The moment before the match starts

Two players short. You're in a room with eight strangers, all standing still, watching a countdown tick slowly down. Someone jumps for no reason. Someone types "hi" and nobody answers. Someone else drops a comment about how badly their day has gone and, suddenly, three people reply. Nothing has started yet and, even so, something is happening.

That wait —the forty seconds almost every server treats as a defect that ought to be eliminated— is probably the most social stretch of the entire match. It's also the only one nobody designs.

A place that's neither before nor after

The anthropologist Victor Turner devoted much of his work to studying rites of passage, and found that the interesting part lay neither at the beginning nor at the end, but in the middle. He called that intermediate phase liminal, from limen, threshold: the stretch in which someone has stopped being what they were and isn't yet what they're going to be.

What Turner observed is that something strange happens during that stretch. Hierarchies are suspended. Those crossing the threshold together treat each other as equals, because for the moment none of them is anything. Turner gave that bond a name: communitas. It isn't friendship and it isn't a team; it's the brief, horizontal solidarity of people waiting together.

A pre-match room fits that description almost point for point. Nobody has won or lost. Nobody knows yet who plays well and who doesn't. There's no scoreboard, no roles, no history. For that half-minute the ten of you are exactly the same: people waiting.

That's why people talk right there

Conversation turns up in the wait for an unromantic reason: there, talking costs nothing.

As soon as the match starts, every sentence has a price. Saying something exposes you to looking bad, to being blamed for a play, to giving away that you don't know. Communication becomes functional —warnings, instructions, reproaches— because something is at stake. In the wait there's nothing to lose, and that's why out come the greetings, the nonsense, the complaints about school and the three or four exchanges that will later make you recognise a name.

Notice where you remember meeting people. It's almost never in the middle of the action. It's before: in the queue, in the changing room, in the corridor, at the bus stop. Action absorbs; the antechamber leaves room.

What breaks when you remove the wait

We've spent a decade optimising that gap until it disappears. Instant matchmaking, filling with bots, matches that start on their own, rooms that are skipped if there are enough people. All perfectly reasonable: waiting is boring, waiting makes people leave, and cutting it improves every number a server usually looks at.

The problem is that none of those numbers measures what's being spent. Removing the wait removes the only stretch in which two strangers coincided with no objective at all, and that's precisely the condition under which conversations begin. What's left is a quicker game with fewer familiar people inside. Efficiency is charged in a place where nobody was looking.

The principle: dead time is almost never dead

Step out of the server for a moment, because this is much bigger than video games.

Almost everything we call "dead time" is in fact the only unstructured time an activity had left. The ten minutes before a meeting starts. The canteen queue. The shared commute. The doctor's waiting room. They're the stretches any improvement plan cuts first, because they produce nothing measurable —and they're exactly the stretches where people get to know each other.

A space designed to be crossed as quickly as possible stops being a space and becomes a corridor. The rule, if there is one, would be this: before eliminating a wait, ask what was happening inside it. Often the answer is "nothing", and then go ahead. Sometimes the answer is "the only thing that stopped this being anonymous".

What taking an antechamber seriously would look like

If there were a place that treated the waiting room as a place and not a formality —where you could jump, type, look at what someone else has built, sit down, or simply be there for the forty seconds without anything pushing you—, I'd like it to be called KobiiCraft. Not for adding things to the wait, which would be the obvious mistake, but for no longer treating it as a fault.

And now the honest part, because this piece could be read as a defence of making people wait, and it isn't one. A badly made wait is simply annoying. Forty seconds in a place where you can do something is open time; four minutes in front of a loading bar with nothing around is stolen time, and no anthropological theory fixes it. The difference isn't in the length: it's in whether the space offers you something to do without forcing you to do it. Confusing "don't eliminate the wait" with "lengthen the wait" would be keeping exactly the worse half of the idea.

Before the countdown

Next time you're in one of those rooms, watch what happens. Someone jumping. Someone testing whether the chat works. Someone asking whether this is the four-versus-four one. It's the part of the game nobody designed, nobody measures and almost nobody defends.

And it is, quite often, the only part where you meet someone rather than an opponent.

Frequently asked questions

Why do people talk more in the waiting room than during the match? Because nothing is at stake in the wait. Nobody has won or lost yet, nobody knows who plays well and the scoreboard doesn't exist, so talking exposes you to nothing. As soon as the match starts, roles, competition and the cost of looking bad appear, and conversation becomes functional: instructions, warnings, reproaches. The wait is the only horizontal stretch the encounter has.

What is the liminal phase and what does it have to do with a video game? It's a concept from the anthropologist Victor Turner: the intermediate stage of a ritual in which a person has stopped being what they were and isn't yet what they'll become. During that stretch the normal hierarchies are suspended and a horizontal bond appears between those going through it together. A pre-match waiting room fits that description almost point for point, and that's why it produces more spontaneous conversation than the game itself.

So is instant matchmaking a bad thing? It isn't bad in itself, but it has a cost that is almost never counted. Shortening the wait improves speed and reduces drop-off, and those are real benefits. What's lost in exchange is the only stretch in which two strangers coincided with no objective at all, which is precisely the condition under which conversations tend to start. The reasonable question isn't how long it takes, but whether you can do something during that time.

What's the difference between a good wait and an annoying one? Whether you can do something in the meantime. Forty seconds in a place where you can jump, type, look at what someone else built or simply be there is open time. Four minutes in front of a loading bar with nothing around is stolen time, and no social theory fixes that. The length matters less than whether the space offers something to do without forcing you to do it.