How three college students turned Kevin Bacon into a game
In 1994 three students noticed Kevin Bacon seemed connected to everyone in Hollywood. Their game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, became a pop culture phenomenon and a lesson in network science.
A snowy night and two movies
In 1994, three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania, Craig Fass, Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli, were watching TV when two Kevin Bacon movies aired back to back: Footloose and The Air Up There. They started joking about how Bacon seemed to have worked with everyone.
Earlier that year, Bacon had said in a magazine interview that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or with someone who had worked with them. The students turned that into a game.
How the game works
Pick any actor. Connect them to Kevin Bacon through films they appeared in together, in as few steps as possible. The number of steps is that actor's "Bacon number."
| Bacon number | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0 | Kevin Bacon himself |
| 1 | Appeared in a film with Bacon |
| 2 | Appeared with someone who appeared with Bacon |
| 3 or more | Each extra step adds one |
Most working film actors have a Bacon number of 3 or less. That is the surprise at the heart of the game: the film world is far more tightly connected than it seems.
From dorm room to TV
The students wrote to TV host Jon Stewart, explaining that Kevin Bacon was "the center of the entertainment universe." They ended up appearing on his talk show, and on Howard Stern's radio show, alongside Bacon himself. A board game followed, and the phrase "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" entered everyday speech.
Online tools such as the Oracle of Bacon let anyone type in two actors and see the shortest connection, using movie databases.
Bacon's reaction
At first, Bacon has said, he worried people were making fun of him. Over time he embraced it. In 2007 he started a charity, SixDegrees.org, which uses the idea of social connection to support causes and connect people with charities. He has appeared in ads and comedy sketches playing on the game.
The science behind it
The game borrows from a much older idea called "six degrees of separation," the suggestion that any two people on Earth are linked by a short chain of acquaintances. In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran "small-world" experiments in the US that tried to measure this by passing letters between strangers through people they knew.
Mathematicians have their own version: the Erdős number, which measures how many co-authorship steps separate a researcher from the prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. A few people have both numbers, giving them an "Erdős-Bacon number."
The key insight from network science is that a few highly connected "hubs" make the whole network small. Bacon was not unique. Many actors who worked across many genres and decades are equally central. He just had the catchiest name.
What it teaches
- Joking can lead to insight. A college game became a popular way to explain network science.
- Embrace your meme. Bacon turned a joke at his expense into a charity.
- Hubs make small worlds. A few well-connected people link everyone else.
- A good name helps. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is easier to say than "average shortest path length."
For another pop culture moment that the subject decided to play along with, read about the Rickroll.
