Tag: Games

Top-Secret Games: The Bathroom Line

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The goal of the game is to pee. You pee by checking the doors.

(An accidental series. Part 1: Trader Joe’s, Part 2: Airports.)

At the World Cup final watch party at the Harlem Tavern, a woman waits in front of five bathroom doors. I ask: “Did you check them all?”

She says no.

I walk down the line, twisting each knob. At the third door, the knob turns. The door opens. I gesture to her to enter. She does.

What is wrong with people?

Hold that question.

On the screen, Argentina was busy demonstrating the opposite mistake. A ref draws a box, and you fill the box you’re given. Players will play as rough as you let them — and they should; that’s the correct way to play a game. Argentina filled its box and kept pushing at the sides: four yellow cards by my count, one of them on the coach, two of them on Enzo Fernández, who was sent off. They played the end of a World Cup final a man down. They did it to themselves. (For more on refs and the dark arts, see Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping.)

A bathroom line has no ref. That’s what makes it the purer game. Field notes:

The early exit. Leave before the hydration break is called, or the instant it’s called. This is playing within the rules. I left immediately and made the front of the line. Plenty of others made the same move; the line stacked up eight deep behind me.

The exit-door gambit. At the halftime of extra time, a man arrived, realized the line was a line, and was very much not into it. I watched him scan for a shortcut. Finding none, he circled around to the bathroom’s exit and went in from there. He checked whether any doors were open. He played off the visit by washing his hands — “I only came here to wash my hands, not to skip the line…” — and then stood inside, watching the doors, waiting for one to open. Cutting the line is breaking the rules, and watching it riled up a rule-enforcing Germanic part of me that wants to destroy him and everything he stands for. The rest of us waited in the line.

The empty stall. The line filed right past the accessible bathroom. On Partner’s previous bathroom visit, a dude next to her tried that door: empty. She immediately stood in front of that door, waiting for him to come out; someone else lined up behind her. Nobody had been using that bathroom, and somebody should be using the bathroom: seems like an efficient use of resources. But the second line forming back there was the wrong shape. It should be one line, feeding every door. (I have preached this queueing theology before, at Trader Joe’s.)

Which returns us to the woman and the five doors. Five doors, five knobs, all that information free for the twisting. She had checked none of them. Behind door number three: an empty room.

Check the doors.

Soccer Commentator Qualities

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What makes a good soccer commentator? 

  1. Know the players on the field by sight, so you can rapidly say things like “Smith passes to Jones; Jones to Marmoset, Marmoset back to Jones…” 
  2. Make predictions based on your previous soccer experience, of the ilk “If France keeps playing like this, it’s going to be a 4-0 game before the half!” and “Johnson, would you call me daft if I said France were the favorites despite being down 4-2?” 
  3. Be human. E.g. “My son texted me at the half to ask why doesn’t England always play like this?” 
  4. When you have a hunch, puil up a statistic: “Y’know, I said earlier that this might be the highest World Cup game in two decades. Turns out it’s the highest scoring game since Sri Lanka vs Pakistan in 1982”. 
  5. Make comparisons to other sports about which you’re familiar: “There’s no defense on either side: they’re playing like the NBA All-Star Game right now!” 

Things not to do: 

  • Go on and on about one topic over and over again. (“Like I said earlier, some people don’t like there being a third place match. But this third place match was excellent.”) 

Having watched the World Cup this year, it turns out the traits of being a good commentator highly correlate with one particular demographic, and anti-correlate with another. So my biggest suggestion to you, should you want to be a good soccer commentator, is: 

  • Don’t be American. 

— 

An unrelated musing: 

Why are nachos better than salad? 

  1. Nachos: the best stuff is on the top so you eat it first. 
  2. Salad: the best stuff falls to the bottom. 

When you’re hungrier, food tastes better. So sequencing the food to have the best food first (nachos) is better than having the best food last (salad). 

Also the crunch. 

[Partner says she wants Nachos to be more like salad. I think she’s insane.] 

The Spire Ate My Friday

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The goal of the game is to keep me playing. It keeps me playing by staying at the edge of my skill.

