Tag: Games

Rugby 7s: Two Halves, No Whole

JulianLeave a comment

To win, attract fans. To attract fans, form a cohesive game. 

Rugby 7s needs to choose a side.

After three days at the HSBC SVNS World Championship in Bordeaux (and 8 years following the sport as a casual fan), I think it’s standing at a crossroads. It can lean into being the 14-minute party it already is, or it can grow into a full, standalone sport. Right now it’s trying to be both, and that’s untenable. 

(For anyone who’s never watched: sevens is rugby boiled down to 7 players a side and two 7-minute halves. A full day runs more than a dozen games, back to back. It’s the tasting flight of athletic events.)

I argued last week that a sport’s heir wins by cutting the boring parts. Sevens already did the cutting (15 players down to 7, 80 minutes down to 14). It just never decided what it was cutting toward. 

If You Lean Into the Shortness

The short version is already good. It just wastes its own format. Two fixes:

1. Use the downtime. The games are too short for fans to bond with the teams, so spend the breaks building investment. Share stats on the players. Run through how important this game is. Each team is only on the field for under 20 minutes. That tightness is good. Use this time to reinvigorate the fans about the metagame. 

2. Vary the downtime. How many times can a crowd sing “Sweet Caroline” and watch the “sleepy cam” (the one that finds someone napping in the stands)? Once a day, the organizers seem to believe. These approaches are repetitive. Put a team on interstitial fun: t-shirt cannons, quick water-balloon fights, fan footraces for prizes, a costume contest for cash. You already have a fanbase that turns up in costume. Lean in.

If You Make It A Full-Length Sport

A 14-minute sport is not full-length. The organizers pack three days of tournaments together because each game is only 14 minutes long. What if they made it 2 hours instead? The ledger: 

What it has going for it

  • Fast play. Almost no setup or positioning. All action.
  • It’s a highlight reel. Lots of intensity, no dull moments, and a huge amount of drama. Most of basketball happens in the last 2 minutes. Rugby 7s has a new exciting event happening at least every minute. 

What it’s up against

  1. No obvious fanbase. Rugby fans already have two codes to follow: union (15 a side) and league (13 a side). Sevens is a third, and a stripped-down union at that. Why would a rugby fan adopt a third version? And a newcomer has no particular reason to start with the niche one. (Except that sevens is the Olympic version. And that’s a big leg up.) 
  2. Injuries. In 3 days I watched 9+ players get carried or helped off, 2 of them on stretchers. The playing base is growing fast (it looks like a blast to play, if you’re not attached to your future cognition). For a sport chasing families and casual fans, that body count is a bad look on camera. 
  3. A touring format that fights fandom. There’s no home-and-away. A small set of core teams (8 this season) tours a circuit (Dubai, Cape Town, Singapore, Perth, Vancouver, LA), then 12 teams contest a 3-city World Championship (Hong Kong, Valladolid, Bordeaux). That’s a time-trial structure (Formula 1, tennis, the surfing tour), not a league. Great for a traveling roadshow, lousy for “my team versus your team”. 
  4. Yearly churn. Each season the bottom of the top tier is relegated (down to “SVNS 2”) and new teams come up. So the division’s membership changes every year. Just as a new market learns its team, the team can drop out of the top flight. Hard to grow roots that way.

Changes I’d make

Regardless of which path Rugby 7s takes, these are improvements to the game: 

