Lessons from Game Designer Raph Koster

I am going to be reading game designer Raph Koster’s book Theory of Fun pretty soon. For a preview, I listened to an old interview on the Think Like A Game Designer podcast with Justin Gary.

Link: https://www.thinklikeagamedesigner.com/podcast/2018/10/25/think-like-a-game-designer-5-raph-koster

Raph’s 25-year-old blog is a monument to design knowledge — it includes his writing, talks, and links to projects.

Raph is a creative force of nature. And this interview gets behind the madness. As always with my recaps, this is just what I wanted to write down for my own future reference but so much more is covered (there’s an especially great section about the use of simulations)

Ideating from scratch

When designing a game Raph will have a starting point. On one end of the spectrum might be a particular loop or mechanic the game hinges on. At the other end of the spectrum, he might start with the type of experience he’s looking to design. His approach to tabletop games tends to start with the mechanics and for video games from the experience. I excerpted the following because he decomposes the act of swimming into game mechanics off the top of his head in the interview. It was a neat example of how native this thinking clearly has become for him:

In my board game work, I find myself biased towards the mechanical. It’s unusual for me to start from the other end of the board games. But in video games, I often start from the experiential end. My goal is to establish what I know at one end and then use it to jump to the other end to draw conclusions. For example, if I start from the experiential end and I want to make a game about swimming, I think about the experience of swimming for me. There are different strokes. There’s the fear of drowning when you start to learn. Rhythm is crucial to swimming, as is breath management. The concept of a breath might be a resource. It could be something consumed periodically, but there might also be an exhaustion meter that decreases over time, limiting your breath. Different strokes might have different breath expenditures. If I decide to create a tabletop game, I think mechanically. I could set up a board with a race structure appropriate for swimming, perhaps with themes like sharks chasing or diving challenges. I’d play a game of resource management to get the necessary strokes, maybe using cards or tokens. If I were designing a digital game, I’d focus on rhythm, possibly incorporating a timing aspect and still manage resources of breadth and endurance. Different strokes would offer varied trade-offs. My aim is to establish two foundational ideas and move inward, paying attention to both. Ideally, they meet in the middle. If I have an abstract idea, like a deck of cards that “moves” me, I might not end up with a swimming game. It could fit another context but remain mathematically sound. It could be rules for moving cavalry in a supply chain. It’s crucial to consider both ends because it helps generate ideas that lead to a cohesive design.

Having a wide array of influences and skills

I’m always fascinated by and strive to understand the universal principles that apply to the creative process. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making games, poetry, art, or a movie, I believe there are common threads in how you approach creative work. You have such a polymath background, maybe you can speak to that.

My education and background is eclectic, with a consistent focus on the arts. I took studio art classes beyond the college level and I’m a musician. I play multiple instruments and studied music theory and composition in college. Interestingly, the one thing I do but never formally studied is programming. I have a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and draw on all of these disciplines regularly. It’s challenging for me to imagine not being a jack of all trades or how I’d approach games if I weren’t integrating all these skills. I also frequently use Excel. A primary reason I enjoy game design is because it allows me to utilize various skills in one project.

Getting better — what does it mean to practice?

What’s the equivalent of “practicing scales” for other creative work?

I consider the practice of all those things I do as being very similar. I use the same habits for all of them. I made a list of them once in a blog post, which I think was called “practicing the creativity habit“. First was, whatever the activity is, do it regularly and make it a habit. So part of that is having the tools near you at all times. In the room I work out of, there are about 20 musical instruments within five feet, a complete art studio, a recording studio, and a game design reference shelf. Not actual games, but books about games, economics, interface design, and other topics related to games. For board games, I have a prototype kit with hundreds of dice, wooden bits of different shapes, and about 30 or 40 different decks of cards. The first thing is to make it a habit. Second, have the tools close at hand always.Third, give yourself constraints. I try to do that regularly. If it’s guitar, I might find five jazz chords and learn them, then write a song using those chords until I understand them. I picked up this habit from studying art and poetry. There are traditional poetic forms like sonnets, Villanelles, and haikus. In a writing workshop, we set ourselves the challenge of writing a poem using every single traditional form. In game design, it would be trying different game types. I haven’t succeeded at it for games, but that’s not the point. It’s about understanding design patterns. This approach applies to everything I work with, be it music composition, writing, or drawing. It’s a common underlying principle. It’s like working out — you need to rotate through the different muscle groups.

Intuition is pattern-matching against experience subconsciously

This is illustrated by an example from one of the cognitive science books on my shelf: the firefighter intuitively knows a structure is going to collapse. If you ask them why, they often have trouble explaining. I believe the process of conducting formal analysis of numerous games or seeking NP hard problem categories or compiling a pattern library and trying to internalize it helps strengthen our intuition. The exercise of building games around patterns serves as practice for honing this intuition. I may not always explain why I opt out of a conflict early, but I just intuitively sense it won’t work. The key is recognizing this earlier. I still believe 90% of ideas are shit but now, I discard them even before jotting them down, often when they’re just scribbles.

Nuance about the role of games in education

The changes over the years have involved the “chocolate covered broccoli” concept, where something fun is wrapped around an academic task. It’s clear this approach wasn’t effective. We’ve come to understand that games teach in specific ways that are well-suited for certain subjects but not for others. Games motivate players best through intrinsic motivation. Players choose to learn and take on tasks because they want to, with the game guiding their objective. For instance, instead of making a game to directly teach math, you create a game where players have a goal they wish to achieve. This might lead them to discover that understanding a certain type of math is the solution. They then learn it out of their own motivation. This is a realization that educational game design has recognized over time. As for games with broader themes, they can reflect social structures, human interactions, economics, politics, and other vast topics. While there’s an abundance of narrative-driven or viewpoint-based games out there, game systems can be informative as well. For instance, Sim City faced criticism for presenting an overly optimistic view of public transit and its associated challenges.

You can bias your game systems to convey specific lessons. It’s important to recognize that your game systems inherently teach lessons, intended or not.

Game-playing trains your “systems thinking”

Finding real world systems and abstracting them or boiling them down to their essence isn’t actually a very common skill. Games can teach people how to do this. The idea involves setting constraints, modeling real systems, and allowing people to experience them within a game context to understand them deeply. It provides an opportunity for individuals to experiment with these systems, unlike in real life where, for example, you only get one shot at lifetime earnings. Playing a game that emulates this system offers lessons. This is applicable to various scenarios, such as political engagement. There should be games that allow players to experiment with political engagement methods, helping them discern more effective strategies. This principle holds true in many areas.

Kris here…yea, I’ve made this point repeatedly over the years.

