Life Is a Game: What Game Design Says about the Human Condition 9781501359187, 9781501360619, 9781501359156, 9781501359163

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Life Is a Game

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Life Is a Game What Game Design Says about the Human Condition Edward Castronova

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Edward Castronova, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Egbert Clement All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Castronova, Edward, author. Title: Life is a game: what game design says about the human condition / Edward Castronova. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010200 | ISBN 9781501359187 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501360619 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501359163 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501359170 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Games–Design. | Games–Social aspects. Classification: LCC GV1230 .C37 2020 | DDC 793–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010200 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5918-7 PB: 978-1-5013-6061-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5916-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-5917-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For all my children, living and dead.

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Contents Acknowledgments viii Preface ix Part I  Life in Strategy   1   2   3   4  5

Life Is a Game Opening the Box Evidence of Games in Life The Strategic Layer Stances

3 21 36 47 71

Part II  A Catalog of Stances   6 The Hedonistic Stance   7 The Excellence Stance   8 The Heroic Stance   9 The Orthodox Stance 10 The Mystic Stance Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

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125 141 158 189 206

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Acknowledgments This book has been more than twenty years in the making, and it would be impossible to thank everyone whose conversation improved its ideas. Certain thanks go to Katie Gallof, Erin Duffy, and the anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury for their work on the manuscript. Some deserve special mention. Joshua Fairfield has engaged with me again and again on a wide variety of topics from religion to law, always to my benefit and I hope a few times to his. Many thanks to him. My wife Nina has been a true consigliera and the main sounding board for everything in the book. Over the years she has heard the ideas many times—too many—and patiently offered feedback. I wrote a draft back in 2009, and Nina helped guide it to a worthy death. She has pruned away so many bad branches in my thinking. Endless thanks. The most recent audience for these my frequent ravings has been my children Luca and Malcolm, now teenagers. I wanted to make it relevant to teenagers, the idea that life is a game for them to play seriously. They helped me do that, as much as I am able, and so thanks. I trust them to come up with sensible victory conditions and go, play, win. Thanks be to God too, whose inspiration, guidance, and help makes everything better.

Preface Life is a child, being a child, playing a game. —Heraclitus (Fragment 52, 500 BC) Football is like life. —Vince Lombardi (AD 1967) What if life is a game? Great thinkers have said as much, going all the way back to Greek philosopher Heraclitus, quoted here in a textual fragment from 500 BC. There are ideas about the game of life in Plato, St. Paul, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Pascal, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Wittgenstein, Vince Lombardi, and many more. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has famously argued that we may be living inside a simulation, much as depicted in the 1999 film The Matrix.1 Media scholars and cultural theorists have said that our lives are fantasies.2 If we were to list every author, philosopher, business guru, and coach who has made this comparison, it would take dozens of pages. Very well—but what if? What does it mean that life is a game? Most of the great thinkers were speaking in metaphors, saying that life is like a game. They were using games to explain something about life. But let’s go farther than that. Let’s take the great thinkers at face value: let’s assume that life really is a game. What does that mean? It means that we are all players, that there are pieces and moves, and most importantly, there’s victory and defeat. If life is a game, you can move your pieces well or badly, and you can win or lose. This opens up quite a few points of discussion, about what kind of game this is, what sort of pieces we control, and how to play. There is a problem, though: Nobody knows what winning is. Not for certain, anyway. We have various ideas about it, but there’s no general consensus about victory. We’re in this odd situation that philosopher Martin Heidegger called

Nick Bostrom, “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55. 2 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1995). 1

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geworfenheit, which we will try to translate and explain later. For now, the basic idea is that we’ve been thrown into a game and we are not quite sure what to do. If nothing else, this situation is interesting. It’s not boring, far from it! We stand before a vast mystery: What is this game? And what is the objective? There’s nothing new in these questions. As we just said, great minds have been wrestling with them for a long time. What’s new is an enhanced ability to discuss them. There’s a new academic field devoted to games and game design. For about 100 years (going back to the field’s founder, Johan Huizinga), more and more professors and researchers have been thinking hard about what games are, how they work, and what they tell us about all kinds of phenomena, from education to the firing of neurons in the brain. It’s time to set all this knowledge on a new quest—to discover what game design says about the human condition. What can a game scholar say about being human that has not been said before? Here is one little example. You may have noticed that people act differently in different situations. We adopt roles depending on our surroundings. “All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare. Well, there is a genre of games called roleplaying games (RPGs) designed to take advantage of precisely this feature of being human. Through RPGs, game designers and game researchers have learned interesting things about humans and their roles. People want to be heroes. They crave agency, and the ability to do something that matters. They want meaning. Perhaps we knew all that before, but until the advent of videogames and their explosion into the media sphere, we did not know how many people wanted to be heroes nor how intensely they desired it. It is now considered ordinary in the game industry that a player might spend twenty to forty hours a week playing just one RPG. It’s ho-hum for game designers, but a serious wake-up call to people concerned about the human condition. This book is about the human condition as it is reflected in game thinking. If you were a gamer and a ponderer of the human condition, what would life look like to you? How would you think about it?

Stances and the Strategic Layer The first thing a game scholar might notice that others would not would be a type of thinking, a mode of approach that game design emphasizes more than other fields. There is a layer of thought, just below the level of our grand philosophical commitments, where we translate the grand commitments into general norms

