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Playing
to Win Example: Richard Hatch on Survivor
Survivor was a 13 part television series on CBS
in which 16 people were voluntarily marooned a desert island. Every
3 days they’d vote someone off the island until there was only one
left…who would win $1 million. I’m sure you’ve heard of this.
I only half-heartedly watched the series during
its first run, but I watched it very closely when it was replayed
during the Olympics. (I find the Olympics and physical sports not
strategically interesting.) I
found Survivor to be a huge, blazing advertisement for “playing to
win.” The community on that island so closely mirrored my Street
Fighter community that I was shocked. There was one expert player
and 15 “scrubs.” Richard Hatch, the winner of Survivor, was the
only participant who really even played the game at all. He put it
best when he said towards the end, “I arrived on this island at
the same time as everyone else. We all saw the sign that said
‘Survivor—outwit—outplay—outlast.’ That’s what I’ve
been trying to do since before I even got here, and the other 15
people seemed to think they were on vacation.”
The Game
Let’s take a strategic look at Survivor
before we talk about Richard. There is only one reasonable, logical
way to hope to win such a game. There are not two ways. There are
not three ways. There is ONE way: to form a voting alliance. At
first, the 16 players are divided into 2 teams of 8. Every 3 days,
the teams face each other in competitions called “immunity
challenges.” The losing team must vote a member off. After 6
players were voted off, the teams merged, forming a single 10 person
team. At this point, the immunity challenges were individual
competitions, not team efforts. The individual who won such a
challenge would be immune from being voted off during the next
voting period.
Again, the obvious way to win this game is to
form a voting alliance. If you have teammates with whom you
coordinate your vote, then you have both the guarantee that their
votes won’t go towards you, and the power to concentrate your
votes on a single opponent. The whims of other players’ votes are
sometimes hard to predict, but the more people you have in your
alliance, the better you can control who to vote off. By doing this,
you control the game. Now, you don’t want too many people (too
difficult to manage, and not self serving enough anyway). Yet you
don’t want too few (not enough voting power). An optimal number
for a game of 16 people might be 4. Once those 4 become the final 4,
they should amicably dissolve the alliance and each try to win. This
was Rich’s plan.
The Players
A four person voting alliance was not something
Rich stumbled
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Richard
Hatch, winner of the first Survivor. |
into; it was his plan all along, starting before he
ever set foot on the island. Not a single other player had even
considered such a thing. The other players reacted in classic scrub
fashion to Rich’s plan, calling it “no fun.” I was just
waiting for someone to call it “cheap.” The other players were
bound up by their own made-up rules of honor—rules the game has no
knowledge of. The game knows nothing but winning and losing. One
player said, “It’s no fun to sit around and get picked off one
by one by an alliance. If that’s the way the game is going to be,
then I don’t want to play.” Good. Get off. Why did you show up
in the first place if not to win?
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Jenna's
kids will be real proud that her mother lost. |
One player, Jenna, said that she didn’t want
to be part of an alliance because she wanted her young daughters to
watch the show and be proud of her mother when they got older. The
supposition here is that she is somehow ethically bound to play in a
sloppy, non-strategic way. Rich’s response was, “Jenna should
make her kids proud by showing that she can WIN. She should be
concerned with showing them ‘look kids, mommy has the will to win
and this is how you do it.’”
Rudy was an interesting player. He initially
found Rich’s alliance
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You
gotta love Rudy. |
to be somehow dishonorable, but he joined
anyway and he gave his word. Above all else, Rudy keeps his word.
Three episodes later, he told the camera that he had “turned 180
degrees,” saying that he now believes that the alliance is
absolutely necessary and that he’ll stick with it until the end.
When Rudy was eventually voted off, his parting words to future
Survivor players were, “Forming an alliance is the only way to win
this game.” Yet I believe that Rudy was incredibly lucky that his
nature (being true to his word) was exactly in line with what
happened to be an important quality to have in the game. After all,
if one is to be in an alliance, one must be trustworthy. Rudy had no
superior grasp of playing competitive games, but at least he was
able to see reason when Rich explained the alliance.
Another notable player was Colleen. She saw her
own defeat
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If
only Colleen acted earlier. |
coming. She saw the alliance. She saw she wasn’t in it.
She saw that the alliance had the power to vote her and every other
non-aligned member off. Her conclusion? To form her own alliance.
This was exactly the right response, but a case of too little, too
late. Rich said, “I find it amusing that people are so naïve as
to think they can start playing strategically at this very late
stage of the game. It’s far too late to start now.” In fact,
Colleen banded the 3 votes together, and might have gotten Kelly’s
crucial 4th swing vote, but failed.