In Let Your Kids Play Boardgames I said this of the game Quacks of Quedlinburg:

Quacks is a bit like a deck builder. It’s known as a bag builder but with a don’t-bust-press-your-luck mechanic. To most of you, that means nothing but for the remaining, you should know this an outstanding game. It’s fun, and while seasoned gamers won’t like this necessarily, it has enough luck to allow a first grader to compete with an adult. I found myself thinking quite a bit about the value of the “options” (they’re actually chips representing ingredients in a potion recipe) in the game and their respective costs. The concepts of theta, volatility, and vega would be visible to someone with a finance background if they looked past the game skin. An engineer would see this game as a very pure simulation (most likely AI) based problem especially since the game has no trading interactions.

In Practice Second Gear Thinking I write:

We must identify second-order effects. In the options world, the “greeks” are sensitivities. Delta is the option’s sensitivity to the underlying. Gamma is a second-order sensitivity that describes how an option’s delta changes with respect to the underlying.

But this topic is everywhere. If a company sells more widgets it makes more profit. But second-order effects mean attracting more competition or saturating a market. Every satisfied customer is one less customer that needs satisfying. So if I build a model of profitability based on units sold, when does the function inflect? When does opportunity fade into unsold inventory?

A fun way to think about second-order sensitivities is playing “engine builder” boardgames like Dominion or Wingspan where synergies between your cards lower the marginal costs of later actions². In essence, the cards have gamma based on how you stack them. Every time I use a card it might increase my odds of winning by X. That’s the delta or “benefit per use”. But the delta itself increases with synergy, so as the game progresses, you get more delta or benefit/use ratio, from the same card

In Greeks Are Everywhere I write:

One of the reasons I like boardgames is they are filled with greeks. There are underlying economic or mathematical sensitivities that are obscured by a theme. Chess has a thin veneer of a war theme stretched over its abstraction. Other games like Settlers of Catan or Bohnanza (a trading game hiding under a bean farming theme) have more pronounced stories but as with any game, when you sit down you are trying to reduce the game to its hidden abstractions and mechanics.

The objective is to use the least resources (whether those are turns/actions, physical resources, money, etc) to maximize the value of your decisions. Mapping those values to a strategy to satisfy the win conditions is similar to investing or building a successful business as an entrepreneur. You allocate constrained resources to generate the highest return, best-risk adjusted return, smallest loss…whatever your objective is.

Games have mine a variety of mechanics (awesome list here) just as there are many types of business models. Both game mechanics and business models ebb and flow in popularity. With games, it’s often just chasing the fashion of a recent hit that has captivated the nerds. With businesses, the popularity of models will oscillate (or be born) in the context of new technology or legal environments.

In both business and games, you are constructing mental accounting frameworks to understand how a dollar or point flows through the system. On the surface, Monopoly is about real estate, but un-skinned it’s a dice game with expected values that derive from probabilities of landing on certain spaces times the payoffs associated with the spaces. The highest value properties in this accounting system are the orange properties (ie Tennessee Ave) and red properties (ie Kentucky). Why? Because the jail space is a sink in an “attractor landscape” while the rents are high enough to kneecap opponents. Throw in cards like “advance to nearest utility”, “advance to St. Charles Place”, and “Illinois Ave” and the chance to land on those spaces over the course of a game more than offsets the Boardwalk haymaker even with the Boardwalk card in the deck.

In deck-building games like Dominion, you are reducing the problem to “create a high-velocity deck of synergistic combos”. Until you recognize this, the opponent who burns their single coin cards looks like a kamikaze pilot. But as the game progresses, the compounding effects of the short, efficient deck creates runaway value. You will give up before the game is over, eager to start again with X-ray vision to see through the theme and into the underlying greeks.

[If the link between games and business raises an antenna, you have to listen to Reid Hoffman explain it to Tyler Cowen!]

Advice for aspiring game designers [Kris: I think much of this applies to anyone whose job is to communicate — which is basically everyone]

The first piece of advice is to make games. I understand many are familiar with this advice, but it’s valid: make a multitude of games and practice consistently. The second piece of advice, especially for aspiring game designers, is to become intellectually curious. I haven’t met any outstanding game designers who aren’t. Be a voracious reader and be open to exploring different fields. Be genuinely curious. These two traits alone can take you a long way in the game design world.

Well, ok. But, given Raph’s background, it seems incomplete for me to not quote uber-successful game designer Sadie Green’s character in the novel Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow responding to a rando who asks her “How did you get into making video games?”

Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person had told her that he hadn’t heard of Ichigo. “Well, I learned to program computers in middle school. I got an eight hundred on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig. And then I went to MIT, which by the way is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology, with an emphasis on Judic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of but yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the US, soooo…”. Instead, she said, “I like to play games a lot, so I thought I’d see if I could make them”.

Specific content recommendations

Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton: A highly recommended book for those eager to dive into game system design.
Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell: Provides an expansive overview of game design, though not structured as a course.
Characteristics of Games by Garfield
Advanced Game Mechanics by Ernest Adams: Great resources for those intrigued by game systems.
Game Feel by Steve Swink: For those in the video game realm, this book focuses on the importance of haptics and controls.
Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon: Stands out as a guide for game narratives.
Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle: Essential for those venturing into online communities and virtual worlds.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: A recommended read outside the gaming sphere.
100 Principles of Game Design by Wendy Despain: Covers core design principles across various disciplines.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte: Despite being pricey, it’s invaluable, especially “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.”
Disney Training Manuals: Includes titles like “The Illusion of Life” and “Drawn to Life.”
Art from Studio Ghibli and art history collections: Resources that provide visual and historical context to design.
Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman: A foundational book on design, emphasizing that game design is a subset of the broader design discipline.
Diverse Topics: It’s beneficial to explore books on economics, history, and mythology.

Notes From C.Thi Nguyen Interview About Games and Society

Link: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/10/18/169-c-thi-nguyen-on-games-art-values-and-agency/

C. Thi Nguyen received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He has written public philosophy for venues such as Aeon and The New York Times, and is an editor of the aesthetics blog Aesthetics for Birds. He was the recipient of the 2020 Article Prize from the American Philosophical Association. His recent book is Games: Agency as Art.

I only excerpted topics of particular interest to me so you should listen to the podcast for a fuller understanding. Anything bold is my emphasis.

Intro by host Sean Carroll

One of the good things about the artificiality of games, you know when you’ve won or lost, unlike life. But…that clarity of knowing when you’ve won or lost is very seductive outside the context of a formal game. It’s very seductive in life.

Thi has developed this understanding to study things like echo chambers and cult leaders. A cult is in many ways like an echo chamber. In both cases, it’s not just a filter bubble where you prevent information you don’t want from getting in, but it’s like a strategy for preemptively undermining claims from outsiders that the cult leader or the echo chamber doesn’t want you to believe in, right? You give people ways to discount outside information.

