 Prior to the work of  von Neumann &amp; Morgenstern (1947),  situations of this sort were inherently baffling to analysts. This is because utility does not denote a hidden psychological variable such as pleasure. As we discussed in  Section 2.1,  utility is merely a measure of relative behavioural dispositions given certain consistency assumptions about relations between preferences and choices. It therefore makes no sense to imagine comparing our players’ cardinal—that is, intensity-sensitive—preferences with one another’s, since there is no independent, interpersonally constant yardstick we could use. How, then, can we model games in which cardinal information is relevant? After all, modeling games requires that all players’ utilities be taken simultaneously into account, as we’ve seen.