  1. A score shouldn’t end the game. Right now, if you’re up by two scores when the clock hits zero, you’ve effectively won but everyone keeps playing until one of a number of game events happens (the ball goes out of bounds, e.g.). It’s an anticlimax. Either call it the moment it’s decided, or flip it and give the trailing team a lifeline: they keep playing as long as they keep scoring. 
  2. Let the halves run longer. Fast doesn’t have to mean 7-minute halves. Hockey is just as fast and handles the gas-tank problem with constant substitutions. Roll players on and off and you can stretch the game without melting the athletes. (Note: You can’t just make it longer. They tried. World Rugby cut their finals from two ten-minute halves down to two seven-minute halves in 2017 precisely to avoid injuries. You have to add fresh legs and deepen the bench.) 
  3. Host it in party cities. Amsterdam, Budapest, Las Vegas. The core audience wants to drink for 3 days straight in costume while watching sport. Put the event where that’s already the local economy. (Bordeaux, in fairness, understood the brief.) 
  4. Make the drop goal matter. The scoring: a try (similar to a touchdown in American football) is 5, a conversion (like the kick after a touchdown) is 2 (so a converted try is 7); a penalty or drop goal (similar to a field goal that’s not after a touchdown) is 3. Which means a team down by two unconverted tries can claw back exactly to a tie (7 + 3) but cannot win it. Bump the drop goal to 4, maybe even 5. The drop goal turns from a museum piece into a live weapon, and “up by 10” stops feeling safe. 
  5. Publish the draws earlier. Tell fans when their team actually plays. As it stands, you find out the morning of the first match, which doesn’t help fans. Currently, a bunch of fans missed the first half of the first day. If your team is playing in the morning, would you make it to the first game (early) and then have a nap? Definite possibility.  
  6. Stop the clock during dead time. The clock keeps running during penalty kick-outs, after a score but before the restart, and between a scrum call and the scrum itself (a scrum is like a hockey face-off where three teammates are tied together). That warps the game and rewards stalling. It bites hardest on a yellow card, when a team who’s playing 6 players against 7 for 2 minutes can just bleed the clock. Stop the clock and the gamesmanship dies.
  7. Trim the pool stage. You play 3 pool games to cut 12 teams to 8, and then the real tournament is also 3 games. Half the days are positioning, and the pools barely change anything. That’s too much foreplay for the payoff.
  8. Make the final feel like a final. Today the final is the same length as every other game. Give it longer halves, or make it a best-of-3 with the 3rd/4th-place match slotted in between for the breather (if you’re concerned about injuries). 
  9. Fix the scrum. Over the last 3 days, I cannot recall a time when the team rolling the ball lost possession. That makes scrums in rugby 7s basically just a restart with extra steps. This one needs a revamp, because as-is it’s just wasting time. 

If rugby 7s keeps sprinting the direction it is, it’s going to get tackled. Time to keep tinkering and pick a side. 

Today’s Games Played

The cheese standoff. A vendor slices me 200g of emmental and quotes 3 euros 50. I say card. She says 5-euro minimum on card. I say card is all I’ve got. She says no deal. I walk to the monger two stalls down who sells me 200g of emmental for 5 euros 40. Partner points out how, in the US, the vendor grumbles but eventually takes my money. I’m reminded of the time $20 was as good as 20€. 

The bottle-cap. A French security officer asks if I have bottles. He squeezes the bag. It crunches. He says, “Bottles.” He tells me to take off the cap and bin it. I take off the cap, walk towards the bin, pocket the cap, and walk past him into the stadium with the bottle. (Once inside, I reapply the bottle cap: this wasn’t mere sport, I wanted to use that bottle cap!) French security continues its purposelessness. 

“Oh, Right: It’s a French Baby!”

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To win, befriend the hooligans. To befriend the hooligans, follow the fun.

What is the purpose of sport?

  • Fitness?
  • Camaraderie?
  • War minus the shooting? (Orwell’s opinion.)

Today, I experienced my first real-life British rugby hooligans. A dozen of them, in St Andrews Rugby hats and shirts, had packed into the tram before Partner and me. We boarded their car, met by the keyless strains of “Wonderwall.”

Then another song. Then a chant about a man who wants to go to the pub (yay!) but the pub is closed (boo!) but there’s another pub (yay!) but they don’t serve beer in pints(boo!) they serve it in buckets! (yay!), but the bucket has a hole in it (boo!) but it’s in the top (yay!) and so on.

At the first stop, the doors opened and I called out, “Come on in, there’s plenty of space!” The rugby fans laughed. A few stops on, I was singing along.

Then a family boarded with a ~16-month-old baby in a stroller. There wasn’t quite enough space. The doors closed on the front stroller wheels. And reopened. And tried to close. And reopened, hungry jaws attempting to devour the stroller.

Terrified at the prospect of being eaten, the baby began crying. One of the hooligans began shushing the others. The rest joined in, more as a game than from any knowledge of the baby: a dozen drunk men playing the Quiet Game. They fell silent enough to hear the crying. Someone started up, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star…”

The only time comparable to a dozen rugby hooligans singing a baby to sleep was 20 years ago next month, when a beer line of Colorado cowboys sang my mother happy birthday. Both were very kind and affectionate, and both very drunk.