One of the reasons why cults and echo chambers are so seductive is that they bring clarity to values and moral reasoning, maybe a little bit too much clarity: They make it too easy, they make things cut and dried in a way that the world itself is often not so cut and dried. So he has a whole understanding of why we’re so seduced by conspiracy theories, by cult leaders, by echo chambers, and how it relates to this seductiveness of clarity that we get from thinking about games and point. We get points, we get likes on our tweets, we get steps on our Fitbit. This engages our brains for interesting evolutionary reasons, and that feature of human psychology can be gamed, if you like, by the leaders of cults or echo chambers.

Games

What is a game?

The notion of a game is really disputed in philosophy. It’s very storied. In philosophy, it’s a particularly famous concept, because when Wittgenstein was like, “No, you can’t define concepts,” his example of an undefinable concept was a game.

There’s an amazing book from Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper, which is an attempt to define games, which actually takes itself as a response of Wittgenstein and also secretly about the meaning of life and the relationship between games and the meaning of life.

The short version is, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the experience of struggling against them.”

Part of the idea of the game is that the goal of the game is partially constituted by obedience to certain restrictions:
If you’re trying to get to the top of a mountain to get some rare drug that’s only there, you’re not playing a game. You’re just trying to get to the top of the mountain. If you’re trying to climb the mountain as a mountain climber, then certain restrictions are part of what you’re doing. So the medical seeker is not a game player, and the mountain climber is. And one way you can tell is if someone goes by in a helicopter and says, “Hey, you want a ride?” The medical climber will say, “Of course, get me the cancer drug.” And the other person is like, “Of course not. What do you think I’m doing?”

Autotelic: It’s worth engaging in the activity for the sake of the engagement and the doing rather than the product.

The charm or allure of games

Struggle
The aesthetic experience of struggle can be accessed in a safe way by making the difficulty manageable.

Some struggles are beautiful, some struggles are satisfying. And what games do is, they let you tweak the activity to maximize that satisfaction…Most of life’s challenges are too big or too boring and little for us. In games, we get to modify the world of the game and the abilities we’re allowed in the game until they fit just right.

Example:

I feel like things like chess are kind of tuned to maximize that moment, you get more and more of those moments. In my normal life moving around the world, I get to feel graceful once a week, but rock climbing tunes you into the part of the activity that has that feeling. It’s built to constantly call out of you that incredible experience of delicate, graceful, perfect motion.

Manageable because of clarification

Games are these circumscribed spaces where the actions in space have been often been leaned down and clarified, so your actions can fit. They’re clarified, not just because the actions you can perform have been clarified, it’s because your values have been clarified.

Bounded and limited beings make things that make them feel temporarily okay, like spaces where we don’t feel too little for this vast world. The real world is this existential hell-scape of too many values, and games are like this temporary balm, where the world makes sense for a little bit.

Games as art
Games are sculpted experiences of practicality. I think what’s interesting in games is, if games are sculpted practicality, then the beauty emerges in the practical action. So in other words, when you play a game, it’s not the game that’s beautiful, it’s you that’s beautiful.

I think a lot of the literature about games has been going around looking for qualities that are in the game, like, Oh, the graphics are beautiful, the sound is beautiful, the story is beautiful. And they’re not looking at how radically different games are. And I think there are other things like this that are also mostly neglected, but the thing that makes games unique is that they’re sculpted action.

The danger in having your values clarified

Gamification
Game values are hyper crisped-up, and that’s fine if you put away those values at the end. But when you gamify something like education or communication, then you’re forcing a singular clarified value system on a real-world activity. Think of how Fitbits or Twitter engagement can orient your goals towards local maxima. Twitter’s gamification squashes an individuals’ pluralistic values and gets everyone, insofar as they’re motivated, to be motivated in the same direction.
- Education examples:
  - Sean Carroll: I used to be at the University of Chicago, which obviously has always been academically super-duper strong, but back in the day, it wasn’t the place you applied if you were interested in Harvard or Stanford or Princeton, it was less well known. So suddenly, there was a strategy that they undertook at the University of Chicago because they were being hurt in the US News rankings, and they were being hurt because the only people who applied to the University of Chicago were the ones who really wanted to go there. And you are rewarded in the US News rankings by having a high selectivity, by rejecting most of the people who apply, so they intentionally encouraged people to apply knowing they would reject them, ’cause it increased their selectivity, and they leapt up in the rankings. That’s an example of maybe the goal perverting the original aspiration.
  - Law School culture
    A study about law school culture when the US News and World Report started ranking them charts a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about, about people gaming the rankings. One of the things they point out is that different law schools used to follow different missions before the rankings, but if their mission is skewed to the ranking at all, then you drop in the rankings, so it’s forced everyone to pursue the same values.
    Before the rankings, prospective law students used to talk about what different law schools valued and talk about their own values and decide what their values were, to pick which school to go to. Now, they, say 99% of the students just assume their goal is to get into the best school, where the best school is set by the ranking. So they don’t go through the process of value self-deliberation. You end up outsourcing your values, you end up letting somebody else perform value deliberations for you, and what goes into those values are often very much based in what’s in the interest of large-scale institutions and the kind of information management systems at large-scale information.

People worry a lot about games creating violence, and there’s actually a lot of data that mostly they don’t. And I think part of that is that the violence in games is fictional, and we have a lot of information that people are mostly capable of screening off fictions. The thing that I’m really worried about is people becoming used to the idea that the goal is some simple, quantified thing that people share, and what we’re supposed to do is do everything in our power to up that simple measure, and one thing on to note, that’s not fictional.

We shouldn’t worry about games creating serial killers, we should worry about them creating Wall Street bankers.

[obligatory reference to James C Scott’s Seeing Like A State: “Look, what you should think is that large-scale institutions generally see the parts of the world that are processable by large-scale bureaucratic machines, which are quantified data, they can’t register the part.” So, think about this, a large-scale school district or an educational bureaucracy can’t register individual student evaluation data, they can only register aggregatable data like GPA. So, says Scott, large-scale institutions have reason to remake the world along lines that are more regular, so that they can be legible to the institution and actable on by the institution.]

The satisfying aspect of games common to conspiracy theories

The satisfaction we crave in the clarity and simplification of games is why we are drawn to conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are tuned to give you the exact same pleasure [as games]. Someone has changed the nature of the world, apparently, to make it tractable.

