Muscular America and Russia are in conversation on page 7 of LURU Magazine’s Issue #3. America asks, “Do you even lift, bro?” To which Russia replies weightily, “DA! And I don’t even need protein powder. Only potato.” There is little difference in how they look, barring their hair. A jacked America is blonde, Russia is black-haired and tatted up — the hammer and sickle sits on his arm — in case it’s not clear who’s who. The image above is only one panel in a ten-page comic that ‘Games We Play’ opens with.
The panel described above, set during the Russia-USA Cold War, reminds us that it might be good to make decisions “with more brain, less bicep.” In a world where we’ve begun to throw around words like “missiles” and “fuel” and “war”, ‘Rules’ reroutes your path to ask what it means to be human—why do people behave the way they do. This question is the very core of behavioural science, a discipline built on the simple premise that people are people, and our behaviour exists in patterns.
This warm, Bengaluru comic, featuring young Lila and her Appa, takes us through the traffic of the city to a birthday party she’s dreading terribly. The quintessential back-and-forth between the cool-young child, and an up-in-his-own-head Appa is a reminder of what good conversation can do. An enthu father can irritate his daughter into using game theory to make friends, and a ten-year-old can calmly judge her father for his typical Bengaluru road rage.
History is important. In a city constantly trying to do better — make friends, discover the world, be kinder — it is helpful to remember that the patterns that hold us have existed for time immemorial. In 1944, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern published Theory of Games & Economic Behaviour. They discovered that “to win, you had to see patterns.” von Neumann is otherwise credited as the “father of the nuclear bomb and computers”; a man who changed the course of geopolitics by simply discovering that people are predictable. You may then ask what these patterns can be used for. ‘Rules’ offers us this:
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