Deceptively simple...

This will dovetail nicely with the (much talked about, but never written) "buttons" post (which, when it arrives, will be awesome).

So, back in the Commie country days, while in hateful, hateful Poland, I saw a show on Polish television. I couldn't quite tell what was happening. Lots of people screaming, lots of money amounts flying at the screen, lots of unattractive Polish people holding suitcases. I watched two episodes of it, and couldn't figure out what was happening. One person was picking suitcase numbers, and the people opening the picked suitcases would get ridiculously excited. Who was winning money? Who were all these people?

Once I saw a commercial for "Deal or No Deal", however, I understood. The unattractive Polish people were just props -- so, naturally, for the American version, they'd have models holding the suitcases. (And, look, you can meet them all!). The game is ridiculously simple, and I now doubt my anthropological skills for no being able to figure it out:

There are 26 numbered suitcases, each suitcase containing a dollar amount betwixt $.01 and $2 million. The contestant picks one, and that becomes "their" suitcase, which they can either keep or "sell" later in the game. They start by picking other suitcases to be opened and their dollar amounts revealed. After opening a certain number of suitcases, the "banker" calls the contestant and gives an offer to buy the suitcase for a dollar amount or let the contestant keep opening suitcases. That's it. If the contestant gets all the way to the last suitcase without taking the banker's offer, they get the amount of money in the suitcase.

It's so simple, it's brilliant. Especially since the "banker's offer" seems to be based on casino like-odds. He'll always give you a little less than you're actual odds of winning (ie, you may have a 1 in 4 chance of winning a million dollars, but he'll buy you out for $200,000, for instance.) It's, therefore, a game about playing your sense of luck and karma against your head. Howie Mandel does a great job of emphasizing the math, and people keep flying in the face of it, caught up in the excitement of the ritual. The book I've been (slowly) reading since Vegas, Something for Nothing, talks about modern gambling as an offshoot of ancient divination -- a way to speak to the gods and determine our place in the universe. This show (unlike, say Millionaire, which had a certain skill element to it) seems closest to that notion of giving into your gut and letting the universe talk to you in the only way us modern, secular Americans can discern our karmic value -- oodles and oodles of cash.

"Deal or No Deal" is church, Howie is the Pope, and I guess that makes me the faithful.