How the argument works:

1. There’s a source of anxiety: The world is complex
  Scientists are hyper-specialized, no-one understands everything, at some point you realize that you have to just trust tons of stuff that you have no ability to grapple with.
2. Conspiracy theories circumvent our need to trust
  They say “Don’t be sheep. Don’t trust other people. Here is a vision of the world, where you can contain the world in you. You can explain all of it with this one powerful explanation.” It is a game-like pleasure, but exported to a place where it’s dangerous.
  - Refers to a book by Elijah Millgram, called The Great Endarkenment. It talks about how knowledge must not be individual quest given the fact that the world is so hyper-specialized that no one can know more than a tiny amount of it. [This stands in contrast to the] ideal of intellectual autonomy that drove the Great Enlightenment. But it doomed itself, because it created all the science that made it impossible to be intellectually autonomous. If you still hold to the old ideal of intellectual autonomy, where everyone can understand everything, what you get is being driven to anti-vaxxing and various conspiracy theories in which you reject trust in the sciences.]
3. Conspiracy theories hack our desire for clarity
  It’s not that clarity is always bad. When you have intellectual success, you do have this feeling of clarity. My worry is the feel of clarity actually comes apart from real understanding, and that outside actors can game it.
  
  For example, in the course of evolution, it made perfect sense for us to pursue sugar and fat because calories are scarce, it’s hard to get enough fat and so on. Then the world changes and industrial forces figure out that they can maximize the feeling of sugar and fat separate from any nutritive qualities. And then if you’re still stuck on that old heuristic and chasing sugar and fat, then you’re screwed. Clarity can be like cognitive sugar. Someone can aim to max out the feeling of clarity, and the way that looks like is a conspiracy theory.

Trust’s role in conspiracy theories

1. Trust is tricky because there’s a lot you cannot trust, yet being able to trust is not optional

If you devote your entire life to it, you can understand one one-millionth of the human landscape of knowledge. [Even worse] not only can you not understand everything else, you don’t even have the capacity in yourself to pick the right experts to trust.

I have a PhD in philosophy, I have a lot of education. If you gave me a good, a real statistician, and a fake one, I don’t have the mathematical skills to tell the difference between a good statistical paper and one that gives a bad result. I don’t have that in myself. So what you get is actually this incredibly iterated and very fractal chain of trust.

[An example of why we have no choice but to trust in many cases:

There was one proof of a really famous theorem that literally only one guy understood, and he’s getting old, so a whole bunch of people had to have a project to re-write the proof in a way that other people could understand it. And that whole process of dealing with the fact that you need to trust some things, while you shouldn’t trust everything, is a tricky thing that is probably under-theorized.]

Politically, conspiracy theories tend to be associated with the right, but the left’s appeal to science fall flat because they are not appreciating the role of trust:

- - The false argument they spout:
    “Oh, these fucking anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. Think for yourself, look at the science, evaluate the science.”
    
    When the truth is “I can’t evaluate that science.”
  - The obstacle is not whether people trust Science with a capital “S”, it’s the trust of its messengers
    Look at the people that are legitimated in a certain institutional structure, which involves a background trust in those institutions. And I think there’s this vision where for a lot of us, like when you look at anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, the climate change denialist space, what we want to say something like, “Oh, those people are totally irrational.” But I think what you have to think instead is, they have an entirely different basic framework of trust, for a different set of institutions. The degree of rationality there depends on the degree to which we can justify our trust in our institutions. And that’s a really, really complicated matter, and it’s not like the authoritative institutions are always right. There are plenty of historical cases where they are corrupted, right?
    
    It’s hard to be against conspiracy theories as a blanket statement ’cause sometimes there are conspiracies. We have plenty of historical examples where all the institutions in a particular country have become corrupted, have taken over the news media, are issuing fall statements. That’s a real thing that happens.

2. Echo chambers are not about ignorance, they’re about trust

An echo chamber is a system in which people have been taught to systematically distrust people on the other side. The book Echo Chamber doesn’t quite say the world around Rush Limbaugh is a cult, but they basically almost say it. This book is an empirical analysis of the world around Rush Limbaugh — Rush Limbaugh’s top people just systematically distrust and dismiss people on the other side.

This is is different from not hearing them at all (which is the filter bubble argument). The problem goes back to trust, not irrationality or disbelief of science.

A large segment of the population has had their trust subverted and undermined and directed toward what we think of as like the wrong institutions.

The way back is not to wave the evidence in people’s faces. I think people want to be like, “Oh, climate change denialists, just look at the evidence, here is the evidence,” but of course they’re not showing you the evidence, they’re showing scientists that they trust who process the evidence, ’cause not even a climate change scientist, a particular climate change scientist, has looked at all of the evidence for climate… It’s all processed.

Someone whose trust has been systematically undermined in that set of institutions will not trust evidence from sources they distrust**. And that is rational.

This is a complicated problem without easy solutions. But the first step is recognizing the story is that the other side doesn’t hear us. It’s that their trust has been undermined.**

A lot of public policy figures are fixated on the filter effect thinking we just need to create these public spaces where people can meet each other and talk to each other. That’s a standard view in a lot of political philosophy and public policy. And I think that’s not going to work if trust has already been systematically undermined. It doesn’t matter if you meet and hear the other side, if you already have a prevailing story that says they’re malicious, manipulative, evil people.

The grand takeaway

The need for clarity as evidenced by our love of both games and conspiracy theories can cause us to overoptimize and seek safety in echo chambers.

What do we do about it?

While there are no answers some hints that can point in helpful directions:

Transition between perspectives
Playfulness is the quality to transition between different world perspectives, easily, lightly, to hold your perspective lightly and slip between different ones. This can be done via literally traveling and playing games where you are forced to slip in between different value perspectives.

It’s hard to do, it’s hard to put on different worldviews as like different outfits. This is a resonant argument for reading and earning widely:

This is going to become the world’s oldest chestnut, but sometimes I think like, this is what the fucking humanities are for. Read some art, read some novels, motherfucker, and if you want the background paranoid view, it’s something like the world has very good reasons to get us to onboard to super simple, clear targets. And when I look at universities cutting humanities programs in favor of business schools and STEM, because those are higher-earning jobs or lead to more clearly measurable productivity, I’m like, of course, reading weird subtle art, experiencing weird subtle art, including games, but also including novels and music and all this other stuff, is this stuff that might have clued you in to different value perspectives other than make a lot of money and get a good job. And of course, they’re going to get cut out in a world dominated by hyper-simplified institutionalized values.

One of the suspicions I have is that certain domains, especially the domains that science has a lot of success with, are the kinds of domains that admit of extraordinary clarity. And other domains, like the domain of life value and the domains of personal health and fitness and aesthetic joy, are not domains that admit of the same systemic clarity. And when we demand them, we start hitting simplified targets.

There’s a difference between qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data is really rich and nuanced and subtle, but it’s really context-sensitive. It doesn’t aggregate, it doesn’t travel well.

[insert quote: Not everything valuable can be measured, and not everything we measure is valuable]
Be aware that there are forces that are trying to manipulate us

Like the sugar analogy, is this moral view or worldview too yummy? Is it just too satisfying? Did someone make this just for me and people in my cohort to swallow down?

This is definitely not a blanket. The thing is, you also get clarity and pleasure from really getting at truths. You can’t throw all that stuff away, you just have to realize that the signal has been amenable to perversion and misuse.

