B4| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
M
ark Turmell was a
remarkably odd
teenager who be-
came an enormously
successful adult for
two reasons. The
first was that he recognized from a
young age what he wanted to do for
the rest of his life and never strayed
from his ambition. The second ex-
planation for his phenomenal suc-
cess was that he was a bit of a py-
romaniac.
When he was a kid, Mr. Turmell
strolled around his Bay City, Mich.,
neighborhood lighting matches
along the gutters, walking away and
turning around for a peek, which
provided him with the little thrills
required to survive childhood. In
that fleeting moment when he
looked behind him, it felt to him
that anything was possible. Some-
times there was nothing. Sometimes
there was smoldering. And some-
times there was fire. He loved when
there was fire.
There were two other things he
loved as much as he loved fire: bas-
ketball and videogames. It turned
out he was much better at making
videogames than playing basketball.
His very first game was bought for
an unfathomable amount of money
to someone who was still living
with his parents. “My dad opened
an account, bought some mutual
funds, and poured some money in,”
Mr. Turmell said. “I had no idea
what was happening.” What was
happening was that he was becom-
ing one of the great developers of
his generation.
Mr. Turmell would one day com-
bine all three of his childhood loves
into the biggest hit of his career.
The name of this game was “NBA
Jam.” In less than a year, it earned
$1 billion in quarters. And the most
seductive thing about one of the
most lucrative arcade games ever
made was a phenomenon that Mark
Turmell didn’t understand, couldn’t
have explained and wasn’t even
supposed to be real.
It is known as “the hot hand.”A Dangerous Bias of the Mind
To have the hot hand is to achieve
some elevated state of ability in
which you feel briefly superhuman.
There is no more pleasurable sensa-
tion for humans. The ethereal feel-
ing of having the hot hand exists in
nearly every industry and touches
nearly every person on earth.
But there is one more curious
thing about the hot hand: It isn’t
supposed to exist.
The hot hand is a phenomenon
that has been studied by genius
scholars, brilliant minds and Nobel
Prize winners for nearly 40 years
now. The fight began in 1985 with
the publication of a classic paper
called “The hot hand in basketball:
On the misperception of random se-
quences,” which has since become
part of the canon of behavioral eco-
nomics. It revealed a dangerous bias
of the mind: that we see patterns
where they don’t exist. Or, to put it
succinctly, there is no hot hand.
While Tom Gilovich, Robert Val-
lone and Amos Tversky studied how
this concept applies to basketball—
when you’ve made a few shots in a
row and believe you’re more likely
to sink your next shot because
you’ve made those previous shots—
the implications of their research
weren’t limited to the court. Basket-
ball just happened to be a wonder-
ful excuse to explore the rest of the
world. How we manage our money,
how our favorite movies get made,
how we listen to music, how we
hire for jobs and how we make all
kinds of decisions—they all have
something to do with the hot hand.
What the psychologists behind
the paper didn’t realize was that
they had stumbled upon a seduc-
tive idea that would follow them
for the rest of their lives. Their
finding has been the subject of
fierce debate ever since, and re-
cent studies powered by new data
and new ways of thinking have
come to illuminating new conclu-
sions about the hot hand.
One of these papers that changed
the way we think about streaks
came from an unlikely source: a
team of Harvard University under-
grads. As part of an independent
study for school credit, they negoti-
ated access to a trove of informa-
tion that allowed them to study
NBA shots in granular detail.
They knew the hot hand warped
the behavior of everybody on the
basketball court. Now they could
account for that change. They
were able to prove that players
who felt emboldened by their pre-
vious success took longer, harder,
riskier shots when they were on
fire. They took shots they were
less likely to make. Once they con-
trolled for that shift in probabilityand searched for evidence of the
hot hand, they found what had al-
ways been masked. They also got
an A on their paper.
The most significant break-
through in our understanding of
this phenomenon came from two
young American economists in Eu-
rope who looked at the problem of
the hot hand and saw a mind-bog-
gling statistical bias that even some
of the world’s most accomplished
statisticians had missed. Once they
corrected the math, they calculated
that there was a hot hand, and
there always had been. Their paper
was published in 2018 by Econo-
metrica because of their irresistible
conclusion: that the fallacy was it-
self a fallacy.
This made sense to people who
simply refused to believe that the
hot hand was a misreading of ran-
domness. LeBron James is one of
those people. After a particularly
hot performance last month in a
Los Angeles Lakers game, the NBA
player with the loudest voice was
asked for his thoughts on this sub-
ject of academic inquiry that has
been raging for almost as long as
he has been alive. Once he learnedwhen it became part of his bas-
ketball game that would make
billions of dollars.
As soon as he was old enough to
leave his childhood home, Mr. Tur-
mell moved to California to make
games for a living. His reputation
preceded him. One of the many peo-
ple who knew his name before they
met him was the guy responsible
for his computer, Apple Inc. co-
founder Steve Wozniak, who invited
Mr. Turmell to his wedding. That is
where he said he was approached
by another young geek with a
bright future.
“Mark Turmell!” the stranger
said. “We love your games.”
This stranger eventually got
around to introducing himself. He
was running a software company
near Seattle and wanted Mr. Tur-
mell to come work for him. “No,
man!” Mr. Turmell said. He was
too busy making games. And that
was how Mark Turmell blew off
Bill Gates.
But only in retrospect was turn-
ing down the opportunity to be
one of the first employees at Mi-
crosoft Corp. an unfortunate deci-
sion. The early 1990s were a great
time to be as geeky as Mr. Tur-
mell, who went to work for a com-
pany called Midway Games in Chi-
cago. And then he made a game
called “NBA Jam.”
