GAME THEORY IS CONCERNED WITH RATIONAL WAYS OF PLAYING

Here is a fascinating little blurb I found (somewhere). Think about how to use this not in games or roleplaying but in a detective story. A.D.

GAME THEORY IS CONCERNED WITH RATIONAL WAYS OF PLAYING
BY A. D. DeGroot

Thought and choice...

[...]The rapid insight of the masterplayer into the possibilities of a newly shown position, his immediate 'seeing' of structural and dynamic essentials, of possible combinatorial gimmicks, and so forth, are only understandable if we realize that as a result of his "experience" he quite literally 'sees' the position in a totally different (and much more adequate) way than a weaker player.

The vast difference between the two in efficiency, particularly in the amount of time to find out what the core problem is ( ' what's cooking really ' ) and to discover highly specific, adequate means of thought and field action, need not and must not be primarily ascribed to large differences in ' natural ' power for abstraction.
The difference is mainly due to differences in perception.

It is above all " the treasury of ready experience " which put the masterplayer that much ahead of the others.
His extremely extensive widely branched and highly organized system of knowledge and experience enables him, first, to recognize immediately a position as one belonging to an unwritten category with corresponding field means to be applied, and second, to 'see' immediately and in a highly adequate way its specific, individual features against the background of the category.

It is no accident that the word ' seeing ', as used here, stands both for perception and abstraction. The two processes tend to fuse together; they are difficult to distinguish. But if a masterplayer and a weaker player are
compared, often the former literally 'sees' possibilities that are deeply hidden for the latter, possibilities that the latter must first try to discover, calculate, think out, or deduce in order in his turn to be able to ' see ' them.
In other words, the difference in achievement between the masterplayer and non-master rest primarily on the fact that the masterplayer, basing himself on an enormous experience, [ can start his operational thinking at a much more advanced stage ] and can consequently function much more specifically and efficiently in his problem-solving field.