2021 Goal: Not Lose To A Kid

Happy New Years all. Even those of you, who like us, celebrate Lunar New Year which is still 6 weeks away. Nobody should feel like they are still left behind in whatever the heck you want to call that last revolution around the sun.

The last few weeks have been a nice break including a week off from work. Our kids spent 2 straight weeks with their cousins and we had a lot of downtime with family. We played lots of games (thanks to my sister for sending Zak Ticket To Ride which was a big hit). Max played chess with an NJ cousin over Zoom…we point the cameras at the board and use the chess grid to announce moves, ie “rook to D4”. We chose not to simply play online because Max is 4 and I think this is a better format for that age.

One fun way to play online is if you use lichess.org (free) and cast your browser tab to your TV. Then everyone in the room can participate. We did this with some puzzles and all the kids could chime in. It’s much more social than bending your crooked neck over a small screen. On chrome, just mouse over here:

Yinh is a big goals person. She gets won-the-lotto-level excited from planning her next 13 weeks in the SELF journal. It’s on a technology most of you remember called “paper”. Pronounced with a long “a” sound. (I don’t operate this way, I’m much more of a habit tracker, which might sound similar but is spiritually different and a topic for another time. Or not, I don’t know). Anyway, Yinh led all the older kids in goal-setting exercises and one of Zak’s goals is to beat me in chess in 3 consecutive matches. This of course scared me into adding 15 min a day of chess into my habits to at least delay the inevitable.

So I started by putting myself into the mind of my hunter. I started reading How To Beat Your Dad in Chess (as I searched for the title of that book in Amazon to fetch the hyperlink it auto-completed “how to beat your wife”. Maybe it’s better to just wait for malls to open and buy it at Waldenbooks. Screw you, Amazon). In the intro of the book, I came across a great demonstration of what pattern-recognition skills can look like. They are exceedingly context-dependent. If you are trying to assess how effective a new hire can be or how well your own skills translate to different domains than it’s one of those meta concepts to be aware of.

I wrote a thread about it here including screenshots from the book. (Twitter thread)

Finally, I’ll point you to a little discovery I in Google Sheets.

If you use the following function =CHAR(key) you can generate chess pieces!

For example, =CHAR(9818) will generate a black king.

I discovered this as I take notes in Google Sheets from the book. I got stave Zak off as long as possible. (I actually used this against him last night and yes I’m proud of beating a 7-yr-old. Judge me all you want.)

Let Chess Help Kids

Two years ago my wife Yinh started her podcast Growth From Failure. Her second guest was Berkeley Chess School founder Elizabeth Shaughnessy. It is one of my favorite interviews ever. We have referenced wisdom from it on many occasions since. Yinh texts with her from time to time and always comes away so invigorated. This past week I was stoked to meet the 83-years-young chess whiz. My expectations were high.

It turns out I still underestimated how special she is.

We went to lunch at Cafenated Coffee in Berkeley and 5 minutes into the conversation I immediately regretted not having a notebook. Elizabeth is bursting with passion for her mission and practical insights for teaching, life, and of course chess.

I did a full write-up that I’d love for you to check out: Lunch With The Amazing Founder Of Berkeley Chess: Elizabeth Shaughnessy (Link)

Here I’ll give a brief version of why it’s so special but the full article gets into ideas you can literally apply today in your life.

The Mission of Berkeley Chess School

BCS is a true Robinhood organization. As a non-profit, they are funded by donations and fees they receive for after-school programs around the Bay Area and private lessons (our son and his friends do group private lessons with BCS instructors). This supports their mission to provide free or low-cost chess instruction to students at poorly sourced Title 1 schools. In the past 40 years, BCS has taught over 250,000 kids.

But when you sit with Elizabeth you realize this is about far more than a game. Today, with Covid decimating enrollment, the school has re-purposed its building to teach disadvantaged kids. These are kids from low-income sections of Oakland, Richmond and Berkeley who are struggling with distance learning. These kids have no internet or computers at home. Without intervention, these kids, already struggling academically before the pandemic hit, may suffer an irreparable learning loss that could affect their health and financial well-being far into their adult lives.

From her experience, Elizabeth is convinced there is hope.

How Does Chess Help?

As a fan of games and games in learning, I like to believe that the skills acquired in play “transfer” to other domains. This is something I’ve wondered aloud about on Twitter. It is rooted in causality. I specifically asked Elizabeth if she thought a joy of chess was simply a symptom of a more general aptitude or if chess was imparting a more generalized skill that could be applied to other fields.

Elizabeth is a big believer that there is transference.

Chess asks kids to slow down and be methodical.

Count how many pieces are threatening your pieces. Do this for every piece, on every turn, to find the strengths and weaknesses on the board. Then look at all the checks you can deliver, then the captures, then the attacks. When all this is done, then make your move.
Consequences matter and compound.

Chess teaches you that consequences matter. Make a rash move and you get penalized by your opponent. Mistakes are expensive in chess and life. What scenarios can unfold if you always skip math class? How will this serve your long term objective of being a Wall Street wizard if you’re unable to calculate risk or odds?
Chess sharpens your focus.

She has repeatedly seen firsthand the power of chess to harness kids’ attention. It’s an effective tool to settle kids so they can get into a better headspace for learning. Kids who start out resistant often do not want to go home after school.

Chess can show kids they are smart. It teaches them to believe in their own abilities. Many of the kids BCS teaches face long odds in life but chess can offer lessons in foresight, creativity, problem solving, and self-control.

Helping BCS

Children heatseek that which provides immediate benefit or stimulation. BCS has figured out how to stimulate children that have been written off. Any witness to that transformation will see one thing — the longest lever we have as a society to improve a child’s well-being today and into adulthood. When I listen to Elizabeth, I can feel what she has seen.

If you are looking for high impact ways to give back I encourage you to check out my full post or if you prefer you can simply head over to BCS site to learn more. (Berkeley Chess School)

Tips and Insights

Elizabeth cannot help but spill insights all over the place when talking. Check out the full post to get:

practical tips for learning chess today
how to play chess with children and why
insights into teaching girls specifically
the role of genius
the pros and cons of being a good loser

And if you are wondering her view on Netflix’s Queen’s Gambit — she thought it was too long but the beginning and end were fantastic. Ultimately, she thought it deserved high marks for making chess so compelling.

Wrapping Up

My 7-yr-old has been taking lessons with BCS intermittently since he was 5. Even our copycat 4-yr-old is into it. It took him all week of multiple games per night to learn how the knight (he’ll correct you if you call it a “horse”) moves. I better start learning more, they are hot on my heels. I’m MoontowerMeta on Lichess.org if you want to add me. I’m a beginner. I’m still beating the 7-yr-old but it’s getting tougher.

This is one of Elizabeth’s sons teaching chess at our pod a few weeks ago.

