Homo Ludens: Man, The Player

 

‘Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstraction: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play’

Johan Huizinga

 

Woman: ‘"Grown men”, why are you still playing video games?’

Man: ‘Same reason you wear makeup. Nice lil’ escape from reality.’

 

Still. So. Funny. Although there is a consensus amongst the female population that video games are a waste of time; and since most men are trying to get the female population to copulate with them; they may begrudgingly give games up or play on the DL. Mark Rober, who came up with the Super Mario Effect offers a different perspective to gaming. Many a millennial is well acquainted with the Italian plumber that is Super Mario and therefore an effect that is named after him is nostalgically well received and simply lands for many of us. The Super Mario Effect occurs when we shift our focus from falling into pits to saving the princess, in this way, we stick to the task and learn more. The effect is centred around reframing failure. When we were learning to play Super Mario, every time we ‘died’; we would try again and do things differently to how we had done them before. That’s it. We didn’t really care how we looked when we failed or anything else besides getting good at the game. This in essence is what life is about; life is a meta- game. We could leverage this effect and apply it to the rest of our lives. It seems ‘grown men’ may just be in a better position skill-wise; to deal with life. People would argue that life is different from gaming in that games are low stakes. This is what makes Rober’s point salient. We decide if something is high stakes or not and when we do that we get to decide where we place our focus; on the princess or the pits; the prospective gains or the losses. Andy Frisella says that people assess risk from the perspective of what they could lose as opposed to what they could gain. ‘You’ve built this life that you are afraid of losing as if it’s extremely valuable. When in reality, the value is way down the road, that you haven’t build yet and you are afraid to trade what you have for what you could have.’

Another factor that impacts how we characterise failure is whether we see life as an infinite game or finite game. James P. Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility differentiates between the two. He writes: ‘There are at least two kinds of games. One could be finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game adds ‘No matter how successful we are in life, when we die none of us will be declared the winner of life. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things, are journey, not events.’

The idea of life being a journey ties wonderfully with the The Hero’s Journey myth (Joseph Campbell) which players tap into through games. Edward Castronova writes in a book called Life is a Game: what game design says about the human condition, ‘People want to be heroes. They crave agency, and the ability to do something that matters. They want meaning.’ Ray Dalio of Principles co-opted The Heroes Journey and formulated a five step process people can apply to get what they want from life: 1. Pursue Audacious Goals 2. Fail 3. Learn Principles 4. Improve and 5. Pursue More Audacious Goals. Whether you are trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser or trying to be an amazing athlete or trying to live an infinite life like Sinek’s grandma, this process is applicable to all facets of life.

As hilarious as the tweets I opened this essay with are, they only scratch at the surface of the role games and makeup play in the lives of human beings. As contemptuous as the woman is towards men who play games, she doesn’t realise that she is playing as well. You only have to watch women dressing up and beating their faces to know that they derive plenty of fun from it and are essentially playing when they engrossed in cosmetics. The man dismisses the makeup play as a form of escapism, but he is only considering the aesthetic, tangible morphological aspects of makeup. Of course, there is another game at play here called the mating game where women use makeup to beguile, lure, out-compete other women to win over the affections of suitable males. The biological seriousness of mate selection is used to cover up the fact that makeup is both ploy and play. All roads lead to Rome. Even when men play video games, they are learning important skills which when applied to other contexts of life propel the species forward evolutionarily. Michael Phillip of The Third Eye Drops podcast says in an episode on Transrational Oracles and Magical Thinking in the 21^st Century with Sarah Zucker, ‘I would posit that play leads to evolution, to curiosity, to exploration, eventually to acts of creation, science and even art. I think they are all derivative of play.’ Play creates reality, it does not escape it, well at least it shouldn’t. While Icarus was instructed to fly neither too high nor too low; play, too, has a golden mean: The Divine Child archetype. If we play to distract, to wile away our time, to numb or escape reality, we miss the golden mean and spend much of our time at the extremes of the continuum of play: being Peter Pan/ Wendy Darling whose play renders them impotent or ineffectual in life or Adulting-Adults who have removed all play from their lived experience. For the most part, makeup is low-hanging fruit when it comes to playing games particularly because there aren’t really any higher-order skills that women tap into during that form of play. Jordan B. Peterson qualifies games worth playing by asking: ‘To what degree do you practice a wide range of subset of skills that would be transferable to other games while you are playing that game? I think you could make the case that if you are playing a very complex video game; that the activities that you are engaging in, which involve leadership, and cooperation, and communication and problem solving are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop, to work in the world as a complex place?’ Castronova breaks down game design into two main components: strategies and stances. He describes a stance as ‘a combination of three things: an assumption about what victory in life is, a strategy for winning, and a set of tactics for carrying out that strategy on a day-to-day basis. A stance is an attitude towards existence, when existence is understood as a game.’ I think that there are conducive stances and obstructive stances in life. It is usually obstructive stances that hamper people’s progress in life. A stance can go awry at any of the three junctures listed above: viewing failure as rigid and static losing as opposed to dynamic nuanced learning (antidotally addressed by The Super Mario Effect); having no strategy and/or doing things on a day-to-day basis that do not move you closer to your goal. Strategy is what allows us to exercise our agency effectively. Games do not only develop these skills but they also impress upon us that ‘agency [in the world] is taken, not given’ (Ryan Holiday).

