Tag: parties

Party Games

A year and half back, my wife had gone to Gurgaon on work. One evening, she called and told me that she was “going to go for a party at the guest house”, which I duly conveyed to our daughter.

The next morning, our daughter woke up and asked me about her mother’s party. Having been appraised of the proceedings late in the night, I shared the summary. “That is all fine, Appa”, she want, “but WHAT WAS THERE at the party?”.

I was a bit puzzled by the question and said there was nothing. “Why does a party need to have anything?”, I replied, “in this case there was big people juice, which people drank and talked to each other”.

It was in the course of that conversation that I realised that most kids’ parties usually have “something”. Some have bouncy castles. Some take place in play areas. Some people organise magic shows. Others have art workshops. And so on. A lot of kids’ parties are “structured”, with “stuff to do”.

Coming to think of it, this is not true of kids’ parties alone. Even a lot of adult parties nowadays have “themes”. So people have “poker nights”, or “board game nights”, or “movie nights” for which they call other people and socialise and together perform what can sometimes be a perfectly satisfactory single player activity.

Poker nights, I can understand, since it is sport, and one that can be much better played offline. However, I can’t imagine calling a bunch of random friends for a “poker night” – if it’s a poker night, it ought to be a bunch of people who are also interested in poker.

That aside, why should you bother hosting a party for a bunch of friends, and then not give them the opportunity to talk to one another, and instead subject them to some “party game”? “What is even the point of having structured activities at a party?”, my wife wondered loudly one morning.

My theory is this – not everyone is interesting and capable of holding an intelligent conversation. However, everyone has the need to talk to other people and socialise.

So if you are not sure about the quality of conversations that the people you are inviting to a party are likely to contribute, you want to somehow ensure that the party is at least somewhat interesting to everyone that attends. And so, you get rid of the upside (of some fantastic conversation happening at the party), and instead limit the downside (of everyone there getting bored), and put some structured activity on the party.

In other words, you put a “collar” on the party.

Collar – a derivatives strategy where you give up on upside to avoid downside

I have written here about the concept of “alcohol buddies“:

My friend Hari The Kid has this concept of “alcohol buddies”. These are basically people who you can hang out with only if at least one of you is drunk (there are some extreme cases who are so difficult to hang out with that the only way to do it is for BOTH of you to be drunk). The idea is that if both of you are sober there is nothing really to talk about and you will easily get bored. But hey, these are your friends so you need to hang out with them, and the easiest way of doing so is to convert them into alcohol buddies.

Now, there are some people who you can’t hang out with in “ground state”, but when one or both of you is drunk you can have an interesting conversation. Those are alcohol buddies.

However, there is a (possibly small) set of people who are fundamentally so uninteresting that even if both of you are pissed drunk, it is impossible to have a conversation is interesting to both people. And if you are having a largish party with a diverse set of guests, it is likely that there are many such pairs of guests, who cannot talk to each other even when pissed drunk.

And that is where having a party game helps. It prevents people from having random conversations and instead corrals (notice that wordplay there) everyone into the party game collar. No upside, no downside, nobody needs to find that there are others at the party who are absolutely boring to them. They all go home happy.

So far, we have resisted this “themed party” concept, except maybe in the context of NED Talks. Even our daughter’s birthday parties, so far, have been at home (once in Lalbagh during the pandemic), with the only “planned activity” being eating cake and snacks, and kids randomly playing in her room.

Let’s see how far we can carry this on!

Order of guests’ arrival

When I’m visiting someone’s house and they have an accessible bookshelf, one of the things I do is to go check out the books they have. There is no particular motivation, but it’s just become a habit. Sometimes it serves as conversation starters (or digressors). Sometimes it helps me understand them better. Most of the time it’s just entertaining.

So at a friend’s party last night, I found this book on Graph Theory. I just asked my hosts whose book it was, got the answer and put it back.

As many of you know, whenever we host a party, we use graph theory to prepare the guest list. My learning from last night’s party, though, is that you should not only use graph theory to decide WHO to invite, but also to adjust the times you tell people so that the party has the best outcome possible for most people.