Lunch With The Amazing Founder Of Berkeley Chess: Elizabeth Shaughnessy

I’m going to tell you about Elizabeth Shaughnessy. Exactly 2 years ago, Yinh contacted to Elizabeth to be one of the first guests on her podcast Growth From Failure. Elizabeth has been an inspiration to our family since that first conversation. I have been telling anyone interested in chess, children, education, or simply hope to listen to that interview.

This past weekend I was privileged to meet Elizabeth for lunch in Berkeley.

About Elizabeth

Nearly 40 years ago, Elizabeth, 83-years-young, volunteered to teach an after-school chess enrichment class at her children’s school. She expected a handful of people to take interest. Instead a diverse group of 72 children showed up. She was stunned. In the eighties, chess was the underground world of nerds. And if you think back to 80s movies, nerds were people jocks stuffed in lockers. (It probably didn’t help that we were in the Cold War — think about it — if Drago was a Grandmaster and Stallone a genius orphan from Brooklyn, Rocky IV would have swept the Oscars).

How times have changed. Today, Elizabeth oversees a chess school that teaches nearly 7,000 kids per year. She estimates the school has provided instruction and community for nearly 250,000 people in the past 40 years!

Her illustrious history can be found here.

The Berkeley Chess School

The chess school is a true Robinhood organization. As a non-profit, they are funded by donations and fees they receive for after-school programs around the Bay Area and private lessons (our son and his friends do group private lessons with BCS instructors). This supports their mission to provide free or low-cost chess instruction to students at poorly sourced Title 1 schools. While they are in over 120 local schools, Covid-19 has been devastating to enrollment as in-person instruction has cratered.

Always the optimist, Elizabeth has pivoted resources. With generous support from philanthropists and organizations working through the Berkeley Public Schools Fund, the Chess School now administers a program to help our most vulnerable neighbors. Her son, Stephen Shaughnessy, a former California State Scholastic Chess Champion and a teacher with more than twenty years of experience, guides cohorts of students struggling with remote learning in a safe setting in the School’s spacious tournament hall. Steven’s gifts and calling has always been to teach children, but this year this mission has been extra special. And challenging.

Coming from low-income neighborhoods in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, his 5th graders are from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. Not one to mince words, Elizabeth says that without intervention, these kids, already struggling academically before the pandemic hit, may suffer an irreparable learning loss that could affect their health and financial well-being far into their adult lives. They are at a critical age, steps from a dark a road without an offramp.

From her experience, Elizabeth is convinced there is hope. BCS is determined to help kids believe in themselves and their own ability to be smart. Many of the kids BCS teaches face long odds in life but chess can offer lessons in foresight, creativity, problem solving, and self-control. It can give these youngsters a chance for better futures far from the disadvantages of their childhoods. The hope is they would have kids of their own one day for whom the sky is the limit. If the realism is off-putting, then you can imagine just how important the work is.

Lessons From A Lifetime Of Teaching Chess

While this lunch was supposed to be nothing more than friends catching up, I found her passion and enthusiasm for her work the only thread I wanted to pull on. She just oozes hard-won insights into children and learning. I immediately regretted not having a notebook. Here is what I can remember from the 90 easiest minutes I ever had of keeping my mouth shut as I tried to absorb the steady stream of wisdom.

Benefits of Chess

Elizabeth is a big believer that there is transference.

Chess asks kids to slow down and be methodical.
Count how many pieces are threatening your pieces. Do this for every piece, on every turn, to find the strengths and weaknesses on the board. Then look at all the checks you can deliver, then the captures, then the attacks. When all this is done, then make your move.
Consequences matter and compound
Chess teaches you that consequences matter. Make a rash move and you get penalized by your opponent. Mistakes are expensive in chess and life. What scenarios can unfold if you always skip math class? How will this serve your long term objective of being a Wall Street wizard if you’re unable to calculate risk or odds?
Chess sharpens your focus.
She has repeatedly seen firsthand the power of chess to harness kids’ attention. It’s an effective tool to settle kids so they can get into a better headspace for learning. Kids who start out resistant often do not want to go home after school.

Tips For Learning Chess

Yinh and I are starting to learn chess alongside our 7-year-old who has been getting intermittent instruction since he was 5. Our 4-year-old recently learned how to set up the board and how the peices move (ok, he doesn’t really understand how the “horse” jumps). Learning chess can be a bit overwhelming for good reasons. There are tons of amazing resources out there from software, to YouTube, books, and communities. If you are like me, sometimes you just want to be told “Do this” and be handed a basic recipe from which you branch as you learn.

Here’s the simple recipe.

At first, focus on tactics.
You can think of tactics as a series of maneuvers to gain an advantage over your opponent. They have cool names like “forks” and “pins”. They are the “fun” part of chess. Most major software and websites provide ample puzzles to teach and reinforce tactics.
There’s plenty of time to worry about openings later
Don’t worry about studying openings until you have at least a 1200 rating. More has been written about openings than any other aspect of chess and it is a rabbit hole from which the beginning and intermediate chess player might never emerge.

In the meantime, take solace in the idea that beginners’ focus on tactics is not just the best use of time, but conveniently, fun. Strategy including openings and end games come much later (Elizabeth mentioned that endgame chess is especially fascinating to the mathematically inclined). Although I have just started, I find the puzzles extremely engaging. While it’s humbling, the feeling of “seeing” the move is addictingly rewarding.

Chess and Children

High standards
With a good teacher, many kindergartners can visually play without looking at a board. It is not the realm of genius. In fact, one of the most inspiring feelings you get from spending time with Elizabeth is how bullish she is on children’s abilities. She believes we do not give them enough credit. They are capable of so much. We easily forget how we stunt a plant’s growth when it’s in a small pot.
Playing chess with children
Do not let them undo bad moves. Remember, consequences matter. If they make a weak or ill-advised move (a blunder in chess parlance), turn the board around and play the weaker position. You can continue to do this and by the end there is a sense that nobody has truly lost which can be useful to keep kids encouraged.
Genius
They exist. She has seen her share. There are children out there who can recite every move of the last games they have played. You cannot teach geniuses. They are smarter than the teachers. But you can guide them and help them explore the exponential facets of the game. BCS has had the privilege of coaching three Grandmasters, including Olympiad Gold Medalist and 2018 US Chess Champion GM Sam Shankland. BCS offers Master Classes so the best players can learn from and help one another even as they compete.
Not pushing too hard
Other than World Champion Magnus Carlsen, the life of a grandmaster is hard. There are few things in the world in which you can be so close to the top and have so little to show for it. Most grandmasters are scraping by, writing books, and being paid to play in tourneys. She does not push the geniuses in that direction. The application of genius to real world problems results in easier, productive, and more prosperous lives.