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of action. It could be called the strategic layer. It’s where we decide how to live, not on a minute-to-minute basis, but rather in terms of general approaches. The strategic layer is where we decide we can eat fish but not meat. It’s where we decide what groups to join or what jobs to seek. We don’t determine specific votes on the strategic layer, but we do consider what kind of government would be best. The strategic layer gives us broad outlines of what to do. A second thing that a game scholar might notice is the stance. A stance is 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 toward existence, when existence is understood as a game. A stance begins with the philosophical and theological assumptions that we make. These then lead to an assessment of the game of life, which then specifies the victory conditions. The victory conditions, in turn, are dumped into the strategic layer where general strategies for living are worked out. These strategies finally give us tactics, ideas for what we do every day. The stance is an algorithm that translates grand thoughts into daily choices. Our stance might begin with “I love Nature” and end with “I’ll have the tofu.” Thinking in terms of stances and the strategic layer has some interesting implications for our understanding of human society and behavior. For one thing, there is much less conflict and argument on the strategic layer than on the layer above. We fight, even go to war, over questions about philosophy and God. We say that Philosophy A is utterly incompatible with Philosophy B. And so it may be (I am no philosopher). However, both A and B may recommend the same strategies on the strategic layer. Indeed, that is often the case. Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth made incompatible statements about the nature of God, but they were in much agreement about the best way to live. If we view life as a game, we may be able to let others have whatever grand commitments they wish, yet go along the road with them in terms of strategies for living. Another insight from thinking in terms of stances is that we can use game design as a new and perhaps more reasonable way to assess behavior. The Buddha teaches that self-denial is the road to happiness. If I see a drunk Buddhist, I really have no grounds for criticizing his devotion to the teacher, but I do have grounds, within game design thinking, for criticizing the man’s decision to get drunk. Any reasonable stance derived within a Buddhist framework will recommend restraint with alcohol. If the man is drunk, it means he is either going against his own stance or he has developed an internally incoherent stance. It is incoherent to combine a Buddhist commitment at the philosophical layer with a heavy

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drinking commitment on the strategic layer. This isn’t criticism of Buddhism; it is a criticism of game play. Good game play recommends that a player develop good strategies and then stick to them. This fellow either hasn’t developed a good strategy for life or he has done so but isn’t carrying it out. Thinking in terms of game play opens up new ways of assessing what people do—ourselves, as well as others—and whether it makes sense. Later in the book I develop some general considerations about what makes a good stance. Features like internal coherence, flexibility, and “livability” are markers of a good rather than a bad combination of philosophies, game concepts, and strategies.

Concepts and Examples The book has two parts. Broadly speaking, the first part is devoted to ideas. We start with a cold-blooded assessment of the universe from a game design perspective. When we come into existence, we open the game box. What’s inside? What pieces do we have to play with? What are the rules? These questions have no easy answers, of course, and whatever answers there may be involve the great issues of the human condition: meaning, mind, and consciousness. Regardless of one’s point of view on these great questions, it is apparent that the human condition is situated in a system that invites play. Existence is interactive. How fun it is, then, to think about the fundamentals of the human condition and compare them to different games that we all know. In some ways, life is like an “idle game”—you click and click and click and things outside you spin and whirl and grow and burn out. In other ways, life is like the game Minesweeper— you poke in different places to learn about what you don’t know, taking care to avoid big explosions. Or, life is like an RPG. You adopt a persona and speak your part, always seeking adventure. We could go on and on. Throughout the book we see again and again that the real-world-as-we-know-it does seem to operate as a great big game of everything. It has features that any gamer should recognize immediately—dynamic difficulty adjustment, leveling systems, player-vs.-player combat, positive feedback loops in resources, and so on. Now, are these things in games just because they already existed in nature? Of course! But the fact that our games are derived from a nature that appears to be game-like might give us pause. Nature could have been built in a way that suggested nothing in terms of interesting interactivity. But it wasn’t. It was, and we are, built to game.

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Our vision of the world is a little different if we think of the cosmos as a big game teeming with players. Take the idea of “victory.” Most games, even those that don’t have a way of measuring successful play, have some kind of victory condition. What is “successful play” in the game of life? Is there victory, and if so, what is it? There are many ways to look at this, and in Chapter 4, we will sketch out some of them. This leads into a general discussion of what thinking on the strategic layer is like, what stances are, and how to assess them. Throwing ideas like this together is what occupies most of Part I of the book. In Part II of the book I describe several stances and provide a strategic assessment of them. I consider, for example, the hedonistic stance, which begins with the philosophical commitment to pleasure. This stance says that you win life’s game if you can make yourself happy. It has numerous strategies for being happy. And, it turns out, almost none of them make any sense from a gameplay perspective. Strategies that aim directly at procuring happiness usually leave a person miserable. That’s just the way life’s game is designed. A rational response might be to pursue an “enlightened” hedonism, where the goal is not immediate pleasure but pleasure in the long run. There are logical and illogical ways to do that. At some level, the commitments of an enlightened hedonistic stance are indistinguishable, strategically speaking, from the commitments of other stances that focus on such things as achievement or inner peace. In sum, hedonism is an odd stance and not highly recommended from a game design point of view. Some of the other stances I consider include heroism, personal excellence, religious orthodoxy, and mysticism. Each has its own unique shape and color.

Is There a Game Designer? The suggestion that life is a game adds a new hue to thoughts about God. There is an old argument that if the world seems designed, it must have a designer. Here it would be, if the world seems to be a game, then it must have a game designer. Although this is not a book on religion, it cannot avoid bringing up the intriguing thought that perhaps God is the Dungeon Master (DM) behind everything. The idea that God may be a DM brings up some interesting possibilities. It puts evil in a somewhat new light. No gamer wants a boring game; we want something to be at stake, and our choices to matter. Imagine God as a game designer, yet suppose that He made a game with no evil. That would be boring, wouldn’t it? Perhaps evil exists to make our game better, to provide to endow our choices

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with genuine significance. Going into more depth on these questions is the job of theologians, of whose club I am not a member. Only in the Epilogue, and then only briefly, will I engage the possibility that an omniscient, omnipresent game designer lies behind this great big game of existence. For the bulk of the book, these ideas are left to the reader.

Life’s Important, So Are Games Writing a book is an intellectual journey, and a journey involving games could be criticized for not being serious. Many people today still see the word “game” as an indicator of silliness. Vince Lombardi, quoted earlier, did not. When I say that life is a game, I am not arguing that life is silly. Rather, I am saying that life has a certain structure and that its core elements are players, strategies, and outcomes. The human condition, on this view, is not an art studio, a labor camp, a school, or a monastery. It is a collective puzzle and a social challenge; it is an interpretable thing; a movable, responsive thing; a thing that results in good and bad outcomes; a thing that produces interesting choices for all people; a thing at which we can do poorly or well. To label life as a game is not to say it is silly but rather that it has certain features that are worthy of serious attention. Nonetheless, to many readers the idea that life really is a game will seem insane. Perhaps it will seem less insane as the pages of the book go by. The idea seems a lot less crazy to me now than it did when it first came to mind more than two decades ago.