With the full benefit of hindsight, the social network at last night’s party looked approximately like this. Rather, this is my interpretation of the social network based on my knowledge of people’s affiliation networks.

This is approximate, and I’ve collapsed each family to one dot. Basically it was one very large clique, and two or three other families (I told you this was approximate) who were largely only known to the hosts. We were one of the families that were not part of the large clique.

This was not the first such party I was attending, btw. I remember this other party from 2018 or so which was almost identical in terms of the social network – one very large clique, and then a handful of families only known to the hosts. In fact, as it happens, the large clique from the 2018 party and from yesterday’s party were from the same affiliation network, but that is only a coincidence.

Thinking about it, we ended up rather enjoying ourselves at last night’s party. I remember getting comfortable fairly quickly, and that mood carrying on through the evening. Conversations were mostly fun, and I found myself connecting adequately with most other guests. There was no need to get drunk. As we drove back peacefully in the night, my wife and daughter echoed my sentiments about the party – they had enjoyed themselves as well.

This was in marked contrast with the 2018 party with the largely similar social network structure (and dominant affiliation network). There we had found ourselves rather disconnected, unable to make conversation with anyone. Again, all three of us had felt similarly. So what was different yesterday compared to the 2018 party?

I think it had to do with the order of arrival. Yesterday, we were the second family to arrive at the party, and from a strict affiliation group perspective, the family that had preceded us at the party wasn’t part of the large clique affiliation network (though they knew most of the clique from beforehand). In that sense, we started the party on an equal footing – us, the hosts and this other family, with no subgroup dominating.

The conversation had already started flowing among the adults (the kids were in a separate room) when the next set of guests (some of them from the large clique arrived), and the assimilation was seamless. Soon everyone else arrived as well.

The point I’m trying to make here is that because the non-large-clique guests had arrived first, they had had a chance to settle into the party before the clique came in. This meant that they (non-clique) had had a chance to settle down without letting the party get too cliquey. That worked out brilliantly.

In contrast, in the 2018 party, we had ended up going rather late which meant that the clique was already in action, and a lot of the conversation had been clique-specific. This meant that we had struggled to fit in and never really settled, and just went through the motions and returned.

I’m reminded of another party WE had hosted back in 2012, where there was a large clique and a small clique. The small clique had arrived first, and by the theory in this post, should have assimilated well into the party. However, as the large clique came in, the small clique had sort of ended up withdrawing into itself, and I remember having had to make an effort to balance the conversation between all guests, and it not being particularly stress-free for me.

The difference there was that there were TWO cliques with me as cut-vertex.  Yesterday, if you took out the hosts (cut-vertex), you would largely have one large clique and a few isolated nodes. And the isolated nodes coming in first meant they assimilated both with one another and with the party overall, and the party went well!

And now that I’ve figured out this principle, I might break my head further at the next party I host – in terms of what time I tell to different guests!

Aamir Khan and Alcohol Buddies

Over the weekend I was watching Koffee with Karan, the episode featuring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor. It was one of the better episodes in the season, along with the one featuring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt (I did not finish watching any of the others, they were damn boring).

The thing with Koffee With Karan is that it is highly dependent on how interesting the guests are, and not all bollywood stars are equally interesting. Even in this episode, Kareena Kapoor came off as a bit of a bore, refusing to answer most questions, but Aamir Khan was great.

In the early part of the episode, both Kareena and Karan accused Aamir of being “boring”. “You come to a party stand alone and just leave; You catch one or two people and just hang out only with them for the full party”, they said. And then a bit later, one of them (I now forget who – possibly Kareena) said “when I meet you in small groups of 5-6 or less you talk a lot and you are such an interesting person, but why is it that you are such a bore at parties?”

Then Aamir went on to talk about a party at Karan’s house where the music was so loud everyone had to shout to be heard. Nobody was dancing to the music. Nothing was happening. “What is the point of such a party?” he asked.

My friend Hari The Kid has this concept of “alcohol buddies”. These are basically people who you can hang out with only if at least one of you is drunk (there are some extreme cases who are so difficult to hang out with that the only way to do it is for BOTH of you to be drunk). The idea is that if both of you are sober there is nothing really to talk about and you will easily get bored. But hey, these are your friends so you need to hang out with them, and the easiest way of doing so is to convert them into alcohol buddies.

