The moment before the match starts

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

Two players short. Eight strangers standing still, watching a countdown tick down. Someone jumps for no reason, someone types "hi". Nothing has started and something is already happening.

The anthropologist Victor Turner studied those in-between phases of rituals: the point at which someone has stopped being what they were and isn't yet what they'll become. There, hierarchies are suspended and a horizontal bond appears between those waiting together. Turner called it communitas.

A waiting room is a textbook case. Nobody has won or lost, nobody knows who plays well, the scoreboard doesn't exist. That's why people talk right there: talking doesn't cost anything yet.

We've spent a decade shortening that wait in the name of speed, and removing it eliminates the only stretch in which two strangers coincided with no objective. What's left is a quicker game with fewer familiar people inside.

Dead time is almost never dead: it's usually the only free time an activity had left. The difference between a good wait and an annoying one isn't how long it lasts, but whether you can do something in the meantime.