Wait, the value of the clothing, or the women?
I hate all shows where the contestant’s ability to win depend on his knowledge or physical prowess. I want more shows based on social dilemmas. Dollar Auctions would be great. Split the Difference, Stag Hunt, Prisoner Dilemma, they would all make for great TV.
I would love to see Survivor without the jungle games non-sense. 16 people have to convince the rest to give them one million dollars and go home with nothing. Beautiful.
I want games won through gamemanship.
Funny you should mention that…
‘Nine diverse contestants are isolated in a specially designed underground bunker for Channel 4’s brand-new strategic game show thriller Unanimous.
Cut off from the outside world, without clocks, windows or outside space, the group will have no idea whether it is day or night. Only on arrival are they told the full premise and rules of the game: they must decide unanimously which one of them deserves a cash prize of one million pounds.
And as if reaching such a life-changing decision wasn’t difficult enough, to make matters worse the clock is ticking… if the contestants can’t reach a Unanimous decision, the prize money starts to count down - one pound every second they can’t decide. The race is on for contestants to convince each other they are most worthy of winning.’
http://www.ukgameshows.com/page/index.php/Unanimous_Press_Release
This could be improved by keeping the contestants isolated from each other, and prohibited from sharing facts about themselves. Each one in his concrete isolation booth would know only that there are 8 other contestants and that one of them must get all the money or none will. Based only on this info, each one must reach a decision.
I remember in Ultima Underworld 2 there was a spectacularly stupid troll who invented a game called Black-Rock-White-Rock. You had to pick one of two rocks and if you picked the black one you lost, if you picked the white rock you won. And both rocks were in plain sight throughout. 
How about B- and C-list celebrities are given a ruler and sent into the bathroom. They have to measure the length of one of their turds. The winner is the one with the longest, of course. We could call it Down In The Dumps. I thought of this when I saw the first adds for Armed and Famous.
There is nothing so dumb that it hasn’t been topped by what has already aired.
Does anyone else remember the $1.98 Beauty Show?
Give us your bio.
[…commercial…]
Introduce your family and friends.
[…commercial…]
Interview a walk-on celebrity.
[…commercial…]
Pick a number between 1 and 10.
[…commercial…]
Have you made your choice? We’ll find out what it is right after this.
[…commercial…]
Seven. It’s my mental age.
[…commercial…]
Suspenseful music. We’ll find out if you’re right right after this.
[…commercial…]
Welcome back. You chose seven. What was the number? Four!
[…commercial…]
And here’s our next contestant.
Sadly what they actually do is ask for small amounts through e.g. juggling, “I want £10,000 to bring juggling to children” (response “fuck off”), or tell sob stories: “my granny’s never been to a restaurant and I want £6,000 to give her a nice 80th birthday” (sobbing millionaires give the good looking woman the full amount and then some).
Also, in the US you haven’t yet got The Dragon’s Den, which I have to say is pretty much the best gameshow I’ve ever seen, where real-life tycoons offer VC in exchange for equity in genuine business ideas - some great, some absolutely barking mad. Watch out for it, it’s genius.
However, all y’all thinking up new gameshows need to check out TV Go Home. “Mick Hucknall’s Dolls House Sackbag Prodfest” is a classy one, as is Aquatextile Savegoose Challenge. How horribly prescient Mr Brooker seems to have been…
How about a game in which the host asks a contestant “Pick a letter between A and Z”.
After the conestant picks his letter, a random dollar value is assigned to each one. Then, the host repeatedly asks the contestant, “do you want to trade your letter for roughly the average value of the rest of the letters?”
Every time the contestant says, “no”, remove a couple of the letters at random, and repeat.
I mean, you might have to dress it up a little with shiny stuff, bright lights, and pretty women, but a concept that good pretty much sells itself.
Naturally there would be a huge Internet audience who would log in!
*Guess What Number I’m Thinking Of! *
Ooops, you guessed wrong? Then you’re killed, off-camera, in a horribly painful way. Bring on the next contestant!
How about Have Your Cake, or Eat It!
Come to think of it, you could title “Cake, or Death?” that, too!
I’ve seen “Deal or No Deal” a couple times and, at best, I rather indifferent toward it. However, I don’t think it’s entirely devoid of actual rudimentary skills. Because determining what suitcase to pick and whether it’s time to make a deal or not requires knowledge of probability and outcome, it helps if a contestant has some math skills. Of course, such a contestant would likely play the game rather conservatively and thus be a rather boring contestant.
Here’s a question I have about the ding-a-lings who are contestants on this show. I know there is no real strategy for picking cases but a lot of people are supersticious and like using numbers they consider “lucky”.
So why if you have “lucky” numbers would you pick those cases to eliminate. Wouldn’t you want to keep the cases with your lucky numbers around as long as possible? (Of course it dosen’t matter one way or another but how do these superstitious people explain why they’d eliminate the case if it was so lucky?)
I remember an old Dave Barry column where he racked his brain for a gameshow idea that was dumber and less likely to be successful than anything else out there. His eventual pick was titled “Eat Bugs for Money”, and there was widespread agreement it would never make it.
How long has Fear Factor been on?
Actually, a person with decent math skills would tend to play the game longer than a lot of these people play it.
People are always taking deals when the math says they should go on.
I could swear I’ve seen this show before…what was it called, “Accept or Decline” or something like that…
I don’t know why more contestants don’t take advantage of the law of averages by thinking: well, there are 7 large value cases (six REALLY large ones) out of 26, or about one-fourth of the cases. If the distribution is random, the odds are that they’ll be evenly distributed (that is, the large values, probably, will not cluster together). So, if I find a large value case, the cases right next to it in order should contain low values. Or, by the same token, if I take out both cases right next to my chosen number and they both contain large values, my case probably does not contain a large value and I shouldn’t push my luck so much.
Were I on the show, I’d work my way through every other case, knocking out all the odds or all the evens, to get a feel for where the large values might be. It won’t necessarily work, but it’s gotta be better than shooting in the dark.
No, it’s not better than shooting in the dark. But, the good news is, it’s not worse either.
If they truly randomly distribute the dollar amount (and I GUARANTEE they do) then big dollar amounts are just as likely to be next to other big dollar amounts as they are small dollar amounts.
If you look at random spatial patterns, there are distinct “clumping” patterns.
Humans thend to think that “random” means some kind of evenly spaced thing. Look at this for instance. The “random” one is the one where things cluster together.
If there were humans doing the distributions of the dollar amounts, your theory would probably be more sound. But, after game show debacles like the “Beat the Whammy” thing, I have to imagine they use a real random number generator to distribute the amounts. And in that case, you might as well go 1-2-3-4-5-6 as 23-17-1-4-11. It’s like playing the lottery.
Actually, what I meant by “conservative” is that they’d be fairly calm and calculating in their approach to the game. Game show producers generally prefer contestants who are emotional types who make decisions off the top of their head without any real strategy.