Tag: Frameworks

A Game You Can’t Decline

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is to play well. You play well by knowing you’re playing.

Last night, friends came over. They’d baked cookies. They brought the cookies in a Tupperware container. As they were leaving, Partner went to retrieve the Tupperware and hand it back at the door.

I winced internally. I should have said something. 

Here’s the game I saw and Partner didn’t: you don’t return the Tupperware at the door. You keep the Tupperware. Eventually, you need to return it – which means you’ll see them again, which means there’s an open thread between you. The Tupperware is a mild promissory note. Yes, we’ll have you over, or you’ll invite us, or we’ll see you at the thing – because also, here’s your Tupperware.

Returning the container at the door closes the loop transactionally. Everyone walks away even. But the loop is what builds the relationship. Even is not what you want when starting a relationship if the other person would find you returning the tupperware weird.

When I mentioned it to Partner afterward, she got it instantly. She’d just never thought of it that way. We also agreed that it isn’t logical. Of course they want their Tupperware back. The whole thing is illogical. Most social dynamics games are.

I’m reminded of a buddy of mine this past summer. A woman had stayed over at his apartment. Now, she wanted her ring back. He told her to retrieve it from his roommate. No, buddy! She left it so you have to see her again! 

I once had a 9 AM appointment with a doctor. Due to a series of errors made by his office and lab, my appointment ran until 2:30 PM. Around noon, I mentioned wanting to grab a sandwich. He gave me cash and offered to pay for mine as well.

Something felt wrong. I bought both sandwiches and gave him the cash back.

I suspect he didn’t even register the move. But Partner had the same instinct I did when I told her: pay for his sandwich, refuse the cash. The discomfort was real and shared, even if neither of us could immediately articulate why.

Here’s why: the cash created an obligation flow that didn’t match the relationship. He had spent five and a half hours of my day on his office’s mistakes. The appropriate flow was him owing me. His offer to buy me lunch was a way to pay down his debt of guilt. But not an appropriately-sized one.

Buying the sandwich, refusing the cash, was the right move. It accepted the kindness implicit in offering food while refusing the implicit power-move. Imperfect, but instinct steered correctly. 

And as we left his office, he apologized at least 8 times for the delay. By the end, he said, “I’m done apologizing. If I apologize again, hit me.” That’s the appropriate obligation for someone who’s wasted 5 hours of your day. 

Recently, I made a friend who pocket-vetos any activities that are emotionally intense for him. He only plays the games he wants to play, in the ways he wants to play them.

It’s no surprise this correlates with power and resources. As friends have gotten more powerful, more of them have developed this stance. No explanation, no apology, no negotiation. Generally no answer, not even a “No”. 

If you’re young and broke and unattractive and awkward, you can’t pull this off. People stop inviting you. Every social interaction has to be navigated, every gift has to be reciprocated, every obligation has to be honored. The poverty of optionality forces you to play every game offered. 

As you accumulate power and resources, you can decline games without consequence. People still invite you. People still want you around. They accept this trait because you’re still worth it. Like the celebrity who’s notorious for being prickly in interviews, the rudeness becomes a feature: a filter mechanism.

Three observations: 

1. Refusing to play is itself a move. 

  • A recurring claim of this blog. It holds here.

2. Not-playing a game requires winning sufficiently in other games, or people will stop playing games with you entirely. 

  • The friend’s pocket-vetos work because the rest of his social game is in order. He’s not refusing because he doesn’t understand the games; he’s refusing because losing this game doesn’t matter for him anymore. If Warren Buffett never set a schedule, only meeting with people willing to show up at his offices in Omaha, people would still gladly sit in his office for hours, waiting for the possibility to talk with him. 

3. Winning generally comes from choosing which game is being played and at what level. 

  • Most of us learn how to act in specific spots in specific games. That’s a fine level one, but it misses out on level two (shifting the odds in your favor) and level three (dictating the battlefield). 

One more thing: the move I should have made about the Tupperware was overruling Partner in real time. I saw the game. I knew the right move. I let her make the suboptimal one because I didn’t want to interrupt.

