Michael Suk-Young Chwe

Suk-Young Chwe, Michael. Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Princeton UP, 2013.
With this title, you might think you were in for a parody like Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. But no. In Jane Austen, Game Theorist, Michael Suk-Young, a political scientist from the University of California, offers a serious work of literary criticism applying game theory to the analysis of Austen’s novels. In Austen’s novels, the word “stratagem” usually describes the plans of less admirable characters, but as Suk-Young Chwe points out, her heroines tend to be those who pay clearest attention to the goals and strategies of others. They have a quality Austen calls “penetration,” which means the ability to see into the intentions and feelings of others. Emma is a heroine who overestimates her own abilities in this regard. Fanny Price of Mansfield Park improves her gaming skills as she grows up. The most fascinating analysis here deals with characters who are in one way or another “clueless,” with no insight into what others are up to. Most of the time, not understanding your opponent is a disadvantage in gaming, but not always. In Northanger Abbey, cluelessness works to the heroine’s advantage because her cluelessness makes her unpredictable and able to avoid traps into which more insightful women might fall. Suk-Young Chwe points out that many of Austen’s minor characters are amateurs at gamesmanship. Characters like Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice and John Dashwood think of themselves as shrewd social operatives, but they depend on social rules and rank to tell them how to act. The more expert gamers are more able to think autonomously and know when the rules can be bent. Suk-Young Chwe assumes his audience knows nothing about game theory (in my case a good assumption) and has never read Austen. Sometimes the argument gets lost in the plot summaries that follow from this assumption. 4 stars.… (más)

What did I just read? It felt like the introduction chapter was rewritten for each chapter hammering in the same points that were made in the first chapter. Not all that informative, explains metaknowing aka knowing others know and know they know others know too. Goes into some detail about how and why commercials work and why circular seating is ideal. That is about it and it just kept reexplaining this over and over again. The book’s examples are outdated, it was originally published in 2001 so its kind of expected but it was then republished in 2014 with a afterword that didn’t address social media and the internet at all.

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