When “Twinkle, Twinkle” ended, one of the hooligans asked how the baby was doing. Not great, it appeared. So someone said, “Oh, right: It’s a French baby!”

They began “Frère Jacques” instead. The baby’s ~3-year-old cousin loved this.

Whatever the purpose of sport, neither Orwell nor I would have guessed: lulling babies to sleep on French trams.

Why I love the kick-and-chase (and you should do)

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To win the rugby match, score the most points. To score points, move the ball forward. 

Rugby 7s is my favorite spectator sport. My favorite move: the kick-and-chase. The move is what it sounds like: kick the ball into the space behind the defense, then run it down before they can. (Context for the unfamiliar: rugby is a sport similar to American football. In rugby, you cannot throw the ball forward.) 

Here’s why it works.

1. Speed wins the chase. Some teams and players have wheels (the Kenyan men, Japan’s number 3, Mariana Talatoka for Fiji’s women). When you’re that fast, the kick is more a pass to yourself (it’s harder to run with the ball than after it), and you win the foot race more often than not.

2. Nobody’s home in the back. With only 7 per side, teams can’t afford a defensive sweeper. Drop one player from the line and you’re defending six across, and 6-on-7 gives a free space to the offense out wide. 

3. The defense is facing the wrong way. The instant the ball leaves your foot, you’re already sprinting. They have to stop, turn, and go. How many of them will make it there faster than your teammates? 

4. Even a miss pays off. Lose possession and you’ve still gained sizable yardage — and their ball-recoverer will need support to mount a reasonable offense. No second man means no ruck (pass through the legs, during which only your team can grab the ball) and no ruck means they hand the ball right back. The kick-and-chase-to-tackle-and-recover pipeline is a strong one. 

5. My favorite: the bluff. Just having a kick-and-chase in your bag forces the defense to pick a poison. Guard you tight and your kick gains more value. Sit back to cover it and the holes open up for your runs. The threat alone bends the whole defense. If a team restructured their strategy around it (instead of simply playing rugby 7s like it’s a faster rugby 15s), the metagame could easily undergo a paradigm shift. 

So if anyone’s ever complimented your speed (e.g. if Partner referred to you as “having wheels” and I made oinking noises in reference to you being a greased pig), develop your kick. Then go chase it.

— HSBC Sevens World Finals Day 1, Bordeaux, France

Murphy’s Law

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When you set up the pieces properly, you’re okay when they fall. 

Murphy’s law says that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Murphy doesn’t know how robust my systems are.

I woke up at 4:30am to catch the 5:01 train to Paris for my 6:45am operation[1]. If I’d missed it? I had another train half an hour later that would get me in 7 minutes after my desired check-in time. Robust enough and didn’t need it.

They were to constrict my pupil, wiggle my embedded lens, and release the edge of my iris that was caught under the lip of the plastic. The nurse gave me dilation drops instead of constriction. Clearly their system was not robust enough. Fortunately, medicine is, and my surgeon just flooded my eye with constricting agent. The constrictor won.

Next, immediately back to Étampes to do a 10am walkthrough with the French leasing agent. I needed to be out the door 10 minutes after my surgery to make the train to be 7 minutes late for meeting the agent. It took me 15. I was 2 minutes late for the train, but the train was 3 minutes late. Insufficiently robust? An uber would have backstopped the train. And if all else failed, Partner was at the apartment and capable of doing the walkthrough.

Then back to Paris for a follow-up appointment at 2. We missed the train by 5 minutes. It didn’t matter, we could have missed three more trains and been fine. The next train was late. Still fine.

At the appointment, the doctor explained the suture he has placed in my eye. “When does it need to come out?” “At some point.” “What do you mean ‘at some point’? Two weeks? Two months? Two years?” “Not before two months, and two years is probably fine.” Surprisingly robust.

I set up today so nothing could fail. I selected this surgery because it’s hard to go terribly wrong. 

Capping your downside is a good strategy. But the safe choices aren’t always the ones that everyone would think they are. E.g.: 

  • Surgery in a foreign country where you speak the language at a foreign-language-college-student level 
  • Scalpeling your eye 
  • Inserting plastic into the eye 
  • Suturing that same eye
  • Pursuing follow-up corrective surgery for a minor adjustment on the same day as you’re moving out of your apartment and leaving the city for good. 