That’s a habit of mine – letting people make moves I see as wrong, then discussing afterward if it matters. The discussion-afterward version doesn’t recover the move. It just generates retrospective alignment for next time.

Sometimes the right move is to interrupt. Saying wait, I’m gonna eat all those in the moment would have been weird. It also would have been the right move. Weirdness is sometimes the price of playing well.

[It’s late. I’ve read this one too many times to like it. The daily-publishing game is hard tonight. I hope I like this post in the morning. Sigh.]

Do Fewer

JulianLeave a comment

You win by making the right move. You make the right move by waiting for it.

Before my jaw surgery in 2018, I made too many moves.

I underwent a sleep study at a facility that allowed me to sleep on my stomach. Obstructive sleep apnea is positional. Bad medical care.

A dentist prescribed an oral appliance and lied to me about its potential side effects. I wore it. The side effects were bad. 

A surgeon told me I’d need to fix my deviated septum, so I might as well do it now. Unnecessary surgery. I’d later have maxillomandibular advancement, which would necessitate a septum fix at that point anyway. I had mis-sequenced, again due to bad advice from doctors.

Six doctors mis-diagnosed or mis-treated me before I found the world’s expert in obstructive sleep apnea. Not himself a surgeon, he sent me to the only surgeon he liked. I had the surgery. It went wonderfully. 

One quality move would have saved me ten years and six bad doctors, one bad surgery, and one damaging oral appliance.

I had an insufficient respect for quality.

A friend has spent the last decade on a large legal case about a contract violation. Ten years, about ten moves. He says most of his days are spent staring at a wall thinking. The hardest part hasn’t been any single move. It’s been the waiting between them — the part where you’re not doing anything visible. 

It’s easy to get antsy. But the right move at the wrong time is the wrong move. And the wrong move, just to do something is even worse. 

That’s not laziness. That’s respect for quality.

Recently, two optometrists told me I should get corneal crosslinking. The pattern-matching said I needed it. Something didn’t smell right. 

So I went to the actual experts — the ones who’ve seen thousands of patients who look like me over the past thirty years and done seven hundred-plus surgeries on people with my eyes. 

At the end of this month, I’m flying to France to install permanent contacts. The pattern-matchers were wrong. The real experts were right. The move they suggested would have been unnecessary.

Refusing a move is also a move. Sometimes it’s the best move.

When I started freelancing, I asked everyone for client referrals. I had to. I didn’t know who would say yes, what worked, what my rate was, or who my buyer was. This was the explore phase. More information was better.

By my third set of clients, the machine started carrying itself. My hourly rate was higher than many lawyers’. Inbound exceeded what I wanted.

The shift on calls was exponential. I had good pre-call materials. I had good post-call follow-ups. The call itself was mostly listening and repeating back what the client had said.

One call, I was sitting at a kitchen table on mute, pulling funny faces while my then-partner pointed at the phone whisper-yelling, “Pay attention! Focus!” The client stopped talking. I unmuted. I said five words. I re-muted. The client said, “Wow, you really get it!” Then-partner was floored.

I would tell early-Julian to keep investing in the process. And not to abandon it when he got tired of it — to keep investing, just in a new way. The work shifts from doing more to doing fewer, better. Respect the elegance. 

Flailing is not testing.

When I hired my contractor, I went for volume — got fifteen quotes, narrowed them down. The cost of each one coming by was low — just some of my time — so I figured why not. But I wasn’t systematic. A bit more research upfront — learning how the process works, what the categories of contractor are, what the right questions to ask are — would have produced a faster result with fewer visits. 

Getting a lot of information systematically is a research strategy. Getting a lot of information randomly is flailing. The two feel similar from inside. They aren’t.

Closing on this apartment took eight months. The required topics ranged from negotiation to financing to weird legal processes to printing documents at 11 PM in rural France. About ten major moves in total.

Once the incentives were aligned — me, my broker, the seller’s broker — the rest clicked pretty smoothly. The eight months were spent making the right moves slowly, not many moves quickly. And about half of the key moves were me saying no to other people’s requests. At least two of those would have ruined the deal. 

