"That Happens"

Competitive Card Games and Coronavirus

3/31/2020

This year my blog was supposed to be for reviews of the books I’m reading each week, but because of *gestures broadly* it has seemed pointless to try to start such an off-topic discussion. So for this blog I will not-so-briefly blurb the books I’ve been reading the past few weeks and then add my gaming-informed rant to the Internet pandemonium. Skip the next 5 paragraphs if you’re just here for the rant. Only read the next 5 if you’re just here for the books. Or read the paragraphs in random order if you want it to make as much sense as the plot of Catch-22.

Two weeks ago I read Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. A novel about the home front during The Second World War as told from the overlapping perspectives of a well-connected mafia lieutenant, Dexter, and an ambitious female factory worker, Anna, whose father disappeared during the Great Depression after doing a job for Dexter. I would recommend this to anyone interested in historical fiction. Of particular relevance is the exploration of various ways people dealt with the massive societal upheaval of the times -- often oscillating between feeling like they should be doing more to help their countrymen and doing more to help themselves.

During the time I was reading Manhattan Beach I was supposed to be on a climbing trip in Oregon (or maybe Southern California… or maybe Nevada -- the world was at our fingertips!). So the week before that I was psyching myself up reading Chris Noble’s Why We Climb: a collection of essays and interviews with accomplished climbers trying to get at why people compete and/or put themselves in danger just to get on top of rocks. Over the course of that week as the smart states shut down, reading the book went from inspiring to frustrating. Trying to take from it what I can, Chris Noble points out that some old-timey French alpinist called the mountains “the stone mirror” because while a glass mirror shows what you’re like on the outside, being alone on a cliff face staring down a fifty foot fall with your face inches from the cold granite behemoth will show what you’re like on the inside. I wonder what other activities have this property?

The week before that, I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The book is quite long and the absurdist style of humor is relentless and it’s not told in chronological order (to be contrasted with Slaughterhouse Five, the other World-War-2-Was-An-Outrageous-Waste-Of-Lives novel from that era, which is short, doesn’t hit you over the head with the humor, and is explicit when it switches back and forth between time periods). The eponymous “catch-22” in the novel is that any bomber pilot who was crazy simply needed to ask the doctor to ground him and he would be grounded since crazy pilots shouldn’t fly. But by asking not to fly the pilot proved that he must be sane since only a crazy man wouldn’t try anything and everything to avoid real and imminent threats to his life. So since the pilot must be sane, he has to fly. That’s some catch. Basically every page presents yet another absurd version of this paradoxical predicament posed by the human cogs of the military-industrial bureaucracy.

I couldn’t help but think Donald Trump would have done quite well for himself in this universe. A universe where the Colonel decides to give a medal to the protagonist whose mistake cost the lives of everyone on a neighboring plane because having the medal meant he actually must have done the right thing (having subordinates getting each other killed needlessly would make the Colonel look bad, but having subordinates getting each other killed heroically would make the Colonel look good). Or the universe where an Air Force Lieutenant inexplicably becomes a black market mogul by selling hard-to-come-by foods for less than he bought them for. Come to think of it, Trump has done quite well in this universe. Uh oh.

And last week I read Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang. Jiang was a failing entrepreneur that realized his actually-quite-normal fear of rejection was keeping him from putting himself out there, making bootstrapping his business impossible. He imposed on himself the challenge of getting rejected by someone every day for 100 days and wrote this book about what he learned. He criticizes self-help books for being overly enthusiastic about their “one simple trick” to turning your life around, but then acts like being less afraid of rejection is indeed just such a trick. I’ll forgive him that one though because his rejection challenges were brave, often hilarious, and often not even rejected! And because the book was a needed wake-up call for me to remember to put myself out there more -- as a wanna-be videogame entrepreneur myself.

Moving on from the books, I think competitive card games have a little bit to add about our response to the Coronavirus -- at the collective level and at the personal level. First of all, I should note how brilliant social distancing/isolation is as a public health measure: people acting selfishly to protect themselves from disease end up adopting the exact same behaviors they should be adopting to selflessly protect others if they already have it. The testing for who has Coronavirus does not work this way. Competitive card games like Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone show that the rich and well connected selfishly using tests on themselves while there aren’t enough for the rest of us is actually worse than testing nobody at all.

