Good reply game is good life game
Studying the philosophy and practice of three masters: Visakan Veerasamy, Louie Bacaj and Michelle Varghoose
I don’t enjoy Twitter.
Not because it sucks (although those architectural and algorithmic quirks aren’t fixing themselves) or feels sucky (the wonder drug for inducing both anxiety and cringe), but because it needs me to be in my head. I, like you, prefer to live in my whole body, not just above my neck.
But a tech-powered, always online life became inevitable in 21st century India. So I had to find ways of being online.
One idea helped me.
They call it the “reply game.”
visakan veerasamy1 who coined the term describes it in his 2020 book, Friendly Ambitious Nerd v1.0, as
“Every “utterance” (status, tweet, whatever) is a bit of an invitation, a bit of a proposal. “Let’s play this game”. When strangers read the proposal accurately, and support the game, a shared understanding develops. You can make friends this way.”
For Visa, as he likes to call himself, the idea is to support the invitation to play. A good player learns how to support gameplay whether they are agreeing, disagreeing, bantering or just riffing.
This doesn’t mean you have to support everyone in all their games. It just means that if you find someone fun online, your best bet at creating a shared social reality with them is to support their game.
Good reply game is not a call to be a good moral person, equitable and undiscriminating in whom you play with. It’s a call to create your social reality with intention, so that it is nourishing for all actors.
The more I let the idea sink into me, the more I love it. Reply game may be a metaphor for being online. But it is secretly the life hack for living offline.
This appears to be Visa’s idea as well. “Reply game is the most critical, load-bearing pillar” of friendliness, in his three part framework for living well in the book.2
Good reply game is good life game.
Good life game is when someone you care about picks up on your signals and bestows them with attention and care. In life, every move you make can be a cue. A signal to your people.
Take conversations. Each word, phrase, sigh, and tonal inflection can be a signal. Often, these signals can be unwitting. Like the time I was in the kayak with Ravi, my partner, sitting behind me, as a wind bellowed sideways and rocked us adrift, with the choppy Atlantic waves off south Portugal.
I stared at the angry waters swallowing the sky whole at the horizon. Then I joked to Ravi, feebly, that we didn’t have a Moroccan visa. What Ravi heard through that joke was the panic I was gulping down. Gently, he said from behind me: don’t be scared, we just need to steer left – the wind can help us.
Reading the room supportively has been a gamechanger for me. It’s carried me through difficult hearings, impatient courtrooms, distressed clients, coaching roadblocks, some semi-dark childhood stuff, and earned me the understanding and trust of many dogs, cats, and human-beings.
A signature bad life game move is to see signals where there are none, read them wrong, or worse still, selfishly. They are the biggest reasons for a range of unfortunate events, from racially disrespecting someone to sexually assaulting them. Even tiny failures to read the room are responsible for some of my highlight “I fucked it” moments.
Still, I never thought to play the good life game online.
Online was too big, too many unknown unknowns, and too much of a foreign world that was beyond my small context. I didn’t find myself able to give that world my unselfconscious and unabashed self.
Besides, I was scared to be honest, vulnerable, or fully me. I never felt worthy enough to receive attention from the thoughtful folks on the internet, and was uninterested in the attention of others.
So I didn’t ever endow anything with attention.
At the same time, I observed the masters of the reply game and began to wonder if this was a me-problem, not an online-problem.
Two of my favourite online personalities, Louie Bacaj (@LBacaj on Twitter) - a seasoned player with about 24k followers built over some years, and Michelle Varghoose (@mvarghoose on Twitter) - a rising star with about 1200 followers built over some months, have taught me some things about how to play.
Here are three key ideas.
Understand the game. It is a long and not zero-sum.
Good reply game takes inner work.
The easiest game play is to give.
Understand the game. It is long and isn’t zero-sum.
The reply game isn’t a game that ends because someone won. It’s not a game that ends at all, if we want to have a fulfilling online life.
It’s the kind of game that’s only as good as its continuous play. As Visa says, the best players take the game forward.
The reason? It’s not a zero-sum game. My win doesn’t mean your loss. I only win if we are all winning.3 In a very large public sphere comprising millions of actors, the way we all win is if we all play long, to keep the game going.
Both Michelle and Louie unleash daily butterfly effects in this long, non zero-sum game.
Michelle only tweets observations, seldom judgments, and she speaks from her experience, never of others’.
She offers perspective while making me feel seen. Her posture is open and inviting. It makes me yearn to play the game with her. But more importantly, she creates a nurturing space in talking about her experience. I find myself leaning into the parts of me that are me, to see what rings true for my experience.
Louie always speaks to the human beings behind other accounts. I’m struck when I see that he replies to even small accounts - something I’ve heard others don’t do. I suppose for Louie, people are people regardless of size of account.