All I did today was play Slay the Spire 2. Not most of what I did. All.[1]

A game that can eat an entire Friday of a grown man’s finite life deserves an autopsy. Three findings.

First: I can watch myself getting better. The game has five characters, each demanding a different approach, and I randomize between them every run — I don’t know who I’ll be until the wheel stops. No settling into a groove. Every run I find a weakness in my play; next run I improve it and find another. A satisfying learning curve. 

Second: the difficulty rises to meet me. When I win a run, the next one starts with a handicap, along the lines of “start with 70% of my health”. Win again and the handicaps stack: tack on “only two potion slots instead of three”. The game keeps re-placing itself exactly at the edge of my skill, run over run over run.

One amusing wrinkle: the maps are procedurally generated, and someone once went looking and proved that at least one run of the original Slay the Spire is literally unwinnable. Which is fine — that’s the cost of procedural generation. But it’s funny, because I would never know. I’d just be disappointed that I failed.

Third: it’s meditative. The verbs are few and constant: select card, play card. Select room. Occasionally buy item or use potion. That’s the whole vocabulary. Die in room 40, start the next run immediately. It pairs well with music, which is to say it occupies exactly as much of me as I give it.

I’ve written before that when I’m playing a game I love, three things happen: I pay attention without effort; I want to improve; and when it ends, I want more. Slay the Spire 2 is those three sentences built as software. The attention is the meditation. The improvement is visible. And “when it ends, I want more” — well. See: my Friday.

Any further questions?

“How is it better than the first one?” Slower, more intentional drip of unlocks. More characters. Better balance. More distinct strategy paths within each character, depending on the cards you’re dealt. And the learning curve is fast because it builds on the first game: a fast learning curve on an already fast-to-learn game.

“Do you regret the Friday?” The goal of the game is to keep me playing. It kept me playing. It won. And I had a blast. 

Compare this to yesterday, when I played the demo of the Backyard Baseball relaunch. The demo exists to make me play more. I loved Backyard Baseball as a kid. But the demo was… meh? After playing through it, I had no interest in playing the actual game. Slay the Spire slays. Backyard Baseball flops. 

[1] This is the sort of hyperbole permitted to we practitioners of the creative arts. I also installed an A/C unit in my apartment and coached a client for ~2 hours and went to the gym. But I did play Slay the Spire for upwards of 8 hours. 

The Ferrari of Overhead Lights

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To win, buy the Mercedes. To buy the Mercedes, price the Ferrari in farms. 

My designer wants me to buy the Ferrari of overhead lights. I want the Mercedes. 

Partner was a professional lighting designer. She geeks out about lumens and beam cones. When I hear these discussions, my eyes roll back and I start seeing spots as though I’ve been staring at these lights for too long. 

Six weeks ago, my designer took me to a lighting showroom. He said, “Do you like these?” 

I said, “Yes, pending cost.” 

I then spent four days calling and emailing the showroom to get a price quote. They did not reply. Never a good sign. 

Three weeks ago, my designer sent me the price quote: $20k for lighting for the whole apartment. I performed 15 minutes of research and located a $5k option. 

The big differences between the two options: 

  1. Visible plastic trim; and 
  2. Lights at the level of the ceiling, rather than lights recessed into the ceiling (he wants recessed). 

All the other elements are similar: lumens, color rendering index, warm-dim, smart connectivity. (These elements wouldn’t be preserved if I spent only $1k buying lights and light equipment through Amazon. But at $5k, from a reputable lighting supplier, they are.) 

This raises the question: Would I rather have $15k or hide my plastic trim and light sources? 

$15k is abstract. Let’s make it concrete. What can $15k buy me? 

  1. ~5 week-long trips to new cities with Partner, airfare and housing included. 
  2. Half of a functional new automobile. 
  3. 600 copies of the computer game Slay the Spire (my current favorite). 
  4. 300+ different “new hot board games” when they come out. 
  5. Half a year of preschool education at a fancy NYC Montessori for a child of mine. 
  6. 1.5% of a million-dollar farm upstate. 

