This is fascinating. JW plays C in the last round, even though AA just played D in the next-to-last round. What explains that? Maybe JW's belief in his own heroic story is strong enough to make him sacrifice his self-interest?

Theoretically, of course, utility functions are invariant up to affine transformation, so a utility's absolute sign is not meaningful. But this is not always a good metaphor for real life.

So you're suggesting that real life has some additional structure which is not representable in ordinary game theory formalism? Can you think of an extension to game theory which can represent it? (Mathematically, not just metaphorically.)