Bringing together this concept and Aamir Khan being “boring”, we can classify people into two kinds – those that are fun when drunk, and those that are fun when sober (some, I think, are both). And people who prefer to have fun when drunk consider the sober sorts boring, and people who prefer to have fun sober think the “alcohol buddies” are boring.

Aamir, for example, appears to be a “have fun when sober” guy, who likes to hang out in small groups and make interesting conversation. Most of Bollywood, however, doesn’t seem to operate that way, hanging out in large groups and not really bothering about conversation.

Yesterday, my wife and I were talking, after an event, about how if you are the sort that likes to hang out in small groups and make conversations, large parties can be rather boring. The problem is that you would have just about started making a nice conversation with someone, when someone else will butt in (hey, this is a party, so this is allowed) and change the topic massively or massively bring down the interest level in the conversation. Every conversation ultimately goes down to its lowest common denominator, leaving you rather frustrated.

And if you are the types who likes large parties and alcohol buddies, small conversations will drain you. You struggle to find things to talk about, and there are only so many people to talk to.

PS: Alcohol and good conversations are not mutually exclusive. Some of my best conversations have happened in very small groups, massively fuelled by alcohol. That said, these have largely been with people I can have great conversations with even when everyone is sober.

Zoom in, zoom out

It was early on in the lockdown that the daughter participated in her first ever Zoom videoconference. It was an extended family call, with some 25 people across 9 or 10 households.

It was chaotic, to say the least. Family call meant there was no “moderation” of the sort you see in work calls (“mute yourself unless you’re speaking”, etc.). Each location had an entire family, so apart from talking on the call (which was chaotic with so many people anyways), people started talking among themselves. And that made it all the more chaotic.

Soon the daughter was shouting that it was getting too loud, and turned my computer volume down to the minimum (she’s figured out most of my computer controls in the last 2 months). After that, she lost interest and ran away.

A couple of weeks later, the wife was on a zoom call with a big group of her friends, and asked the daughter if she wanted to join. “I hate zoom, it’s too loud”, the daughter exclaimed and ran away.

Since then she has taken part in a couple of zoom calls, organised by her school. She sat with me once when I chatted with a (not very large) group of school friends. But I don’t think she particularly enjoys Zoom, or large video calls. And you need to remember that she is a “video call native“.

The early days of the lockdown were ripe times for people to turn into gurus, and make predictions with the hope that nobody would ever remember them in case they didn’t come through (I indulged in some of this as well). One that made the rounds was that group video calling would become much more popular and even replace group meetings (especially in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic).

I’m not so sure. While the rise of video calling has indeed given me an excuse to catch up “visually” with friends I haven’t seen in ages, I don’t see that much value from group video calls, after having participated in a few. The main problem is that there can, at a time, be only one channel of communication.

A few years back I’d written about the “anti two pizza rule” for organising parties, where I said that if you have a party, you should either have five or fewer guests, or ten or more (or something of the sort). The idea was that five or fewer can indeed have one coherent conversation without anyone being left out. Ten or more means the group naturally splits into multiple smaller groups, with each smaller group able to have conversations that add value to them.

In between (6-9 people) means it gets awkward – the group is too small to split, and too large to have one coherent conversation, and that makes for a bad party.

Now take that online. Because we have only one audio channel, there can only be one conversation for the entire group. This means that for a group of 10 or above, any “cross talk” needs to be necessarily broadcast, and that interferes with the main conversation of the group. So however large the group size of the online conversation, you can’t split the group. And the anti two pizza rule becomes “anti greater than or equal to two pizza rule”.

In other words, for an effective online conversation, you need to have four (or at max five) participants. Else you can risk the group getting unwieldy, some participants feeling left out or bored, or so much cross talk that nobody gets anything out of it.

So Zoom (or any other video chat app) is not going to replace any of our regular in-person communication media. It might to a small extent in the immediate wake of the pandemic, when people are afraid to meet large groups, but it will die out after that. OK, that is one more prediction from my side.