I’m not looking to buy the Honda Civic of lighting. (That costs $7 per light, and does not do what I want.) I’m looking to buy the low-end Mercedes: $75 per light, but it has all the features. 

Plus, that puts me 1.5% of the way to a farm upstate. 

Yeah, I’ll take the Mercedes. 

–

P.S. Partner just ran an experiment on me. She showed me two pictures of a strawberry and asked, “Which has better color fidelity?” I guessed wrong. She told me that she had also guessed wrong. It turns out we can’t tell the difference between a 95 CRI strawberry and a 90 CRI strawberry. 

You might expect my next sentence to be, “So, despite the $20k lights having better CRI, we’ll go with the cheaper ones”. But that’s inaccurate. The $20k lights and the $5k lights are both rated “90+”. 

So why the hell would we get the Ferrari? 

Oh yeah, because it’s sexy. 

You know what else is sexy? 

Fifteen thousand dollars in cold hard cash. 

Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping

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Playing the ref just makes sport less fun. 

Soccer sucks. It mainly sucks because of its relationship to fouls: too many key moments of the game feel like a child overreacting in front of their parent so the parent will punish their sibling.

It could be my American sensibilities, but I don’t respect a game where so much is influenced by the authority figures. Yes, American football stops the clock. But we stop the clock in accordance with a very specific set of rules, and we review every touchdown to ensure the rules were followed. Over the three soccer games I watched this World Cup, however, I recall four or five spots where the announcers noted that a call was incorrect. (Most often these were questions of who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds — an easily answerable question via video review.)

So, back to flopping vs drawing a foul:

  • Flopping is pretending that someone else did something that they did not actually do (and from which you are mortally wounded).
  • Drawing a foul is behaving in such a way that the opponent actually does something to violate the rules of the game.

Flopping is, at least to my American ethics, anathema to sport. Sport is about strength, determination, and courage. It is a battlefield where iron sharpens iron, where the best of my group challenges the best of your group for honor and glory. It is, as Orwell said, “war minus the shooting.” (Orwell meant that as an indictment. I mean it as a compliment.)

We look up to athletes as the epitome of physical prowess. And athletic performance, as separated from theatrical performance, is real. Physical. Not subject to judgment calls — or as nearly not as humans can manage.

The difference between flopping and drawing a foul is the difference between truth and lies. In a flop, nothing happened. In a drawn foul, a rule really was violated.

While watching a soccer game with Partner’s sister last weekend, I asked how long it would be until all soccer plays are reviewed by video. She scoffed and said she was against using AI in this case.

Two thoughts:

  1. I hadn’t mentioned AI; I had mentioned video review (lol)
  2. When it comes to sport, shouldn’t we be in favor of every activity that makes the rules more accurately enforced? If a sport is merely the implementation of those rules accurately and universally, shouldn’t we all support their accurate and universal implementation?

If the rules truly are the rules, any hesitancy toward enforcing them is either 1) an argument against those rules actually being the rules, or 2) corruption. (I’ve argued before that the rules of a game are never quite the rules. FIFA is not making that argument.)

FIFA takes upwards of three minutes to video-review its plays. American football’s reviews stop the game too — but they’ve structured the game to make this experience dramatic and fair (every touchdown automatically reviewed, a fixed list of reviewable calls, coaches with a limited budget of challenges). The rules for reviewing the rules are themselves rules.

From the president of FIFA celebrating Argentina’s victory (I assume because Messi is the biggest economic draw for the tournament) to the FIFA draws happening in a notoriously riggable way, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this sport in which players appeal so frequently and vigorously to the authority figures is also the sport where the authority figures use their power so corruptly.

Americans don’t like government. We rebel against authority. Maybe that’s why a game of cowering and groveling and performing in front of the king will never quite sit right with us. The last time we petitioned a king for fairer enforcement of the rules, it ended in war plus the shooting.

The Secret Soccer Structure

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To keep 90 minutes interesting, you need an arc. To get an arc without structure, you need a conductor.

Maybe soccer has a secret rhythm.

