MYCHALLENGE
Category
Quizzes, challenges and the small mechanics that make a friend group actually pay attention to each other.
3 articles
A referral puts your reputation in a friend's hands. A promotion puts a friend's sense of where they stand in yours. Most awkward moments between friends and work trace back to that one change.
A friendship quiz is a test the person taking it never agreed to sit, marked in public, with entirely social stakes. It should not work. It works enormously well — and the gap between one that gets finished and one abandoned at question four is almost entirely structural.
Between 2003 and 2020 the average American went from an hour a day with friends to twenty minutes, while time spent alone rose by nearly an hour. Games are not a cure for that. They are a cheap, reliable structure for the time that remains — and it is worth being precise about how they work.