It sounded so stupidly simple, I could only laugh at its sheer absurdity. A completely balanced, skill-based, coin-flipping eSport? How silly. How dumb. How bafflingly ridiculous.


A game of random chance, with a binary outcome. That simply can’t be all, could it? None of it made sense, or at least, it didn’t make sense for now.


The coin stays the same, but the outcome never stays the same. Positive. Negative. Positive. Negative. I would analogise it to a pendulum that cares little for the laws of physics when swinging back and forth, but that would make zero sense. Just like this game.


The magnitude of it all… a pendulum can swing further away from its centre point when given enough force, but can a similar analogy be applied to a coin? It’s as if with every toss, the stakes only climb higher and higher.


I can’t stop watching. I’m watching a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ coin flip-flop about on a screen, and I can’t take my eyes away from it. The numbers only grow larger and larger. Do you know that the Q-Up coin flips approximately 23 times before it lands on the ground?


There’s no escape… there’s no escape from this, is there? To be stuck in this binary cycle of maximally randomised outcomes? To have the dopamine be coursed and drained from my neural pathways upon a single toss of a coin?


I see it. I see it all so clearly now. A perfectly balanced game of skill will have a 50/50 outcome. When the skill level of each player is perfectly calculated and matched to such a degree that they are quintessentially the same with no bias whatsoever, there will only be two possible outcomes. There will either be Q-Sides, or there will be Up-Sides. Call it.


Could it be? Is it possible to move beyond perfection? The purest form of skill may not be to embrace randomness as it is. Rather, what happens when we reject the notion of chance in its entirety?


I am one with the coin, and the coin is one with me. Let there be Q, or let there be Up. There will be no difference either way.

literally a handmaid's brave new animal farm farenheit 451984 tale