Bored Games
In the latest Weird Studies episode about games and play, Phil Ford recalls the time he saw birds in a high wind up on an electricity wire. They were throwing themselves into the wind and getting flung forward, as if on a carnival ride. They would then would laboriously fly back into the wind’s face, back to the wire, where they’d do it all over again.
Sometimes I see the cockatoos nearing dusk, in the small valley beyond my window, flying against the trees in looping circles, appearing to do nothing in particular except fly around in random patterns screeching at each other. It is impossible for me to perceive what they’re doing as anything other than play for its own sake. I feel like I can feel their pleasure. But, because I live in the year 2022, it is required for me to feel slightly ashamed for a childish thought. How dare I anthropomorphise myself onto those cockatoos.
Well, how dare you technopomorphise me right out of my own body, my own place on the earth upon which I depend, and away from the animals with which I share it, motherfuckers.
It feels like all the explanations as to why animals and humans play are funnelled down into the boring on/off switch of it being an elaborate method of securing the species’ survival. Only the raped children of capitalism would accept this dullardry. I don’t know why we’d bother, to be honest, trying to secure our survival in such a boring world.
This is the thing about play: its excessive abandon, its frivolous slutty use of precious biological energy, makes it seem like the world could possibly harbour some excitement and enjoyment in its fabric alongside its curious beauty. And you can’t have that.
The idea that play is its own reward also feels childish to the children of the hustle. Anyway, digital play is good but analogue has so many variables, so much unwieldy human, is so weirdly chunky, so fleshy, it probably makes us pre-transhumanists feel uncomfortable. The whole idea of a playful world calls into question why we continue to endure living on a spreadsheet in the “human capital” column. But one day maybe it won’t.
Cybernetics has shown us that networks can have “minds” but the concept that life or nature is comprised of many analogue minds is all just a bit too alive for the system. Discomfiting. Eyes that have interiority enough to play looking back at us. We want to vaunt nature, of course we do, we want to save the earth (very performatively, via green capitalism of course) but we still see her as not all that smart. This is our view from the view, as observers now rather than those living and moving in and depending upon her for our survival. The relentless, continuing capitalistic drive to convert all of her into resources must continue until it cannot anymore without ruining the holidays of the few. The problems of the earth (you may call her climate, please, or the environment) are not for you and me to solve but must be left to the same class of people who created these problems in the first place and who are blaming you for all the effluent. You will have nothing, and you’ll be happy.
“Play seems so trivial and unimportant to historians of culture – at least, many historians of culture – and yet all of a sudden you look at play and you realise: is this the principle by which reality itself becomes conscious, becomes sentient, becomes alive?" Phil asks.
“Well, that's Heraclitus in a nutshell: time is a child playing at draughts," responds co-host JF Martel.
Here is the third childish idea I hold: that we are on the verge of some kind of quantum leap and that everything that is going on at the moment, this giant gonorrhoeic pustule of totalitarianism that’s gaining ground into everything, is both the end of the old story and the grit in the pearl to force us forward into the new. We yearn and thirst for change, and we are also terrified of change, and so we must be pushed out of the birth cavity we’ve been dying inside for hundreds of years.
That’s how I see all of this, anyway, in my more spiritual moments when I’m not cowering on the floor wishing to be away from all of this terror. It helps. Which is probably a pathology. Or maybe it’s true. I guess we’ll find out.
The idea that the natural world contains processes that may help balance out the overbalance makes sense to me. It sounds ridiculous that something like that might be happening now rather than in some deep dark past or future, but why wouldn’t it. It has to happen sometime.
Nature as something alive that talks back to us can not be borne, oh no. You might get ideas. You might start to feel safe. Matter lives, but only if it’s dead. Anything that talks back to you is your own biological chemistry misfiring, or it’s your own inner fantasy that is separate to the world. But have you never had moments of synchronicity, those moments when disparate elements come together in a way that is so meaningful it stops you in your tracks?
Of course there are explanations for this, too, and I imagine they lead the same way all the other explanations do – to your wonky freaky self living in a cold, careless world of meaninglessness.
The reality is that I do have those moments, and I can’t see how they could be averaged out into something that doesn’t still feel magical to me, and at those moments I’m reminded that life is full of playfulness when it’s not feeling like hell, and no explanation can satisfactorily explain to me why that is.
“Animals play just like men,” said the historian Huizinga back in 1949. “We have only to watch young dogs to see that all the essentials of human play are present in their merry gambols. They invite one another to play by a certain ceremoniousness of attitude and gesture. They keep to the rule that you shall not bite, or not bite hard, your brother’s ear. They pretend to get terribly angry. And – what is most important – in all these doings they plainly experience tremendous fun and enjoyment … In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action.”
My longest, most memorable The Sims game was quite a few versions back and required a cheat code. The cheat-code is the rich people’s world, passed on through the networks of the 1%, while the rest of us hang impaled on programs stuffed full of viruses.
