> At the time it surprised me, but of course it is natural to expect long games to be long.
Indeed, which is why I am skeptical of purely anecdotal claims of the Lindy effect, as they may be skewed by survivorship bias. In this case, however, you have the numbers to back up the observation.
The Lindy effect and survivorship bias are one in the same. That's kind of the idea.
Take programming languages for example. If I asked you to bet on 30 different programming languages which would still be in use in 10 years, and all you knew about them was how long they had already been in use, you'd probably correlate your bets to some degree with their age.
Consider radioactive decay. An isotope has a half-life that remains constant over time. After one half-life, the remaining material of that isotope isn't there because it's "special" or robust or less likely to decay, it just got lucky. Its half-life from this point remains unchanged, so it does not display the Lindy effect.
Similarly, old humans give us plenty of opportunity to talk about survivorship bias, but we out lifetimes do not display the Lindy effect -- older humans are not expected to have longer remaining lives than young humans.
Indeed, which is why I am skeptical of purely anecdotal claims of the Lindy effect, as they may be skewed by survivorship bias. In this case, however, you have the numbers to back up the observation.