Schrödinger's cat experiment is often misunderstood to mean that just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive, it is actually half-dead and half-alive.

This has nothing to do with quants though. The same could be said about the shell game: I don't know whether there is a pearl under this shell or not, so it's half-there.

The point of Schrödinger's cat is to connect the actual half-facts (according to popular interpretation) of the quantum world to the macro world.

So, what is my opinion on the shell game? I'd say there is an actual reality independent of my knowledge. I can look under the shell afterwards and learn whether there was a pearl even before I looked. I mean - that's certainly the most popular, "naive" interpretation of reality, isn't it?

Would you say that "the universe" has no opinion about whether there is a pearl under a shell, or about how many fingers I'm holding behind by back, as long as you don't know anything about it?

I admit, it wouldn't cause any problems. It's unfalsifiable whether things really happen that nobody will know about or whether only things happen that people directly or indirectly observe.

Another game: In Germany it's called "Topfschlagen" - "pot hitting". One person gets blindfolded and the other people have to guide them to a pot by shouting "hot" and "cold". The blindfolded person doesn't know where the goal is (if we assume that the others don't help them). I think that means that at least things can exist when one person doesn't know about them - because other people still do. It could theoretically be the case that the pot stops existing once everybody puts on blindfolds.