Would You Let a Friend Send Any Text to Any Contact in Your Phone?

Damage control is an excruciating, highly addictive game that among my friends has destroyed relationships, rekindled others, threatened to ruin careers, sparked sexual intrigue, and caused no end of terror and laughter. It is a game for two friends, and best played drunk. The instructions are simple: 1.) Trade phones. 2.) Select a […]

David Sparshott

Damage control is an excruciating, highly addictive game that among my friends has destroyed relationships, rekindled others, threatened to ruin careers, sparked sexual intrigue, and caused no end of terror and laughter. It is a game for two friends, and best played drunk. The instructions are simple:

1.) Trade phones.

2.) Select a name from your friend's contact list. Nobody is off-limits, but it's sporting to choose a person whose name you don't recognize.

3.) Write a text message to this person from your friend's phone. You can write anything. As a rule, the crazier the message, the better. Send. Cackle gleefully.

4.) Return your phones to each other. Once in possession of your own phone, assess how badly your friend has damaged your life. Weep, scream in agony, or lie on the floor, catatonic, praying that you will wake up from the nightmare that your life has just become.

5.) Damage Control! It's 3 am, you're intoxicated, and you have to figure out how to prevent your life from falling apart. Maybe you just texted an ex a sonnet about her kneecaps. Maybe you just told your boss that you wanted to see him that minute, about a matter of extreme importance. Maybe you sent a surreal, menacing note to a second cousin you haven't talked to in three years.

David Sparshott

A novice's first impulse will be to do one of three things: text the person back immediately and claim that your message was intended for someone else; claim that a friend took your phone and pranked you; wait until the next day and say that your phone was stolen. But these plays are likely to cause greater trouble. If the message is sufficiently disturbing (“I'm thinking of U boo but I just want U 2 know that I would NEVER treat U sexually!”), what difference does it make if it was intended for someone else? And what kind of person would have friends who would do something as reckless as steal their phone and send nonsensically illicit text messages to random contacts? There is also a risk that any excuse will only convince the recipient that you're not just deranged but a liar. Often the best solution is to act like you sent the message and attempt to redeem yourself. You have to be creative. The damage inflicted in a single drunken moment might require weeks, even months, of sober, grim machinations to undo. And sometimes the damage control itself yields even greater damage. It is really a suicidal game.

David Sparshott

And insanely fun. There's a certain excitement common to every form of self-destructive behavior, and Damage Control is no different. The thrill of the game lies in the risk. It is a digital bungee jump, made possible by the knowledge that you can (probably) undo the destruction with a few texts.

But Damage Control offers something else too. We now feel that we can communicate with anyone at any time, that we can get most of our needs met, almost instantaneously, with a few swipes. We've accepted that our device, never more than inches from our flesh, is part of us. It's as intimate as a portfolio, a sketchbook, or a diary. Our phone is an extension of our ears, our voice, our heart, our brain. It is us.

Damage Control puts a wedge between us and our phone. It reminds us that our virtual identity is not our actual identity; we are not our phone. Not too long ago this statement would seem a banality, but now the reminder feels refreshing. Chaos is frightening, but it is also liberating.

Besides, the damage is not usually severe. A friend is unlikely to act cruelly or with malice. Recently Luke (names and identities have been changed to avoid further damaging the players' lives), or rather Luke's phone, texted Candace, a woman who sublet his room a year earlier: “i have this funny feeling in my toes when i wake up.” Luke liked Candace. They had stayed in touch after she moved out. They hadn't seen each other in nearly a year, however, and after she received his text message, they never spoke again. Luke was upset about this but not destroyed; there was a good chance they'd never have spoken again anyway.

Not every round of Damage Control ends so benignly.

David Sparshott

I discovered with horror during a recent game that I had sent the following message to a man I barely knew: “let's go over the top 2 times to-nite 4 real let's go hard to the max.” He responded in seconds: “Cool! Where should we meet?” I still get regular invitations from this guy, eager to go hard to the max.

It gets much worse. During a game three years ago Brad, an employee of an off-Broadway theater, found that he had sent the following message at 12:57 am on a Thursday to his boss: “What up this is whatever but my shit is feelin mad rock for little old you and you and you and you and you. That's for certain.”

In a panic, Brad texted a follow-up (“Sorry my friend stole my phone and sent that to everyone”). It was too late. His boss joked about it the next day, but she didn't believe he was telling the truth about his “friend.” “It was extra-uncomfortable because she's older than me,” Brad told me. “Our relationship has never been the same.”

A year later he had his revenge on his game partner, Saul, a film director. Saul got his phone back to discover that he had sent a raunchy text to one of his film agents. There was no way to fix the relationship, no story that Saul could tell—including the true story—that could repair his professional standing. He never spoke with the agent again. “I lost out on huge jobs, I'm sure,” says Saul. But he has no regrets. “It was one of the best things that ever happened in my life. It was exhilarating. You haven't lived until you've played Damage Control.” My friends and I spend more time talking about why we play Damage Control than actually playing it, which might tell you something about the game's narcotic pull.

David Sparshott

There are some indications that the game, or at least the spirit behind it, is catching on. Comedian Nathan Fielder once asked his Twitter followers to text their parents “got 2 grams for $40” followed immediately by “Sorry, ignore that txt. Not for you.” His followers posted screenshots of their parents' horrified responses. Fielder later conducted a similar experiment in which followers texted the person they were dating “I haven't been fully honest with you” and then did not send another message for an hour. While more mean-spirited than Damage Control, at least as we play it, the gesture is similar. The games reverse the traditional prank phone formula—the caller is identified, but the message is obscure.

It's true that the game can twist relationships, usually by forcing a leap to a higher degree of intimacy, but this can be a positive development. “Really what we're doing,” Luke says when I ask him why he plays, “is trying to use the weird medium of texting to create new ways of interacting with people.” In this view, Damage Control turns texting into something more than a mode of communication. It is texting as a new art form. “It can be transcendent,” Luke says. “But mainly it's just terrifying.”

David Sparshott

One incredible game lasted nearly a year when Brad's phone texted a girl with whom he had gone on a failed blind date three years earlier. She had deleted his number, so she had no idea who he was; she figured he had the wrong number. But she returned his message, and a conversation began. Soon they were texting each other habitually. They began to confide in each other. A genuine friendship began to form. Brad knew he could never meet her—she would recognize him from their failed date—so he refused to send her pictures of his face. She didn't seem to mind. She enjoyed having open conversations, free of social context, with a perfect stranger.

He did, however, send a photograph of his hands. She texted a photograph of her hands in response. It became a little game with them, the hand photographs. They sent each other photos of their hands on a mountain, hands in the middle of the night, hands outstretched, hands waving, fingers and knuckles and palms.

They might have gone on like that forever had Brad not accidentally sent a phone screenshot that revealed he knew her name. She realized he wasn't a stranger after all. She was crushed. He was crushed. There was nothing he could do. Their relationship was damaged beyond repair.

David Sparshott