# Game theory

All [human purposes](purpose.md), when measurable, are a game, complete with implied [constraints](people-rules.md), resources, and [goals](people-decisions.md). Most of these purposes involve other players, each with separate purposes and resources.

Game theory is an excellent subdivision of math that explores [situational ethics](morality.md) and [decision-making](people-decisions.md). It has a [philosophical](philosophy.md) use, but will *never* be a reliable and practical predictor of human behavior and [trends](trends.md) relative to basic human common sense, for several reasons:

1. All mathematical elements must be theoretically measurable. [Feelings](mind-feelings.md), though, are impossible to measure because they're relative to each person's scope and interpretation of experience.
2. Even if game theory predictions could completely quantify [stories](stories.md) from humanity's feelings, most people would change their motivations as soon as they knew both that their past had been quantified and that they were being predicted from it.
3. Players wish to win games, but real-life people are more concerned about resources, relationships, and others' resources compared to themselves, so the win conditions move around second-by-second. Resources can move around and are usually easily measurable, but anything about human relationships is based on mutual [feelings](mind-feelings.md), thereby compounding non-measurable Problem #1.
4. Real-life people often find meta-purposes to [creatively](mind-creativity.md) hack games. Some of them are [taboo](morality-taboo.md) (e.g., con artistry) and others are [venerated](image.md) (e.g., inventing). Meta-games complicate things further than they already are, and it's unlikely any human can [visualize](imagination.md) all the elements, even with [technological assistance](data-viz.md), since they're still *part* of that meta-game.
5. Purposes move around as people [change](people-changes.md), and the entire collection of a person's memories will determine subtle differentiations proportional to their [wisdom](understanding.md). In any game longer than a few minutes, any modeled [expectations](imagination.md) of what someone will do leans heavily into a mixture of [culture](people-culture.md) and [decisions](people-decisions.md), which is impossible to measure and weight correctly.
6. If anyone behaves sacrificially (i.e., out of [love](people-love.md)), the game is impossible to calculate in any useful way because it's difficult to gauge *whose* interests drive actions.