It’s not about doing less. It’s about doing fewer, where each one is more elegant. Build the system that reduces the steps. Invest in infrastructure. Make the right move when the right move presents itself.

If “fewer” ever becomes zero, that’s a different problem. This approach won’t fix that one. But it does need fixing.

Life is full of games. Games require moves. Don’t do less. Do fewer. 

A Hole in One Case

JulianLeave a comment

There is no Platonic ideal of any game.

When I was 8 years old, my father told me the Supreme Court had ruled that walking the course is not fundamental to golf. My father was, at the time, interested in golf. I, now, read Supreme Court cases for fun. Let’s intersect these.

In 2001, in PGA Tour v. Martin, the Supreme Court ruled that walking the course was not integral to golf. Casey Martin, a professional golfer with a circulatory condition that made walking dangerous, sued the PGA under the Americans with Disabilities Act for the right to use a cart in tournaments. He won, 7–2. The majority held that walking wasn’t essential to golf, so accommodating Martin didn’t fundamentally alter the game.

Whether Martin should’ve gotten the cart is a question outside the scope of this post. Commentary on it would require considering What Golf Is, What Role Golf Plays in Society, What Role Golf Should Play in Society, and a host of other deep, philosophical questions. This post will be long enough: hard pass.

What I want to argue is narrower and weirder. The 7-2 ruling rested on something I think is wrong: the idea that golf has an essence, and that judges can determine what is and isn’t part of it.

Here’s how the majority framed the question:

“a modification of the tournaments might constitute a fundamental alteration in these ways: (1) It might alter such an essential aspect of golf, e.g., the diameter of the hole, that it would be unacceptable even if it affected all competitors equally…”

“An essential aspect of golf”. They genuinely deliberated whether changing the diameter of a hole would alter the essence of the game. Prior to 1891, different courses used different hole sizes. And to think those players – on holes with 6-inch diameters – thought they were playing golf!  

The Court debated this topic despite the Court itself not having achieved its own Platonic form: 50 justices, one from each state, with each justice’s height varying in one-inch increments from 7’6″ down to 3’4″. You hear how insane that sounds? It’s not just the height thing. It’s the very notion of a Platonic Court. Let’s drop the heights: is the Platonic form of the court one Justice per state? If so, the Platonic form of the Court would sometimes have an odd number and sometimes even. If not, how do you ensure fair state representation on such an important body?

There is no Platonic Court. There is no Platonic golf. 

Chess is a wildly different game whether it’s played untimed, with a long timer (“classical”), a short timer (“blitz”), a timer with an added increment per move (a “Fischer clock”), or by a computer. Which of these is the Platonic Ideal of chess? Four hundred years ago, the technology didn’t even exist for timed chess. If the Supreme Court had existed, should they have solidified any traits of it as integral to the game?

Games evolve. They evolve through edge experimentation. Edge experimentation requires edges. 

The location of basketball’s 3-point line varies between the NBA and NCAA. Professional baseball has two leagues with two different rules: Is the designated hitter part of the Platonic ideal of baseball?  

Is golf about getting a ball in a hole? Is it about selling polo shirts? Is it about ad revenue on TV? In all cases, you cannot distill a game down to its Platonic ideal. Just as chess has evolved technologically, so has golf. So has the Supreme Court itself (and modes of interacting with it). 

Evolutions in games are often derided, then adopted, then universalized.

Personally, I preferred Pickleball before the USA Pickleball Association banned wearing clothes the same color as the ball starting in the 2023 season. I was a player when that change happened. I understand why they did it. I preferred the previous game. And even that preference isn’t a comment on Pickleball itself — it’s a comment on Pickleball-as-the-USAPA-defines-it. Personally, I define Pickleball as a game where it’s legal to dress as a pickle (even though the ball is generally a yellow color two notches away from brine). 

