What are some easy to understand ways of defining an order among a group of people

Question

One of the most popular techniques employed in a game show to define what order people take turns to play a game is by each person picking a piece of paper with the order of play written on it from an urn.

What are some other techniques that are easy to employ (with less/no props), ubiquitous, and communicable to a layman (a simple hashing function using their names) and not potentially offensive (ordering by one's height could tap on someone's insecurity).

Answer 1

In John Barth's novel The end of the road, whenever "the Doctor" cannot make a decision between alternatives, he resorts to three principles:

1. Sinistrality ("if the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left")
2. Antecedence ("if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier")
3. Alphabetic Priority ("choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet")

In the current case, one can generalize these to:

1. sinistrality in birthplace (western birthplaces first, eastern birthplaces last)
2. antecedence in birthdate (older people first, younger people last)
3. alphabetical priority by last name (ordered by last name)

Others include:

• alphabetizing by birthplace
• height
• alphabetizing by father's (or mother's or ...) first names
• ordering by driver's license number
• ordering by middle digits of social security number
• etc.