Holiday shares an anecdote about General James Mattis in Courage is Calling. ‘“What keeps you up at night?” General James Mattis was once asked by a television reporter. Before the question was quite finished, he was already answering. “I keep people awake at night.”’ Mattis is a strategist. Alternatively, we can have life happen to us and be in constant reactivity mode like tacticians. Robert Greene in The 33 Strategies of War writes, ‘In war, strategy is the art of commanding the entire military operation. Tactics, on the other hand, is the skill of forming up the army for battle itself and dealing with the immediate needs of the battlefield. Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood, you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away. That makes the tactical decisions of daily life much simpler and more rational. Tactical people are heavy and stuck in the ground; strategists are light on their feet and can see far and wide.’  Strategists keep people awake at night and take the offensive in life and accomplish their overall objectives. ‘Few men of accomplishment, da Vinci noted, got there by things happening to them. No, he said, they are what has happened’ (Ryan Holiday).

‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play’ (Heraclitus). In his Ted Talk, Mark Rober illustrates that people succeed because of the way they frame failure. This is crucial because the manner in which we frame failure will predict how much more practice we put in i.e. repetitions. There is a characteristic of video games called ‘Lives’ where a player has a finite number of tries before the games ends with a game over. This has been one of the developments of gaming that have been for me, a game-changer. Andrew Huberman describes two types of motor skills: open and closed skills. Open skills are performed in a dynamic and changing environment, while closed skills take place in a predictable environment. Skill type as well as focused attention determine how readily a new skill will be acquired. Repetitions lead to errors which let us know where we need to focus our attention which increases our plasticity and improves our skill. Lives incorporate all these aspects of skill acquisition. A novice can learn quicker, and an advanced player can take more risks. All this hangs on one thing however: The reps. There’s a word in adulting-adults language, that gets a bad rep; that word is discipline. When we frame failure negatively, discipline means doing hard things that we hate but are good for us. When we frame failure like the Divine Child: we see discipline as doing something we love to do anyway; that may be hard because its good for us. Discipline is ‘the seriousness of a child at play’. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy writes ‘because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘do it again’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.’ When we play, we unwittingly say to ourselves ‘Do it again’. As we arrive at the console, court, contour etc., we say to ourselves ‘Do it again’ and we infuse play into our work, our lives. In the face of failure, error, pits; we tell ourselves ‘Do it again’. 

Castronova writes, ‘I love games and have been playing and studying them my whole life. It stands to reason that, eventually, I would start seeing life as a genuine game. It has been a way to process and accept the awful things that can happen in a life. A game perspective on life gives the awful things a place: they are part of the experience; they make the experience good in the same way that reality of unfair losses in sporting events makes the whole experiences of sport genuine, legitimate, and emotionally real. A sport without crushing losses is not good. Neither is a life without any possibility of suffering. Human suffering makes this a serious game indeed. Well worth our time, thought, and passion. Well worth playing. Worth playing well. The game of life matters; it also seems to have been incredibly well designed. The more time I spend thinking about life as a game, the more brilliant its design seems to be. The game is rich, deep, beautiful, and elegant; moving and full of pathos; exciting, exploding with possibility, rich with reward, and fraught with danger; full of vast empty timelines punctuated by heart-pounding moments whose memory lasts forever; and also, a dense web of secrets, absolutely impenetrable, yet with hints and clues lying about everywhere. The game is played both alone and with other. No human person has ever won definitely, yet playing is satisfying to everybody. The game of life is real, and it fascinates endlessly.’

Let’s play!