Scalia’s dissent saw all this clearly. The line that wins all the points:

“It is as irrelevant to the PGA TOUR’s compliance with the statute whether walking is essential to the game of golf as it is to the shoe store’s compliance whether ‘pairness’ is essential to the nature of shoes.”

I recently bought two shoes of different sizes. Please don’t assume same-sizeness is essential to the nature of shoes!

Then Scalia’s sharpest paragraph, dripping in glorious sarcasm: 

“It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government’s power ‘to regulate Commerce …,’ to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn [from the majority decision], is yes.”

And then, the philosophical conclusion:

“It is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is ‘essential.’ Eighteen-hole golf courses, 10-foot-high basketball hoops, 90-foot baselines, 100-yard football fields — all are arbitrary and none is essential.”

Just because rules are arbitrary – just because they are non-essential – does not mean they are unimportant. In fact, it is their arbitrariness which contributes to these games being low-stakes and light and playful, which are generally key to them being fun. Why is the basket 10 feet high? Because at that measurement, the game is fun. Move the basket to 8 feet and slam dunks become trivial. The arbitrary numbers are what make the games fun. And over time, as people excel at these arbitrary numbers, we change the numbers but keep the name. 

Here’s the meta-point: the Supreme Court is also playing a game. Their game has rules. One of those rules is that process matters. Another is that the Court should answer questions it can answer, and decline to answer questions it can’t.

The question What Is Golf is not a question SCOTUS can answer. Even the PGA can only define What Is Golf As Regulated By The PGA. Players can influence What Is Golf by playing the game. Tradition can inform What Is Golf Today. None of those is the Supreme Court of the United States. And none are really clear answers of What Is Golf. Personally, I prefer golf with windmills and tiny gnome figurines. I prefer golf where each player gets two tee-tosses per 18 holes. I prefer golf where one deducts a half-stroke for bonking an opponent’s ball with one’s own ball. (This is a real game with real rules that I have really played. It is entitled Julian Wise Presents: a Julian Wise Production: Wise Minigolf, brought to you by Julian Wise.)

By answering What Is Golf?, the Court broke its own rules. They played their game badly. They claimed jurisdiction over a domain they couldn’t competently rule on, using a standard (“essence of golf“) they invented for the occasion.

One more thing the Court got wrong, while we’re here.

Games are unavoidably unfair in their outcomes. They have to be — that’s what makes them games. Scalia, sharper than I could put it: “The very nature of competitive sport is the measurement, by uniform rules, of unevenly distributed excellence. This unequal distribution is precisely what determines the winners and losers.”

The ADA, on Scalia’s reading, guarantees Casey Martin equal access to the competition, not an equal chance to win it. The latter is impossible by the nature of competition. Some people are taller. Some people see colors better. Some people have circulatory conditions. The unevenness is the game.

Due to visual processing changes, I see colors with less contrast than I did three years ago. I’m therefore a worse player at speed-jigsaw-puzzling, for reasons that have nothing to do with skill or effort. The unevenness isn’t a bug. It’s the thing being measured.

My insight here is not legal nor moral. It’s that games lack a single, definable essence. Every game is the version currently being played, by the people currently playing it, under the rules they’ve currently agreed to. Golf, chess, the Supreme Court, marriage, work, the publication you’re reading. You can never step in the same game twice. There is no Platonic version sitting elsewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Games evolve. The evolution becomes the new game. We use the same name because it’s easy.

Further fun facts:

  • The “Rules of Golf” are (or at least were as of 2001) jointly written by the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Scotland. The latter, to my disappointment, is not formally abbreviated RAGS.
  • Reading this case has increased my desire to be a religious organization. In the US, religious organizations have their own rules. From the case: “The provisions of this subchapter shall not apply to private clubs or establishments exempted from coverage under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … or to religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship.”
  • The district court judge “found” that the purpose of the walking rule was to inject fatigue into the skill of shotmaking, but that the fatigue from walking was insignificant. This isn’t a finding. It’s an opinion. You can tell because I found that the purpose of the walking rule is to increase the number of rules that start with W.

