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February 27, 2005
how i win at kevin bacon
i'm starting to catch up with the class in watts' six degrees, and while i'm not holding on to as much of the math as i'd like to be (i spoke this language once, i swear, but it's been so very long), i'm seeing the impressions emerge, & digging the already-dead metaphors of streams and currents, webs and handshake-associations, even (although i'm glad i'm almost through that chapter) viruses--i knew about melissa, but i didn't know the simpsons had anything to do with it! & i'm finding a lot of kernels like that in watts, more, certainly than i expected: it turns out that all those years i spent as the only humanities major surounded in a social network of CEs & CivEs & double-Es & programming inclined nerds who dropped out but kept geeking anyway have paid off & informed my thinking & ability to grasp things that ought to be outside my realm in really fortuitous ways.
when he says, on pg 156, "just try playing six degrees of kevin bacon without the computer," though, i have to laugh at him.
geeks watch a lot of movies; i don't need a social scientist to tell me that. & while my geeks weren't at uva designing oracles for the purpose ("the university" has actually been the sworn nemesis of every school i've been at until now!) we were certainly familiar with the kevin bacon game. watts' initial treatment of the game as he knew it intrigued me enough that i went to the oracle (which despite my vast experience with the game itself i hadn't heard of until watts explained) & spent an hour-long aim chat with a friend in florida trying to find anyone in the movie database with a kevin bacon number of 4 or higher--we failed, & had to admit defeat & get back to work. part of what frustrated us, though, was the rigidity of the criteria. tv didn't count, bollywood didn't count, stage productions didn't count--and none of the tricks we used were even vaguely admissable. another thing that got old quickly was that the same movies that we'd never heard of kept coming up over & over. the computerized version lacked the resonant associations that mattered to us. it didn't even notice the movies we'd seen & enjoyed remembering, because they weren't significant enough as hubs for the purpose of the game--which wasn't creating interesting chains, at that mathematical level, it was just to minimize the number of steps. kevin bacon has been in a lot of heavy-hitter movies. watching the computer win just for the sake of winning wasn't fun for long.
the latter link above actually describes a much more accurate version of the game we used to play in college--only and always without a computer: whereas the oracle admits only hollywood actors & only collaboration on a film as legitimate associations, we'd take any connection at all, & in so doing, played a game much more like the kinds of multi-group, multi-path-type associative networking watts describes later on. for starters, our connections were relevant to us. if a movie came up in the game at all, it was because one or more of us had seen it (which often led to recommendations and movie-night selections)--it was a conversation, not just a fact. it was a genuine connection, the kind with multiple meanings, not just a binary data-blip flipped to "on" on both sides of the question.
more importantly and far more interestingly, though, we had fewer restrictions on our associations. any connection to kevin bacon was... a connection to kevin bacon. it was that simple. my friend in florida has a kevin bacon number of 3, because he dated a girl who had thanksgiving dinner one year with julia roberts, who was in flatliners with kevin bacon. & me? my kevin bacon number is 1: he & i share a birthday.
(x-posted to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at February 27, 2005 09:53 AM
Comments
I went to college with a guy (and yes, I'm on a first-name basis with him) who played an uncredited role as bartender in the movie Mystic River, including a scene with (ta da!) Kevin Bacon.
Thank you, thank you very much.
Of course, as Ms. J points out, having been a drama major with enough folks who've actually worked as actors gives me a headstart on this sort of game...
Posted by: susansinclair at March 12, 2005 04:36 PM