We packed an umbrella today. We left it in the storage locker at the train station. It rained. We enjoyed watching the rain fall in sheets while under the plentiful overhang of the train station. Twice.

I generally sleep 8 hours per day so I have the strength to power through days like today. 

Julian: 1

Murphy: 0

[1] All times are approximate.

French Security: Worse Than Nothing

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Whatever they’re trying to do, they’re failing.

French security sucks. It’s worse than nothing. At least nothing wouldn’t delay tourists.

I approach the metal detector. I hand the officer my backpack. I walk through the detector. He hands me my backpack. Sounds like a normal security process. Except he never looked inside my bag.

Same thing yesterday at the Paris catacombs: at the end, a man seated at a desk with a sign saying open your bags so we can ensure you’re not stealing bones. But he doesn’t open your bags. He doesn’t even wave you on. He just plays on his phone.

Three months ago at a Parisian rugby match: the security officers pat down every entrant. Partner stayed in my line. The officer gestured her to a line with a female agent. Partner walked past him. He let her go.

At Orly Airport, you must navigate through all of the stanchions in sequence, even if the line is 0 people. An extra 60 meters of walking per person. One white-haired woman ducked under the rope. The officers yelled at her. She said, “I’m old, it’s hard to walk!” They demanded she go back.

The Louvre was heisted last October. Has nothing changed? Do none of the workers know the point of their jobs? Do none of them believe in their work? Are they too snoozy from the fondue lunch? (Author’s note: fondue is Swiss. But it does make me snoozy.)

What game is this?

The goal of the game is to win. I say that a lot. Sometimes too much. The goal of the game is to win; you win by doing X. But it’s pretty fundamental: if you’re not trying to win, what are you doing?

Sometimes the goal is different. Sometimes it’s to not-lose. Sometimes it’s to survive. Sometimes it’s to tie. But this security bullshit? Whatever it is, it’s not achieving it.

Even some contrived goal, like “create a specific form of job stability for a certain number of people in France without disrupting the general French living and working systems”, couldn’t you do that better? And that’s already super contrived.

The best rebuttal: fake security still deters. Which is fair. True. Like the faux eyes on the wings of a moth, the mere existence of security may prevent me from attempting to sneak a gun into the [insert grand French monument].

But fake security works when it appears real. If the moth has a sign saying “These are just mock eyes; I’m actually a helpless moth, teehee”, that bug is getting nommed. And today, at the Palais de Justice, a guard waves visitors through a body scanner. The alarm went off on the visitor behind me. The guard ignored it, clicked “Ok,” and waved the woman through. You can’t advertise the fakeness! Bluffing is one thing! This is bluffing while turning your cards face up!

Even I get it!

I don’t like security. I’m fully anti-TSA. Considering the rate of deaths by terrorist attack vs the rate of deaths by automobile crashes, I’m even pro-shrug-it-off re 9/11.

But even I understand the point of security. I get why we have it. I just think it’s dumb.

This version of security is the worst version! Not only does it have no impact; it also wastes people’s time! What the hell are you doing, France?!

Do you want to get invaded by the Germans for the fourth time in 160 years? Because you’re sure acting like it!

Contra Suits & suits

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When in doubt, argue with dead guys.

Fun fact: to test whether that item you found is a bone or a rock, touch it to your tongue. Bones are porous, so will stick slightly. 

Other fun fact: Today Partner and I toured the Paris catacombs. 

We did not touch any bones to our tongues. 

I bought a suit today. I hate suits. They stifle my expression, and I wish we could all just be naked all the time. (With some clothing, for warmth.)

Then I found the suit. Right color, right size. My previous option was not black and not accurately sized; this one is definitely black and definitely accurately sized. It only took Partner and me two thrift stores. I haggled the owner down from 59 euros to 55. The shirt was another 15.

And the tie. The tie reminds me of how I first met the groom. (At the arts school tour, he asked, “What are you working on?” I said, “I wrote a cubist book.” This is a spiritually cubist tie.)

I hated 90% of the purchasing process. I’m happy with the result.

After the white shirt was 15€ instead of the 10 the sign proclaimed (trust me, Partner went back and checked, but the shopkeeper maintained that it was a 15€ shirt that was misplaced due to the presence of a security tag), I was done with the whole process but still needed a tie.

I grumbled through another shop. All of their ties were bad.

Partner changed the game.

