One of my favorite cartoons, by Charles Barsotti, shows a hot dog excitedly saying, “Hey everybody, we’ve been invited to a cookout!” I share this with my classes when I teach decision analysis to emphasize that different people (or, more generally, “agents”) have different goals.

I was thinking about this point recently after a discussion here a couple weeks ago about the first-player advantage in Risk. Commenter Ken Williams suggested solving the problem by alternating games. In considering why this seems like a bad idea to me (beyond the impracticality of playing several games of risk back to back), I realized that the relevant issue here is not fairness but rather is fun, or playability. After all, for fairness alone you only need to randomize who starts first and that solves the problem. But, if there’s a huge first-player advantage, the game still might not be so playable. It’s not always a lot of fun to play a game if you know to start with that you’re gonna lose.