We Can Only Write from Who We Are 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 the reality of unfair losses in sporting events makes the whole experience 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

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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 others. No human person has ever won definitively, yet playing is satisfying to everybody. The game of life is real, and it fascinates endlessly. Saint Meinrad Archabbey, Indiana December 23, 2019

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Life in Strategy What everybody should know everywhere: That life is fundamentally a merciless game; that man should find his protection in the warp and woof of society; that curbs on man’s instincts constitute the essence of civilized living. Without such protections man is alone in the world, as alone as a beast of prey or as the prey itself, waiting to be devoured.1 —Luigi Barzini Barzini, an Italian writer and social critic, believes life is a merciless game. Suppose we take that idea seriously. If we do, we are turning our thoughts in a strategic direction. Thinking strategically invokes a unique set of mental moves and concepts, things like reconnaissance (what is the situation), directional heuristics (what should I do), and operational flexibility (how can I prepare for change). Strategic thinking involves objectives, resources, decision points, rules, and constraints. At the abstract level it is all rather dry. Yet those of us who are fascinated by strategy are animated not so much by the concepts as by their implementation in situations fraught with significance. In every life, there are moments of decision that truly matter. Sadly, my wife once found it useful to buy a little children’s book titled What On Earth Do You Do When Someone Dies?2 That’s a good question. What do you do? What strategies are available, and what are their consequences? Getting moments like this right is the ultimate justification for thinking in airy terms, beforehand, about situations, powers, limits, and goals. The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 180. 2 Trevor Romain, What on Earth Do You Do When Someone Dies? (New York: Free Spirit Publishing, 1999). 1

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This first part outlines a general strategic approach to the human condition. It introduces the idea of existence as a great game of everything and asks strategic questions about it. What are the playing pieces, the rules, the objectives; who is playing; what does winning look like. The second part looks more closely into specific strategies for playing the game of life. But first we ask: What does it even mean to think of life as a game?

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Life Is a Game

Only the man who has grasped this transcendence inscribed in the very essence of participated, created being can truly “play,” for he has laid hold of the mean between gravity and fun, between the tragedy of existence and the light-hearted surrender to the game of life which is mysteriously guided by the goodness of a Wisdom itself, also at play. —Plato, Laws The idea that life is a game is old. It is also frequent, going back to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and beyond. “Life is a game” has been said and written so many times that it would take volumes to list them all. There is nothing new in the idea that we are playing at life. What’s new is how we respond to that idea. We now have a thriving discipline of game analysis, and hundreds of researchers around the globe spend day and night thinking about games, using all the tools in the academic toolbox: data, cultural comparison, social theory, market analysis, and many other things besides. With all this intellectual artillery lying about, we can now take the idea of life as a game seriously. We can analyze life using the same tools that game researchers use to analyze games. Here is one immediate benefit of doing so. Most people conflate the idea of play and game: we tend to think of them as the same thing, whereas game scholars have determined that they are not. According to game theorists, a game is a set of players, a set of choices, and a system that takes player choices and translates them into player payoffs.1 According to play theorists, play is a structured activity that is not serious.2 The differences are critical to understanding happenings in Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, Game Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). There are many more definitions of game than this, but the formal, mathematical definition used in game theory is the most precise. If we use this formal definition, we are more likely to find agreement about what is a game and what is not. 2 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961); Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 1

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this area. When two kids pretend to be mommy and daddy, they are playing house. They are not serious (and if they are teenagers, we thank heaven for that). It is not a game, though, because there is no choice architecture, no system that takes what the kids do and translates it into specific rewards. On the other hand, an election is a game but is not play. It has an elaborate choice architecture but is not silly at all. If we listen to these game scholars, then, we know that the phrase life is a game does not mean that life is silly. It means that life presents all people with choices, and those choices—combined with the inevitable randomness produced by the choices of others as well as Nature herself—come back in terms of gains and losses. This makes sense. The many thinkers who have said that life is a game were not necessarily saying that life is silly, but they certainly were saying that life has good and bad moves. Take, for example, the quotation that opened the book: Life is a child, being a child, playing a game.

This 2,500-year-old fragment from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus may be the oldest written reference to life as a game. Heraclitus, like many others, casually uses game and play together. He talks about a child playing a game. Is this a serious situation? Possibly. Children take their play quite seriously, and the subject, which is life itself, is serious. On the other hand, maybe the point is that child’s play doesn’t have major effects outside the world of the child, which make this child’s play unimportant. Whether Heraclitus intends to say that life is silly is not completely clear. However, it is pretty clear that he thinks in terms of choices and outcomes. Playing a game is more than just playing. The philosopher is trying to express how life involves making decisions and watching what happens. “You win some, you lose some” would be an apt response. It would fit. It be an appropriate thing to say, whereas “Nothing really matters” would not. The irony and pathos in the quotation come from the fact that life does matter. Life really does matter, and yet it unfolds as a series of moves and countermoves that give us the feeling that we are tokens on somebody’s game board. We work hard to craft a resume, and we just need things to proceed in a more or less normal way in order to get the job of our dreams; yet when we only need a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, we roll a 1 and lose the job anyway. We have all had that feeling, and Heraclitus captures it perfectly: it feels like some kid is playing a game and we happen to be the pawn who goes to the Unemployment Office when the die is rolled. The quotation evokes

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the feeling that there is a merciless set of rules—designed for somebody else’s entertainment—that will have serious consequences for us.

Some Quotes To deepen understanding of this idea that life is a game, let’s review some of the ways different authors have expressed it. As we said earlier, there are so many examples that we can only look at a tiny fraction. Beginning with the ancient Greeks—everything seems to start with them— the sentiment expressed by Heraclitus was part of a general commitment to games in Greek life. The Greeks saw competition as the key to greatness. The philosopher Hesiod proclaimed: “Strife is wholesome for men.”3 Accordingly, games were an important part of Greek culture. Foot races expressed the cultural commitment to getting better by competing with others. The Olympic games occupied the attention of the whole country and, it was said, of the Gods themselves. The games were perhaps intentional models of the way Greeks felt people should live. Intentional or not, the presence of competition in both games and life made a connection apparent. Thus, for Heraclitus, life is like a game. Moving from Athens to Jerusalem, here is a quote from the Book of Proverbs. The speaker here is Wisdom: “The Lord begot me, the beginning of his works,    the forerunner of his deeds of long ago; From of old I was formed,    at the first, before the earth. When there were no deeps I was brought forth,    when there were no fountains or springs of water; Before the mountains were settled into place,    before the hills, I was brought forth; When the earth and the fields were not yet made,    nor the first clods of the world. When he established the heavens, there was I,    when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep; When he made firm the skies above,    when he fixed fast the springs of the deep; Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 11–24 (c. 700 BC).

