Dan Luu asks, Why is bridge declining?:

My partner and I [Luu] started playing bridge recently, and people at the local bridge club. People often comment on how young we are. You’ll find serious competitive players of all ages, but the median age of a casual player is probably in the 60s or 70s. There are a lot of discussions about why this is. The most common reasons I hear are:

1. People who are retired have more time to play games, the reason bridge looks so old is that that’s who has free time.

1.b. Bridge isn’t actually declining, as long as people keep retiring, the population of bridge players isn’t going to decline

2. Kids nowadays don’t have the attention span and play video games instead

3. Bridge takes a really long time to learn

4. Poker has sucked all the air out of the room, at least outside of Asian card games

(1) and (2) seem pretty obviously wrong to me. People my age and younger spend plenty of time playing games, they just choose games that aren’t bridge. As (2) hints at, they often choose video games, but they often choose tabletop games (including other card games) instead. . . . (2) seems easily falsified by the popularity of chess or go, games which take a substantially longer attention span than bridge . . .

I think (3) is a correct reason, but it isn’t sufficient to explain what’s going on. It’s true that bridge has an extremely steep learning curve, much more so than games like chess or go . . . (3) has some explanatory power and is consistent with the card games that are still popular, like poker, not to mention da lao er, da bai fen, tuo la ji, zhao pengyou, etc. (Asian card games which haven’t seen a decline in popularity the way bridge has).

Luu continues:

However, I don’t think (3) is a sufficient explanation. if people really want an easy entry, they could teach spades as an entry into bridge . . . A related comment is that it’s not clear that the initial learning curve to bridge is steeper than for a moderately complex modern board game like Terra Mystica (TM). . . . Modern board games as complex as TM aren’t exactly wildly popular, but they’re not in decline, either. If anything, it’s the opposite . . .

Even if it’s true, (4) is more of a symptom than an explanation.

Then he lands the punch:

There’s one factor that seems obvious to me that I haven’t heard. . . . there’s a stodgy bureaucracy around bridge. . . .

If you look at bidding systems in use today, most casual players in the U.S. use some variation or evolution of a single system. There’s more variety at higher levels, in tournament play, but systems that are considered too strange are either banned or highly discouraged. For example, Forcing Pass systems (where opening with a bid of “pass”, instead of indicating a hand not strong enough to bid, is used to indicate a strong hand) are banned in American (ABCL) tournaments. In tournaments where FP systems aren’t banned, players note that people who run FP are often severely penalized by tournament officials . . . And, because penalties are applied at the discretion of tournament officials, additional penalties can be applied for minor offenses . . .

If you contrast this to younger games like Magic or Netrunner, meta-breaking discoveries are lauded; people are rewarded for thinking about the meta and figuring out how to break it. If you manage to “break” the game in a way that’s not cheating, rules will be updated for the next tournament, but you’ll win the tournament in a way that’s considered to be creative and fair. In Bridge, officials may ban your bidding system for being too innovative in the middle of a tournament . . .

If, in the abstract, you imagine one card game where, decades after someone proposes a new meta, officials still ban it or penalize it as a Highly Unusual Method, and another card game, where people reward players for coming up with creative meta-breaking changes, and then you tell people to guess the relative age distribution of the games (ceteris paribus), I think most people would guess that the more creative game has a younger player base and the more conservative game has an older player base.

You might argue that this bidding system stuff doesn’t matter outside of the highest levels of play, but the cultural impact trickles down to the beginner level. When initially learning bridge, my partner asked “why does the system say to do X?” a couple times, but she quickly learned to not ask that question. . . . If you ask the analogous question when learning Netrunner (why was this deck constructed in this way), people *love* talking about this; part of teaching someone Netrunner is teaching people the reasons behind deckbuilding decisions and helping people learn how to construct better decks.

Much like (3), I don’t think that creativity stifling bureaucracy is a sufficient reason to explain the greying of bridge, but it seems like a plausible contributing factor.