It wasn’t long after “NBA Jam”
migrated to a local arcade in Chi-
cago for beta-testing that Mr. Tur-
mell began hearing that something
was wrong with his new game. The
machine was malfunctioning. Mr.
Turmell went to the arcade to
check for himself. He quickly de-
duced the problem. It was true
that the machine couldn’t take any
more quarters—but not because
the machine was broken. It was
because the coin boxes were
stuffed. The kids were feeding
quarters into “NBA Jam” at such a
furious pace that employees had to
empty the machine every hour soBYBENCOHEN
He’s on Fire!What‘NBA Jam’Reveals
About the Power of Streaks.
that being in the zone was the ba-
sis of an “analytics study,” as one
reporter put it, he could barely
disguise his contempt for the topic
of conversation.
“I guarantee that analytics per-
son,” Mr. James said, “has never,
ever been in a zone in their life.”
We’ve all seen the hot hand.We’ve all felt the hot hand. The
appeal of that first paper was
that it challenged something we
all thought to be true. It forced
us to reckon with an eternal
question of the human condition:
How much should we trust what
we see and feel?Creating a Monster
Mark Turmell was another per-
son who didn’t initially under-
stand the power of the hot handWe’ve all seen and felt
the hot hand. But how
much should we trust
what we see and feel?they could keep playing.
Every shred of data suggested
that “NBA Jam” would be a sensa-
tion unlike any game ever created.
“NBA Jam” made $2,468 in one
week when no other game earned
more than $750. That number was
so ludicrous that Mr. Turmell
saved a physical copy of the earn-
ings report as proof. And the com-
motion inside his local Chicago
test arcade was a preview of the
delirium that would infect arcades
across the country. The mania sur-
rounding Mr. Turmell’s game was
neatly encapsulated by a nasty let-
ter from one out-of-stock distribu-
tor. “Your programmers have cre-
ated a monster,” he wrote.
But there was nothing obvious
about “NBA Jam”’s success. And the
suits who had been skeptical of the
numbers never could have imagined
the reason people around the globe
would become so obsessed with Mr.
Turmell’s basketball game.He’s on Fire!
It was essential that each of Mr.
Turmell’s games included a goal
other than beating the computer.
There had to be an elevated state of
ability that would compel people to
keep stuffing coins into the cash
box. He went to Burger King for
lunch one day when he was stuck
on this problem for “NBA Jam.” Af-
ter ordering a chicken sandwich
with cheese and only cheese, he
mentioned his dilemma to another
developer named Jamie Rivett. “We
need some kind of mode,” Mr. Tur-
mell said.
By the time Mr. Turmell’s chicken
sandwich with cheese was ready,
Mr. Rivett had suggested an idea
they both knew immediately was
brilliant: on-fire mode.
If a player made two shots in a
row, then he would be heating up.
If he made three shots in a row,
then he would almost certainly
make his next shot. It didn’t mat-
ter what kind of shot it was. The
ball would burst into flames. He
would be...on fire!
Mark Turmell was a sucker for
this mode because of his childhood
appreciation of fire. But what made
his arcade game so addicting for the
rest of America was that our minds
are programmed to search for pat-
terns. We see one, two, three shots
in a row and intuitively seek out the
fourth. We crave order in chaos. Mr.
Turmell made sure there was a re-
ward for that behavior.
He turned the hot hand into
“NBA Jam”’s superpower.
Not long after that working
lunch, Mr. Turmell offered the
voice-over role for his game to a lo-
cal comedian. This was another crit-
ical decision. It turned out test au-
diences kept feeding quarters into
machines because they wanted to
hear the comedian bellow the
game’s catchphrases.
“Boomshakalaka!”
“He’s heating up!”
But what they really wanted to
hear were the three majestic words
that came next.
“He’s on fire!”
It has been nearly three decades
since the release of “NBA Jam,” but
this childhood pyromaniac is still
playing with fire. Mr. Turmell
learned from his experience in the
early 1990s to program a version of
the hot hand into every game that
he develops. It is a lesson that he
keeps in mind to this day.
As his basketball game became
unavoidable for boys and girls of a
certain age, it was as if Mark Tur-
mell had brainwashed a generation
of young, impressionable minds into
believing the concept of the hot
hand. They played “NBA Jam” so
much that it was systematically
drilled into them that anyone who
made three shots in a row was go-
ing to make the fourth. And there
was one kid who would never be
convinced otherwise.
This boy who would one day
change the NBA—a historically
great shooter whose team won
three championships in five seasons
and revolutionized basketball in
part because of his very hot hand—
learned how satisfying it was to be
on fire by spending countless hours
with “NBA Jam.” He could even pre-
tend to play as himself since his dad
was in the game and they techni-
cally shared a name. But nobody
called this kid by that given name:
Wardell Curry.
They called him Steph.Adapted from “The Hot Hand: The
Mystery and Science of Streaks,” by
Wall Street Journal reporter Ben
Cohen, to be published on March 10
by Custom House, an imprint of
William Morrow/HarperCollins
Publishers. HarperCollins Publishers
is a unit of News Corp, which also
owns The Wall Street Journal. TURMELL: KENDRICK BRINSON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; CURRY: EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGESEXCHANGE
Mark Turmell, above, turned a childhood love of fire into a crucial breakthrough while designing ‘NBA Jam,’ bottom. One
kid who spent countless hours with the game was Stephen Curry, below, who grew up to be the NBA’s best shooter.