The Word I Used In A Meeting That Gave Me Away

Most of the crossover between my job and this hobby runs one direction, work habits bleeding into how I treat a game shelf, dollars per hour, expected value, that whole apparatus. This one ran the other way, and it took a coworker calling it out in a meeting for me to even notice it was happening.

We were doing a reserve review, which if you don’t know the term means going through a set of claims and figuring out whether the money set aside to pay them out eventually is actually enough, a fairly dry exercise most days involving a lot of triangles of numbers and a lot of people nodding along. One of the lines we were looking at had gone sideways because of a single large claim that a different team had handled in a way that shifted risk onto our book without really meaning to, nobody malicious about it, just a decision made in isolation that ended up mattering more than the person making it realized. And I said, out loud, in the meeting, that it looked like a kingmaker problem, one party’s uninvolved choice deciding an outcome for parties who had nothing to do with the decision.

Dead silence for about two seconds. Then a guy on my team, who I did not know played anything more involved than Catan, asked whether that was a board game term, and yeah, obviously, it is, I used it because a board game taught me the concept before my job ever did in those words. I’ve been calling that exact failure mode a kingmaker problem in my head for years, mostly from Rising Sun, where a losing player deciding who to hand the game to is basically the whole design flaw I keep coming back to, and apparently the vocabulary had migrated so completely into how I think about risk that I used it in a room with an actuarial director in it without a second thought.

What got me thinking afterward wasn’t the mild embarrassment, it was that the game had actually given me the concept cleaner than my own field had. We’ve got a dozen technical terms for adjacent ideas, moral hazard, adverse selection, none of which quite capture the specific shape of an uninvolved third party’s decision deciding an outcome for two parties who were actually competing. Kingmaker does that in one word, because a game designer had to solve the exact same naming problem I’d apparently been dancing around for years without noticing.

That coworker and I ended up getting coffee about it after, which is its own small good thing, he plays more than Catan, it turns out, he just doesn’t talk about it at work because nobody ever asks. We spent twenty minutes comparing notes on which of our current shelf games handle the kingmaker problem well and which ones just pretend it doesn’t exist, and somewhere in there the actual reserve number we’d been arguing about got resolved almost as an afterthought. I’m not going to pretend I’ve stopped bringing game vocabulary into work meetings since. I’ve just gotten slightly better at noticing when I’m doing it, which given how long it took me to notice the first time isn’t saying much.