1. Debate
There are two girls quietly playing a card game in a grubby corner on the floor of this deserted middle school cafeteria, and they’re fighting for something greater than themselves.
Alice is playing the “BDIF”-- the “Best Deck In Format”. It's well-named! Other players read strategy guides about how to beat it, add “silver bullets” to take down the beast, abandon strategies that are incidentally weak to it. It’s no matter. The deck can be inconvenienced, but after months of being targeted it's still a known entity, calling out: "How can you stop me?"
Betty is attempting to answer that. She’s studied Alice’s deck, painstakingly killed her darlings, gone back and back again to the drawing board, scraped forum after forum for advice. As a result, she has a deck that can consistently outmatch Alice without sacrificing too much win-percentage against other decks.
In theory, anyway.
Because that’s the thing, they’re theorists. Debaters. Alice claims that her deck is unbeatable (or if she does get beat, it’s due to some uncontrollably bad luck). Betty disagrees.
As theorists, they understand every card as a theory. “I’m a good card,” Alice hears, “because I exchange one resource for another, allowing players to fight on an axis their opponents are unprepared for!“ “Well, I’m better,” claims another, “because with proper support I refute the ideas in the classic article ‘The Philosophy of Fire’!” And so on, and so forth.
Their decks are hypotheses, syntheses, responses to the hundreds of cards that existed before them. When Alice and Betty play, they're arguing.
Except not really. Partially because their argument doesn't matter. But partially because when one wins, it’ll be a data point that doesn’t really prove anything on its own. The game is full of luck, after all, and tiny revisions to play can be made. The debate will rage on.
This cafeteria is the entire school. A lesson on ceaseless toil, done consciously, with great joy.
