Why
are we haplessly hooked on our favourite games, and take
them so seriously when winning or losing at whist or Monopoly
counts for nothing (gambling is a separate issue) in real
life?
We
soberly note there isn’t a culture in the world that
doesn’t have its games. If going-game is not mapped
out in our DNA, there is a preponderance of empirical evidence
suggesting that while we choose the games we play, there
is very little choice in the species inclination to set
aside a significant percentage of its leisure time for games.
Reduced
to its indivisibles, every ‘formal’ game institutes
a highly particularized, patent-protected culture with a
fixed set of rules and delimited range of negative and positive
outcomes which produce every game’s winners and losers.
Lewis
Lapham, in Money and Class in America, synonymizes
the environment of the game with the prelapsarian world,
especially in sports that feature fields of dreams, which
are in fact perfectly ordered, tableau-like, edenic spaces.
"But inside the park the world is as it was in the
beginning. The grass is as green as it was in everybody's
lost childhood; nobody grows old.”
In
Seduction, Jean Baudrillard introduces the notion
of the rules of the game taking irrational precedence over
the laws that surround it, as if the diversion, however
irreal and inconsequential, is no less deserving of the
respect and deference accorded to the real world.
Our
uncanny and incurable attraction to game culture and the
often outrageous import we attach to winning and losing
is further proof, where proof is not wanting, that we are,
at best, a part-time rational species.
Let
us go then, you and I,
Where the card table is spread out beneath the pie in
the sky
And no human voices shall wake us, until we disqualify
Since
its materials are tangible – the board, the deck of
cards, the dice, the computer screen – the game functions
more as an alternative world than fantasy. Unlike the latter,
all games engage the physical body: from the spirited manipulation
of joysticks or pinball flippers to the more sedate positioning
of chess pieces.
What
laws are to the real world, rules are to the game. Laws
can be ignored, finessed or interpreted, but rules are meant
to be obeyed. Disobey the rules (introduce a fifth ace in
a bridge hand, move your bishop like a rook) and the game
breaks down. So why do we happily, if not with quasi-giddy
anticipation, look forward to submitting to the fixed rules
and absolutes of whatever game we fancy? What is it about
games that convince us to surrender our freedom for a restricted
range of pre-determined outcomes that, win or lose, have
no practical bearing in the real world? And how do we rationalize
that for the sake of winning, a certain percentage of gamers
will be tempted by unauthorized means to gain the upper
hand, risking their real-world self-respect and friendships?
The game,
however contrived and removed from the real world of real
consequences, creates an equal playing field among unequals.
Rich and poor, high class low class, literate illiterate,
provided they submit to the rules, find themselves contemplating
the same bingo card, Clue board or computer screen. And
while the better player usually emerges victorious in
games such as Scrabble and Bridge, the element of luck
in most games predicts that the loser one day will be
the winner. Real life’s losers, most of whom are
economically disadvantaged, are predictably attracted
to games that offer good odds at winning
The game,
the concentration it focuses, the passion it generates,
shrinks time to the present indicative. Our fears and
anxieties disappear as we submit to the rules and operations
of the game, or as spectators to its unfolding. Temporarily
relieved of regrets over the past and worries about the
future, especially the angst over that singularizing event
no one escapes (decease), every game is a means to the
same end – getting out of the black and into the
blue. In bio-chemical speak, game culture provides a high
similar to that experienced through drugs: serotonin and
dopamine levels shoot up when playing our favourite games.
In
the heat of the game at the exclusion of everything else,
we don’t age, we experience time passing like our
beloved pets that dwell in the eternal present
and for whom time does not exist -- but without forsaking
our faculties of judgment, which, depending on the game,
are engaged to a greater or lesser degree. When the outside
world intrudes, the gamer’s displeasure or anger is
not directed at the intruder or intrusion, per se;
his upset is a direct effect of being yanked back into existential
time, which undermines the raison d'être of
the game.
Pinball,
which came into its own in the late 1940s, was a game
changer: it was the first game that required of the player
absolute concentration for the entire duration of the
game. It raised the game’s intensity like Charlie
Parker in jazz and James Brown in funk turned up the heat
in their respective genres.
Certain games
require waiting in between turns, or moves or bids. For
some, these waiting periods reduce the intensity and gratification
of the escape/diversion. In response to the growing demand
for a more unadulterated product, newer, more fully engaging
games have been developed, especially in our current century
in conjunction with cyber technology.
For its sheer
intensity and immoderation, pinball has not been surpassed.
In its phylum, every game subsequent to it is modeled
on its template, like the fizz (carbonation) is the sine
qua non in every soft drink.
All games,
all easily assembled and commenced, represent alternative
worlds with their very particular time and space grids.
The wall that separates the world of games from the real
world is invisible but very real, and is a decisive indicator
of the innate incompatibility that provides for each world’s
safe and autonomous orbit. Despite its discombobulatingly
superior mass and significance, the outer world is remarkably
kept at bay for as long as any game is being played. The
lasting appeal of any game rests on the quality of escape
it provides from the real world as well as its ability
to neutralize the mostly discomfiting effects of self-consciousness,
a species specific distinction that evokes both awe and
extreme anxiety.
And for those
“passing strange” ones (those unflappable
freaks of nature) – and we have all encountered
them at one time or another -- for whom the gaze of the
other does not exist, who are everlastingly comfortable
in their skins, whose way of being-in-the-world we secretly
envy from near or afar, we must never forget that they
are excluded from a world that can never be explained
or revealed, much like the world of sexual desire cannot
be described or demonstrated to a child.
The integrity
of the game is threatened when the outside world begins
to take an interest in it, when its contrived but purposeful
irreality begins to take on water (reality) and lose its
float. A chess game is simply a game until two world masters
find themselves playing for the prestige and honour of
their respective countries, and the millions of very real
dollars at stake.
For many,
the ideal game combines its irreality and inconsequentiality
with the added real consequence of winning or losing money.
Huge complexes (hotel-casinos) have been constructed around
this particular combination in which the play-and-pay
binary represents the pinnacle of gaming, where the losers,
having waived the ‘no consequence’ option,
consent to deal with losses that range from the trifling
to the catastrophic.
Since every
culture treasures its games, gaming, along with sex, drugs
and rock’n’roll, ranks as one of the world’s
most cherished and dependable modes of recreation and
escape. And while its psychological high cannot compete
with the physical high of drugs, games are sanctioned
by the law and even fanatical gamers are exempt from the
negative health outcomes associated with incontinent drug
and alcohol consumption.
Suffice to
say that games are much more than merely games, if not
windows into the subconscious of a species not yet fully
adjusted to the implications of being self-aware. Whether
it be through mind altering substances, the all night
rave party, the Mardi Gras or playing your favourite game,
they all reduce to the deep seated desire to escape into
the present, the eternal now, which Freud contends is
tantamount to asubconscious
death wish, or “return to the
inanimate.” Games both cater to and mask that primordial
longing of wanting to be relieved of being the object
of the gaze (the judgment) of the other.
In
an ironic twist of DNA, children
spontaneously invent and play games in order to develop
the competencies required to navigate the real world while
the adult plays them in order to escape that same world.