Gervase was another true scrub. He initially
renounced alliances
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Gervase
thought alliances were cheap...at first. |
saying that he’d never play that way. It’s
cheap, you know. Once his fate was sealed and he would clearly lose
to the alliance, only then did Colleen change Gervase’s tune. He
said, “Well, we got a new strategy, going to try a something
new.” He was all excited. He was talking about Colleen’s
alliance. He was a scrub. Scrubs often delight in feeling innovative
and original when they latch on to better player’s superior
tactics when it’s far too late to matter.
Brilliant Strategy
It was the last episode of Survivor, though,
that really showed what competitive games were all about. Rich’s
forfeit of the last immunity challenge was the most brilliant move
played during the 39 day game. With 3 players left, the final
immunity challenge was simply to stand up and keep touching a wooden
idol. It would go on for hours and hours until two gave up and one
was left. The winner would cast the single vote to remove one of the
two losing players. The final two players would then stand before a
jury of 9 of their previous colleagues. The jury would decide the
winner.
Rich was in a tough spot here, with remaining
players Rudy and Kelly. He had a deal with Rudy that they would
stick together until the very end. They agreed that if either of
them won the challenge, they’d vote Kelly off the island and go to
the finals together. The problem is that Rich was well aware that
he’d lose the grand prize if he went to the panel of 9 judges
against Rudy. Rich was seen as slimy and Rudy, though a bigot, was
well liked. If Rudy won the immunity challenge, he’d take Rich to
the final 2, but Rich would still lose. That’s no good.
If Rich wins the immunity challenge, he’s
stuck. He can’t take Rudy with him to the final 2 (since Rudy
would win the final popularity vote), but has to take him (they had
an agreement). Rich would be forced to break the agreement and vote
Rudy off. Unfortunately, that means he’d lose Rudy’s vote (in
retaliation) in the finals. In fact, he might even lose more votes
since breaking an agreement is a slimy thing to do.
That leaves only one possibility: Kelly must
win. If she wins, her gut instinct will be to vote off Rich (she
hates him) and go to the finals with Rudy. Unfortunately for her,
she’d lose the finals by a landslide to Rudy. Rich’s gamble is
that Kelly, scrubby as she is, is not dumb enough to go to the
finals against Rudy. And if she votes off Rudy and goes to the
finals with Rich (her smartest option) then she’s done Rich’s
dirty work for him. Rich is in the final 2 with Kelly (just like he
wanted) and he never had to break his agreement with Rudy, so
he’ll still have Rudy’s vote in the end. Kelly had already
proven her ability to win such immunity challenges, so it was fairly
certain she’d beat Rudy if Rich just conceded. Even if by fluke
Rudy won the immunity challenge, he’d still take Rich to the final
2. So Rich took the gamble and took his hand off the idol on
purpose, hoping Kelly would win—and she did. It all worked out
exactly like he planned.
Kelly: Star Athlete, Star Scrub
Kelly, scrub to the very end, remarked that
Rich claimed he had some reason for removing his hand, but that she
knew his arm was just tired.
But Kelly would have her final moment being the
queen scrub.
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Kelly,
Queen Scrub. |
In the finals between Rich and Kelly, they were each
allowed to give opening statements of why the jury of previously
voted-off players should vote for them. Kelly was a pillar of
inspiration to scrubs everywhere when she explained that people
should vote for the best person, “not based on how they played the
game.” As a scrub, she had her own made-up rules of the game that
the game itself knew nothing about. She was “more honorable” and
“a better friend” or other rubbish.
Rich responded by taking the exactly opposite
stance, as he well should. He said that entire purpose of coming to
this island was to play this game. Kelly asked for votes based on
friendship, but that’s not what the votes should be based on.
Friendship is great and worthwhile, but it’s not purpose of the
game called Survivor. The purpose of the game is to win. The best
player of the game maximizes his chances of winning at all times. In
this case, that meant forming an alliance, which Rich did. Rich was
basically asking the jury to leg go their mental construct of
made-up rules and see the game for what it really was. He asked them
to choose the player who played to win. And they did.
More Games
If the players of Survivor 2 actually learned
the lessons of Survivor 1 and of competitive games in general, then
things will get very messy, indeed. They’ll all try to form 4
person voting alliances. If at least two such alliances emerge, then
the optimal move is to align two of the alliances to get rid
everyone else. Then the 8 will compete as 4 vs 4. Then the remaining
4 would do well to have already planned partners of 2 or 3. This
strategy of the shrinking alliance, though (I believe) optimal, is
an incredibly tricky thing to manage in actual practice. As I
said…it will be messy.
Anyway, Rich may be many things, but he is, at
least, an excellent player of competitive games. It’s so telling
that he was able to beat Gervase in a variety of card games Rich had
never even played. If you’re out there Rich, I’d be honored to
introduce you to Starcraft. (heh.)
Talk
back! Discuss this article in the forums.
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| "A
show set on a desert island with no monkeys or bananas can't be
good!" |
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| "I
can relate to Rudy." |
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"I
could win Survivor so easily. I already live in a hut, anyway.
And no one would ever vote me off." |
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