With two marquee names cast, the show will continue to center on Joel and Ellie, and is expected to retell the story of the first game, released in 2013. This may give the showrunners some creative leeway. Video games are sometimes described as telling the parts of a movie that would be skipped, like traveling a few miles to the destination just to get to the next story beat. A TV show isn't hamstrung by any obligation to gameplay. Luckily, the first game had plenty of time pass between its chapters, so there's ripe opportunity to tell stories the games didn't -- or couldn't.

We study the subclass of singleton congestion games with identical and increasing cost functions, i.e., each agent tries to utilize from the least crowded resource in her accessible subset of resources. Our main contribution is a novel approach for proving the existence of equilibrium outcomes that are resilient to weakly improving deviations: $(i)$ by singletons (Nash equilibria), $(ii)$ by the grand coalition (Pareto efficiency), and $(iii)$ by coalitions with respect to an a priori given partition coalition structure (partition equilibria). To the best of our knowledge, this is the strongest existence guarantee in the literature of congestion games that is resilient to weakly improving deviations by coalitions.

Multi-agent decision problems, in which independent agents have to agree on a joint plan of action or allocation of resources, are central to AI. In such situations, agents' individual preferences over available alternatives may vary, and they may try to reconcile these differences by voting. Based on the fact that agents may have incentives to vote strategically and misreport their real preferences, a number of recent papers have explored different possibilities for avoiding or eliminating such manipulations. In contrast to most prior work, this paper focuses on convergence of strategic behavior to a decision from which no voter will want to deviate. We consider scenarios where voters cannot coordinate their actions, but are allowed to change their vote after observing the current outcome. We focus on the Plurality voting rule, and study the conditions under which this iterative game is guaranteed to converge to a Nash equilibrium (i.e., to a decision that is stable against further unilateral manipulations). We show for the first time how convergence depends on the exact attributes of the game, such as the tie-breaking scheme, and on assumptions regarding agents' weights and strategies.