The game was based on a convention in Lewis's home town of Oberlin, Ohio that when a telephone call was cut off then the caller would redial the callee.
[1] This game involves two players in a town having a telephone service with only one telephone line that cuts callers off after a set period of time (e.g., five minutes) if their call is not completed.
If both players call each other, then they will get a busy signal, again, resulting in zero benefit to either party.
In a simple case where the cost of calling is negligible then it is equally optimal for both parties for one of the caller and the callee to wait whilst the other redials (represented as a benefit of 10 for both parties in Fig.
2), if the cost of calling is high, then the players will prefer the waiting strategy with its resulting deadlock.