I haven’t had a chance to meet or chat meaningfully with Louie yet. Still, in my head, he is the friend-mentor I would love. Just from observing the way he carries himself online, I have learned grace, authenticity and the merits of being serious.
To me, these are virtues of good life game as much as they are of good reply game.
Good reply game needs caring attention. This takes inner work.
Michelle and Louie both stood out to me because of how unselfconsciously themselves they were on Twitter.
Louie tweets often about being an “awkward engineer”. Everytime I hear him speak I go, I’d never have guessed. But more importantly, every time he says that, it gives me courage to be my awkward self too.
His replies are crafted with care, and intention. I’m always struck when he says something “means a lot” to him. First, that he thinks to let me know that it does, and then, because it takes a kind of mental security to notice the little things in life that could mean something.
Michelle is funny yet with grace. She’s got the banter and also the insight. She is a master of repartee and of building rapport.
Every time I saw her on my feed, I wondered how one person can be all those things, everywhere, for so many people and all the time.
Scratch the surface - or get lucky enough to call her a friend - and you know that’s just Michelle being Michelle. In her recent essay on how she does it, she reflected on this with her characteristic wit:
“Look at me,” I thought, “it isn’t creepy that I liked my friend's Tweet 2 minutes after they posted. It’s engagement.”
With that permission, I was soon roaming around Twitter, commenting on everything. It felt like I was crashing a wedding, engaging with the guests before anyone could tell I wasn’t actually invited.
It takes work to be so unabashedly and unselfconsciously oneself. Visa calls it “emptying your cup.”
“When we’re holding on to preexisting ideas about what we’re looking for, who we’re talking to, etc – there’s a sort of Procrustean effect that takes place. We mostly only see what we’re looking for. It makes us slow, stupid. We fail to notice nuance, surprise.
We might *feel* fast and smart, but we’re only fast and smart within the narrow bounds of the game that we think we’re playing. When we are fixated on the game we think we’re playing, we close ourselves off from playing a bigger, better, more interesting game.”
I can bet Michelle and Louie have spent years building themselves up with intention, reflection and action.
As someone who has spent a fair few years reading, reflecting, and in therapy to get out of my own way, I still find that this was my biggest hurdle.
I needed to find conviction that I can offer something to the worlds of thoughtful people online. I could only do that by emptying my full cup of baggage. I needed to fix my sense of worth, not prove myself as worthy.
I had to be my “loosey goosey” self unabashedly. In reply game as in life game.
There’s an easy way to play the reply game. Give, give, give.
My guess is that Visa, Louie and Michelle have different motivations for playing the reply game.4 And that is the point. Motivations don’t matter if your methods are right.
If I had to tie their methods up into one idea, I’d say: give yourself generously to those you want in your (online or real) life.
Louie’s explicit approach to the reply game is to give. “You do need to go somewhere with strangers and help them in some way with your ideas.”
Michelle’s approach is out there to see. She gives her time, attention and energy to anything that catches her fancy. Whenever she replies, she is either supportive or witty, often both.
I suspect the reason Louie and Michelle can be so giving is because they read in good faith what many - including me - do not. They’re so real about their own humanity that they can see the humanity in everything online. It all comes back to inner work – in good reply game as in good life game.
Folks like Visa, Michelle and Louie have turned my feed into a close approximation of the ideal public sphere. One where I can live in my body as much as I have to in my head.
Which means I will now have to get my reluctant butt online.
Visa is an introspective internet microcelebrity. He is open and thoughtful in how he shares his work, which itself is eclectic and wide-ranging. He thinks in public - you only need to see the tone of his (often nested) tweets or the (occasionally nested) curiosities he is tracking in his public Roam database to know how. He develops these thoughts in longer form essays and then in his books (Introspect (2022) is his other). He has views. Even when I don’t agree, I have to sit with his views for a minute to see why. I have to wait to let my bodymind speak to me. Seldom can I get my answer through a heady, cerebral engagement with his content. Perhaps that’s why I enjoy reading him; his thoughts are a peak into an interconnected web of ideas emerging from a deep, contextually grounded, and historically aware reflection on a full life. Check out his Twitter here @visakanv.
The other two parts are ambition - a quest to manifest your taste and sensibility in the world, and nerdiness - a quest to develop taste through curiosity. I won’t get into that but let’s take it as a given. You need to put in the reps and you need to be credible and curious and have done the work.
Visa’s got this 75-1 idea about bad actors. “Assholes make up about 1% of most groups, cause about 75% of the damage, and ruin everybody’s experience. And we let them, because we still haven’t learned to do better.” I won’t get into it now because I could write endlessly on his ideas across his books and tweets. I’ve a mind map to offer instead. ;)
Love this.
Loved this, Malavika! I 100% relate. Let the games begin :)