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Life Is a Game When he set for the sea its limit,    so that the waters should not transgress his command; When he fixed the foundations of earth,    then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day,    playing before him all the while, Playing over the whole of his earth,    having my delight with human beings.” Prov. 8:22–31

Wisdom describes herself as a worker for God. She takes on the job of building the world, as God’s “artisan” or craftswoman. In doing so, she plays, having delight with us, the people. Fortunately her name is Wisdom, not Anger, Revenge, or Nasty, because in those cases being her pawn would be a bad thing indeed. Being the pawn of Wisdom, however, is a good thing. The delight that Wisdom takes in her people produces a world that is fundamentally good. Wisdom plays, but this is not silliness at all. Instead the lines express the joy that Wisdom experiences in the creation of the game. Later we have the apostle Paul describing his own life as a game: “I have competed well; I have completed the race” (2 Tim. 4:7). The word competed stands out here; Paul is satisfied that he played the game well and made good moves. Maximus the Confessor (AD 580–662) expresses it like this: We speak of the playing of God, who through this creative pouring out of himself makes it possible for this creature to understand him in the wonderful play of his works; who has made for us children’s toys out of the bright and variegated forms of his world.4

This quote is from a remarkable book called Man at Play, by Jesuit father Karl Rahner, that, to my knowledge, has not been cited in the literature on play. Rahner’s work uncovers the idea of play throughout the vast tradition of Western theology and philosophy. The book’s preface, by Jesuit priest Walter Ong, remarks that we have always known that life is a game: “When we turn to work activities to see which of them are mixed with play, we find they all are. We have always known this, in fact: Life, we say, is a game.”5 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961); Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 5 Rahner, xii. 4

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Rahner’s goal is to support this assertion by citing writers from century upon century. As a priest and theologian, he naturally focuses on the Christian philosophical tradition. It may be surprising to some that the medieval church was a hotbed of game thinkers, but Rahner makes the case persuasively. Ong points out that the Latin ludus, used by many game scholars to ennoble our field (“ludology”), means both play and school. Rahner repeatedly uses the term ludimagistri in the sense of “masters of play.” Who knew there was a Latin phrase for DM.6 Rahner, as a theologian, believes that the point of this game of life is virtue, more specifically, getting into Heaven. We will return to this idea in a later chapter devoted to the religiously orthodox approach to the game of life. Medieval thinkers were comfortable with the idea of we are part of a vast game, and naturally it is implicit in the work of later philosophers. Seventeenthcentury mathematician Blaise Pascal took a game-like view when proposing his famous wager.7 The wager can be briefly described as follows. What if the existence of God was itself the outcome of a roll of the die? If you roll a 1, God exists; otherwise he does not. If you were in that game, argues Pascal, you would be stupid to deny the existence of God. Why? Because of the way the consequences play out. If you choose to be a believer, a 1 sends you to Heaven and eternal bliss. A 2–5 only means that you have wasted some time sitting in church, worshiping a God who is not there. But if you decide to be an atheist, a 1 condemns you to eternal Hell and a 2–5 gets you nothing. According to Pascal, eternal Hell is so bad and eternal Heaven so good that a rational person should choose to be a believer. It’s better to face a 5/6 chance of wasting time in church than a 1/6 chance of burning forever. In the twentieth century, writer Stefan Zweig similarly saw humankind as players of a difficult but important game: Some strange deity has set us down in our seat at this gaming table of a world. If we wish to amuse ourselves there, we must accept the rules of the game, taking them as they are, without troubling to inquire whether they are good rules or bad.8

This usage is also encountered in Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). The game in the novel is a metaphor for the complexity of human thought and art. The very best game masters compose beautiful systems of moves. 7 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1662. 8 This quotation appears in Joseph Epstein, “Stefan Zweig: European Man,” First Things, June (2019). The quote is from Zweig’s Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture (1928). 6

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Life Is a Game

Zweig’s attitude seems close to Heraclitus: there is an irony we cannot avoid, because we have been placed without our permission into a game whose rules we did not design. We have to take the game as it is, even if it seems unfair. According to moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the game is important and extremely beneficial because it gives us meaning.9 In the later parts of After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre invokes the notion of quest to identify the practices that give meaning to life. Quests are essential to a life well-lived: they solidify our sense that we have something to do, our sense of purpose. Without quests, life would be terribly boring, and this is MacIntyre’s diagnosis for the ills of the world today. The modern world, he says, has lost its quests. More recently, there have been interesting and quite direct analyses of life as a game. In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits describes a dream world in which “everyone alive is in fact engaged in playing elaborate games, while at the same time believing themselves to be going about their ordinary affairs . . . . Whatever occupation or activity you can think of, it is in reality a game.”10

The same point is made in Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon,” which describes a lottery which becomes so big and all-encompassing that it controls everything in life.11 Playing games is not an idle pastime but the most important activity imaginable. In this, he echoes game designer and educator Bernard de Koven, who also argues that if we had nothing functional to do, we would do nothing but seek well-played games, and be all the better for it.12 Similarly, James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games comes to the conclusion that “there is but one infinite game” within which all other games are nested.13 So far we have quoted philosophers and writers, but the idea that life is a game appears in much more practical concerns. The economists who developed Germany’s post–Second World War economic order (Franz Böhm and Walter Eucken) used the concept of Spielregeln (rules of the game) to find a middle way

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 10 The Grasshopper (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1978), 11. 11 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions Pub. Corp., 1964). 12 Bernard De Koven, The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1978). 13 James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986), 149. 9

