#470

One of the problems with doing a thing--in this case, Factually Game Theory 2024, which shall continue apace--is that if I come up with any number of other concepts to twiddle with it troubles my vector of approach and I tend to write nothing instead of dealing with both or synthesizing the concepts. I can sometimes do these things, but not always. Shortly, solutions to these problems, or at least, changes of some magnitude will manifest which will modify my process, if not streamline it.

Well, that was obscure and in no way utile. Onwards!

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Apropos, then, a synthesis. We can do it today, though I may not like it. 

Politics. I know. Well, allegedly, we are that sort of animal.

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Rage when pundits and other mechanisms of the profit-mandated media use game jargon to describe the decorative contours of the mechanism they truck with, drawing attention away from the nightmarish, suppurating underbelly, is something I experience and express at will. There is no denying, though, that like all phenomena, political contests can be expressed as games, played with rules which change over time.

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A thought experiment, then, in which as is so often profitable, we begin with Sun Tzu: when in contest, if your opponent wishes to direct you, the way is to do otherwise than your opponent wishes.

For example, if your opponent aims to divide your forces, you have options--to withstand or overcome the divisive force/terrain, maneuver around same, feint the desired division as you deliver a lateral complication or draw the opponent into your own trap, etc. Always the overarching aim is to resist your opponent's will, always to do and be otherwise than your opponent would have you do and be.

As is so often true, in life as in combat, the best way to do this is to be as water--natural and irresistible in one's flow, always water despite undergoing state changes. On a long enough timeline, despite any attempt to control or channel it, water always finds its own way to where it is going.

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If your oppoenent wants you to hate and mistrust and cast out the stranger, do not do these things. Actually, if someone wants you to do these things, they are in fact revealing themselves as your true opponent.

They want you to do these things because they want you to be afraid and to be alone so that you are easy to defeat, to pick off one by one. It is a tactic. It can hardly be called a strategy, since it is employed so that no strategy will be necessary in order to secure a win condition.

It's like convincing you to get rid of a big chunk of your chess pieces before you play, but they get to keep all of theirs. It dissipates entirely the morality of  this particular play, which is a level playing field symmetrically arrayed where identically apportioned armies engage in maneuvers to manipulate the asymmetrical complexity that arises from the first turn to a win condition. Why would someone need an advantage under these conditions? 

They know they cannot play with enough skill to win. However, winning is more important than playing to them.

That is why they fail, and fail perennially, even if their star is ascendant for a season or ten. And when you fail with them, or play by their rules, it's not like you get a mulligan. They might, but you went out and died for them, which is what I was talking about before. And if you played by their rules, you were never really playing. You were just meat.

We must be brave and we must hang together. We must not believe that we are enemies. What is evident is that we are pieces, arrayed on opposing sides--but that does not make us enemies. Perhaps, on someone else's playing field, there are enemies, and these divisions are then imposed on us. But that is no reason to play their game.

We must play our own games. We must make a game of being as different as possible from our opponents, going as far as to state radically that we have no opponents, that there is only, in this life, free play. Fuck that winner/loser bullshit--let's just play some more, play will we're tired, and play again tomorrow.  

God! We have to remember to play. If it's not a game, there is no fucking point. 

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An opponent is not the same as an enemy. But the core strategy remains the same: don't do as they wish you to do, which is another way of saying don't be what they are, which is another way of saying when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares into you and in the process of defeating dragons one must take care to not become a dragon oneself, all of which is to say that one ought to play one's own game, not someone else's.

Opposition is, itself, a game. There are no opponents, only the game itself. Only the information and the interaction on the field. Only the flow of energy, directed harmoniously, unleashed chaotically.

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Descending a bit from the lofty peaks of our abstractions, we are, all of us living on this planet today, staring down some consequential choices and conditions. Soon things will be asked and demanded of us at the superorganism and individual level that will determine the fate of our species and the shape and outcome of not only every human life but the life of the planet itself. Many things are about to happen all at once and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Very nearly on some Final Fantasy nonsense, eh--and how many parties, even now, might exist a suspension of molecules, waiting to bond and coalesce and crystallize and save the world by defeating the forces of death and destruction in the name of love and freedom?

Again, Sun Tzu. If your opponent is choleric, aggravate their temperament. If they are phlegmatic, take advantage of their stillness and outmaneuver them. If your opponent wishes to engage, ensure to engage on different ground. 

Seriously, find and read that little book.

How many ways can we Splatoon some of these situations out? Fact: thick jets of paint will almost certainly jam most firearms, as would sufficient quantities of grease, many kinds of oil, oatmeal, fecal slurry (which deals several kinds of devastating bonus damage), maple syrup, marinara sauce, you name it. I dunno how well marinara sauce would work, actually, but you never know and you might have to make do and laugh about it. Covering someone head to foot in warm corn syrup or whatever has an inevitable and inescapable sting to it, after all, and sometimes all we can do is sting.

Maybe the last and only win is to laugh in someone's teeth before they write an end to it, and maybe it's time to make peace with that.

And yet, maybe it's time to survive so craftily and cleverly they'll tell Robin Hood level lies about you someday.

It is as important to take a page out the books laid out by the greats as it is to be creative. I suggest both, whenever possible, and so does Sun Tzu.

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Peace, then! Peace, and one thousand times peace again, till peace is all we remember! More game thoughts soon.

--JL