If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.

You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.

Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.

That’s basically why dictatorships are so hard to overthrow. In real life the game is slightly different, if you choose red (don’t protest) you get a negative outcome. But if you choose blue (protest) you risk being jailed (a very negative outcome) unless enough people also choose blue, in which case the outcome can turn highly positive.

That’s why dictators try to limit protests, not just because of the protests themselves but because they don’t want people to know how many others are willing to protest.

This is a purely theoretical concept, but ties nicely into existing game-theory which has real world implications.

This question has multiple layers of thinking:

1. People who can't read pick randomly.

2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.

3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.

4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.

5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.

6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.

There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.

As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.