As someone who doesn’t have fun easily with other people, I’ve had to be creative and figure out events that do anything to my deadened social circuits. I like events that are weird, or mentally challenging, or nominally do something useful.
Competitive Socializing
Filler Words
The win condition is eliminating filler words such as: “um”, “like”, “you know”. Feel free to suggest others; the canonical list will be made known at the beginning of the event. Crucially: an involuntary despair-noise over using a filler word is also a filler.
Phase 1 is calibration. From 8-9pm, you will socialize and be stickered by your fellows every time you use a filler word. You should get a sense from this of how many times you use one per minute. In this phase you should hold the intention of speaking naturally, even though your brain might already be trying to leap ahead and minimize such usage. It might also be interesting to catch your subconscious trying to lean you one direction or another.
Phase 2 is competition. 9:15-10pm is one section, 10:15-11pm is the second section.
There is a mandatory break before each competition round. We are doing a sport, and I think a break would be valuable to getting us to treat it as such.
Four awards (baked goods, probably):
- Initial least (if you don’t use filler words in general)
- Improvement, I over calibration
- Improvement, II over I
- Improvement, II over calibration
Making people laugh
When someone makes you laugh, you sticker them.
Interruption
If you WANT to interrupt someone, sticker them. (It is some signal that they are being boring.)
Thinky
Conflict Improv
Update: I ran this one five times, and have posted the event outline, cards, and tips.
This is a social event where people can play out mock conflicts with given strategies, and then analyze which strategies are ideal in which situations.
A set of blue cards will have conflict strategies written on them: e.g. ‘smiley but unyielding’, ‘social norm enforcement’, ‘appeal to own desperation’, ‘be so weird that the other person goes away’, ‘out-reasonable them’, ‘bluff for social power’. A set of red cards will contain a sentence to a paragraph of description of a face-to-face conflict scenario – these, the participants will fill out at the beginning.
In each iteration, two people will be selected to play. Each draws a blue card, their strategy. Then the pair draws a red card, which is their conflict scenario. Before the scene, they spend a few minutes coming to an agreement on which one is taking which side (unless argument is symmetric, as in the case of taking a parking spot they’ve simultaneously arrived at), and fleshing out the scenario a bit if needed. They start the scene, which ends either when 5 minutes elapse or a participant taps out. A participant can also say ‘new strategy’ and get a new randomly chosen strategy card, and they must immediately transition to that strategy.
Wikipedia crawl competition
Everyone is given a different Wikipedia link on a big topic with lots of outgoing links. For the next 6090m, they click through randomly as they wish, and prepare a 38m talk on the most interesting fact or anecdote they find. Determine winner by voting.
Read your backlog + lightning talks
h/t William Ehlhardt:
If you’re like me, you have a big list somewhere of interesting papers or paper-like blog posts to read. Now is your time to read them. We’ll do 45 minutes of silent reading, then 15 minutes of lightning talks where you’ll get max(1min, 15min/num_people) minutes to tell us what you’ve learned in the last 45 minutes. We will do 3 rounds of this and then regress to unstructured hangouts.
Cuddly reading night
I moved into a house with a large room where we put 4 contiguous mattresses and a lot of pillows. It seems nice to host a reading night here.
Feely
Wail and Gnash
This doesn’t really fit in with the other ideas - it is a multi-day festival specific event where you support people who aren’t having fun at the festival or con - but since I ran it, I’ll add a link here.
Ask and Point
Lame name, sorry. This is a variant of hot seat (intrusive questions game) where, instead of going around a circle and having each person taking 3m to field questions from everyone else, you go around a circle, have a person ask a question, and have everyone else point at the person they most want to hear answer that question. Best for groups of 9 or so, 15 at most. List of questions I’ve compiled is here.
Circling with limited initial context
See circling.
I’d bet that a variant that started with everyone getting 2 minutes to talk about some of their life context would be better, as long as the circle after that did the usual thing of precluding followup questions that tried to drag in any outside context other than that provided at the beginning.
Circling with resets
This is a conversational improv event where the conversation halts every 10m.
We go meta about the conversation for 3-20m. The review should be circle-y, if you’ve done circling. I’ll use my judgment to decide when to terminate the review and move back to conversation. When we do, we do a hard reset – resuming a previous conversation is not allowed.
We’ll do this for 2 hours, and then have an unstructured normal hangout for 30 minutes.