In today’s Argentina/England World Cup Semifinal, the players came out swinging. Only three minutes into the game, an Argentine player whacked an Englishman in the back of the head. I immediately shouted, “Red card!”, much to Partner’s dismay as her ear was near my mouth.

And then, the refs… just… didn’t?

They awarded a free kick to England. At any previous point in the tournament, merely stepping on a guy’s foot has been enough to receive a card. But an unprovoked whack to the back of the head?

Just after the hydration break, one of the announcers said something like, “That’s probably the last foul they’re going to get away with like that before the ref starts handing out yellow cards.”

He was right. Shortly after, the first yellow card came out.

Wait… What?

A player can do the exact same thing in the beginning of a match and it’s a mere free kick, but later in the match it receives a card?

Do soccer fans like a specific emotional arc? It wouldn’t surprise me if all enjoyable sports share a common one (I’m looking at you, Freytag’s pyramid). But soccer is a relatively random-tension game. Tennis has tension management built into its structure: “game points” and side switches that increase and release tension. Soccer has no such machinery. So the refs supply the dramaturgy by hand — swallow the whistle in the first act, tighten as the plot demands, save the cards for the climax. The announcer wasn’t guessing. He’d read the script.

One of my biggest gripes about soccer during this World Cup has been the importance of the referees. But the game may actually need them. Soccer is the simplest major sport. (Its history can be traced back to the first time a child said, “Look, ma: no hands!”) That simplicity leads to games of unpredictable quality. The England/Mexico game was one of the greatest sporting events I’ve watched. Today’s Argentina/England was decently enjoyable. The remaining 6 games I’ve watched were terrible disappointments.

To fit an appropriate emotional arc, the game may require better structure. Update fouls and substitutions. Change the rules around contact. Start the game with 3 penalty kicks per side. Award corner kicks or penalty kicks at various times throughout. Something to make this game less universally flat.

Perhaps most of all: tell us how much time remains. (Yes, I know about the fourth official’s board. A minimum is not a clock; the actual end still arrives at the referee’s whim.) I’ll grant that the ambiguity creates drama — for the initiated. For the newbie, it creates only confusion. And a real clock needn’t kill your “play until an appropriately calm stopping point”: Rugby 7s has a clock, but the game only ends after it goes off and the ball next goes dead.

It might be true that avid soccer fans can feel the right energy of a game and thereby determine when a foul is a yellow card rather than a mere free kick. But the rules of a game should be comprehensible to a newbie, lest you end up with arbitrary authoritarian rulings.

You know, like ending the Argentina/England game when you did — ball still in play, within range of the Argentine goal.

Slow and Steady wins Second Place

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A brief adjustment to a fable.

A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “Consistency beats intensity every time, but intensity does really fucking help.”

We’re taught from a young age that slow and steady wins the race. But it actually gets second place.

  • Fast and steady wins the race.
  • Slow and steady gets second place.
  • Third place goes to fast and erratic.
  • Bringing up the rear, slow and erratic.

One challenge: there’s a thin, unobvious line between fast and erratic.

My current weightlifting goal is to bench press my bodyweight. I’m a novice and adding weight to my lifts quickly. I think I’ll get there in ~6 months if I don’t get injured.

But, since I’m a novice, my odds of injury are reasonably high – unknown unknowns abound. 

It’s simple. That doesn’t make it easy. 


Cascade

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My new favorite cooperative game 

My family is obsessed with a game. We call it Cascade. Here’s how it’s played: 

Setup: 

-1. Ask each player whether they’d prefer to play the simpler, more social game or the more intricate, challenging version. Each player who chooses the simpler version will receive one hand; each player who chooses the more challenging version will receive two hands. 

0. Arrange between the players four sets of tokens (we wrote ours on scraps of cardboard). Each of these sets will contain one token for each of the hands in play, and be labeled with a number and word, either “Preflop”, “Flop”, “Turn”, or “River”. (So one set of tokens is Preflop 1, Preflop 2, Preflop 3, etc.) 

  1. Deal 2 cards to the players who want to play the simpler version and 4 cards to the players who want to play the more challenging version. 
  2. Ask the players with 4 cards to split them into two separate hands, any way they desire. 

