(6). love and other games
For me, love is the great game.
Saccharine and sentimental, yes, and I’m sure that many people resent the comparison. “Many” people is probably a bit optimistic—a dramatic overestimation of my audience.
Reiner Knizia, storied game designer, has a quote that is often passed around in gaming circles and forums: “When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.”
Reiner is unwilling to fully divorce the concept of winning from what makes a game, but he almost gets there, and is closer than most people. Winning is odd as a metric. To be crowned a winner, the circle of parameters that constitutes that win is fragile, and is fairly easy to shatter. If someone wins by accident, or accident of birth, are they a winner? Ability is not distributed equally amongst players of games. If you are not modest when winning, your sportsmanship can be called into question, your win invalidated. If someone misinterprets a rule, and you win because of it, did you actually win?
The charitable interpretation of winning as a constitutive component of a game is that the agreement between players to seek victory binds them together, connects them, creates the holism of non-violent contest. We are connected and bound by our quest for the win.
But nobody wins for long, and the wins of yesterday pale when we are confronted with the promise of new wins tomorrow, a new carrot to pursue, a new project, a new challenge. And then suddenly, you’re out of track, you’re out of runway. You then just lose, lose, lose.
Love is the great game. Like all great games, its maintenance requires incredible leaps of faith. You discover a lot about someone based on how they treat themselves and others when they play, more than people often want to admit.
That said, the purpose of games, and playing at all, is not to judge and categorize people. Someone’s desire for competition is not at odds with another’s desire to explore and understand better. People who are petulant when losing, and boastful when winning, are not displaying some great character flaw. Games are not the medium by which we love, they are expressions of love. A future without games is a future without love. It is a world where relationships are mediated and controlled, empty and absent of soul.
I work with people, and I write. I play many games. While it may be problematic to reason from personal experience, but it seems to me that there are more ways than ever before to avoid interrelationship with others, or to heavily mediate interaction.
When someone orders delivered food in 2023, they don’t ever need to see the person bringing it. We are untroubled by the games of How Much to Tip? and How Do I Take This Food From This Person? We are encouraged to buy homes in neighborhoods free of people that are not within our socioeconomic class, avoid schools that have been given arbitrarily low ratings, buy guns to protect ourselves from our neighbors, move into apartment buildings that are built like hotels to maximize privacy. Our jobs and our marketplaces are built upon exploitation, and the slave classes that serve the great godless machine are forced into invisibility. Most people feel bad, and they don’t know why. The death of interdependence is why. Rapacious exploitation is why.
The game of love is the game of interdependence. It is a game that provides someone nourishing and vital, which can be found nowhere else.
I don’t know if I ever consciously made a decision to be a writer, or if some people just are born this way. I’ve always had an almost pathological desire to explain myself. I’ve never been able to let that particular trait go, but I like to think that I’ve moved on from what was once an expression of self-hatred or demure false humility and have completely embraced bald-faced self-righteousness. Righteous people are frightening—booga booga. I am no exception, but my desire to explain, to understand the rules and logic of the game I’m playing is one of the defining features of my life.
As I write this, it feels like a way of being in the world is falling apart. To be honest, I would not be displeased to see our system of work-or-die capitalism go—I have little love for engines of exploitation.
I’m not sure if we can survive a break from the system, nor am I sure we can survive the radical calamities that will come to define my future, but I have hope. Some days.
So, love, the game of it. The question that taunts me, that comes at me from all times, that has occupied every waking thoughtful moment of my conscious life is the question of love. I think love, faith, the well-played game, and the denial of death all circle around the same set of questions and ideas.
What does it mean to act in good faith? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to struggle in the face of immanent death, to engage in a well-played game of life? And how do you do that when everything seems to be falling apart and there’s little you can do about it?
If our fate is to be eradicated from the face of the earth without a single memory, struck from the cosmic record by plagues or global meteorological meltdown, how do we handle the endgame? What does it mean to play well unto death? This collection is coming to a close, and I have not yet found my answer.
Death does not frighten me, at least not more so than any other inevitable thing. Honestly, I am more frightened of spiders. Writing is not, for me, an attempt to create immortality. I have no interest in such a thing. I do have an interest in playing the game well while I am alive.