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9

between total state control and economic anarchy.14 The market was seen as an arena of competition, where the state was to be only a referee, albeit a powerful one. For a country emerging from the shadows of totalitarianism yet still wounded by economic disasters of the 1920s and 1930s, the idea of a game—a free system that is designed to be fair and ordered—had a strong appeal. And then we have the famous quote by coach Vince Lombardi, in the 1960s: “Football is like life.” Lombardi also said that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” He recommends approaching football as he apparently approached life—with gusto, espirit, drive, and initiative. We can imagine him saying “Life is game. Go win it!15”

Why Is the Idea So Popular? We could go on and on with examples of thinkers and writers and doers who have tried to explain some important part of their lives as a game. But let’s stop and ask why this sentiment is so popular. What is it about games, and life, that makes them seem similar to so many people? To address this question, let us turn to scholars who have studied human behavior and come to see it as gamelike in general. We’ve already mentioned Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. His was the first careful analysis of the idea that people going through daily life are playing a game. His 1938 book Homo ludens has become the foundational work in game studies.16 The title means “playing man” and identifies our species as one for whom play is a core behavior. Huizinga saw elements of play and games throughout society, from churches to law courts to markets. For example, he describes a law court as a place of contest, in which a judge dons wig and gown to step out of ordinary life.17 Huizinga’s observation that humans act as though they are playing a game raises the question of why people would do that. The answer appears to be very deep indeed. Animals play games; there is an entire field of biology devoted to Viktor J. Vanberg, “The Freiburg School: Walter Eucken and Ordo-Liberalism,” Freiburger Diskussionspapiere zur Ordnungsökonomik 4/11, at http:​/​/www​​.euck​​en​.de​​/file​​admin​​/bild​​er​/Do​​ kumen​​te​/Di​​skuss​​ionsp​​apier​​​e​/04_​​11bw.​​pdf, observed December 23, 2016. 15 There are many popular books that advise people to win the game of life by making more money. This literature is generally fraudulent and we can set it aside. 16 Ibid. 17 Huizinga, 76. 14

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animal play.18 Consider this: a dog can play games but cannot talk. This means that the ability to play is buried deep in our brains, deeper than the ability to talk. Gaming is older than language. Anyone who has been around children knows that the capacity to play appears before many other abilities. This has led child development experts to explore the role of play in human development. Renowned development expert Jean Piaget centered his theories around children’s play.19 Play seems to be important to the way people develop; it may also be fundamental in the development of our social life. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein held that all statements—even the words you are reading right now—are moves in a game.20 The game is about assigning meaning to words. This is important because when words get new meanings, or when new words are invented, it can change the way everyone acts and, ultimately, what happens to people. For example, consider the difference between the words “war” and “conflict.” At one time, a country would not invade another country without declaring a state of war between them. Once a state of war was declared, both sides could use all the weapons at their disposal. After nuclear bombs were invented, however, unleashing all weaponry in this way became dangerous for both sides. Therefore politicians stopped talking about going to war and began to say instead that they were sending advisers to assist in a local “conflict.” The word conflict sounds like a small affair, not worth blowing up the whole world. By saying “conflict” instead of “war,” world leaders were essentially promising their opponents that they would not use nuclear weapons. Using different words changed what happened on the ground in reality. If all words are part of a game, then a vast amount of human experience is part of a game too. Words and other symbols are a kind of cheat-book by which we understand reality. If the cheatbook is produced through a game, then much of our understanding of reality is as well. Wittgenstein’s idea that language is a game has been expanded by other cultural theorists into much broader notions of the social construction of all reality. That phrase social construction of reality was coined by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in the 1960s and refers to the way that social interactions Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009); Marc Bekoff and John A. Byers (eds.), Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 19 Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul ltd., 1967). 20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953). 18

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11

influence what we think.21 The claim is that social interactions are so powerful that we cannot think of anything but what they give us. Most contemporary cultural theory relies on the social construction of some variety. Modern thinkers are comfortable with the idea that social life is a game that determines everything we think. Literature theorist Jacques Derrida, for example, would argue that there is no “true” Shakespeare.22 The man himself is lost to time. The “Shakespeare” that we talk about is a Shakespeare of our own construction—we have defined him to be a certain sort of fellow, with attitudes and features that have little to do with the actual man who lived in England 400 years ago. Since our social processes have defined Shakespeare, there is no “true” Shakespeare who can limit or anchor out the interpretation of his works. We are permitted to “deconstruct” and “reconstruct” him however we please. We can stage his plays as though they were written by a 1980s feminist, for example. Doing so would be a move in Wittgenstein’s language game. Is it a good move? That depends on whether one believes that the true Shakespeare, the actual sixteenth-century man, can be so easily ignored. It depends on the rules of the game, and whether those rules allow historical reality to be so easily dismissed. Whether the real Shakespeare matters or not, the larger point stands: smart people have come to view social interaction as a game. Social interactions—as well as economic and political—have come to be viewed as games in a completely different region of the intellectual universe: social science. Game theory is a field of social analysis that treats all kinds of interactions as moves in a game, from bargaining to elections to market competition. The definition of game we are using in this book comes from game theory: a game is a set of players, a set of strategies, and a mapping from the strategies to payoffs. The basic idea started in economics but has been used widely, including political science, sociology, anthropology, biology, law, and many others. Game theorists have even developed models of finding the right marriage. Using game theory to analyze life itself led economists Dixit and Nalebuff to write The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life. The book’s implicit assumption is that many aspects of life

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). His theory of deconstruction is defined and explained in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