She set a timer every time we walked into a store. We had ten minutes, max. Main goal: get a tie we like. Sub-goal: see how fast we can get in, find the ties, and get out.

First store: 1 minute 36 seconds. Second: 1 minute 24 seconds. Third: something like 6 minutes, but we got the tie.

Games make everything better.

Bernard Suits, another dead guy (and author of The Grasshopper, the canonical attempt to define “game”), says a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. So what was the obstacle? 

The obvious answer is the timer. But that’s wrong. Ten minutes is not an obstacle. In any of these stores, you can see every single tie in under three minutes; add a minute to find them and a minute to leave, and the clock still never touches you. 

The timer didn’t set a limit for us to strain against. It started a race. The real game was to get the tie and get out as fast as possible. This type of game is called a “speedrun”. The opposite of an unnecessary obstacle, a speedrun chases the goal by the most efficient path it can find. Suits (the Bernard one, not the one we purchased) says a game makes you take the long way. Our game did the opposite. 

Given our circumstances (in the Les Halles district of Paris, need appropriate tie for upcoming wedding), sprinting through thrift shops is the most efficient way to achieve the goal. One could argue that various aspects of this macro activity are unnecessary (wearing a tie) or obstacles (the dress code), but taking those for granted, the manner in which Partner and I attempted this (do it as fast as possible) is certainly a game. And it’s a game without any new unnecessary obstacles. 

The timer does not create unnecessary obstacles; it creates motivation. A ludus (“game-playing”) posture, if you will. The obstacles were already there: finding a tie, judging a tie, the distance to cross. The speed didn’t add a new one. It just made us want to win.

(Suits’ potential comeback: “Then it wasn’t a game, just an errand with a stopwatch.” My response: When we add a timer or a score or a counter or a badge, we call that “gamification”. What does “gamification” refer to if not “to make increasingly game-like”? Clearly there is something about the tracking that increases an activity’s game-ness, not only the obstacles.) 

I spent the afternoon in the Paris catacombs. Now I argue with a dead guy. But at least I look dapper doing it. 

The Walk Becomes a Sprint

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To inherit a game, serve the crowd its keepers forgot. To serve the crowd, cut the boring parts.

Four times, strangers have asked whether my hat is a Savannah Bananas reference. It isn’t. Now that I know what they are, I wish it were.

A month ago, Partner told me I’d like the Savannah Bananas. The recommendation sat on my to-do list (read: “email inbox”) until this morning, when I finally read up. I am hooked. At least on the concept. 

Two decades ago, my father told me he didn’t get the appeal of e-sports. I asked whether he got the appeal of regular sports. He did. So I asked: when you watch football on TV, how do you know those are real people? If they swapped every player for a digital avatar, how would you know? 

Professional sports is entertainment. The money comes from the people watching, not the people playing. Say that out loud, and a lot of baseball starts to look indefensible. (Partner thinks I should henceforth refer to old baseball as “indefensi-ball”. I like the joke, but fear readers would find it intolera-ball.) 

The Savannah Bananas play Banana Ball, which is baseball, except someone took the rulebook and asked, of every slow part, Who is this for? A walk is the most boring thing in the sport: four boring balls, a slow and boring trot to first, a predictable outcome, nothing to see. So Banana Ball has no walks. Ball four starts a sprint, where the batter runs as far around the bases as he can while every fielder but the pitcher handles the ball in turn. The dullest outcome in baseball became a footrace.

The rest rhymes. No mound visits. No stepping out of the box. A 2-hour clock, so the game can’t sprawl. Catch a foul ball in the stands and the batter is out, which turns the crowd into a tenth defender. One guy plays on stilts (Dakota Albritton). Another bats in a cape (Reese Alexiades). I’m surprised the players still go by their own names. 

The cape doesn’t help him play baseball better. It does help him play banana ball better.

Scoring changed too. Win an inning (i.e. score the most runs in it), and you get a point. One point per inning, like sets in tennis. My grandfather leaves every baseball game before the 9th “to beat the traffic.” He couldn’t pull that in banana ball, because in the final inning every run is its own point, leaving every banana ball game to a dramatic finish. He would stay.

