If someone invites you to play with an overture (a mild good-natured insult, tossing a ball at you...), you can accept in 2 ways: 1. Infer and play by implied rules (assuming you’re socialized enough to know them) 2. Take advantage of the underspecification to “win” in 1 move
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Reason for this little thread is that many otherwise competent people don’t seem to get how to “play twitter,” going for the win-in-one-move mic-drop interaction, rather than “playing along” to find the most satisfying banter chain.
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In a way “playing along” is the infinite game meta skill required to play finite games well. You’re trying to set yourself boundaries so the given finite game turns into the means of “continuing to play” the infinite game for a bit before you must find another finite game vehicle
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The opposite of knowing how to play along is being an unwitting spoilsport. Being intentionally a spoilsport is of course a different thing altogether, where your payoff is derived from others’ annoyance.
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A good illustration of this dynamic is in Futurama when Bender gets jealous of Nibbler and tries and fails to get the attention back on himselfhttp://www.cc.com/video-clips/ubbd92/futurama-nibbler-s-birthday …
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End of conversation
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