#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

#365

As of this moment, someone could read Factually Pointless one post a day for a full year, which is cool, but the coolest thing is that three hundred and sixty-five million years ago the Devonian Extincion went down, one of the truly hardcore ones for the oceans, which at the time made it deadly to just about everything. The nascent tendrils of terrestrial life at the time, relatively fresh from the briny deep, made out fine, though. It was their time. End of the Devonian, dawn of the Triassic. It's bonkers how incredible thinking about that makes me feel. Time is just so fucking crazy. Life is just such a trip. 

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FACTUALLY SPORTSMANLIKE

ROLLS ON

Balls--spherical devices made from a range of materials to roll, or bounce and roll. Light and heavy, big and small, the ball is the massively significant fulcrum around many games and sports, usually played in large groups and divided into teams. I like handball, myself--just a body and a bouncing rubber ball that fits the hand snugly, and a decent wall built perpendicular to the decent ground. Poetry. 

We have come up with many novel ways to cause the human body to interact with various balls in order to achieve various goals. Some sports even include manipulators for their balls--stickball as played by First Nations; the descendant of those games, lacrosse; baseball, tennis, polo. I also like to play tennis against a wall, but a singles match is fun, too. My serve is for balls, but I got a pretty hardcore forehand and good net game. My backhand works from anywhere, not bad, but it's not exactly gonna light a fucker up. 

The coolest thing about soccer is getting to use your head. That's far and away my favorite part. I got a great dome for it, and my power in the neck and shoulders gives me the control required to use it however I like. Passing, defense, scoring--it's just more interesting if I get a chance to use a header instead of footwork.

Waterpolo, you play ball in the pool. If it wasn't also about getting sexually assaulted under the water, it would be fun. I guess some dudes don't mind. Love swimming to death, and the game isn't lacking in fun. But my participation level reaches zero the moment a dude tears my swimsuit down to my knees to prevent me from scoring. It's like, you win, bud. Maybe if we started naked, I wouldn't take it as personally. I have no problem wth nudity or competing naked. I have a problem with being forcibly stripped down. A dude almost pulled my shirt off playing soccer once and I'm not exactly proud of this but I punched him like three times as hard as I could. Don't grab my clothes, man!

One time playing gym soccer when I was eight the ball got kicked into my testicles so hard I fell down on my back and whited out for a second. When I was six playing in Rec and Ed it hit me in the face so hard I thought my eye had fallen out. That one stung like a hundred ants, though it didn't knock me off my feet. I just stopped running, put my hands on my knees, and tried to breathe enough to scream, not quite getting there before I was hustled off the field. In the car, my father praised my toughness about taking a cannon like that, and I told him that I thought it hurt so much I couldn't cry, so I wasn't sure if it counted, but as he was quick to remind me, I got back in the game. One thing about me--it takes pretty serious damage to keep me from playing a game I'm invested in.

I find it is enough, with a basketball, merely to hang out with it, and you will find yourself having fun. A Spalding basketball is a marvel of ball technology. It is fun merely to stand in place and dribble slowly. It is fun to hold. It is fun to pass it to yourself lightly from hand to hand and it is fun to circle it behind your back. It is fun to throw in the air and catch, fun to roll off your fingertips and watch it spin like a little tigerball in the air, it is fun to rebound off a wall over and over. Make it or not, it's fun to go for a basket. Some stuff is easy to ruin, but it's even fun to play basketball with a basketball, which is awesome. Catching a good hard pass in fast motion can be a nice, solid way to remind your body that it's a real thing in a real world, with real people all around you doing something real, ephemeral though it all is, unreal as reality can be. Like music. The analogy has been drawn a million times, but it holds.

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Thinking about balls and games and sports and athletics is thinking in venn diagrams of sorts. Chess is certainly a game and could not be called a sport by any means, though it is as competitive and perhaps moreso than any sport. A video game may or may not be competitive and if competitive may or may not tick enough boxes to be called a sport, but there are those games in which the level of competition and ability climbs high enough, plugged into the right matrix, to be called a sport--many different fighting games and resource-tactics-strategy games, racing sims, deathmatch arena games, and others can be called sports in serious conversation--the hand-eye coordination, reaction times, rules, and muscle-mapping is sufficiently demanding that it takes particular skill, dedication, physical ability, and practice to compete. That not only a layperson but a person who plays games extensively, whose neural pathways and reactions are more than suitably attuned to play, is more than likely unable to even think of being able to compete at the highest levels is a huge factor in differentiating a game from a sport. Of course, most sports, especially as we think of them now, are definitely games, albeit athletic ones, or ones in which your whole body is something of an analog controller, and/or a unit playing out their part of a larger strategy in a metagame played by coaches. Finally, there are ways to compete and "play" in the realm of feats of athleticism that are neither games nor sports, such as several elements of track and field. These rate more on the order of performances than sports or games, even the races and the relays, which have a lot in common with games and are spectacles, like sports. All these, cross-country, discus, javelin, the high jump and so forth, and to a debatable degree gymnastics, are more akin to performances than games or sports, though they are attended to as and perhaps are even more than many spectator sports tests of human athletic ability, directly linked as they are to survival schema dating back to jumping around in the trees and our later migration to the plains and running around for a living. Certainly more than bowling, for example, as gamelike a sport as it is possible to find. Anyone can bowl, even if they can't. And anyone can learn to bowl a perfect game if they tune out distractions and put some sustained effort in. Not everyone can dash the hundred-meter convincingly, let alone competitively, and not everyone can compete against others for superior bowling records season in and season out. 

So going around the three circles and accounting for outliers, hybrids, I think of another circle, or perhaps even the very field on which the circles are described--the great level of labor and craft, the massive economies at play around these essentially ludic pursuits. The textiles, the writing and keeping of rules, the training of children, the armor, the color theory, the balls, the playing fields, the goalposts, the gymnastics equipment, the stories, the broadcasting, the energy and fuel requirements, the worldwide shipping, the political sphere, the question of rights, of meaning, of power. 

I have decided to coin the term "ludistics" to broadly cover THE PRECEDING, t.m.

Suck it, whoever cares!

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Cool cool cool cool alright alright now let's keep the ball rollin

--JL