Indecision

I suffer from decision paralysis a lot, and just like my need to gamify exercise with numbers and goals to get me motivated, I try to create a lot of mechanics for what should be a simple decision: picking a fucking restaurant.

Sometimes it helps to just randomly choose an ethnicity.

Sometimes I try to just narrow done the choices to just 3 and have someone else select.

In my personal experience: select 3 from infinite choices and selecting 3 from 1 are both easier than selecting 1 from all.

For the fall season leading up to Halloween hearby known as Spooktober my friends have crafted a little cardboard box with a number of horror movies listed out on business cards to help us select movies. One of the more annoying pain points on any given movie night is coming up with what we should watch for the evening. The rules are similar to the mechanics of popular secret role games such as secret hitler.

We currently have about 50 movies in the box. We randomly deal out N+1 cards to the first person in the viewing party who vetoes 1 then passes the pile to the next person. The last person will thus have two movies to select from and must select from one of them.

There is an additional mechanic that is a carry over from our more short form viewing parties (new episodes of anime, youtube videos and the like) that is a person has exactly one veto for the session if they think viewing the chosen media will literally kill them.

There’s a number of details on each of the cards to help let people make the decision. We have run times, whether or not the movie is a spook or a spoop (denoting whether or not movie will be taken seriously amongst the general viewing audience), a small elevator pitch which can indlude anything from the director, thems, or a just a really cool scene from the movie.

Sometimes, when we’re getting together to watch a movie, I just want to skip all the horrible foreplay leading up to it.