Play is the interface

I believe the best way to get to know someone is to play a game or do an activity with them. When the goal is conversation, people are guarded; when the goal is to build, solve or win something, the guard drops on its own and you see who they are.

Let me start with an anecdote.

A few months ago my husband and I took a road trip with people we barely knew, a cousin of ours and a few of his friends. The drive out went the way these things go: we introduced ourselves, made small talk, traded a couple of jokes, and then the conversation ran out. One person drove while the rest of us slept, listened to music, or looked at our phones. Three hours later, the sum total of what we knew was where everyone lived and what they did for work.

My husband and I are allergic to small talk, and games are a big part of how the two of us got to know each other, so on the drive back I taught everyone a word game called Contact.¹11How to play Contact One person holds a secret word and reveals its first letter, and the rest of us have to earn the next letter by giving each other clues that a teammate will decode before the word-holder does. A clue only works if it points at something at least two people get, so the game is really a search for shared references, and people throw out obscure ones partly to see which land. Within a few rounds people were opening up: one person’s Christmas tradition, which they had assumed was universal, turned out to be theirs alone; a Pokémon reference two of us caught instantly went straight past someone else. By the time we got home, the city and the job were the least interesting things we knew about anyone: by then we had childhood stories, a few quirks and one or two esoteric obsessions to go on.

Games have a way of stripping away the curated version of a person.²22Purva Tendulkar, “Board Games and the Truth They Tell” (Substack, August 2025): games strip away curated personas; the tells are in the small choices, whether you bluff, gamble, trash-talk, or help others at the cost of your own score You cannot keep up a façade while deciding whether to trade sheep for wheat (Catan, if you have played it).³33Catan, the board game where sheep, wheat, ore, brick and wood are traded across the table The small choices a game forces on you, how you bluff, when you gamble and when you play it safe, whether you help someone at the cost of your own score, are windows into instincts that an hour of questions never reaches. Conversation asks people to describe themselves, and most of us are practised at that. Play asks them to act, which is much harder to rehearse.

This matters most on a first date, where two people with almost no information about each other have shown up to gauge whether they could be a good fit. The typical first date gives them a table and an hour of questions. The table is the interface, and it is a poor one.

At Quest, we build a better interface. Our AI matchmaker (Rumi) designs a quest for each pair, shaped by who they are and what they are hoping to find out about each other. Quests are designed to be fun, interactive, high-signal, and easy to be yourself in. Rumi builds quests at varying levels of stakes, and all of them play easily from a phone.

The interface for getting to know someone has barely been designed; all the innovation went into the catalogue. Now that the catalogue is “every eligible” individual, how you get to know a single person is the most high-stakes problem (as it rightly deserves to be), and we are excited to solve it!