21

22

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Life Is a Game

are like games. Because of game theory, social scientists are now comfortable viewing any given social situation as a game, with players, moves, and outcomes. The move by social science to broaden the conception of game to cover almost any social interaction involves a very useful concept: the model. A model is a smaller, more practical version of reality. For example, a map is a model of the terrain it describes. It is not completely accurate, because many little paths and settlements have been left out. But it is very useful: it tells us what we need to know in a quick and easy-to-understand way. All models are like that, and game theory is a model-building discipline. The social scientists who use game theory build little models of actual social situations, so that we can understand the “guts” of the situation better. The models clear off the unnecessary details and reduce the interaction to its fundamental components. They reduce a messy situation like an auction of a fancy painting to a few key components: What value, v, do the bidders place on the item? What amount, R, is the real-world worth of the item? What price, p, will bidders actually pay? Do bidders observe the bids of others? and so forth. The fact that it is a Rembrandt does not matter in this model and would only complicate things unnecessarily. A model is a useful abstraction that helps us to understand all social interactions of a given type—auctions, negotiations, competition, and so on. Social science uses game-like models to analyze real situations. More generally, we can say that all games are models. Every game tries to model some aspect of reality.23 Chess is a model of war. Poker is a model of bargaining. Hockey is a model of a Canadian saloon brawl. Sometimes the connection to reality is clear, as with contemporary war games that simulate actual battle conditions. Other times, the abstraction is heavy—checkers is a model of competition only in a very general way. Yet even in this most general sense, checkers, and all games, capture something of reality, reduce it, bottle it, and make it easier for us to digest. If games are models, it would explain why so many people have said that life is a game. Recent psychological research suggests that we understand the world through models. Our senses deliver a bewildering amount of information to us, and our minds reduce this down to a working model of reality that we hold in our heads. Our minds store a virtual world, a representation of what is actually out there. As a model, this virtual world is fairly accurate, but not completely; This insight is due to Ian Bogost, who expressed it during a talk at Indiana University in 2010. However, I have not been able to locate the idea in his written works.

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13

more than anything, it is useful. It is the result of our mind deciding which details are essential and which are not. Having reduced reality down to essential details, the mind then analyzes and makes decisions using this virtual model. If we see all life through an internal mental model, and if games are models, the connection between games and life makes a great deal of sense. Life looks like a game because games are models, and our entire idea of “life” is itself a model. Our perception of life is a model; games are models; therefore, life looks like a game. In sum, there appears to be a very tight psychological connection between our interest in playing games and our faculties for understanding reality. Both involve the development of mental systems that model the far more complex phenomena occurring outside our heads. Our minds evolved to build internal models of reality and, at the same time, to engage in play. The two developments were undoubtedly related, and it is not hard to see why: when we play, we test our models of reality. The relationship between play and mastery of the external world can be seen in a couple of interesting examples. Consider the case of animal play research, which we have already mentioned. It is believed that the goofing around of cubs and kittens is related to social learning.24 When they play with each other, the animal toddlers learn about aggression, submission, and trust. The same thing happens when we humans play games with other people. We learn about them, and about ourselves, and how to handle things like betrayal, bad fortune, and power. What happens at the poker table has direct parallels to the bargaining table, and it all goes back to what we learned while playing with other kids on the playground. Our innate tendency to play games also led to the evolution of religion, according to recent work by sociologist Robert Bellah. In his magisterial study Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah argues that humans began creating religious institutions in order to create a separate, shielded sphere of communal interaction, a place to discuss, depict, and interact with metaphysical concepts and forces.25 This would mean that the liturgical aspects of religion—its rituals and ceremonies—are moves in a game about the cosmos itself, in its broadest conception. The religious act asserts that the cosmos is similar to it. The Mass is like life; the Mass is a game that is like life. Religious acts are games that model Brown, 29–32. Robert Bellah. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Belknap, 2011).

24 25

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all of existence. And that is why life seems to be a game—the Great Big Game of which our ceremonies and rituals are only a model.

What Makes This Book Different Very well—this is apparently not the first book to talk about life being a game. The idea is part of an old, old conversation about reality, understanding, and society. But this conversation has wandered into new territory in the last thirty years. In the past, there was no systematic intellectual inquiry into the concept game. It is interesting that in our review of the literature, few of the authors spent much time explaining the nature of games. They said that life is like a game, on the understanding that their readers were all familiar with game as a mental concept. Only the social scientists gave a clear definition—a game is people, choices, and outcomes—but their interest was not in the meaning of this definition but rather how it might help us understand serious phenomena like markets. Only recently have scholars and thinkers begun to analyze games themselves, in the field of Game Design. Game Design is an engineering discipline with artistic and social science elements. It is engineering because the game designer is trying to make a system or a model. It has its struts and buttresses, which go under names like dynamic difficulty adjustment, interaction channels, balancing, complexity trees, and power progression. Like a machine, a game can actually break when used. But this machine also has an artistic element because it involves images and music and, quite often, is attempting to engage or entertain the user. Social science comes in when the player interacts with other players or non-player characters; the designer is often making a little society for the player to inhabit. Game Design allows us to reverse-engineer the game-like structures we see in reality, but it also lets us build new structures. This sets the usual intellectual process on its head. Take the economics of bargaining. In the past, an economist would see a bargaining situation and then attempt to build a game model that replicated it. Today, a game designer can ask: “What would be a good bargaining situation, and how can I build that?” Instead of going from the real world to a model, the game designer builds a model of a social interaction and then exports into the real world. The relationship between game design and the other fields that have talked about games is like the relationship between ornithologists

Life Is a Game

15

and aeronautical engineers: the bird scholar figures out how birds fly, while the aeronautical engineer makes machines that fly. Secondly, most of the literature just surveyed is metaphorical. They write, “Life is like a game.” Here we are asserting that life is a game. No metaphor. This shift from metaphorical to literal can make a big difference. Imagine a pair of young fourteenth-century lovers, in fair Verona. The boy dreamily says to the girl, “Your eyes are like stars.” And this is as far as the boy can go, having no knowledge of stars beyond the fact that they twinkle. Today, the same boy— if he is trained in astronomy—could say “Your eyes are like stars,” and then follow up with a spectrographic study. Sadly, he would have to conclude that his beloved’s eyes are not actually like stars, deviating from starness in terms of color, temperature, size, and elemental composition (“There’s no helium!”). Yet he would better understand stars, as well as the young lady’s eyes. He would be making the first step to determining why they do twinkle so. Similarly, by casting off the metaphor that “life is like a game” and proceeding directly to “life is a game,” we engage the risk of disenchantment in the hopes of improving understanding. If life is not merely like a game, but actually is a game, then losing this game is not just a metaphorical problem. It is a real problem. That kind of stress is the price of wisdom.