Playing with “Play” 

JulianLeave a comment

You win the game by playing appropriately. You play appropriately by recognizing and mastering different kinds of “play”. 

We interact with games through play. If you are a participant in a game, we say you “play”. This is true regardless of the intensity of investment. What about a mandatory game (all students of Ms. Jones’ 3rd grade class will now play tag) during which you participate minimally — sit in the corner of the yard, picking grass? Are you still playing? Does it matter whether anyone ever tags you, or is the mere fact that you could be tagged enough to call you a player? Do you even need to react within the constraints of the rules (make an effort to tag another player once you’ve been tagged)?

We generally relate to games through play. When we are unsure of the verb, if the noun is a game, we use the verb play. Fencers fight, but they also play (“playfight”). Politicians manipulate, but they also play (“play politics”).

One can interact with a game without playing it. One can voyeur, heckle, or kibitz. All of these participate, more or less. A well-timed heckle may even throw off the pitcher, changing the outcome of the game. Still, none are “playing”.

Play has two meanings. One is the childlike lightness of being amid interaction. The other is interaction with a game. Some games are serious: politics, finance, war. Yet still we call participation in them play.

Here’s why this matters: 

  • We diminish what we call play, which is why we mis-strategize in serious games we’ve labeled as play.
  • The two meanings of play allow people to dismiss game-thinking as childish, when in fact game-thinking is the most rigorous frame for serious activity.
  • People who seemingly aren’t playing — voyeurs, hecklers, kibitzers — affect the game without taking responsibility for it. 

We hear political games and our guard goes down because games are for children. We hear “playing the market” and we forget the player who loses actual ability to purchase food. We hear war games and sleep better at night because games are contained things, voluntary, with rules everyone agreed to.

We’re making serious games sound trivial. You know: wordplay. 

The fix isn’t to stop calling it play. The fix is to remember which meaning is in use. When you’re “playing the political game,” you’re interacting within a structured competition with real stakes. You’re not doing what kindergarteners do. Except for the name-calling. 

Forced Play

JulianLeave a comment

You can lead a human to a game, and you can make them play. 

In his seminal work Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse posits that mandated play is not play: 

  • “There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.” (End of his section 2) 
  • In other words: Play is only play when it is voluntary. 

I think this position is wrong. 

Carse is using “game” to mean something more specific than a structural definition. He mandates a specific quality (voluntary play). I think he’s wrong to exclude from the category of “game” things that share the structure but lack the voluntariness. In short: Carse’s definition is too narrow because games are structural, not single-trait-necessitating. 

Okay, so what about some concepts that are unquestionably games? 

  • Commerce is a game. It contains points, players, and rules regulating play, semi-arbitrarily defined
    • It is also *real* in that you cannot avoid playing it regardless of your culture. (I suppose the archetypical “mountain man” could avoid playing it by homesteading all his resources, alone. We could say he has shifted to playing commerce with nature, but I think that’s a step too far.)

Either Carse is correct and this is not a game, or there is a slice of “game” uncovered by his articulation. 

Carse has a light, airy definition of game. Like many writers, he intuits that a game feels like child’s play. Carse would claim wargames are games while war is a not-game. 

I don’t buy this. 

Imagine someone playing chess against an opponent. These two are unquestionably playing a game. Now, imagine that the pieces represent actual movers on the field of battle: each time player one moves his rook, an actual cannon shifts its position on a real-life battlefield. (Perhaps the pieces contain some sort of location-sensing technology that walkie-talkies directly to the pieces.) Are these two no longer playing a game? If the stakes of the game involve only one of them living (as, when one is surrounded, he surrenders and yields his kingdom), is that activity no less of a game? 

War is a game. To the people playing it, its practice is essentially indistinguishable from chess. Yet war is also, unquestionably, profoundly real and with the highest stakes imaginable. 

Why does this distinction matter? 

Well, sometimes people disparage games. A teacher will tell a student to “stop playing games in the classroom”. A CEO will say to their underlings, “We’re not here to play games”. A general could yell to his troops, “War is not a game!”