Interesting. But I have another explanation, which I think is much bigger than the (1), (2), (3), and (4) listed by Luu, and that’s just that many pastimes are time-bound in their popularity. Bridge was huge for a roughly fifty-year period during the early part of the twentieth century–for example, Wikipedia says, “The number of people who play contract bridge has declined since its peak in the 1940s, when a survey found it was played in 44% of US households.” At that point, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Put it another way. Why don’t they name anyone Susan anymore? See the above graph. At the peak of its popularity, the name Susan was given to more than 1% of babies born in this country. Then Susan became less popular. That makes sense; there are trends. Then Susan became a baby-boomer name, kind of old-fashioned. Now Susan is an old-lady name, and parents aren’t picking it anymore, partly because it sounds like an old-lady name and partly because people choose from a wider variety of names, as illustrated by this graph from chapter 2 of Regression and Other Stories:

The point is, there’s no need for a Susan-specific explanation of the decline in popularity of “Susan.” It’s just the ebb and flow of popularity, along with a feedback mechanism by which, once a name gets less popular and becomes associated with a specific period in the past, that can drive the popularity down even further. This is something we’ve particularly seen with girls’ names over the years. “Susan” could mount a comeback (as has “Sophie” but not “Bertha,” to consider two names that were popular a couple generations before “Susan”), and there’s something to be said about how these trends can vary–but I think the baseline explanation is just the age thing.

Similarly with bridge, a game that was absolutely huge a hundred years ago, then gradually declined in popularity with competition with other amusements (TV is the usual culprit that’s given for the decline of everything else), then, like “Susan,” it got this generational tinge, so it’s less appealing to the kids–it’s an old-people’s game.

But what about chess and go? They’re a lot older than bridge and are going as strong as ever, or at least they haven’t cratered among the young in the way that bridge has. I could give a couple of answers: chess and go have special properties, they’ve stood the test of time in a way that other games haven’t. I’m not claiming that a popular board game will necessarily go into sharp decline or be associated with old people–similarly with names–; I’m just saying we shouldn’t be surprised when this happens.

The funny thing is, a few weeks ago at a party I was chatting with someone who had been the world champion at one of these modern tabletop card games–it might have even been Netrunner! Whatever game it was, I guess it’s orders of magnitude less popular than bridge, but it did sound like it was most popular among young adults. We’ll see how things look in fifty years.

P.S. If you google *Dan Luu bridge* you’ll also come across this fun post, where Luu writes:

You don’t have to be at a party to see this phenomenon in action, but there’s a curious thing I regularly see at parties in social circles where people value intelligence and cleverness without similarly valuing on-the-ground knowledge or intellectual rigor. People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent ones I’ve observed at multiple parties are how to build a competitor to Google search and how to solve the problem of high transit construction costs) and explain why people working in the field today are doing it wrong and then explain how they would do it instead. . . .

Asking people why they think their solutions would solve valuable problems in the field has become a hobby of mine when I’m at parties where this kind of superficial pseudo-technical discussion dominates the party. What I’ve found when I’ve asked for details is that, in areas where I have some knowledge, people generally don’t know what sub-problems need to be solved to solve the problem they’re trying to address, making their solution hopeless. . . .

Since I often attend parties with programmers, this means I often hear programmers retelling their cocktail-party level understanding of another field . . . An example I enjoyed was this Twitter thread where Hillel Wayne discussed how programmers without knowledge of trad engineering often have incorrect ideas about what trad engineering is like . . . Hillel compared the perceptions of people who’d actually worked in multiple fields to pop-programmer perceptions of trad engineering. One of the many examples of this that Hillel gives is when people talk about bridge building, where he notes that programmers say things like

The predictability of a true engineer’s world is an enviable thing. But ours is a world always in flux, where the laws of physics change weekly. If we did not quickly adapt to the unforeseen, the only foreseeable event would be our own destruction.

and

No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction.

But Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don’t move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but, if you talk to actual, working, civil engineers, many civil engineers frequently deal with changing requirements after a job has started that’s not fundamentally different from what programmers have to deal with at their jobs.

Luu continues with this amusing example:

A line I often hear from programmers is that programming is like “having to build a plane while it’s flying”, implicitly making the case that programming is harder than designing and building a plane since people who design and build planes can do so before the plane is flying. But, of course, someone who designs airplanes could just as easily say “gosh, my job would be very easy if I could build planes with 4 9s of uptime and my plane were allowed to crash and kill all of the passengers for 1 minute every week”.