Wednesday, April 13, 2022 // The Statement — 4
BY OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI,
STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Mixed strategies at Scorekeepers
BY TAYLOR SCHOTT, STATEMENT DEPUTY EDITOR
However lame it makes me to say so, I don’t like
going out. It is, to put it simply, a lot of work. It’s physi-
cal work — the walking to, the dancing at. Constant-
ly adjusting my bad posture. It’s mental work — the
middling conversation, if it could be called conversa-
tion, the scheming involved in getting a drink, or cut-
ting the bathroom line.
Needless to say, ‘going out’ is not a game I’m good
at playing. The dusty, blue-vinyl book I checked out
from the library titled “Studies in Game Theory”
suggests that the type of game played at a place
like Scorekeepers — affectionately referred to as
“Skeeps”— can be “non-cooperative” (a competitive
social interaction, each player aiming toward their
own goals) or “cooperative” (non-competitive, with
unknown payoffs).
But if Skeeps is indeed a game, who are the play-
ers, their ranks? What defines a win, and what
defines a loss?
I don’t have social anxiety, I always begin with
as some sort of disclaimer — my mental and physi-
cal faculties, though strained by socialization, typi-
cally remain intact. But I am easily worn down by
long stretches of talking, navigating large groups
and maintaining an approachable attitude. I have to
force my mouth out of its slack, draw back my shoul-
ders and, well, act.
Breaking my introverted habits by going out to
Skeeps, then, required some planning — not just the
outfit I should wear, but the personality, too. What
kind of things should I say? What kind of tenden-
cies should I adopt? How high should my eyebrows
arch, how wide should my smile stretch? There was
a long list of choices for the kind of player I could be,
each with their own taxing responsibilities. I had no
idea what the payoff of playing would be, though I
imagined it would resemble something like enjoying
myself.
The night arrived. Briefing a trusted band of close
friends with my plan to adopt extroversion for the
night, I downed a shot and fumbled to lace my shoes.
It’s so much easier when I drink, I whisper to my
roommate, to say whatever’s on my mind. She eyes
me and laughs. Our other friend across the room
laughs too, her vocal chords animating her silver
pendant inscribed with the word fuckoff.
We arrive downtown at the fashionable hour
of 11, taking our place in line. As we wait, I cannot
stop thinking about the French word for stranger —
l’étranger, phonetically lay-tchron-jay — that stifled
gargle so specific to its pronunciation. I play with the
word’s letters on my lips and in the back of my throat.
How else am I supposed to entertain myself? I stand,
fiddling with my rings, asking my friends in random
intervals how much longer they think we’ll have to
wait under the oppressive, but welcome, overhead
heating system. Rain fell.
Once admitted inside, I marvel at the vaulted
ceilings as my wrist is pulled towards the coat check
table. I shed my jacket, revealing my bare shoulders
and a borrowed top. There is no “right way” to be a
woman, but it is in these sorts of spaces that I begin
to feel as if my shapeless sweater, albeit low-cut, isn’t
exactly following dress code. Leather pants swish
past me. Tight, animal-print tops populate the dance
floor. I eye them all with hardly any subtlety, each
returned look an appraisal of my own appearance.
Refreshing ourselves at a countertop, the bar-
tender smiles at my roommate. Was that attraction
or charity? I smile at my roommate. “Remember
your notes!” She turns to remark, her long hair skim-
ming the top of her drink.
Draining another cup of rum and coke, I find
myself declaring loudly, with a few misplaced verbs,
about how the word fish is an overgeneralization
— we say many animals are fish when they are in
fact not fish: jellyfish, crayfish, starfish, cuttlefish,
despite their names, are not fish. Which me is saying
this completely unessential fact? My mortgaged per-
sonality is worn out already. In the refuge of a text
conversation, I slink toward the nearest wall. My
phone buzzes again: “No wallflowering,” my room-
mate nags, lovingly.
Might my introversion be a genetic facet of
myself that, no matter how much I pretend, I cannot
reverse? Research into temperament and person-
ality as innate traits suggests that I could be right.
Jerome Kagan, one of the great developmental
psychologists of the 21st century, conducted a lon-
gitudinal study in which he exposed 4-month-olds
to an array of new stimuli: balloons popping, colorful
mobiles, foreign scents on cotton swabs. The babies,
based on their reactions, were then divided into two
groups: high-reactive and low-reactive. Kagan held
that the high-reactive group would grow up to be
classically introverted, and the low-reactive group
classically extroverted. Kagan was determined to
follow these children well into development, testing
his theory on temperament as an innate reaction to
stimuli.
In the throes of their adolescence, the no-longer-
babies were brought in for interviews. Did they pre-
fer a few close friends or a large band of them? Were
they eager to introduce themselves to people they
didn’t know or would they wait for an introduction
to happen? Amazingly, Kagan had predicted the
temperaments they would develop with incredible
accuracy: the low-reactive babies who displayed
little concern with the new stimuli were more likely
to become calm, assured extroverts, while the high-
reactive babies who cried and pumped their tiny
limbs at the stimuli were more likely to become
reserved, cerebral introverts.
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAYLOR SCHOTT/STATEMENT
PAGE LAYOUT BY SARAH CHUNG