My favorite game playing in my mind is doing timeline revelsals, what if browsers used bliss from the beginning and then someone invented JavaScript and put it in browser. Would you stick to bliss?
Neatly removes the lhs/rhs distinction in the compiler, although in practice tracking during the translation whether evaluating e.g. "a[i]" needs to end with DEREF or not ain't that onerous.
But "The Design of an Optimizing Compiler" by Wulf et al. is an interesting read nonetheless; especially if you wonder how people did register allocation before Chaitin's seminal paper.