My family lived in a massive two-storey house, in the Sims world of the late 90s. My house was the commune of Bono. He lived, in his downloaded celebrity skin, with about nine or 10 housemates of wild diversity in age and heritage and (imagined) background, who shared in common a love mostly, of course, of the arts. Bono’s many, many cheat-coded millions, so many that money completely faded into the background, had purchased the ultimate lifestyle where, in many and varied beautifully decorated and regularly renovated rooms, all of the house’s inhabitants practised their way to artistic accomplishment. Mahmoud, a 30-something migrant to Pleasantview, along with Jim and Doris, the old couple, and the three slightly psychotic early 20s women who developed a penchant for bitchfighting on the various parquetry floors of the mansion as they fought over the hot housemate. They all went about the business of play: musical instruments, painting, woodworking, cooking, with no outside requirement to report into any system.
My Sims were free within their house, but the world that created their house imposed limitations upon them. There was no spirituality. There was no earth. There was no version 4 where you could travel to exotic locations. The Sims was one massive plot of suburbia. Zero wildness and zoned plots attached to a neoliberal existence where, even when Bono takes care of your money worries, achievement is linearised into meaningless. It was boring, no matter how much those bitches fought each other. It was just in the end racking up numbers.
Of course, capitalism itself is a game, for those who sit on the high side of its seesaw. I remember a quote, which I can’t now find, of an entrepreneurially minded fellow who said that in order to make lots of money, you have to believe there is an unlimited supply. How’s that for the same thing a fluffy-minded law of attraction believer puts into an Instagram quote? To do well at capitalism, you have to pretend it’s different than it actually is on the ground, where the limited supply is hoarded into the coffers of the class which is creating a digital prison around us as we speak and people across the world who are stuck in Maslow’s hierarchy and just can’t quite find the level of comfort and ease where they play their way out of the tent city they’re sleeping in into increasing bank account dollars.
This is the thing about play: to do it, you have to have a certain level of carefree. Playfulness rolls in like a thunderstorm for humans whenever there’s a release from the ratwheel. Play gets sucked into the fear of wondering how you’re going to get by, how you’re going to be able to afford to pay those ridiculous rents, how you’re going to earn a living when there’s only so many YouTube influencers to go around, about how you’re going to function in a society that barely even exists anymore, the social ties all cut. The world we live in now is the antithesis of play. And maybe that’s the whole point. If you’re trying to get a vast population of people to live in a way antithetical to their actual natures, you have to flatten their experience down into something so small that the Metaverse will seem appealing in comparison. It’s an absolute fool’s errand, but perhaps a small portion of extremely powerful people will actually succeed in persuading us to take the abstract shiny version over the real thing itself. We’ve already lost so much. How do you know the value of so much when it was lost long ago?
I hated Monopoly as a kid. It always had an air of inevitability that made the whole thing boring and meaningless from the beginning. Monopoly felt flat. A squaring-in. Like homework. So I felt quite validated when I learned that the Monopoly I played in the 1970s was not at all what its creator had intended. In fact, it was the complete opposite. There’s capitalism right there, tied up in a box, harnessing everything it comes across to its own ends, taking a board game meant to teach people of the stupid limitations of capitalism and converting it into its opposite, selling it to the public and making millions.
I like to imagine that the disappointment I felt as a kid was because I could feel the space of what it was originally meant to be.
On 3RRR’s Greening the Apocalypse (RIP) in 2018, the artist/permaculturist/lifeist/experimenter Patrick Jones talked about the dilemma he faced when his son wanted to learn how to play chess. The problem was, he didn’t want to pass on hierarchical concepts of kings and queens and bishops. And so Patrick created a new chess game.
“About a month ago, our five year old asked me to teach him chess. And I sort of had a few days to think about it; we couldn’t do it straightaway. And I was just thinking, I don’t want to tell him that story. I don’t want him growing up with that story of those little pawns at the front and the royalty all making shots and it all being about the aristocrats. I mean, obviously in feudal times but today it’s I guess it’s corporate bosses or capitalists … So being a chess player, I started setting the board up just by myself. And I came up with what I call Peasant Insurrection Chess. And I shared it. I was in Melbourne a few weeks ago [2018]. I was walking to the State Library to do some work there just as the librarian came out with all the big chess pieces that sit out the front of the library. And I helped her unload it. And I thought, fuck it, I’m gonna set this up. So I set it up as a game of Peasant Insurrection Chess is set up. And I took a photo. And then we did a post on Artist as Family Facebook and Instagram explaining the rules. And it’s just gone completely nuts. And people are discussing moves that they made, how to [laughs] … like, all the so-called pawns I call peasants have the same moves. The black and white peasants at either end of the board are … one player plays for the peasants, one is for the aristocrats. And you have to be a great chess-player, I think, to play on the peasants’ side, but it’s not impossible.
This game we’re living in is a game that’s getting more impossible for us to play even as the pawns. The digitisation of the capitalist game will grid the entire world into a space we will struggle to climb out of. One day, we won’t want to. But we won’t be happy. There’s no playing on a spreadsheet.
Or maybe it’ll pan out differently than this. Maybe the digitised space will contain withered digital citizens of the smart city while the free-rangers dwell outside, foraging. Maybe the system will collapse in on itself before it can permeate everything. Maybe the quantum leaps. Maybe the aliens, maybe God, maybe ultimate dystopia. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don’t know. I hope it is a beginning as well as an ending. I just don’t know.