Doey
LILU Love
I like to group my todos on a 3x3 grid of importance and urgency. Things that are either high importance or high urgency get done first. This means the LILU queue never gets any love. Come work on your least important, least urgent tasks! No important or urgent stuff required.
(I suspect this is psychologically beneficial to do every once in a while. This might be the time you discover many of your LILU tasks are not endorsed – like that book you kept meaning to get around to, but turns out to be eh – and discovering this lets you get rid of it.)
Movey
Learn to moonwalk
Watch some videos, give each other feedback, practice until you can do it without thinking.
Memorize your local grocery store
Event description for the one time I’m going to run this (at time of writing this, 2025 02, I haven’t done it yet):
Expect this to be like 2 hour trip! I am going with the intention of deci-memorizing the layout so that grocery shopping will be fast in the future. (I am really bad at navigating grocery stores and am hoping the upfront investment will mitigate future slowness.) Point out your favorite snacks or weird items, or just come to get the same memorization benefit. For spaced repetition purposes we will be doing multiple circuits, aiming to build a linked list.
Dance invention
If you have some experience with social dance, come invent a dance. We can dance to some programmatic beats (or music, if someone else has the tech savvy for that) so that we can do weird things like having a 7 beat core step.
Bonus: one of my on and off fiction projects is about dance magic. Come invent a dance specifically for
- Dance duel magic: there is no lead or follow. Both people are synchronizing to each other. Whichever one “reality recognizes as failing to sync” dies.
- Illusion magic
- A touchless magic for a magic based on the electromagnetic force – you lead with gestures and closeness, not with tension/compression
- Mechanical telekinesis (via gravity)
- Strong force (alchemy)
- Divinatory dance – the lead ‘asks the question’ by constructing it with their moves, the follow answers it
Misc
Recording night
Recorded, everyone gets a copy.
The point is to have more data about yourself, how you talk, and have accurate access to what kind of person you were in conversations when you’re older. There are often surprises there when peopld go back to old text conversation. Surprise implies ignorance, and we can decrease it by leaving more records of things previously not easily captured.
Important: don’t share audio or text quotes without explicit permission. But also understand that, especially in the long run, such privacy cannot be guaranteed if a recording exists at all.
Optimize meatsuit interface
Are you speaking or smiling in the most charismatic way you could? Probably not! Have you tried different types of laughs in the mirror to map how each one feels from the inside to how it looks? Maybe! But have you been video recorded by another person in a candid conversation, reviewed that recording, and repeatedly re-done a segment of that conversation while workshopping a better intonation or facial expression?
No?
Would you like to?
Abandoned
These ideas I no longer think seem fun or interesting or useful to run.
Light Toastmasters
“Toastmasters, but about actually interesting things, extra friendly to anxious people”. You come with a 5~20 minute talk on an actually interesting thing (if I were going to one in the next week, I’d do ancient human populations and admixture) and give the talk. And because this is for anxious people, the accommodations for giving a talk are extremely flexible. Do you want people to not look at you? Have the other participants sit facing away from you! You can also put a divider screen between you and them, or wear a blindfold.
On the other hand, are you pretty good at normal speaking but want to kick the pressure up a notch? Ask everyone to wear a very critical expression, or stand in a close ring around you holding improvised weapons, as if your life depends on how much you impress them! Maybe you can pick a challenge out of a hat containing constraints like “don’t use your notes”, “sing your presentation”, “present in the form of a dialogue”, “Russian accent”, “integrate hand puppets into speech”.
Shotcode
is for people who like programming and are fine with drinking. Come to solve programming interview problems (e.g. on leetcode, codewars, 4clojure). If you’re the first one to finish, take a shot. Second one to finish, take half a shot. Third one, take a third of a shot.
When everyone is 1~3 drinks in, do behavioral interviews.
Co-forecasting
Pick a handful of questions from Good Judgment Open or Metaculus, like
Will there be a complex coordinated terrorist attack (CCTA) in the United States before 1 September [YEAR]?
Will the border conflict between India and China escalate to a deadly clash involving gunfire or explosives before [YEAR]?
and divide people up into subgroups, one or more per question (this is because I think the ideal size of a group discussing such a question is 3~5, but your mileage may vary). Some adjustment may have to be made for the fact that Metaculus/GJO questions are dominated by politics predictions, which is not everyone’s jam.