Let me explain. In competitive card games like Magic (or Pokemon or Yugioh), two players face off against each other with decks of cards that each have certain attributes or abilities to help defeat the other player. Typically one player will play a card on their turn, then their opponent will respond by playing a card to counter that one on their turn, and so on. This leads to a concept called “card advantage” where if player A has more cards than player B, then player B eventually can’t play another to counter their opponent, who will continue to play cards after B has run out. B may have time to deal with this inevitability though: having 7 cards when A has 8 cards means B is at a card disadvantage, but has 7 opportunities to make a play where one of his cards counts for two of A’s. But if B has 1 card and A has 2 the situation is far more dire for B since his sole card must be able to handle both of A’s. It’s the difference between a 12% deficit and a 100% deficit in cards.

Now if our cards are Coronavirus tests and the opponent’s cards are people who are potentially infected, then we can see how the concept applies. We are at a massive card disadvantage here which means trading one-for-one -- one test in exchange for one diagnosis of a well-connected, non-essential individual -- doesn’t just do nothing for our global health efforts, it actually hurts because we’ve increased our test-card deficit like in the 7-to-8 vs 1-to-2 scenario above. In order to get our money’s worth out of the tests we need each test administered to count for hundreds or even thousands of people who will now no longer need a test. But how can we do that? Test the cashiers!

The other brilliant thing about social distancing/isolation is that since all the people who are doing it are acting as if they already have the disease, we don’t need to test them since a positive or negative result should not change their behavior. But on the other hand, we must have a significant portion of the population acting as if they do not have the disease since they must continue to work. These people will continue to contract the virus and they will spread it too unless we test them. The best way to allocate our tiny number of tests is to move people from the must-act-like-I-don’t-have-it group to the must-act-like-I-do-have-it group as quickly and accurately as possible.

An example of a cashier shows how this scales. Say a cashier at Target is checking someone out once every 3 minutes for 5 or 6 hours per day. That means that if she has the virus she could contact 500 or more people before showing symptoms, and thousands if she is in the potentially huge group of asymptomatic carriers. Assuming 20% of customers she rings up contract the virus too, then testing the cashier after she has it but before she’s contagious could save 100+ from getting sick and 10+ hospital beds. Not to mention the people they would spread it to. Now that’s value. Even if the cashier tests negative this is also important because higher risk individuals can interact with this person instead of another cashier whose status is unknown.

Cashiers and other essential staff like nurses who are in contact with many people should be getting tested every day. The public good of knowing the status of one Target cashier is easily equivalent to knowing the status of 500 venture capitalists holed up in their mansions (who, let’s be real, are probably getting tested every day themselves because one negative test is just a novelty when you’re more likely to contract it tomorrow than yesterday). Naturally we wouldn’t have this problem at all if only we had enough tests to go around. Though we can rest assured that the people responsible will absolutely suffer no personal consequences for this failure. This leads to the other concept from competitive card games that’s applicable here, this time at the individual level: “that happens”.

In Magic the Gathering one type of card is called a “counter” which can be played even when it’s not your turn to prevent the opponent from playing their card before it even touches the table. Knowing these cards exist, my opponent will hesitantly lay down the card they want to play, and then I either play my counter, or if I don’t want to or don’t have a counter, I say “that happens”. “That happens” is such a powerful phrase because even if I don’t have the counter, my opponent doesn’t know that and so it’s like I am giving permission for something that I didn’t even have control over in the first place. Sometimes I can even convince myself that I am merely letting my opponent have a fighting chance by “allowing” them to do something I could not actually prevent.

“That happens” is also useful just to tell myself. In competitive card games (as in real life… if you see where I’m going here) I concoct an elaborate plan where I steadily dismantle and then defeat my opponent, often imagining that they will never play a card again and will just passively allow my victory at whatever pace I feel like. When this inevitably doesn’t occur, “that happens” is a mantra to accept and then reorient myself to the new reality created by this card or event. It’s not over ‘til it’s over, so for me “that happens” is an effective way to roll with the punches. For example the other day I went for a bike ride but was deciding whether to lug my heavy bike lock with me or leave it at Stanford. “What if I need to lock my bike somewhere on this out-and-back but can’t and then it gets stolen?” I worried. But even that unlikely event wouldn’t be the end of the world, so in that situation the best I could do would be to admit that “that happens” and then start walking.

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