The Madness of Playing Games

If one, unkempt, person, standing on a soapbox were to say that he should become the Prime Minister, then he’d have been diagnosed by a passing psychiatrist as suffering from this or that mental disturbance. But were the identical psychiatrist to frequent the identical spot and see a crowd of countless saluting the exact same lonely, shabby figure – what could have his identification been? Surely, different (maybe of a more political hue).

It seems that one thing putting social games apart from insanity is quantitative: the amount of the participants involved. This is a one-person game, and also mass psychological disturbances are restricted in scope. In addition, it has been shown (for example, by Karen Horney) that the definition of certain psychological disorders is highly dependent upon the context of the prevailing culture. Mental disturbances (like psychoses) are both time-dependent and locus-dependent. Religious behaviour and romantic behavior could be easily categorized as psychopathologies when analyzed out of the societal, cultural, historical and political contexts.

Historical figures as diverse as Nietzsche (doctrine ), Van Gogh (artwork ), Hitler (politics) and Herzl (political visionary) made this eloquent phase transition from the lunatic fringes to center stage. They triumphed attract, convince and affect a critical human mass, which provided with this transition. They seemed on history’s stage (or have been placed there posthumously) in the ideal time and in the ideal location. The biblical prophets and Jesus are comparable examples though of a more severe illness. Hitler and Herzl potentially suffered from personality disorders – that the biblical prophets were, almost definitely, psychotic.

We play games because they’re reversible and their results are reversible. No game-player anticipates his involvement, or his specific moves to produce a lasting impression on background, fellow people, a land, or a business entity. This, really, is the major taxonomic gap: the identical type of actions can be categorized as”match” when it doesn’t mean to exert a lasting (that is, irreversible) influence on the environment. When such intention is evident – the very same action qualify as something entirely different. Games, therefore, are only mildly associated with memory. They’re meant to be abandoned, eroded by time and entropy, by quantum events in our brains and also macro-events in bodily reality.

Games – as opposed to completely all other human activities – are entropic. Negentropy – the act of decreasing entropy and increasing order – is within a match, only to be reversed later. Nowhere is this more evident than in video games: destructive acts constitute the foundation of those contraptions. When children start to play with (and adults, for that matter see Eric Berne’s books on the topic ) they start by dissolution, by being destructively analytical. Playing games is an analytic activity. It is through games that we comprehend our temporariness, the shadow of death, our forthcoming dissolution, evaporation, annihilation.

All these FACTS we repress in normal life – if they overwhelm us. A frontal comprehension of them would leave us speechless, motionless, paralysed. We all pretend that we will live eternally, we utilize this silly, counter-factual assumption as a working theory. Playing games lets us face all this by engaging in activities that, by their very definition, are temporary, don’t have any past and no future, temporally detached and emotionally isolated. That is as close to death as we all get.

Small wonder that rituals (a variant of games) typify religious pursuits. Religion is among the few human areas which undertake death head on, occasionally as a centrepiece (believe the symbolic sacrifice of Jesus). Rituals may also be the trademark of obsessive-compulsive disorders, which would be the reaction to the repression of forbidden emotions (our reaction to the prevalence, pervasiveness and inevitability of death is virtually indistinguishable ). It is when we move out of a conscious acknowledgement of the comparative lack of lasting value of games – to the pretension that they are significant, that we make the transition from the private to the societal.

The way from insanity to societal rituals . In this way, the transition is different from match to fantasy. A mythology is a closed system of thought, that defines the”permissible” questions, those that may be asked. Other concerns are forbidden because they can’t be answered without resorting to a different mythology altogether.

Observation is an act, that is that the anathema of this myth. The audience is presumed to be outside the system (a presumption that, in itself, is a part of this fantasy of Science, at least until the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was designed ).

A game looks very strange, unnecessary and ridiculous from the vantage-point of the external observer. It has no justification, no future, it appears aimless (from the pragmatic point of view), it can be compared to alternative systems of thought and of societal organization (the largest threat to some mythology). When games are changed to truths, the very first act perpetrated by the team of transformers is to prohibit all observations by the (willing or unwilling) participants.

