#469

One would think that engaging in discussions regarding crass, rank digital entrancements would generate some kind of action, but apparently writing about games has hurt pageviews! Forget about it, though--I'm choosing to take this as a sign of progress overall. 

Why does Bravely Default want me to put it to sleep for eight hours at a time, like a human child, in order to gain battle currencies? Because it wants me to pay actual money (an impossible ask at this late date) in order to break out of the turns, a delicious, universe-breaking power. Well, I happen to love taking turns. I may hate laws, but I am a maniacal devotee of rules. Any player of games must be, even if your aim is to subvert those rules--they remain your entire focus, since the delicious thrill of freedom is only from them, and the thrill of cracking them is impossible if they are not there to be broken. 

For my part, it is my game to kick ass just fine within the rules, unstimulated by the arts of the glitcher and the breaker. No offense to that meta, but as an assertion of the advantages of my own philosophies of play, I invite you to sit down to some chess. You will find I do not require extra turns, asymmetrical buffing, or adjustments of any kind to the underlying systems in order to execute my strategic aims.

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Before we get into the fun stuff I have thought to maybe do for Factually Game Theory 2024, I would like to interject a bit of book news. Read the first chapter of Byung-Chul Han's book The Disappearance of Rituals a little while ago, read most of the rest of them yesterday and the spare change on top of the final one this morning. I spoke about this philosopher I think around when or a year after the book came out, and this, my first chance to hold a physical book of his in my hands, has been balm on a fevered brow. The genius of this text cannot be overstated. Whether we agree or disagree, his illustrations and ideas are uniformly useful and diverting, incisive and complexifying. Indeed, every page of this extremely spare and clever book strives and succeeds in a particular tranformative aim--but to say more would spoil the game. 

Indeed, believe it or not, this book is on topic. 

Incidentally, he would perhaps be highly critical of much of this blog's content--but as always I gesture towards the masthead, our shared reminder that all of this is not serious, not productive in any sense; it is done for the fun of it. It is indeed a pity we must engage with production and its proxies when we type into blogs, or print books, very much when we play video games, but so it goes.

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That, and beginning Jacques Derrida's Literature in Secret, is all I've been reading lately, basically. Some comics I forgot to talk about but I should relate Megahex by Simon Hanselmann as a strip of particular power and chuckles before I forget again. Shall have to try to remember to generate a list of unrecorded acquisitions and interpretations. But anyway! Back to games. More specifically, video games. 

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Of course, since I've brought chess into things in this very specific way, it seems clear to me that there is a riposte embedded in my position, which is simply to ask if chess, played by the rules, is fun, or a better question, fun enough to justify not breaking it to make it more fun. 

This is a fair question, and exciting in that it merits a broadening of our scope, because my question in answer to that question is whether that is the foremost concern in play at every level. 

Of course, games ought to be fun and if they are not fun, at least in the abstract, they are not games, though optimally a game ought to deliver any number of things besides fun in its suspension. A game might not necessarily be "played" by all who might interact with its payloads, and it might be designed specifically to make the player feel unmoored mechanically and uncomfortable narratively and aesthetically, but this should, under optimal circumstances--specifically, having found its player--result in a kind of extremely narrow but no less potent or legitimate variety of fun. 

Learning is a game, and games by their nature must be learned. This principle lies at the center of our experience of consciousness, of thought--beginning with the memetic interchange between mother and infant, we learn for and through fun and it is essential that we learn to play or else we cannot learn at all.

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It's why motherfuckers will tell you to grow up and stop playing video games. It is because they want to castrate your brain. Broadly speaking, it's why people tell you to grow up and "get serious", "knuckle down", "do something productive with your life". 

Man, fuck that shit. 

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Similarly, it is why the imperative "learn to play" carries such sting. When one is told one has not learned assiduously enough, in the context of a game, the clear and indelible implication is that you are too slow at thinking to survive. In short, brutal, and honest terms, too fucking stupid to live. 

So that simple law of nature is writ large at the zenith of civilization as inescapably as at its most primordial roots: get good or die.

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Again, I think there is much more to games and to life than that, but that is an undeniable part of their base code, and acknowledging it as a vector for potent truth reveals many rich bands of information, many opportunities to translate and refine one's learning. 

As games teach us to play, they teach us to think, and as we think more and in different ways, we--hopefully--also get better at learning, which is to say, we retain our suppleness of approach and our spirit of play in thought, sinking our roots deeper and spreading our branches ever higher and further in our quest for clear light and clean air.

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In short, it is valid to break chess and valid to try and improve it, but it is valid also to simply devote yourself to playing it, even if it seems more boring than the other two. As I have endeavored to indicate, all three elements are in fact one process.

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More game thoughts forthcoming in an unseemly gush--soon!

--JL