Why? Because Our World Is Boring Examining life as an actual game is not just newly possible, it is important. Humanity is important, and it is—we are—in trouble. We are in trouble in ways that no other people have been in trouble before. Humanity has had problems for a long time, forever. There has been hunger, disease, and natural catastrophe. There has been sorrow—death, injustice, and tragedy. Life has always been hard, and disaster has been so frequent that dealing with it has become part of human chemistry. We are built to respond to problems, either by surviving or by attacking. By attacking our problems we have made tremendous progress, with lower infant mortality, less disease, and more safety. We in the developed world have so much more leisure time than our ancestors. Although some might argue the point, the developed world today is more advanced than just the world of only a few hundred years ago. Things are better. And yet we in the richest parts of the globe don’t feel better. People face less danger and death, yet they are still sad. How could this be? If you told seventeenth-

16

Life Is a Game

century scientists that their work would eventually reduce disease and infant mortality to much lower levels, that life expectancy would skyrocket, that most people had enough food and shelter to live to a decent age, that the population of the world would rise by many multiples, they would have been overjoyed, and they would have assumed we would be too. After all, what was the point of all the progress, if not to make people happy? And yet here we are, somewhat content, but also restless, moody, and at times outright despondent and hopeless. In the words of Jane McGonigal, reality is broken.26 How can this be? The answer is simple: our world is bored. It may be shocking to realize, but the problems of the past were, if nothing else, engaging. A poor serf had to work his field or he would starve; he did not have time to think about what to do. He was not bored. People trying to survive a plague or an earthquake are not restless. The many martyrs who fought against injustice all had a mission. Quests were everywhere. All those problems created meaning for us. Humanity had something to do. That is why, of all the writers and thinkers who have said that life is a game, none of them thought it might be a boring game. No one thought it was a bad game, poorly designed. Many have said that it is not fair, but then again, the possibility of injustice is a critical part of the best games (just ask the Cleveland Browns). Today we can no longer ignore the possibility that the game is boring for those of us in the richest countries. There is a lack of meaning, a lack of quests, and an absence of mission. The boredom of the modern world has been noticed by a wide variety of observers. More than forty years ago, rogue economist Tibor Scitovksy described our society as a “Polynesian economy,” one in which food and safety were fairly easy to come by.27 In such an economy, Scitovksy wrote, finding satisfaction would be difficult. This insight appears often in contemporary cultural criticism. Henri Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life (1947) uses boredom as a cudgel to beat upon many aspects of the modern world—literature, religion, politics, even sex.28 For Lefebvre, daily life has become the realm of the boring, the place where nothing is interesting, despite the promises of the consumerist world. Alberto Moravia’s Boredom (1960) includes the following dialogue29: Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: How Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 27 Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976s). 28 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (New York: Verso, 1991). 29 Alberto Moravia, Boredom (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 156–7. 26

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17

“Tell me, please, did you deceive him?” Finally she replied: “Why d’you want to know? Yes, I did deceive him, now and then; he was so boring.” This took my breath away. “Boring—How do you mean, boring?” “Boring.” “But what does that mean, to you—Boring?” “Boring means boring.” “And that is?” “Boring.”

A boring conversation. But that is the point. It is not often that cultural theorists and Benedictine theologians agree, but they happen to share similar ideas about boredom. Monks R. J. Snell and JeanCharles Nault argue that boredom is the unnamed evil of our times.30 It is a metaphysical sin, and it even has a name in theology: acedia. Acedia has been an issue in monastic life for 1,500 years. It happens when everything is going well for a monk. It drives him into restlessness and dissatisfaction. Instead of avoiding temptations, he begins to seek them, putting his virtue in peril. Snell and Nault explain that the great moral thinkers of the Western tradition directly addressed acedia in their philosophy and came to the conclusion that it is indeed a bad thing. Life is boring. It is not so hard to survive, and life loses some of its zing when it is not so hard to survive. If nothing else, people who have a not-so-hard, predictable, secure way of living are facing a situation that was unprecedented in the environment in which we evolved. We are built to face tough times; when times are not so tough, our mental and physical architecture is all wrong. Modern people eat as though an asteroid storm is about to flatten every burger joint in the world. We have sex as though 90 percent of our kids will be devoured by wolves. And we are desperate for problems to fight, as I have written in earlier work.31 We construct social problems because we have a deep desire to be making progress against problem. Improving the human condition gets harder as the human condition improves. The law of diminishing returns is in effect. We have cured all the

R. J. Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire (New York: Angelico Press, 2015); Jean-Charles Nault, OSB, The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013). 31 Edward J. Bird, “Politics, Altruism, and the Definition of Poverty,” Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 1, no. 3 (1999): 269–91. 30

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easy diseases; now, in order to show medical progress, we have to do something major about cancer, which is awfully hard. A young doctor looking for a mission in his career, for a quest, a purpose, will be frustrated to learn that there is no easy way to move the needle on cancer. The needle will move, but it will require thousands of researchers and billions of research dollars. It is hard to be a hero on a team of 50,000. In the developed world, signs of meaninglessness abound. Drug abuse is everywhere. Obesity is at record levels. Family size is shrinking—a sure sign of apathy about the future. People spend an unbelievable amount of time watching TV and playing video games. People are bored. If life is a game, it is, for too many, a boring game. Game design can cure boredom, and that is why this book is important. If we examine life as a game, we may see how it is broken. Responses may come to mind. This book does not have enough space to propose these responses, but by looking at the human condition from a game design perspective, we may begin the long task of diagnosing the ills of our day and, following ancient and hallowed tradition, fight them.

How Game Design Responds to Boredom Set a game designer down in a boring situation and he will immediately start thinking of ways to make it more engaging. He is like an economist who sees inefficiency, a doctor who sees illness, or a mechanical engineer who sees a crack. How do I fix this? As a start—and it is only a start—this book will paint the world as though it is inhabited by gamers. We will assume that life is actually a game, and then ask what kind of game it is, and what strategies people use to play. With this descriptive information, it may be possible to begin thinking of ways to make the human condition more engaging than it is right now. Just to give an example of where this might lead in future discussions: consider the concept of flow, first introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihályi, as it is used in game design. Flow is considered an ideal state for a game player to occupy. Players in flow lose track of time and place, they are transported into the imaginary world of the game, they feel accomplished and successful, and they have a sense of personal achievement and self-efficacy. Putting players into flow means matching the level of challenge in the game to the player’s