Introspection replaces observation and also becomes a mechanism of social coercion. The match, in its guise, becomes a transcendental, postulated, axiomatic and doctrinaire entity. It spins off a caste of interpreters and mediators. It divides participants (formerly, players) from outsiders or aliens (formerly observers or uninterested parties). Along with the game loses its capacity to face us with death. As a fantasy it assumes the role of repression of this fact as well as the fact that we’re all culprits. Earth is truly a death ward, a cosmic death row: we’re all trapped here and all people have been sentenced to die.

Now’s telecommunications, transportation, international computer networks as well as the unification of the cultural lending only serve to exacerbate and accentuate this claustrophobia. Granted, in a couple of millennia, with space travel and space habitation, the walls of those own cells are going to have practically vanished (or become negligible) with the exclusion of the restriction of our (restricted ) longevity. Mortality is really a blessing in disguise because it motivates humans to behave so”not to overlook the train of life” and it maintains the sense of wonder and the (false) sense of boundless possibilities.

This transformation from insanity to match to fantasy is subjected to meta-laws that are the principles of a super-game. All our games are derivatives of this super-game of success. It is a game because its results aren’t guaranteed, they’re temporary and to a large extent perhaps not known (many of our activities are directed in deciphering it). It is a myth because it effectively ignores temporal and spatial constraints. It is one-track minded: to cultivate a rise in the population as a hedge against contingencies, that might be outside the myth.

Each of the laws, which promote optimization of assets, accommodation, a rise of order and negentropic outcomes – burst, by definition to this meta-system. We can rigorously assert that there exist no legislation, no human activities it outside. It is inconceivable that it must comprise its own negation (Godel-like), therefore it has to be internally and externally consistent. It is as inconceivable that it will be perfect – therefore it has to be all-inclusive. Its comprehensiveness isn’t the formal logical one: it isn’t the method of all of the possible sub-systems, theorems and propositions (because it isn’t self-contradictory or self-defeating). It is just the record of possibilities and actualities open to individuals, taking their constraints under account. This, precisely, is the energy of money. It was – and always was a symbol whose abstract dimension far outweighed its concrete one.

This bestowed upon money a preferred status: that of a measuring pole. The results of myths and games likewise needed to be tracked and measured. Competition was only a mechanism to guarantee the on-going participation of individuals from the game. Measurement has been an altogether more significant component: the efficiency of this survival plan was in query. How can humanity measure the comparative performance (and participation ) of its own members – and their general efficacy (and prospects)? Money came useful. It is uniform, goal, reacts flexibly and immediately to changing circumstances, abstract, easily transformable into tangibles – in short, a perfect barometer of the odds of success at any gauging moment. It is through its function as a universal relative scale – which it came to acquire the might that it owns.

Money, in other words, had the ultimate advice content: the advice regarding survival, the information necessary for survival. Money steps functionality (which permits for survival improving opinions ). Money confers individuality – an efficient means to distinguish yourself into a world glutted with advice, alienating and assimilating. Money payable a societal network of monovalent rating (a pecking order) – that, subsequently, optimized decision making processes through the minimization of the quantities of information needed to affect them. The price of a share traded in the stock market, for example, is assumed (by certain theoreticians) to incorporate (and reveal ) all of the information available concerning this discuss. Analogously, we can declare that the amount of money that a person has sufficient information regarding their ability to endure and their contribution to the survivability of the other people. There has to be other – potentially more significant measures of this – but that they are, most likely, lacking: not as uniform as money, much less universal, much less potent, etc..

Money is supposed to buy us adore (or to endure it, psychologically) – and love is the necessity to success. Very few people would have survived without some kind of love or attention lavished on us. We are dependent creatures during our lives. So, in an inevitable route, as people move from game to fantasy and out of fantasy to some derivative societal association – that they move ever closer to money as well as the information that it contains. Money comprises information in various modalities. However, it all boils down to this very early issue of the survival of the fittest.