IMAGINE the following situation. After a grueling day at work, you plop down in front of your TV, ready to relax. Your TiVo has recorded all of the day’s March Madness games. You’ve sequestered yourself away from any news about who won or lost. Which game to watch?
Suddenly, your spouse pops in and tells you to stay away from Villanova versus Lafayette, which was a blowout, and to watch Baylor versus Georgia State, a nail-biter.
Is this recommendation appreciated? Hardly. Baylor versus Georgia State was exciting because the unexpected happened: It was a back-and-forth affair in which Georgia State, the underdog, clinched the upset only in the final moments. But if you know in advance that it’s a nail-biter, you will expect the unexpected, ruining the surprise.
It’s a lesson that the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, for one, seems to have missed. Once it’s common knowledge that your movie will have a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end, then your movie no longer has a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end.
To be thrilling, you must occasionally be boring.
This is one of several lessons that came out of our recent study of drama-based entertainment using the tools of information economics — the results of which were published in the Journal of Political Economy in February. When we recognize that the capacity to surprise an audience is a scarce resource (“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time”), it becomes natural to use economic theory to optimize that resource.
We began our analysis by noticing a certain similarity. In a number of settings — watching basketball games, reading mystery novels, gambling in a casino — people are invested in learning the outcome (which team will win, who is the murderer, will I walk out flush or broke), but they do not wish to learn the outcome too quickly. In all of these settings, a key aspect of entertainment is the revelation of information over time.
Information revealed over time generates drama in two ways: suspense and surprise. Suspense is experienced before the fact, when something informative is about to happen. Think about a baseball scenario: bases loaded, full count, two men out. We say that a moment has a lot of suspense if there is a lot of uncertainty about what you will soon think about the outcome.
Surprise, on the other hand, is experienced after the fact. We are surprised if something unexpected has just happened. Think about a soccer goalie scoring from a goal kick. We say that a moment has a lot of surprise if your belief about the outcome is very different from what you thought a moment ago.
Once these concepts are formalized in this way, the question of how to maximize entertainment — that is, how to generate the most suspense or the most surprise — becomes a mathematical problem that can be tackled on a whiteboard. The solution yields some simple insights (for example, remember occasionally to be boring) but also many nuanced ones.
