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The Game of “Ten Women”

Po Bronson's The First $20 Million Is Always the HardestThere’s a marvelous game embedded in Po Bronson‘s excellent 1997 book The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest: A Silicon Valley Novel. The game’s free and you can play it almost anywhere. It’s called “Ten Women.”

The first time you hear the rules, the game sounds like a sexist piece of politically incorrect frat-boy mischief — and, okay, there is an element of that. But once you’ve played a handful of times, you realize that this game isn’t really about sex at all; it’s a potent way to examine how we make choices and deal with opportunities.

Here are the basic rules for “Ten Women”. (Or, at least, here’s how I remember and play the game.)

  1. Sit or stand in a public place where there’s plenty of pedestrian traffic. Mall, airport, movie theater, baseball stadium, it doesn’t matter.
  2. Take a careful look at the next ten women who walk by, one at a time.
  3. As each woman passes, you must decide right then and there whether that’s the one woman out of the ten you get to go to bed with.
  4. Once that woman has passed you by, you can no longer choose her. You’ve lost the opportunity forever.
  5. If you pass on the ninth woman, then you’re stuck with the tenth, no matter how unattractive she might be (by whatever standards you use to judge that).

Sounds juvenile, right? Sounds sexist? Indulge me here. Keep reading.

“Ten Women” is about women in the same way that blackjack is about laminated pieces of paper with pictures and numbers on them. It’s really about taking risks and making gambles. It’s about learning to make quick decisions and not regretting your mistakes. The people — like the cards — are just tokens.

Still think the game is sexist or objectifying? Then think about this: imagine these ten women are ten stocks you might buy. Or ten colleges you might enroll in. Or ten potential employees you might hire. Ten properties you might buy. Ten potential spouses. (Did you make the right choice marrying your teenage sweetheart, or should you have waited to see if someone more compatible came along…?)

Make your choice, and make it now. Remember, you can’t change your mind. Time marches on, opportunities disappear. You can’t unchoose.

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Sid Meier’s “Civilization IV”

I’ve been a longtime fan of the Civilization series of turn-based simulation games — ever since the first iteration back in the very early ’90s. But I held off buying the latest release, Civilization IV, for several months because of its horrendous quality control issues. (For more on those, just take a gander at all the nasty reviews on the Amazon page.)

Civilization IVBut finding myself in need of a major distraction a few weeks ago, I gave in and picked up a copy. Armed with the latest patch from the official website, I crossed my fingers and took the plunge.

Lo and behold — it turns out that Civilization IV fuckin’ rocks.

For those that don’t know the concept of the game, it goes like this: You start out a wandering tribe in the wilderness somewhere around 4000 BC. As the years advance, you build cities, research technologies, train armies, conduct diplomacy, and promote your civilization’s culture. The first one to either build a functioning spaceship or conquer the world wins. (There are other paths to victory, but these are the main ones.)

Simulation is always a tricky business. Complete verisimilitude is an impossibility in gaming, and not to be desired anyway. Do you really want to play a game where you vote on endless riders to appropriations bills in subcommittees? Do you want to play a first-person shooter where you need to press the I key every so often to scratch an itch? Of course you don’t. You want a game that provides a convincing gloss of reality while still remaining a game through and through.

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The Joy of Strict XHTML

I’ve recently discovered something else the Mozilla Firefox browser can do that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can’t: Firefox can accept documents using the “application/xhtml+xml” header.

Who gives a shit? you might be thinking to yourself. Wait, I’ll explain. This might actually change your life someday.

For years, people have been writing web pages using the dated and somewhat arbitrary HTML 4 specification. If you don’t know what HTML looks like, take a look at the source code on any web page (by going to the “View” menu and selecting “Page Source” in Firefox or “View Source” in IE).

The problem is that during the web browser wars of the ’90s, Microsoft and Netscape both decided that they wanted their browsers to be as inclusive as possible. You could be a sloppy or an amateur coder, make all kinds of errors in your HTML, and the browser would silently compensate for you. For instance, the proper way to create a bulleted list is by using this code:

<ul>
<li>apples</li>
<li>oranges</li>
<li>bananas</li>
</ul>

But you could just as easily get away with typing this instead:

<UL>
<Li>apples
<li>oranges<lI>
<li>bananas
</ul></Ul>

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Why Is Health Care So Fucked Up?

The American health care system is fucked up. And I’m not talking about health care on the macroeconomic/social policy scale here — right now I’m more concerned with the average Joe/Jane’s trip to the family practitioner or the emergency room.

  • Why do so many doctors still schedule appointments in a black ledger book on the desk instead of in a shared calendar on the computer?
  • How come they can’t e-mail you to confirm or reschedule your appointment?
  • Why is it that every time you go to a new doctor or hospital, you have to fill out that same damn patient information form on a clipboard in the waiting room and wait for someone to type it in to the computer?
  • Why do they actually need to photocopy your health insurance card?
  • Why is that the doctors all scribble notes on pads of paper that can easily be lost or damaged (or misinterpreted) instead of using a PDA or a tablet PC?
  • Why do you get handwritten prescription slips that you have to physically shepherd over to a pharmacy in your car?
  • Why do you have to wait another week or two for the cryptic paper statement to arrive in the mail from my insurance company?
  • Why do supplementary bills come trickling in from various medical labs a couple of weeks after that?
  • Why are there constantly mistakes in the billing that need to be corrected with a million phone calls and faxes?

It’s simple: American health care practitioners haven’t caught on to information technology. It’s an industry that’s stuck in the Stone Age.

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The Vapid World of CNN

At one time, CNN was considered a network of substance. People used to trust CNN to deliver important, on-topic news. What happened? The network has succumbed to competitive pressures and resorted to crass sensationalism, celebrity gossip and the time-honored stories about women in trouble and petty criminals. Checking on the CNN.com homepage a few moments ago, I see stories “above the fold” about: A fire on a cruise ship (the main story, occupying about a … Read more

Bad Creative Writing Advice

The Internet is full of bad advice for creative writers. Here’s just a small sampling of the nonsense you can find if you look for it. “Show, don’t tell.” News flash: writing is telling. It’s a completely linguistic art form. There’s no showing involved, unless you’re writing illustrated books like Dr. Seuss or graphic novels like Neil Gaiman. The real distinction to be made here is between writing descriptive language (e.g. when your character is … Read more

Who Do You Write For?

If you’re a novelist or short story writer or poet or any other kind of dabbler in the written word, who do you write for? Who is your audience? Keep in mind that your words are not immortal. Your words will eventually be forgotten. There will come a time — maybe in ten years, maybe in ten thousand — when everything you’ve ever written will be utterly forgotten. But don’t fret; you’re in august company. … Read more

Why Is Spelling and Grammer Importunt?

Why are proper spelling, punctuation and grammar important? Society values a complex system of spelling and grammar because it gives us an easy way to measure a person’s education.

Miscellaneous Web Design Sins

Chances are, if you’ve put together a website, you’ve committed some (or all) of these venal sins. Or your clients have made you commit them. Hyperlinking the words “click here.” People generally don’t read websites in the way they read a book or a magazine; they skim. And when you hyperlink contentless words like click here, the user gets lost in a sea of “click here”s. You can’t tell where the link goes without reading … Read more

Making Choices

Here’s something I wrote several years ago while facing the most difficult decision of my life. I felt crushed by the burden of choosing between two alternatives that seemed equally horrible at the time. So I sat and scribbled this on a yellow legal pad. It seemed to flow like a Socratic dialogue, building from my own narrow circumstances to a larger and more comprehensive theory of how to live. Is this applicable to every … Read more