In related news, I swore off lecturing in Webinars some five years ago. Found it really stressful to lecture without the ability to look into the eyes of the “students”. I wonder if teachers worldwide who are being forced to lecture online because of the shut schools feel the way I do.

Mixing groups at parties

I normally don’t like mixing groups at parties I host – that sometimes leaves me as a “cut vertex” meaning that I have to personally take it upon myself to entertain one or more guests and can’t leave them to be “self-sufficient”. You might recall that a bit over two years ago, I had tried to use social network analysis to decide who to call for my birthday party.

However, for unavoidable reasons, we had to call a mixed set of friends to a party yesterday. We’re “putting BRexit” later this week (moving back to Bangalore), and considering that there were so many people we wanted to meet and say goodbye to, we decided that the best way of doing so was to call them all together to one place.

And so we ended up with a bit of a mixed crowd. The social network at yesterday’s party looked like this. For the sake of convenience, I’ve collapsed all the “guest families” into one point each. The idea is that while a guest family can “hang out among themselves”, they needn’t have come to the party to do that, and so it fell upon us hosts to talk to them. 

So the question is – with three hosts, one of whom was rather little, how should we have dealt with this assortment of guests?

Note that pretty much everyone who RSVPd in the affirmative came to the party, so the graph is unlikely to have been more connected than this – remove my family and you would have a few islands, including a couple of singletons.

Should we have spent more time with the families that would’ve been singletons than with those who knew other guests to interact with? Or was it only fair that we spent an equal amount of time with all guests? And considering that we could deal with guests on the right side of the graph “in twos”, did that mean we should have proportionately spent more time with those guys?

In any case, we took the easy way out. Little Berry had an easy time since there were two entities she knew, and she spent all her time (apart from when she wanted parental attention) with them. The wife and I were taking turns to buy drinks for freshly arrived guests whenever they arrived, and on each occasion we helped ourselves to a drink each. So we didn’t have to worry about things like social network dynamics when we had more important things to do such as saying goodbye.

I just hope that our guests yesterday had a good time.

Oh, and way too many conversations in the last two weeks have ended with “I don’t know when I’ll see you next”. It wasn’t like this when we were moving the other way.

 

The Anti-Two Pizza Rule

So Amazon supposedly has a “two pizza rule” to limit the size of meetings – the convention is that two pizzas should be sufficient to feed all participants in any meeting. While pizza is not necessarily served at most meetings, the rule effectively implies that a meeting can’t have more than seven or eight people.

The point of the rule is not hard to see – a meeting that has too many people will inevitably have people who are not contributing, and it’s a waste of their time. Limiting meeting size also means cutting total time employees spend in meetings, meaning they can get more shit done.

While this is indeed a noble “rule” in a corporate setting, it just doesn’t work for parties. In fact, after having analysed lots of parties I’ve either hosted or attended over the years, and after an especially disastrous party not so long ago (I’ve waited a random amount of time since that party before writing this so as to not offend the hosts), I hereby propose the “anti two pizza rule” for parties.

While five to eight people is a good number for a meeting, having enough people contributing but no deadweight, the range doesn’t do well at all for more social gatherings. The problem is that with this number, it is not clear if the gathering should remain in one group, or split into multiple groups.

When you have a “one pizza party” (5-6 people or less), you have one tight group (no pun intended) and assuming that people will get along with each other, you’re likely to have a good time.

When you have a “three pizza party” (more than 10 people), it’s intuitive for the gathering to breakup into multiple groups, and if things go well, these groups will be fluid and everyone will have a good time. Such a gathering also allows people to test waters with multiple co-attendees and then settle on the mini-group that they’ll end up spending most time with.

A two-pizza party (6-10 people), on the other hand, falls between the two stools. One group means there will be people left out of the conversation without respite. In such a small gathering, it is also not easy to break out of the main group and start your own group (again, seating arrangement matters). And so while some attendees (the “core group”) might end up having fun, the party doesn’t really work for most participating parties.

So, the next time you’re hosting a party, do yourself and your guests a favour and ensure that you don’t end up with between 6 and 10 people at the party. Either less or more is fine!

You might want to read this other post I’ve written on coordinating guest lists for birthday parties.