My Social Experiments

For many years, I've thrown social experiments as part of a group I founded, called Ergo. Our rule: we can never repeat the same event format. Once we've used one, it's dead, forcing each event to be experimental. Here are a few of our bizarre/entertaining past events: 1) Novelty party: each attendee brings something interesting (an experience, food, or object) that they believe other attendees will not have experienced before. A winner is crowned based on surveying attendees about how novel...
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Our Human Games: games are everywhere, and they matter more than most people think

Photo by Erica Li on Unsplash
Games reflect an important part of human psychology. One broad way to think about "games" is that they are any situation that has: (a) a set of rules (explicit or implicit) that are made up by humans, (b) a scoring system (explicit or implicit) for determining how players are doing or for deciding who wins, (c) participants who are trying to increase their "score," and (d) a game context (outside of which the game rules stop applying). So, by this definition, games include ch...
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