http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/08/19/game-theory-in-the-dark-knight-a-critical-review-of-the-opening-scene-spoilers/

The big movie hit The Dark Knight demonstrates many concepts of Game theory throughout the plot. In fact, I believe that the movie is based heavily on the ideas of game theory. The very first scene itself resembles a game. As discussed in the article, the robbers are the players with payoffs equal to the amount that the person gets from the split of money. The basics are similar to the simple game that we’ve have been discussing about: players choose strategies that offers best payoff and their strategies are affected by other player’s strategies. Here, the best strategy for each player is to maximize his profit but to do so, they must somehow acquire more money from the split. Thus, each player’s dominant strategy is to eliminate the other players. The article provides a deep insight into this dilemma by relating this scenario with a similar game called The Pirates. In both cases, the game deals with the problem of equal division and unequal work. It’s just like in a group project – if you were the one to do the most work, you would want to get the credit for it, rather than splitting it. Ultimately, the Joker plays the mastermind and manipulates the robbers’ mind by telling them to kill off the other robbers once they are done with their part of the job. The Joker, in this case, is the stronger “pirate” and chooses to win by exploiting conflict among weaker conflicts. Unfortunately, the assumption of all players are rational cannot be applied since these robbers failed to see The Joker’s plan. This is an interesting concept that we never expanded on in our class discussion. Having strong and weak players as well as having the mere existence of a player affects the payoffs of the players. These extra factors are the reasons why games like these are much harder to model.

A similar scene in the movie that demonstrates game theory is when the Joker gives a detonator to each of the two ships that connects to a bomb on the other ship. By pressing the button, the ship will have the opportunity of surviving, while the other ship explodes. However, after a certain amount of time, if neither ship chooses to detonate the other ship, both ships will explode. This is just like the prisoner’s dilemma. If a ship chooses to detonate the other ship, they will survive but leave with guilt. If neither ship chooses to detonate, both ships will explode. The Joker, who probably understands what is going on, purposely chose to structure the game like this so that one ship will detonate the other ship by the best response concept we have been discussing. He tries to force people to go against their morals to play out the game. In game theory, the best response for both ships are to detonate the other ship, but so many factors are included in this game, one being guilt, such that we cannot make use our game theory(it relies too much on assumptions).

The movie itself has several themes that relate to game theory. In the scene with The Joker and Two-face, the Joker tells how he does not play with best response or strategy. This makes Two-face to rely heavily on randomization, another topic that we touched in game theory. Ultimately, the moral of the movie goes against what the models of game theory suggests but we cannot really use game theory models to make predictions -  there are far too many factors that affect the game. In conclusion, the Joker displays himself as a mastermind of Game theory, being able to manipulate many minds but failing to defeat Batman.