One detail sold me. This scoring system means the home team has an obvious edge: batting last every inning, it only has to hit until its ahead by one run. (Baseball fans would notice this as a host of walk-off opportunities.) I noticed that and assumed it was a flaw. But they even invented a rule for it! It’s called the Equalizer Point. If the visiting team pulls off more trick plays than the home team by the 8th (a behind-the-back toss for an out, a backflip catch, popping the ball off your glove and into your bare hand for a catch), the visitors get a free point before the last inning. The home team’s structural advantage, paid back to the road team in degree of difficulty. Whoever built this spends their showers thinking about the same fairness questions a real league does. They just answer them in the currency of the show. Because this league is just as real as Major League Baseball. 

Even the charity is a pun: the team’s nonprofit, Bananas Foster, supports foster kids. It’s a real charity. And also a pun. It’s bits all the way down! 

You could file all of this under parody, and parody has a ceiling. It works only while you remember the original, so it can never outgrow the thing it mocks. But the Bananas aren’t mocking baseball. They kept the bones (a pitcher, a batter, a diamond, innings) and rebuilt the rest out of love. That is what an heir does.

Heirs don’t stay capped by the thing they came from. They inherit it. Rome spent the better part of 3 centuries feeding Christians to lions; then, in the year 380, the empire made Christianity its official religion, and the church went on to inherit Rome’s whole apparatus: its language, its hierarchy, its capital, even the old chief priest’s title, Pontifex Maximus, which the Pope still carries. The offshoot outlived the host.

Games run the same play on a faster clock. Cricket already did it. A Test match can last 5 days, and the purists love every hour, but a stripped-down, made-for-TV format called T20 showed up and became the sport’s commercial engine, the version with the crowds and the money. Later this week, I’m attending the Rugby 7s world championship. I’ve only been to one match of full rugby (15 per side) – never again! – but the 20-minute, seven-person format has made me a diehard fan. 

In 2023 Major League Baseball, the incumbent itself, gave itself a pitch clock. Games got 24 minutes shorter, attendance crossed 70 million for the first time since 2017, and ratings rose for the first time since 2012. Banana ball has had a game clock since 2020. (It started in 2018.) That is what the early innings of a succession look like.

The mechanism is always the same. A game gets, well, gamed to the point where it’s no fun anymore. It calcifies. It gets boring to watch, which is fatal, because the watching is what pays. Then someone arrives who treats fun as an engineering problem, and the crowd starts to drift his way, and the money follows the crowd. I’ve made this argument at the scale of a sandwich shop. The Bananas are making it at the scale of America’s Pastime.

You could call the Bananas a parasite. They feed on a host they need alive; half the jokes only work if you know the real game. (“What counts as a trick play?” requires a frame of reference.) Sure. But a parasite that devours its host and moves into the empty niche is just evolution running on schedule. We mammals also once lived in burrows, waiting out the dinosaurs. (As a PhD in biology, Partner does not support this analogy.) 

Give Banana Ball 30 years and it will have its own record book, its own purists, its own slow sacred stretches no one is allowed to touch, maybe even its own children’s rec and traveling teams, and some new weirdo will turn up to strip it for parts. Christianity inherited Rome, then spent centuries hardening into the thing Luther showed up to protest. Every heir becomes an incumbent. Every incumbent grows an heir.

None of this works unless there’s nothing sacred underneath, and there isn’t. No essence of baseball is being betrayed, because there is no essence of baseball, the same way (as I’ve argued before) there is no essence of golf. “Real baseball” is just the version that happened to harden before you were born. Strip it down, hand it back to the crowd, and the purists will call it desecration. It’s only the next version.

Catholics took 3 centuries to get from the lions to the leadership. Baseball is only up to the pitch clock. The new game is less competitive than the old one. It is also, at last, worth watching to the end. Even my grandfather would accept the traffic.

Will You Take Twenty Dollars?

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The goal of the game is to play. You play by paying the entrance fee. Everyone’s invited. 

Outside the original ruin bar in Budapest, the bouncer quoted me the price to skip the line: “Ten euros.” 

“Ten euros for two?” I offered. 

“Ten euros each,” he said. 

“Will you take twenty dollars for two?” 

“Of course,” he replied, in a voice so light and generous it could only belong to commerce. ($20 is about 15% less than 20€.)

He wasn’t being sloppy. He was filtering. Part of his job is revenue generation. The other part is selecting patrons who will spend more money inside. The 15% discount doesn’t matter; if we’re willing to play his game, he’s already won. 

