Game. which was an interesting Michael Douglas movie and in and of itself would make a good run. But the problem is, exactly how do you get the players to play. When you're dealing with people who have guns and are career criminals, shooting at things that scare them is more likely than playing along. Or, they'll go to ground, or even do a run on the people running this Game.
It was after a bit of searching, I found Add a Touch of Original Game Theory to Spice Up Your RPG! and found it to be quite interesting. There was a PDF writeup I found of the prisoner's dilemma and its feature in Knights of the Old Republic, but it didn't really do much other than consider that the choice of prisoner you're pitted against making changes in your thinking. If you don't know the Prisoner's Dilemma, the idea is you and another person are caught. If you both remain quiet, you get little to no punishment, but one turns on the other and the other is quiet, the one who was quiet goes to prison and the other one goes scot free. And if they both turn on each other, they get intermediate prison sentences. The best approach is for both to be quiet, but depending on who you're with, can you trust the other person to think about your safety at the same level as theirs?
Now, that Game Theory link gives an interesting example using the cake cutting theory. The idea is how to divide up resources so that each person involved believes they got a fair amount while the divisions may not be exact. Numb3rs did an example of this in its season 3 episode "One Hour", where one person may like icing more than the other, so cutting the cake in half horizontally works better than vertical. You can do the same with your players by maybe giving them a choice of a bunch of things, but they get only to choose a certain amount and it must be fair for both parties. Imagine a deal with an NPC that way; "I'll take the gun, you can have the vehicle, but I'll take these chemicals and you can have the database files." Maybe your NPC would rather have the chemicals than anything, and would give the character the vehicle in exchange for the chemicals. But does the player want the vehicle? How important are the chemicals to him? Etc. The comments of the article also give some cool examples.
Back to the Box. Looking at the problem presented; "You press the button, somewhere, someone in the world, whom you don't know, dies and you will get money", it doesn't seem so bad. I personally took the 'Whom you don't know' to mean you don't know who it will be that dies as opposed to 'Someone you don't know in the world dies'. The part about not pushing the button is answered by the line "There are always consequences", which would mean that just walking away is not an option either because things will happen. Let's say it came down to this: "You have a button. If you press it, someone dies and you get money. If you don't press it, someone may die but you don't get money." Rather than making the not pressing it a certainty, you are now weighing the 'Do I have the ability to take someone's life from them', instead of 'Someone's going to die, I may as well get my money from it'.
There are some links to courses and other materials about Game Theory in the RPG link I posted earlier and they have some good stuff, but this entry gives a great breakdown of the different type of games in game theory and maybe some people can come up with ways to make it work for them. I like the idea because it makes the players think rather than just acting. If you've got white hat runners, the social games could work by making them decide choices like 'You can save one person, one is a child, the other is <insert specialist here, maybe a world class doctor, maybe a genius who could bring about world peace, or even just some powerful NPC>.', it makes it a question of 'Is the service that the grownup can offer right now better than the possibility of what the child might become? It has been done multiple times I can think of, and it can be a test of a person's character, do they want betterment right now (IE, saving a rich CEO and getting him to give you money or a favor or whatever), or saving a child and planting a possible seed for the future (It is possible the kid could grow up to be a mass-murderer or the like but we don't know that at the time).