A thought provoking, fun read. School textbooks should be this fun!

I love spending hours upon hours playing on my Xbox One so this was such a fascinating read for me! I loved reading about the theory behind the gaming industry and it was interesting to learn about how games have changed society and the way people socialise. Definitely recommend!

Let me be very clear: I am about to fangirl a little bit.
I studied Economics and Finance, so I am not new to Game Theory - I studied it some 8 years ago and went on to work on a different field.
So I picked up this book to refresh my memory not to lose completely the knowledge I gained all those years ago and I have to say it was brilliant. Hair Shapira manages to make Game Theory so interesting showing us only the fun, quizzical part of Game Theory leaving out all the boring (ahem) stuff you want to skip in class. Former Game Theory students and complete newbies to the subject will love this book. It's interesting, fun, funny and makes you thing. Greatly recommended!

An ARC was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Gamification isn’t game theory, but I suspect most marketers are like me and not actually know what game theory is. That’s what I was hoping to learn from Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust.

Mathematician, Haim Shapira, promised to remove the scary math from game theory and make it something everyone can understand. Perhaps it needed the math, or it was the lack of tables and graphs in my pre-release copy, but I feel I understand more of game theory before reading this book. Or maybe I’ve just learned more about game theory and discovered how unrealistic it is? So many questions.

Haim describes game theory as mathematically modeling decision making. Definitely, something as marketers want to understand more of. He then presents a series of situations, studies and models to explain what happens when you apply game theory. There’s an interesting story of behavior when you split the dinner bill. I actually referenced that one at an Instameet yesterday. Then there are several variations of this. You have a box with $1,000 in it and another secret box: which do you choose? You must decide how to allocate $1 million in a group: how is it done?

This is where I have the problem, and without further reading on game theory, I can’t work out if my problem is with the book or the theory. Game theory (according to Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust) makes the assumption that everyone is selfish and greedy and out to destroy everyone else. It tells examples of people having a stand-off and everyone losing rather than being willing to compromise. No one just offers to split the money and declare it done. I know some nasty people but not enough to support the trend of selfishness game theory requires.

So, Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust?

The majority of the book is a series of game theory models and links to when that has occurred in global conflicts and research studies. There’s some discussion stringing it together, but more explaining each model. The last few chapters have a great discussion on how easily statistics are manipulated. By chapter 10, I was skimming the book so I may have missed how it ties in with game theory. I don’t really care because it’s an excellent stand-alone read. The probability of success in gambling was another kind of random addition and missed that the appeal of gambling has more to do with psychology than mathematics.

Who Should Read Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust?

I’m not sure. Game theory is interesting but Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust won’t help you link it to marketing or any decision making that I can use. The only audience I can think of for whom it could be applied is the current US Presidential Cabinet, and that’s not a good thing. If you’re interested in the game theory models, perhaps here’s some bedtime reading for you. If you're wanting a book on decision making, I recommend Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury.

This is an amusing and accurate, if not particularly deep, introduction to the mathematics and economics of game theory. It doesn't tell you how to solve real game theory problems, if you're looking for that, [[ASIN:B00A3M1A6S The Compleat Strategyst]] is an excellent introduction but requires a little more mathematics background. [[ASIN:B004KPM1GM Prisoner's Dilemma]] goes more deeply into the philosophy and history of the subject.

Where this book excels is in integrating mathematics, behavioral psychology and economics in some amusing examples that are simple enough to have clear solutions, but realistic enough to stimulate real thought. It's short and easy to read, clearly written with the flair of an accomplished lecturer.