By dkl9, written 2024-172, revised 2024-172 (0 revisions)
Contact is a verbal game of three or more players, with one player in a special role (here, "leader") and all others in a team (here, "guessers"). As I play it, guessers give clues pointing to words, as they think of them. Words conveyed must start with a prefix, extended thru gameplay, from the leader's hidden word.
When a guesser thinks they understand a clue, they declare "contact!". Simultaneously, the clue-giving guesser and the understanding guesser each say the word they have in mind, to test if the clue communicated it. Iff two guessers correctly convey a word as such, before the leader has a chance to recognise and interject the same word, the leader extends the revealed prefix by one letter.
For example, let the leader be Leslie and two guessers be Alice and Bob. Leslie hides "voluntary" and reveals the prefix V.
Guessers have an obvious strategy for what clues to give: define terms in senses only other guessers know about, rather than the leader. Some time ago, Alice told Bob an anecdote about a doctor remarking "I've never [sic] seen a vein do that before". Bob, remembering that, says the clue "never seen it do that before!". Alice says "contact!", and the two count down to synchronise their saying "vein". Leslie extends the prefix to VO.
Alice and Bob have to use words that start with VO. This is a much stricter condition than that of the prefix V. The obvious strategy breaks down. Alice says "election", but Leslie quickly ruins it by interjecting "vote". Bob says "length, spatially", but Leslie knows about "volume", too. Alice says "combined with instrumentals". Most people, including Leslie, know that most music is made of instrumentals and vocals.
A better strategy for making clues points to a word thru multiple layers. Extra layers give you more freedom to pick different words. Listeners must follow each layer to get to the target word. If Leslie is confused by just one layer, but Bob gets them all, Alice and Bob will have succeeded.
Vocals combine with instrumentals. Most people know that. Instrumental values (helping towards something else) contrast with terminal values (for their own sake). That part, from moral philosophy, is much more niche.
In this game, only Alice and Bob have read much by Yudkowsky, which has sections about those concepts. So Alice could give a multi-layer clue: from "terminal" to "instrumental" to "vocal". She chooses the end-point "vocal" to start with VO, and the layer terminal-to-instrumental to selectively confuse Leslie. Alice says "combined — in music — with the opposite of terminal — in values". Bob mulls it over; Leslie is stumped. Bob says "contact!". Alice and Bob count down to say "vocals" at the same time. VOL, reveals Leslie.
Likewise, Leslie would get that "easily evaporated" points to "volatile" All three know about "volatile memory": a term for computer memory that "evaporates" when power is lost. But suppose only the guessers here know Baddeley's model of working memory. Bob might speak of "the phonological loop, if it were for a computer", making a multi-layer clue. Alice must (and can) recall both the fragility of working memory, and the term for fragile memory in computing. Leslie misses the first part, and ends up having to reveal VOLU.