Is cancer really a game?

A couple of weeks ago a post here on TheEGG, which was about evolutionary game theory (EGT) and cancer, sparked a debate on Twitter between proponents and opponents of the idea of using EGT to study cancer. Mainly due to the limitations inherent to Twitter the dialogue fizzled. Instead, here we are expanding ideas in this guest blog post, and eagerly await comments from the others in the debate. The post is written by Philip Gerlee and Philipp Altrock, with some editing from Artem. We will situate the discussion by giving a brief summary of evolutionary game theory, and then offer commentary and two main critiques: how spatial structure is handled, and how to make game theoretic models correspond to reality.