What they mean is take this seriously. And seriousness can be important. But it is not at odds with playing games. The teacher who demands focus is using that comment as a move in the authority-and-attention game they spend most of their day playing. The CEO is fanning the flames of the motivation game. The general is moving a piece in the morale-and-culture game. And then he returns to his nice, safe bunker where he pretends that those peons are chess pieces. 

Abstracting a game into its constituent pieces – players, goals, win conditions, rules – does not diminish the significance of the game itself any more than defining the goal of a war diminishes the significance of the war. Quite the opposite: by abstracting, we can often remove some of the demotivating emotion that prevents us (the players) from ideal movement. 

While you may naturally freeze when faced with a knife-wielding attacker, I would instead recommend avoiding that knife. Have you considered moving somewhere they cannot attack you? Perhaps one step to the side, because pawns can only attack diagonally. 

The Frame Is the Game

JulianLeave a comment

You win the game by playing to win. You play to win by reframing the game.

I used to play competitive pickleball. I once won the silver medal at the Hoboken Open. While playing, I hated my opponents. Hated them. They were some of the most deplorable people I had ever met. Then, afterwards, we shook hands and they returned to the dentist and lawyer they had always been. 

Today, Partner and I are in Florida. We don’t want to be here; we’re here for the sort of getting-your-teeth-cleaned-style obligation that you do because it’s important but not desirable nor fun. But while we’re here we might as well make the most of it. So we lie to ourselves. We call it a vacation. We walk along the beach. We eat oysters and shrimp. 

The actions are identica. The flights, the hotel, the ubers, the appointment: none of it changes. What changes is whether we’re playing to win or playing not to lose. 

Big difference. 

Partner does a small version of this every day: I pack water because I know it’ll be nice when I drink it, as opposed to packing water because I’m afraid I won’t have it when I need it. Same bottle, same backpack, different relationship to carrying it. The first is light. The second is a lump of fear dragging you down every step. 

The NYC subway ads have the same problem. Subway surfing kills. Theoretically, nothing is worse than death, so this should be the most motivating message ever written. It isn’t. Teenagers ignore it, so they ride outside the train cars and die. Apparently coolness and thrill are more exciting to move toward than death is to move away from – even though the thing to move away from is LITERAL DEATH. 

This isn’t unique to messaging. It comes up everywhere. Are you eating healthy because you love yourself or because you hate yourself? Are you running a marathon to feel proud crossing the finish line or because you’re scared of being out of shape? 

Reframing is self-deception. Every sinking ship could be a swimming opportunity; every torture chamber could be an abusement park. There are people in genuinely bad situations who are surviving them by calling them vacations, and they’re going to wake up at some point and notice the ship is underwater. I’m not naive about this. (It’s the plot of one of my favorite movies.) It has its own dangers: overwork, misdirected effort, self-hoodwinking. 

But the alternative is paralysis. People who are motivated only by avoiding bad outcomes mostly end up doing less. They don’t send the email because it might be imperfect. They don’t take their pills because they don’t like being reminded they’re sick. They don’t go to Florida because going to Florida means admitting why we’re going to Florida. So they stay home, and they stay safe, and they stay smaller than they have to be.

Some days, you can’t choose what happens.

Some days, the frame is the only thing you can choose. 

Wouldn’t you rather choose a nice, kind, attractive, fun frame?
Every event; every observation; every activity is a fantasy.
Wouldn’t you rather choose yours?

Top-Secret Games: Trader Joe’s

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is to win the games. The hard part is noticing they exist.

I was in the Trader Joe’s in Santa Cruz, California, standing between two checkout lines. Both stations had a cashier. Neither line had people waiting. I was deliberately ambiguous about which line I was in.

A shopper arrived behind me. She asked which line I’d chosen. I answered slowly: whichever one finishes first.

She found this unacceptable. She appealed to the Trader Joe’s gods — that is, the cashier. The cashier ruled against me. You have to pick a line. I hemmed and hawed to buy myself time and picked. 

