Good Reply Game Is Rare

“What’s your favourite movie”?

“Movies suck!”

Many conversations have someone making an obvious bid to have a conversation about some topic, and all the responses just fail to give relevant answers. Somehow, people have trouble accepting conversational bids. I’ve even seen cases where person A asks person B the same dang question 10 times throughout a conversation and B just can’t seem to give a response that’s in any way related to the question that was asked. Often, I feel like humans just confabulate vaguely plausible looking responses in a conversation to be used as a filler until they can opine on what they want to talk about.

A less cynical explanation is that people aren’t making the conversational bids they appear to be making e.g. a complaint about a problem is a bid not for solutions but for commiseration. Or an analysis of philology in Harry Potter is not a bid to discuss that very narrow topic but instead a bid to discuss Harry Potter or philology in general.

Still, I think there is some merit to the idea that people are actually kind of bad at parsing and/or responding to conversational bids. Which is why it’s striking when someone is laser-focused on what you say and gives cogent responses to the bids you make. Equally striking is being that someone focusing on understanding and following along with another person’s motions. It requires building up intense curiosity in what’s going on in someone else’s mind, and frankly it feels intimate.

But people appreciate it, and giving good replies is undersupplied. Which is another point for the cynical explanation that people don’t bother to give good replies to conversational bids because they don’t want to. We want other people to respond to our bids. How many reply guys remain replies guys? Very few, once they’ve built up their own following. So the role of reply guy experiences endless churn, and good reply game is rare.