The games we have played
There’s a delightfull idea out there, the idea that everything we do is something of a game. It might even be called Game Theory. It defines a game as a set of rules, written or unwritten, with an objective. With that broad of a definition, it’s hard to argue that everything isn’t a game. It gets more interesting, but I don’t remember anything else about it, but I do remember playing some games.
Like Chess. Now there’s a game. The Egyptians made it up, and generals would play it against eachother, giggling and chortleing at the ingenious way that the pieces simulated actual soldiers, probably the way our less imaginative children feel that characters in war-based computer games so well simulate actual soldiers. I imagine that, when the symbolism was new, it had a more startling realism to those statesmen-warriors; the
Games are powerfull simulations of life, and the drive for better graphics and stronger AI in our games today is the natural push for greater simulations of real life, which we love to see and gives life to our art. Which means Sims is more realistic than chess, but only if you don’t have any imagination: The queen, able to move in any direction, makes it the most powerfull piece, but therefore the most valualble, sometimes forcing it to stay out of danger and out of use, maybe representing that trump card that you might be happy to have in a fight but completely unable to use without totally exposing and possibly screwing yourself. The knight, with it’s unique ability to leap over anything in it’s way in a nonlinear manner unlike any of the other pieces, does’t have to represent a powerfull new kind of warrior from a long dead civilization, but can represet an unorthodox idea that you use to attack another person with in a debate, or a debate that you use against an opponent in the workplace, putting them in a position where they have to chose which position to retreat from, or forking them, to use a chess term. Or maybe you move a piece to someplace that would normally be completely inoccuous, like going on a business trip and leaving some vital work unfinished to show how much you are needed and how important it is to keep you around, like a discovered check.
Anyway, when you go to that one coffee shop where there’s always two or three chess games going on, and your local chess masters are always playing or kibitzing, sometimes you’ll play a game, and sometimes you will think about this sort of thing briefly. Or sometimes, they will talk about this sort of thing UN-briefly (or, at great length) and you will realize, that hard-core chess players are crazy.
Fact: hard-coreness in any area is directly proportional to ones insanity, and you see it all the time, in the people who have seen some kind of light-of-god, have glimpsed perfection and crave it and become a glutton for it, trying to see more of that light, like when you buy two more scratchits after winning two dollars from the one that you bought in a bout of irony. These are the people that sell their house and everything they own, quit their job, and buy a studio apartment furnished with a couch, a computer, and 2 or 3 tons of ramen, and resolve to play everquest for the rest of their lives (example based on actual events, though he’s probably playing world of warcraft by now).
It’s inarguably crazy to be hard-core, to be TOO completely all about something. But certain things are crazier than others; the guy who traded in his real life for a cyber-life is very funny, and I have enlightening conversations about relating life to a grand role playing game, programed and produced by God and distributed by Nature. But the Chess Crazies…
I met a woman once, known by the chess players at my coffee shop to have once held a national title. She sat on the benches outside behind a table with a chess set on it and an empty chair facing her, muttering to herself, sometimes scaring away a customer by ranting incoherently about deamonology. Sometimes someone will sit accross from her, and realize that her side of the board is set up as incoherently as her; a pawn where the king should be, the king where the rook should be, the rook where a bishop should be, the bishop where a pawn should be, and so on.
You couldn’t tell her that her side wasn’t set up correctly and you definately couldn’t try and correctly set her side, because she would get agitated and put the pieces right back where she originally wanted them. No one wants to agitate the insane, right? So, you start playing and you learn that the bishop where a pawn should be moves like a pawn, the king where the rook should be moves like a rook, and throughout the game, all the pieces moved just like the pieces they replaced, and she always won, because the chess fanatics that were regulars knew not to play her, and the casual chess players never had the endurance and tenacity necissary to remember which one of her pieces were what and not be distracted by her rambling dissertation on deamonology which sometimes slipped into other topics, revealing snippets of her real life. A child she never sees, parents that keep her housed and fed and sometimes take her swimming.
She played the game too hard, she took things too seriously, and now she’s gone. I think about her when I see people who are too hard-core or when I’m tempted to eat, breath, and drink a single subject or activity.
