Confession: I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last night. I couldn’t care less about either team, though I am mildly fascinated that someone who is unquestionably one of the best quarterbacks in the history of football can be so widely hated for… being one of the best QBs in history. Humans are funny.
But while I didn’t watch the game, neither am I living in a hobbit hole. A friend sent me a link to the brilliant Reddit commercial, which if you missed it was contained entirely in a 5-second “glitch,” designed to look like it had been hacked into the feed.
I want to be clear that while I disagree with the ethics of the Great GameStop Pump of 2021, I delight in what it points out to us, as does Reddit’s strategy here. Games have rules, or they’re not games. But often overlooked is the corollary that those playing the game need to agree to play by the rules, or there isn’t a game. Or, rather, there’s no longer one game but two, or several. It’s possible to win a game by cheating, but then what you’ve won isn’t the same game that your opponent is playing. It’s also possible to win a game by finding the space between the rules that no one else is looking at. The Fosbury Flop famously did this for the high jump. Moneyball, for baseball. There was no rule that Donald Trump couldn’t lie, contradict himself, and make up facts while laughing his way through the 2016 U.S. presidential election high on the fumes of free media coverage — the only thing stopping anyone else from doing it was precedent and the unwritten rules of decency.
Outrage is the typical reaction from those who are invested in the rules of a game to those who successfully slip through the inevitable cracks in the rule-set. If the outraged are in a position to close a gap in the rules, they will; but that’s not always possible. Who can mandate that a commercial spot can’t be too short? Who has the power to enforce a rule on the speech of a presidential candidate?
In a world where the return on every possible set of rules has been maximized to its logical limit, the place to find margin is in the margin. The stock market, television advertising, management… everything we touch and that touches us is a game if you think about it through the right lens. Find a rule that can be bent, reinterpreted, or ignored and see where it takes you. (Unspoken rules are gold here because the only thing enforcing them is tacit agreement that you can withdraw at any time.)