About two years later, I was shopping with a friend at that same Trader Joe’s. My friend performed the exact same hedge. A person asked which line we were in. My friend answered the same as I had. Once again The Gods smote us. So I stood in one line and she in the other. Whichever line finished first: our group re-combined there. 

It’s like the old saying: “Everyone is playing a game that you know nothing about.” 

Here are my Trader Joe’s games: 

The dual-line straddle. If you stand at the right angle between two lines, you can commit to whichever one moves faster. This is optimal play — it’s an option you should always exercise when the structure permits it. It’s also widely considered rude, for reasons that truly make no sense to me. I’m there first; I deserve to be served first. This is a queueing theory problem: one line is more fair, BUT people also feel more annoyed that they’re in a longer line. (And here’s the thing: the person directly behind me isn’t actually the one harmed by my slowness. The person farther back is — the one whose checkout would have opened up if I’d committed earlier. We’re all glaring at the wrong people.)

The tag-team shop. Often, I stand in line while Partner grabs more items. The line moves; I advance; she rejoins. We’ve doubled our throughput. In the US, this is fine. In France, it’s a violation — my sister once spoke to me in a bakery line outside Paris and the woman behind us made it clear: this is a faux pas. Different country, different rules. (And yes, it’s perfectly reasonable to permit joining, or to restrict joining, or to permit joining but without an item, or to permit a direct substitution of equal numbers of people for equal numbers of people / equal items for equal items. If you can think of it, I can justify it.) 

The end-of-line dash. Partner’s specialty. As we approach the register, Partner likes to make a mad dash for one final item. Discussing this game, she was the most beamingly radiant I’ve seen her in a while. It has all the traits of a good game: clearly-defined, time-pressured, skill-based, some luck to keep you on your toes, low-stakes if you lose. Sometimes she meets me after the checkout emptyhanded. Sometimes she brings the stracciatella we don’t actually need but ends up being delicious with a little honey and salt. That’s not the point. The point was the game.

Here’s the secret: Trader Joe’s is also playing a game.

Their queueing system isn’t optimized for throughput. There isn’t always a central queue, no take-a-number system, no signal from the register that they’re almost ready for the next customer (so the next customer can start walking). When I asked where the bathroom was, the employee walked me halfway across the store rather than pointing. They’ve decided their game is warm experience, not minutes per customer.

Which means the friction I keep running into at Trader Joe’s isn’t accidental. It’s the residue of a different optimization. They’re playing for one thing; I’m playing for another; the shopper behind me is playing for a third (presumably their personal, egotistical perception of fairness powered by a deontological backing of the inefficient rules of Trader Joe’s (because it sure as hell ain’t actual fairness; actual fairness means the first arrival gets to checkout first)). All three of us are right, given our games. We’re just not playing the same one.

Most disagreements about etiquette aren’t moral disagreements. They’re disagreements about which game everyone thinks they’re playing. 

In serious situations, I’ve heard people say, “I’m not here to play games.” 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that they always say that angrily. 

Return of the Sandwich Shop

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is to make money. You make money by selling sandwiches for more than they cost. 

(Part 2 of the sandwich series. Part 1 is here.)

The previous customer had ordered and left without entering his phone number for loyalty rewards. So I entered mine.

Today’s cashier had panache. Flair. Real excitement about which side was heads and which was tails. When I asked if they were still doing the 50%-off coin flip, he said “of course!” like his job was attitude, not mere cash-register-button-pushing.

The cashier showed us the coin: this side is heads, this side is tails. Partner called it: “sandwich logo.” 

It landed sandwich side down.

She lost.

The cashier rang up 50% off anyway.

I hadn’t considered this until today: when I win the flip, I get 50% off 100% of the time. When I lose, I get… 50% off some percent of the time? The expected value just got better.

Since a sandwich is bread, meat, and veggies, the shop probably still exceeds its cost of goods even at half off. So they’re not exactly losing on the flip. But they could have netted more revenue by simply charging me the appropriate amount. 

In any case, the promotion is working: they pay a small acquisition cost to attract me back. Which they have. I’m here, eating my second sandwich in three days, and they also have my phone number. 