My favorite cities have always been the commercial ones. Vegas when I was young, then recently New York and Amsterdam. They run on a meritocracy of cash, with a cosmopolitan, equalizing energy. Nobody cares who you are or where you came from: Your money is good here. 

Everyone in these cities is trying to screw you, at least a little, and often not subtly. New York: There’s a man in an official-looking vest selling tickets to the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. Vegas casinos install ugly carpets and no clocks so you keep your eyes on the slot machines and forget what time it is. The Dutch more or less invented economic colonialism. None of these are ethical, but there is a particular brand of honesty to them. There’s an honesty in a structure being explicitly hyper-optimized for a purpose. A traveler going to Las Vegas may affectionately refer to it as “Lost Wages”, and go anyway! 

Social games (status, position, politics) extract, too. They just don’t tell you the price. I’ll take the bouncer with a clear sense of haggle over a gatekeeper with an opaque shibboleth any day. He’s named his price. I haggled at it. He accepted. 

Commerce can be a brutal game. But it’s also fair, kind, and possible. I remember talking with a homeless New Yorker two blocks from Central Park in 2021. Israeli-born, formerly US military, he told me he loved homelessness in New York: the crowds, the parks, the safety, the free food everywhere. New York is a wonderful place to have nothing.  

So was Las Vegas: it was the first place I went when I moved into a van. You don’t need to gamble; you can people-watch, eat a meatball the size of your head for $10, or palm a $1 cocktail shrimp meant to lure you toward a table you’ll never sit at. Abundance runs downhill to those willing to travel for it. But you must be willing to travel. And you must accept that one day it will dry up. 

This new generation doesn’t gamble. Vegas, needing new revenue sources, raised its food prices. After my prior trip to Sin City disappointed, the last time I had the opportunity for a layover in Vegas, I went to Reno a day early instead. 

The bouncer’s “of course” was more than a discount. It felt like the loose money of my early twenties, the ZIRP years in the Bay Area, when a kid fresh out of college could get hired to write at $50 an hour because nobody was counting that closely yet. It felt like being let in.

Your money is good here. So is mine. The door is open if you’re willing to play.  

And perhaps the most beautiful part: Whenever some entity – a country or company or culture – makes rules excluding some people from playing, they’ll rapidly lose the commerce game that made them dominant in the first place. It’s self-correcting, a thing of beauty. 

Of course.

I’m Now a Pirate

JulianLeave a comment

To guard your blind side, see it coming. You can’t. That’s the trouble.

At the Saturday market, the fruit vendor asked what happened to my eye. Surgery yesterday, I said. Then: “I’m now a pirate.”

He laughed. He handed us a banana and a peach for free, then offered a pair of melons for 5 euros. I said no. He said 3 euros. I said no. He said the French version of “come on.” I thanked him and said no. (I have one working eye, not one working braincell.) 

He totaled it up. Partner counted out the change. (We play a game when we’re about to leave a country. It’s called spend all the fiddly little coins. Yesterday I paid my rent in cents.) He held out his hand. I dropped the coins three inches closer than where his palm actually was. He tutted. “It’s new,” I said, about the eye.

Depth perception. One of the main benefits of binocular vision.

The costs since have been small and physical and easy to laugh at. I have to put medicated drops in the bad eye 3 times a day, and I can’t see well enough out of it to aim, so the eye can’t guide the drops that fix the eye. Tonight Paris Saint-Germain won, and Étampes spilled into the street to celebrate, and I caught about half of it. Partner walks on my left now so I can see her. I poked myself in the eye briefly when blowing my nose. None of it bothers me for more than a few seconds. The eye will heal in a week or two. I agreed to this difficulty. 

At the bakery, Partner said, “He’s staring at you. You should say some pirate things.” Or that’s what she told me later. She talks fast, and I don’t always catch her, so in the moment I missed it and bought my bread. 

Outside, she said, “How come you didn’t make pirate noises for the little boy? He’d have loved that.”

“Little boy?”

She laughed. “He was on your right side.”

That’s the blind one.

The drops, the coins, the half a celebration, the side she walks on now: Unlike things on my right side, I saw those coming. The boy, I didn’t see at all. A kid was standing right there, wanting a gift I was eager to share, and he’d picked the single spot where I’ve got nothing. I only know because Partner saw it and told me. 

Guess I’ll need a parrot for that shoulder.