The games scientists play: How fun can help preserve our humanity

From ScienceMag:

View more

When I was in grad school, a new postdoc brought a valuable import from his own graduate lab: a game called Septa. Here’s how it worked: We would each take a septum—the little orange-brown rubber stoppers that were ordinarily used to cork glass test tubes—and draw a face on it in permanent marker. We would then open the cell culture incubator, which was a large box, about the dimensions of a piano bench whose floor held a steel platform that shook when the lid closed. With the platform immobile, we’d each place our septum in the middle, then stick a pencil inside a little hole to deceive the incubator into thinking we had shut the lid. The platform would shake, septa would gradually rumble off to the sides, and whoever’s septum stayed on the platform the longest was the winner and would collect $1 from every other player. Think of it like horse racing, if the horses were inanimate until acted on by an outside force, and instead of a linear track, the horses ambled stochastically off the racetrack and into the surrounding environs. We often played the game right before lunch or a coffee break, so one lucky grad student or postdoc ended up with their sandwich or latte paid for.

Amid everything happening right now, the insignificant games we played with rubber stoppers in the mid-aughts hardly seem important. Or, maybe the games we play in the lab, taking breaks from our research to shout encouragement at bouncing pieces of rubber, are the small slices of humanity that keep our days sane.

An internet search shows I’m hardly the only scientist who has taken time away from important research to act like a kindergartener. Reddit is replete with discussions of Lab Olympics–type games—shooting pipette tips into a bin, guessing the mass of a powdered chemical, quickly robing and disrobing in personal protective equipment.

In my graduate lab, we built massive desserts for the department holiday party. We played billiards in the grad student lounge. We formed a softball team. We posted comics and articles from The Onion on the walls. Our lunches became epic storytelling fests. We wrote and rehearsed skits and songs for the department retreat. We kept a deck of cards and chips at the ready, often taking a break for a quick poker tournament.

Listing the many ways we didn’t do science makes me feel a bit guilty that maybe we should have, um, done more science. But we didn’t neglect science, we just kept ourselves mildly entertained on the side. That’s not a deficiency as a scientist, it’s a prerequisite for being human.

I’ve tried to bring this mindset with me after leaving academia—though at times I’ve wondered whether I’m doing myself a disservice by committing any energy to them. Once, within my first couple weeks at a new job, we learned that every department would need to enter some sort of fun potluck/decorating competition. I ended up being quasi-volunteered as part of the small group coordinating our department’s entry—which, ordinarily, I would have found fun and exciting. But because I was so new, I wondered: If I do a great job with this, will people resent the time I’m spending baking a pie and making our table look beautiful? Will they think I’m more interested in the distractions from science than I am in science? Or is the distraction an integral part of the endeavor—and by baking a pie and decorating a table, I’m helping build community and positive feeling among colleagues and give talented scientists one more reason to want to stay at this job? In the end, I compromised: I baked the pie and decorated the table, but I kept a look on my face that indicated I was doing this somewhat against my will.

I was afraid of being labeled as that guy who takes the fun too far. When I worked at a small biotech company, we hired a recent college graduate who was quite a jovial fellow—but then one day a co-worker texted to let me know they’d seen him tossing around a football in the lab. (He agreed to put the football away and luckily didn’t break anything, but we kept a closer eye on him after that.)

More recently, after seeing colleagues decorate their offices with Star Wars figurines, diplomas, and vacation photos, I decided to bring in a full-size vintage pachinko machine. (Pachinko, for the uninitiated, is Japanese vertical pinball.) It’s not like we play pachinko instead of working—the machine mostly sits there and looks awesome. But every now and then, when we’re discussing Serious Scientific Matters, someone will notice the pachinko machine in the corner and ask what it does. I’ll sproing a little steel ball up into the workings, and we’ll watch it tinkle down through a field of brass pins. And for a few moments, we’re all reminded that there’s a world outside our office walls.

I’ve been back to visit my graduate lab a couple of times. The cell culture incubator is still there, sitting in the same spot, probably still susceptible to the same pencil hack to start it shaking with the lid open. I don’t know where my rubber septum is, though. Maybe I left it for a future student. Maybe I threw it away. Maybe I kept it to treasure forever, a symbol of a more carefree time, then forgot that I intended to treasure it forever, and it’s in a box in my basement with a pair of lab goggles and stack of business cards people handed to me at a networking event in 2006. Regardless, 20 years after the postdoc introduced Septa, I remember the rules of the game—and I kind of wish I was back there, dollar bill in hand, playing.

I know you have more important things to do today. But if you have a minute or two, find some colleagues and play a stupid game. Tell your boss I said it was OK.

Read More