The game begins (Preflop): 

  1. All acting simultaneously, move any of the Preflop tokens from the middle of the table anywhere you desire. Your goal is to, without talking or communicating too much (no nods or “mmmhmm”s), arrange all hands in rank order (according to poker ranks), with 1 being the lowest. You may assign tokens to other players’ hands, remove tokens from other players’ hands, return tokens to the center, etc. 
  2. Once all the tokens are stable (no longer being moved), ensure all the players are settled, and move on to the flop. 

Flop, Turn, River

  1. Flip over three community cards, then repeat the same process, but with the Flop tokens instead of the Preflop tokens. 
  2. Once all the Flop tokens are stable, repeat with two additional cards and the Turn tokens. 
  3. Once the Turn tokens are stable, repeat with one final card and the River tokens. 

End

  1. Once the River tokens are stable, reveal your hands one by one, in whichever order you think will be most dramatic. How accurate were your rankings throughout? It’s cooperative: the whole table wins or whiffs together. (Each hand is the best 5 from the hole cards + community cards, just like Texas Hold’Em.) 

That’s the game! 

We originally played with one hand per person and a Flop of 3 cards, Turn of 1 card, and River of 1 card, but learned many people prefer playing with two hands, and that the game is more interesting with a turn of 2 cards rather than 1. We’ve also played the game with 3-card hands instead of 2-card hands. That version is particularly enjoyable for the game nerds among us, but really puts a damper on the chit-chat and socializing.  

Why is it called Cascade? If you play it, maybe you’ll notice 🙂 

Pickford’s Getting Jumpy

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A high-quality game is one in which arbitrary referee decisions do not determine the outcome. Therefore, FIFA soccer is not a high-quality game. 

Today, in the England versus Norway World Cup game, about 20 minutes before the end of regular time, I said to Partner: “Pickford’s getting jumpy. It’s time to take advantage of him.”

Pickford is the English goalie, and it’s understandable that he’s jumpy: in his regular occupation, he does not play for a particularly high-level team. But his jumpiness is still notable: to win in a sporting competition, it is often advantageous to note one’s opponents’ weaknesses. And Pickford being jumpy is very good for the Norwegian team.

The game was tied at the end of regulation time, so: extra time. In extra time with only a few minutes left, England led by 2-1 when Norway succeeded in bringing the ball all the way toward the English goal. Pickford punched it away… and ran into his own teammate. He fell to the ground, doubled over. The refs stopped the game. 

The Norwegian players were irate. The announcers had to justify this decision. They said: it’s not very sporting to play the game with a goalie who’s doubled over on the ground.

That’s insane, and it’s what’s wrong with soccer. What is sporting is to follow the rules — not to make arbitrary referee decisions which have vast, overwhelming influences on the game. What’s not sporting is stopping the game when one team has made a giant mistake. 

WHAT SPORTING ACTUALLY MEANS

Sporting as in “be a good sport” and “play with sportsmanship”: what does it mean? The clearest example that comes to my mind is one of an image associated with hunting animals “for sport”. It is not very “sporting” to tie up an animal and then just shoot it when it can’t get away. There’s a famous story about Teddy Roosevelt choosing not to do just this, in part owing to his belief in the morals and ethics of being a sportsman. Sportsmen have honor, fight fairly, and accept their defeats. A sportsman is not a cheat, nor are they a wimp. 

In that definition, you might say it’s not very sporting to shoot the ball at the goal while the opposing goalie is down. And that’s perhaps a fair point… if the game of soccer were at all a sporting game… 

FLOPPING, THE ANTITHESIS

But soccer is a game in which players fall on the ground, clutching themselves, pretending to be terribly injured, upwards of a dozen times per game. These are fully-grown, professional athletes who receive massive paychecks. And we want them flopping on the ground pretending injury? 

I can think of no less-sporting (dishonorable, wimpy) activity than pretending injury in this deplorably weak way. What is sporting is to give the opportunity for success. 

So when the opposing team makes a mistake, the only reasonable response is 1) assume he is faking (because more than 90% of the time, soccer players are faking), and 2) kick the ball in the goal. 