They played me. I played them. And the dinky coin flip is what made it work.

Partner says my odds will increase even further if I’m cuter. I think she says this so I keep bringing her places.

Well played.

What If It Were Easy?

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is to do. You do by removing friction. 

A few years ago, a shaman watched me explain something I was struggling with. Then he asked, “What if it were easy?”

The friend with me said, before I could answer: “Julian associates difficulty with value.” 

He wasn’t wrong. I think most people do. We assume that if something is hard, it must matter; if it’s easy, it can’t be the real thing. Cultures everywhere reinforce this: no pain, no gain; if it burns, it’s working. 

But sometimes a thing is hard because it’s valuable, and sometimes it’s hard because of friction. Both feel difficult. They’re worlds apart. 

I notice the difference most clearly with games.

When I’m playing a game I love, three things happen: 

  1. I pay attention without effort. 
  2. I want to improve. 
  3. When it ends, I want more. 

This feeling – total absorption, no friction between me and the activity – is rare and precious. Most activities require me to push myself to do them. Games don’t. They grab me by my noggin and suddenly I’m along for the ride. 

A movie buff once told me he loves movies for the immersion. I experience immersion with movies sometimes. With books and theater, sometimes. With games, almost always. That’s information about me, not about games. Games are my art form.

This week I made a list of things in my day I find unenjoyable. Except for the entries about physical pain, every entry was a type of friction: either current or future. Some friction is necessary as a means to an end (waiting on hold with a doctor’s office). But some of it is inherited assumptions about how a life is supposed to feel.

If the shaman asked me again today, I’d answer: I think more of it is supposed to be easy. Not all of it. But more than I’ve been letting it be.

I’m game. 

The $10.125 Sandwich

JulianLeave a comment

The goal of the game is selling sandwiches. You sell sandwiches by making it fun. You make it fun by taking fun seriously. 

I bought a sandwich today. The sandwich shop offers a cute promotion: from 3 to 6 pm, if you call a coin flip correctly, you pay half price. 

It’s fun, it’s attractive, and they net 75% of the normal retail price. 

But the experience is broken. 

First, you don’t pay until after the flip. So I, who sees loopholes without trying, am instantly aware that I could order the sandwich, flip the coin, and walk if it lands the wrong way. How would they even develop a process to stop me? I pay full price and then the flip determines my refund?

Second, the coin. It’s some B.S. commemorative coin — one side is the restaurant name, the other the logo — where neither side is obviously heads or tails. So the cashier has to tell me, and presumably every patron between 3 and 6pm, “this side is heads.”

Third, the flip. Less a flip than a half-spin. He calls it whichever way it lands in his hand. Not even the catches-it-and-slaps-it-onto-the-back-of-his-other-hand move that’s standard on any schoolyard.

What happened to the good ol’ quarter?
Why are we making this more complicated than it needs to be?
Why can’t the customer flip the coin onto the counter, where it would be easily visible?
Why not call the sides “name” and “logo” instead of heads and tails? 

The sandwich was good. It satisfied my basic need – fuel after the gym so I’m not grumpy. It wasn’t $13.50 good. It’s definitely $6.75 good. It’s probably also $10.125 good (the expected cost). 

Here’s what bugs me. The promotion could have been theater. A customer walks in, gets drawn into a small moment of drama, calls it in the air, wins or loses, laughs either way, tells their friends. Instead it’s a transaction with a dice roll bolted on. The cashier is phoning it in. The coin is wrong. The flip is wrong. The ritual isn’t a ritual.

The fun version costs them nothing. Same margin, same coin-flip odds, same sandwich. Just a real coin, a real flip, and a cashier who understands he’s running a tiny game show for thirty seconds a day. 

And sure, if there are people in line behind me, by all means do the quick version. But the main reason they’re doing this promotion at all is because they don’t have many patrons between 3 and 6pm. 

If they fixed it, I’d come back. If they fixed it, I’d bring people. The half-time half-price is nice; the experience could also have value. 

Also, I called heads and it landed tails.