If I simply drop sugar into my coffee, the coffee doesn't sweeten. If I simply stir my coffee, again, the coffee doesn’t sweeten. But if I do both, something happens - my coffee gets sweeter.

We can say in statistical terms that there is an interaction between the two variables: how much I stirred, and how much sugar I put in my coffee, on an outcome - the sweetness of my coffee (for the record, I hate sweet coffee). Effects of single variables interact with each other to yield secondary effects.

This is known as an interaction effect in statistics - when the outcome isn’t dictated only by the sum of the parts of contributing factors, but also by an interaction effect. (The "interaction term" is the quantification of this effect).

Ido recently shared the “Stick Game”, an exemplar of a low-tech, high-result, endless development type of game. But it is also a succinct and clean demonstration of the interaction effect in action: you would think that simply improving reaction time, or footwork, etc, would directly improve performance in a tactical game. But it isn’t enough. There is a need to go beyond working on attributes, and to pull them together in an organized fashion.

And that is what such a game does. Ido has presented countless games, tasks, scenarios, time and again, which serve as platforms for addressing attributes at a higher level. To develop, not just a raw attribute, but at a higher level of complexity, the organization of those attributes (which becomes closer to the amalgam that is you yourself).

The platform, in a sense, also serves to recalibrate your new upgraded hardware and software, by giving it wet-tests, immediate feedback, and over time these new attributes become more finely tuned into the totality of the system, rather than being some external unappropriated capacity.

This is a higher order way of thinking, and makes sense of things where more simple approaches fail to render understanding of a situation. The interaction effect and two of it’s children, the mediator and moderator effects, are very useful heuristics for analyzing the world around us.