Chess and Gender

Girls
On average, girls in chess are more discouraged by losing than boys and this can lead them to giving up. They were not born like that. But if one child is encouraged towards cooperative play, while another child is encouraged to compete, losing will be a more emotionally significant event to the child who is unfamiliar with it. She has found that girls who play sports do not give up easily, reinforcing the idea that this is learned behavior.

Losing is an important subject. There is a tension in being comfortable with losing. It’s necessary to be able to lose because it’s part of learning. However, Elizabeth has never seen a great player that was not deeply bothered by losing. So we must examine our own values and how they relate to losing. When daughters come off the floor after a chess tournament what does Elizabeth see? Fathers who ask their daughters “Did you have fun?”. To the boys they ask, “Did you win?”.

Elizabeth has lots of views on women in society based on what she has seen at formative ages and observing thousands of families. She believes there is bias and while we were too short on time to get into the vast subject one thing was obvious. We carry tremendous responsibility for the scripts children grow up believing about themselves. It is the single most empowering lesson I grokked from taking in her wisdom.

And by the way, BCS teaches girls to play chess aggressively. They are trying to balance out society’s conditioning.

There are 65 active Grandmasters in the United States. One is female.
Women
When women compete at tournaments they are extremely competitive with one another but away from the table they can become friends. Elizabeth told a story of a tournament she hosted with women coming from all over the world. After the fierce competition ended, the women organized a guided tour of SF Bay and got along like sisters. She noted this was a very different dynamic from the men. There is a balancing energy missing in our world if that story is any indication.

Why we care

Chess has exploded in popularity as nerdiness has become cool and the internet has spread access to high quality chess tools, matches, and education. Elizabeth’s life mission has coincided with a more secular phenomenon. The chess school boasts 3 of the United States’ 65 Grandmasters with the most recent one being just 17 years old (masters are getting younger thanks to online play).

If Elizabeth’s mission were simply to promote the empowering aspects of a beautiful game then she has the right to be satisfied. That baton is securely passed on to wider zeitgeist than she ever imagined. But as the recent pivot to share the school’s resources with our most neglected has shown, the Berkeley Chess School is not just a Kumon For Chess. It is a sustainable model for meaningful impact. It is a model for fostering local community. And through it’s alumni, a model for global community.

It is a place we feel lucky to have discovered and organization we are honored to give to. With enrollment down and the ongoing renovation of the School to improve ADA access, there is a lot of wood to chop. If you are interested in helping, they have several programs that you may make targeted donation to.

You can find the list here.

I’ll conclude by saying, when I met Elizabeth I had high expectations. Yinh talks about her a lot and her interview is one of my absolute favorite all-time pods, not just Yinh’s. When I met her, I was blown away. She is sharp as hell. She cares so much you can feel it. As I listened to her stories, it was clear I was in the the presence of a special individual who has spliced her DNA into the heart of an institution (this is not so figurative…her son Steven manages the day to day operations now).

We are excited for the future of the Berkeley Chess School!

(And if you want to learn she recommends starting with the tutorials on licchess.org. Hope to see you there!)

Fun Ways To Teach Your Kids Encryption

Here are 2 simple ways to introduce the idea of encryption to elementary school kids.

Ciphers

I had them try to decode the following code:

4 15 7

(with some prodding they eventually figured out it was a simple letter-number cipher spelling “dog”)

Mastermind

You might recognize this game from your own childhood.

You don’t need to buy it. You can play it with different color marbles, bingo chips, coins or almost any set of things lying around the house.

How to play:

1. A codemaker constructs a hidden sequence of 4 different colored beads (out of a possible 6 colors).
2. The codebreaker tries to guess the sequence by arranging 4 colors in order.
3. The codemaker gives non-verbal feedback:
  a) Identifies how many of the colors used are correct
  b) Identifies how many beads are the right color AND in the right position
4. Repeat until the code is cracked
  Enrichment questions:
  
  How can the game be made easier?
  How can the game be made harder?
  
  And if you have an older onlooker…how many possible codes can be created?
  
  And if you have an Excel fan in the vicinity, see how you can solve such problems using the hypergeometric distribution. (A Reddit thread targeting game designers)

A Slightly More Advanced Example: Using a “Mask”

Suppose a group of people are sitting around a table and you all want to know how much money everyone makes but of course nobody is willing to share their own salary.

Here’s a way to uncover the average pay at the table without anybody needing to disclose their pay.

Let’s pretend A, B, C, and D are having dinner together at this table.

Just follow these steps:

Masking Phase

Tell “A” to add an arbitrary number to their pay and write the sum on a piece of paper. It’s very important to write just the sum! So if A makes $100k per year and the arbitrary number is 5,000,000 then they would write: $5,100,000
Pass the paper to “B”
“B” notes the sum and adds it to their own salary plus their own arbitrary number. They write this sum on a fresh piece of paper and hand it to “C”. Important: use a new piece of paper, we don’t want anyone to see the history of how the sum was created.

Example:

“B” receives paper with the sum $5,100, 000
“B” add this to their own salary $50,000 plus an arbitrary number of $1,000,000
“B” passes a piece of paper with the total $6,150,000 to “D”
Repeat this process until the paper gets back to “A”

Un-masking Phase

“A” subtracts their arbitrary number only from the total and passes the new total to “B”.

Example :

“A” receives a piece of paper with the number $9,000,000 written on it
“A” subtracts the $1,000,000 arbitrary number and passes the number $8,000,000 to “B”
Repeat until everyone has subtracted their arbitrary number.

The remaining total is the sum of everyone’s pay. If we divide by 4 (the number of people) we have discovered the average pay at the table and nobody needed to reveal their own number!

You have learned a simple way to “mask” data with arbitrary numbers!

Try it yourself. You don’t even need paper — just explain the rules to some friends in your texting group and find out if you are actually under or overpaid! Just don’t kill the messenger.

(The mask example was inspired by this Twitter thread by @theemilyaccount)

Video Game Veto

Several family members wanted to get Zak a Nintendo Switch when he turned 7 a few weeks ago. I shot it down. I’m the bad guy. Sorry, not sorry. I’ll defend my stance and do you one better. I’ll explain why my stance even needs to be defended. Somehow in this battle over video games, I found myself on the low ground.

First, my defense is simple. Opportunity cost. Here’s an example. My 4-year-old Max recently lost his iPad for 10 days. For those of you who follow Yinh’s Insta (feel free to follow, her ‘stories’ are more amusing than anything I write), there was a period of this kid creating his own Marvel paper costumes and pumping out artwork like he was getting paid commission. Less screentime meant more creativity.

When the iPad resurfaced, it crowded out much of his ingenuity. It’s worse than that too. The iPad summons the devil. Every time Max is asked to turn off the screen we suffer a hell tantrum. All the phases of opiate withdrawal unfolding several times a day.

