One of the most common assumptions made by game theorists is that players have perfect recall - they remember everything that happened in the game up to now. Larry Blume writes "Rubenstein and Piccione convinced us that imperfect recall might be pretty weird. The movie Memento shows how strategies in such a game might have to be implemented. It's a stretch, but my first year graduate students thought you should know."

In the movie, the main character suffers from short-term memory loss, and adopts several unique strategies to remind him of what has so far transpired. Since, without perfect recall, segments of a game are somewhat independent, the movie tells his story backwards.