Played Apples to Apples, among other games, with some friends last night. I hadn’t played said party game in quite some time and had been missing it. In addition to being great fun, it got me thinking about the way we perceive each other.

If you haven’t played the game, it goes like this: there are two kinds of cards, nouns and adjectives. Each player has a hand of noun cards. The players take turns being the Judge. The Judge flips over an adjective card at random and shows it to the other players. The other players then pick noun cards from their hand that they think the Judge will think is described by the adjective. The Judge shuffles all the submitted noun cards, lays them out on the table, and picks the one they think is best. Whoever played the winning noun card gets a point, and keeps the adjective card in front of them as a way of keeping score.

This is all totally subjective. If I were the Judge and flipped over the adjective scary, people could throw out Ben Stiller or they could throw out Going to the Dentist, and neither of these answers is intrinsically more right than the other. It’s all about my subjective opinion. Given those two options, I’d choose Ben Stiller as the scarier of the two and whoever threw that card out would get the word scary placed in their score pile.

We like to joke that the adjectives in your score pile are somehow descriptive of you as a person. I had radiant, fuzzy and playful in front of me by game’s end. Those seemed to fit me, just as the player next to me seemed to think that the words like hostile in front of him somehow were appropriate to him.

Now, you can chalk all this up to seeing patterns where there are none; people are good at that. But I actually suspect there’s more to it than that. This is a game about knowing other people. And for each of us, ‘knowing’ can mean something different. As for me, when I’m getting to know someone, I find myself focusing on things they sort of find innocently beautiful, or fun, or tasty. I’m less likely to care — and, more importantly, know — what a friend of mine finds scary, or violent, or sexy, or thought provoking. So I’m going to be better at collecting certain kinds of adjectives than others. I don’t know or particularly care what my friends’ political opinions are, so i’m going to have a hard time throwing out the right card for an adjective like corrupt. And this, this not caring about certain adjectives, does without question define me as person.

Sometimes, I’ve been listening to friends describe people I didn’t know, and their choices of what details to include baffled me. This person is good at games. This other person is very passionate. This person is attractive. I would never describe a person using those terms; I simply don’t care, or notice things like that. But other people do, and that’s part of what makes them different as people than me.

So to the extent that other people will focus on different things than me when trying to define themselves and others, I suspect that they will, in fact, tend to collect noticeably different kinds of adjective cards than I will.

And, that’s kind of fascinating, and I suppose that’s another reason to love Apples to Apples, which is already one of my favorite games.