Zak, being 7 and having better emotional control, is not as dramatic but the video games are still crowding out his creativity.

You would think my no-Switch policy would be unanimously embraced. You’d be wrong. Here are the arguments and pro-video game propaganda I push back against.

“You played video games and look how you turned out”
If you grew up in the era of “blowing dust” out of your NES cartridges and have managed to simply not blow your life to smithereens, people will say this to you. We have all seen the amusing correlation/causation pictures. Well, this fallacy is a specific strain of those spurious conclusions. The post-hoc fallacy. If Y came after X, then Y caused X.

This fallacy is everywhere. Kid has hives. Sleeps in parents’ bed. Hives go away. Therefore, his bed caused the hives. (This just happened in our house). You have a cold so you drink soup. Cold goes away. Must have been the soup. These interventions are given credit for mean reversion’s work.

The video game example is even worse in my mind because of opportunity cost. I might have a good job today in spite of, not because of, video games. How much didn’t I do because of video games? Maybe I would have been a better athlete, musician, or programmer. All activities that competed for time with video games. Hobbies that if cultivated would have been unambiguously more rewarding considering, today, I wish I was better in all 3 domains and could care less about my video game skills.
Video games have benefits
When I was a kid, I was told video games “rot your brain”. Today, everything from critical thinking to reflexes are attributed to playing games. Scholarships, profits, and Ninja all lend games a legitimacy they didn’t enjoy in 1987. Nothing will make you seem stodgier, techno-fearing, and possibly stupid than being anti-video game.

Consider Shopify founder Tobi Lutke. He is outspoken in his claims of games like Factorio and Starcraft contributing to his business savvy. Well, if you have ever heard Tobi speak, he’s really smart. A mind like his is going to deconstruct strategy and actively pull the insights from the game. Being analytical in the first place is what’s most important. If it wasn’t video games, he would have cracked something else.

It’s not the game, it’s the approach to the game. Just like TV or movies or reading. Any passive activity can be intellectually enriching if your approach is active. When you read are you asking what the themes are? Why is the author framing things a certain way? How does it relate to other knowledge? Critically reading or watching can turn “brain-rotting” behaviors into brain-building ones.

Pushing Back Against The Modern Halo Around Gaming

You’d be forgiven for thinking I contribute to the gaming halo. The gaming section of my site is anchored by Let Your Kids Play Boardgames. Some nuance is in order. Our kids play some video games. Playing them is not especially bad or good. I put it in the same category as passively watching TV and it would count against that attention budget. (I reserve the right to modify my stance for games especially strategic or competitive).

Gaming, video or tabletop, can be an amazing way to learn. Fun is a renewable form of fuel to burn. Yet in the wrong personality, it can be horribly inefficient. Like learning about basketball from watching the Kardashians. How many people playing poker on their phones mindlessly are internalizing probability lessons? And parents, you know zombie-mode when you see it.

The halo of gaming stems from its strategic and competitive aspects. Still, strategy and planning can be acquired in many ways. Just this week I was thinking about how much Zak could learn if I asked him to break down the steps to catch a trout. He’d need to find out where to go when to go, what bait to use, and what technique to employ. Taking a big problem and breaking it into smaller steps.

Gaming has fast feedback cycles. Great for learning. But also convenient to get a mouse to push a dopamine lever. Then there’s the whole issue of transference. Does becoming a grandmaster make you better at other strategic endeavors or does it just make you good at chess? And here’s the diabolical question — if the grandmaster excelled in other domains how much credit should we give to chess? Again the fallacy rears its head, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Our minds are so easily tricked. The literature on transference is mixed, but it’s such a believable grift that most people won’t bother to check.

Overall I think the benefits of games are conveniently oversold. Just like TV, if accompanied by parental prompts and guidance they can be an enriching tool to practice critical thinking. Some kids, like young Tobi Lutke, will be inclined that way on their own. Many will just stare with dead eyes, unfazed if the house was burning down. Maybe I’m just an old crank who wishes he had that time back. I’d rather see what kids come up with when they aren’t sitting in front of a screen.

Codenames Telepathy

In a week, I will have known Yinh for 17 years. We don’t complete each other’s sentences. We still have plenty of stories to tell each other, although CoVid lockdown is burning that fuse a bit faster. (I always think of the Chris Rock joke about a wife telling her spouse to “get kidnapped and come back with new stories”). We have thus far deferred marital mind-meld.

But you would not know this by watching us play the 21st-century version of the Newlywed game…Codenames.

The Joy Of Codenames

If you play any party games you know Codenames so I won’t re-hash it. If you don’t play party games then you should know that blacking out right after dinner at family functions is anti-social. You should play Codenames instead.

Being in sync with a Codenames teammate is successfully web-crawling their brain. You hop from the axon of one idea to the dendrites of another as you stretch to find how they linked words on the Codenames’ grid to the clue that launched the brain scan in the first place.

We tend to work best when she gives the clues because in our relationship I tend to be the one filled with more random nonsense. This is a bug in times when being distracted is a penalty, since I can bike-shed with the best of them. But in Codenames, being a central repository for mutual references that unlocks with a single word is a decided advantage.

Here’s an example from Friday night. Yinh gave the clue “Empire, 2”. This clue was supposed to unlock:

“strike”
Easy enough. Empire was a reference to “Empire Strikes Back”.
“chair”
Ok, so why did she think “empire” would lead me to “chair”?

I had a theory as to why she connected these words, so to test it I asked her what her logic was. She stumbled. She had forgotten why these words went together, which made me think my theory was even more correct.

I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t an “empire” -> “throne” -> “chair” pathway.

Here’s the actual pathway:

“empire” –> what empire comes to mind? –> Roman or Ottoman –> Ottoman = “chair”

Here’s the best part. Her logic was both not original thinking or explicit. It was a subconscious reference to Eddie Izzard’s Dressed to Kill stand-up special that we’ve seen together. When I reminded her of Izzard’s joke that linked the Ottoman Empire to furniture she immediately realized what she had done.

I always get a kick out of her screwing up a reference but still understanding what she means. Just this week, she asked me what the latest on the Skrillex vs NY Times drama was going to which I responded, “You mean Slatestarcodex?”. She laughed at how she butchered it and I was happy to know she listens to me when I talk about the random crap I find interesting.

Check out Codenames. Read your partner’s mind to crush your in-laws at your next family game night.

You Can Mock Trade With A Deck Of Cards

Here’s a mock trading game I learned as a trainee to simulate futures and options market making. This game was commonly used as a day 1 exercise in trading class or when interviewing cohorts of college grads during recruiting “combines”.

The Futures Game

What you need:

A deck of cards
Nerdy friends (the more the better)
A paper and pen per person to use as a tradelog

Setup:

You want to deal out enough cards to players (these are the market makers) so that there is about 25 remaining in the deck. There’s some leeway here.