YOU CAN’T FOUL YOUR OWN TEAM

When I was six or seven years old, my soccer coach stopped the scrimmage we were playing because one player had fouled another. He called the first player over and demanded that he apologize. Then, after demanding the apology, the coach said something like: Wait — you guys are on the same team. Never mind. He called off the apology and continued the scrimmage.

In a very real, fundamental way, it is impossible for a player to foul a member of their own team. The reasons behind this should be obvious. Most simply, a foul is a violation of the rules wherein one team harms another. 

For over 20 minutes, I had been telling Partner that the English goalie was acting jumpy. This was the moment I had been predicting. Sure, I had expected him to make a mistake against his opponents, but running into your own teammate definitely qualifies as an outcome of someone’s jumpiness. He made his bed: now is his time to lie in it. 

EVERY SIGNIFICANT EVENT MATTERS

Soccer games contain very few goals, and most moments of soccer do not lead to goals. Near the end of regulation time, an overlay appeared on the screen: each team had taken ten shots, of which four had been shots on goal. Eight shots on goal in a total of 90 minutes equates to fewer than one every 11 minutes. 

The goalie being down for the count while the ball is near the goal matters. Stopping the game at the point where Pickford is on the ground — by his own doing, having made his own mistake, colliding with his own teammate — is unfair, both to the Norwegian team and any unaligned fans (such as myself) who simply want to watch a good match. 

BAD INCENTIVES MADE WORSE 

Flopping is already a scourge: when one player touches an opponent, you’ll often see both players fall to the floor, clutching their bodies in anguish disproportionate to the actual injury. And now you’re going to encourage players to do it in response to interactions with their own team? Not only will you encourage more flopping; you’ll also give even more power to the referees to make judgment calls based on theatrical performance. 

Further, what about the concept of psychological warfare? In sport in general, it is a completely legitimate strategy to play in such a manner that causes one’s player to make mistakes. In soccer, if a player develops the skill of causing his opponents to run into each other, are you really suggesting we outlaw that skill? 

SOCCER STILL SUCKS

Would Norway have scored? Probably not – most soccer shots miss, which is part of why it’s such a terribly boring game best seen in four-minute post-game highlight videos – but that doesn’t matter. This question is one of fairness, and stopping the game was unacceptably unfair. 

“Who won?” you may be asking. Does it even matter, if the game is a sham? 

P.S. My problem is not with soccer itself:  the game “put the ball into the opponent’s net without using your hands” is a beautiful game. My gripe is with the current implementation as run by FIFA, including the poor power structure and abysmal incentives. 

The Grasshopper turned Ant

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(Only in one area)

I never understood weightlifting. Lots of pain, no obvious gain. 

Partner loves weightlifting. Her spirit animal is the ant. In graduate school, she could bench press more than her bodyweight, a particularly impressive feat for an estrogen-powered life form. (Among non-professional female powerlifting competitions, benching one’s bodyweight is generally enough to medal.) 

Earlier today, I benched 155lbs for 5 reps. A new personal record. Not very impressive for anyone who has lifted weights for a while. Still, I yipped with glee. I remember the day when I broke 135lbs (one 45lb plate on each side of the 45lb bar). Now, I crank out 4 sets of 145lbs with no trouble. 

“I remember the day when X was hard. Now, X is easy.” ← a wonderful lesson of weightlifting. 

A coaching client of mine has felt incredibly stressed this week. He tells me he wishes not to feel this way every week. I told him he won’t, for two key reasons: 

  1. If he truly wants to feel less stress, he can grow slower. It’s a real option. (One he’s not taking 😉)
  2. As you improve, the former difficulty feels easy. 

I’ve promised Partner that, when I can bench press my bodyweight, I will bench press her. We might be six months or a year away from that day. But one beautiful trait of the gym: if you show up and do the work, you will see the results. 

Lots of pain, no obvious gain? After a few months every day, the gain is unmistakable. Once I learned to breathe properly, the whole experience became enjoyable. 

And the pain? You mean the intense difficulty that only lasts for a few seconds? You call that pain? I call it fun.