A learning game your kids will want to play!

Kijiji is a gaming environment built to teach children how to stay safe online. Using Game Theory, this first-person live-gaming experience is the new wave of online gaming. They give a player complete autonomy over their gaming character, but can interact with other players (that they know) to work together in the game for a specific goal.

Click here to test out our Kijiji concept gaming platform and play around with it.

Our Partners

Using Game Theory to teach children online safety during COVID-19

Merci-Michel is a french award-winning digital production house, based in Paris, France. We reached out to them because of their creative implimentation of game design in the development of websites for both web and mobile and the creativity design skill of some of the work they had done in user engagement.

There was a large outcry from parents and educators about the zoom-bombing that happened online and the constant threats an online environment was creating for young minds. In response to that, Kytabu reached out to Merci-Michel to prototype a gaming environment for children to play in either as a single player or as a group. This environment would be a place where kids would come across videos that would help the understand hod to keep themselves safe online in different environments using the fundamentals of Game Theory.

How game theory strategy improves decision making

Game theory, the study of strategic decision-making, brings together disparate disciplines such as mathematics, psychology, and philosophy. Game theory was invented by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 and has come a long way since then.1 The importance of game theory to modern analysis and decision-making can be gauged by the fact that since 1970, as many as 12 leading economists and scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their contributions to game theory.2

Game theory is applied in a number of fields, including business, finance, economics, political science, and psychology. Understanding game theory strategies—both the popular ones and some of the relatively lesser-known stratagems—is important to enhance one’s reasoning and decision-making skills in a complex world.

Key Takeaways

Game theory is a framework for understanding choice in situations among competing players.
Game theory can help players reach optimal decision-making when confronted by independent and competing actors in a strategic setting.
A common “game” form that appears in economic and business situations is the prisoner’s dilemma, where individual decisionmakers always have an incentive to choose in a way that creates a less than optimal outcome for the individuals as a group.
Several other forms of game exist. The practical application of these games can be a valuable tool to aid in the analysis of industries, sectors, markets, and any strategic interaction between two or more actors.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

One of the most popular and basic game theory strategies is the prisoner’s dilemma. This concept explores the decision-making strategy taken by two individuals who, by acting in their own individual best interest, end up with worse outcomes than if they had cooperated with each other in the first place.

In the prisoner’s dilemma, two suspects apprehended for a crime are held in separate rooms and cannot communicate with each other. The prosecutor informs both Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 individually that if he confesses and testifies against the other, he can go free, but if he does not cooperate and the other suspect does, he will be sentenced to three years in prison. If both confess, they will get a two-year sentence, and if neither confesses, they will be sentenced to one year in prison.