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skill. It is understood that players will get better the more they play a game, and therefore the challenge must increase as well. There is a “flow channel” in which challenge growth matches skill growth. Outside the flow channel, games are either frustrating because the challenges increase more rapidly than player skill or boring because there is not enough challenge as skills increase. These ideas point to a simple diagnosis of the modern illness: in the developed world, our skill growth has outpaced the growth of our challenges. The level of challenge is below the level of skill. We have more ability than we can use. We are like a student who has been placed a grade too low. The policy question becomes, how can we increase the degree of challenge? And do so without breaking, or holding back, all the wonderful achievements we have made? We would also need to allocate the challenges to people who can use them, and not increase the challenges for people who, despite the general good times, are individually having severe issues (and there are plenty of them). Not that any of this would be easy, but the flow concept is an example of a way that game design thinking can make contributions to making things better. Another example: game design reasoning reveals that there are some approaches to life that almost guarantee it will be boring. If a person happens to adopt one of these approaches, nothing can be done to raise their interest in living in this world. Two approaches are particularly susceptible to this kind of acedia: subjectivism and materialism. The subjective approach treats all reality as purely mental phenomena—nothing exists outside a person’s head. If this is the case, no true challenge is possible. Challenges have to come from the world of others, or Nature, in order to provide the sense of risk and possible failure that wipes away boredom. A challenge that exists only in my head can be mastered too easily or, if too difficult, can be tossed out the mental window. In a subjectivist world, a person can always move the goalposts to make things easier, and the mere existence of this possibility makes the game boring. A subjectivist can never lose. Similarly, a materialist will always be bored because materialism—the idea that the material world is all that exists—implies that nothing really matters. Materialism denies the existence of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, true and false. It denies consciousness; this feeling we have of being self-aware is just the operation of neurons in the cortex and nothing more. A person is a collection of atoms. From this perspective, any game that might be proposed will be boring because none of the outcomes matter. A game is just atoms moving around. The emotions that a game causes are just atoms moving in someone’s head. None of it is significant.

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These two ideas, subjectivism and materialism, have been analyzed and discussed by thousands of scholars and thinkers but I would wager that no one has identified them as being a specifically boring type of philosophy. Philosophers do not assess ideas about living in terms of how fun they are. Game designers would do so, however, and it is precisely this kind of judgment that the world needs right now. Our world has become so boring as to be a health risk, which means that, in addition to assessing life-ways on all the usual dimensions (justice, power, wealth, morality, truth), we should also assess them in terms of how fun they are.

2

Opening the Box

Mrs. Rattery brooded over her checker of cards and then drew them towards her into a heap, haphazard once more and without meaning; it had nearly come to a solution that time, but for a six of diamonds out of place, and a stubbornly congested patch at one corner, where nothing could be made to move. “It’s a heartbreaking game,” she said. —Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934) Mrs. Rattery has been playing card solitaire, or patience, and has come to grief. She sweeps the cards together into a pile. The cards had been part of an ongoing game, but are no longer. Waugh notes that they are now without meaning. Cards laid out in order are a game and have some meaning; cards shuffled into a deck are not a game and lack meaning. The collapse of game into no-game is a heartless affair. Like a game, the universe is heartless in the sense that the pieces need not come together nicely. It is filled with objects and forces that might lead to tragedy. The objects and forces should therefore be the start of our exploration. The first few questions about the game of life are: “What’s in the box?” What’s in existence? And how does any of it lend itself to the designing and playing of games? Let’s imagine a game player who opens the box of existence. What happens next? How does that feel?

Geworfenheit It feels like geworfenheit, of course! No book like this would be complete without a strange German philosophical term. Ours is geworfenheit. A literal translation is “be-thrown-ness.” It means

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being tossed around and, in the hands of philosopher Martin Heidegger, it refers specifically to being thrown into existence.1 Geworfenheit is his term for the feeling we have when think about first things: Where are we? What are we doing here? This is how it feels when we open the box of the world and look closely at what’s inside. Everything is confusing and we have no idea what we are doing. Game design has a name for this feeling: game vertigo. This is the feeling you have when you first open a game and start trying to do something. The entire system is strange. You have really no idea what you are doing. Moves that would seem to be natural and obvious are strangely forbidden. Powers well beyond your normal abilities are surprisingly available to you. You may have a foggy idea of the ultimate purpose of play, but almost no idea at all about the first steps in that direction. Experienced game players know that game vertigo is normal and that it fades gradually with time. Even the most complex and imposing game system gradually yields its secrets. Therefore it is important not to let the system intimidate you and drive you away. A good player knows that he has to sit with uncertainty and ignorance for a long time. Wiping away that uncertainty and ignorance is a big part of the fun. This practical insight—that our first encounter with any game is likely to be a sense of game vertigo or geworfenheit—leads to a strategic insight that also applies to any game: the very first thing you must do, always, is act. You have to move your pieces, roll the dice, knock on the door, kick the tires, push against the wall, throw the ball, and see what happens. Every action teaches you something about the game. The only mistake is to do nothing, to walk away, or to sit and think. A person in game vertigo needs to stop thinking, because any interesting game system is far too complex to think through. The mistake of thinking too much and too long is called analysis paralysis in game design circles. The correct strategic response to geworfenheit is to do something, anything, and see how the system responds.2

Heidegger, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at https​:/​/pl​​ato​.s​​tanfo​​rd​.ed​​u​/ent​​ries/​​he​ide​​gger/​, observed August 22, 2019. 2 The military is quite explicit about how to react to geworfenheit. There is a doctrine called OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. A battlefield commander is taught to carry out these four steps rapidly, in loops. A commander whose OODA loop is tighter and faster than his opponent’s is expected to perform better. Someone dropped into a battlefield situation will first observe the situation and, normally, fall into a sense of vertigo. OODA training teaches him to immediately orient himself to some aspect of the situation, decide to do something there, and then do it. Analysis paralysis would be to spend a lot of time on the Orient/Decide part of the loop. 1

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It would be good to have a similar attitude as we approach the geworfenheit of life. If we carefully and clearly bring to mind the game pieces and rules of life’s game as they actually are, we are certain to fall into a game vertigo strong enough to knock a person over. We live in a universe that is beyond comprehension. It is complex, massive, and shot through with mysteries. Do you know what Dark Energy is? No? Neither do I nor do any of the experts. Astronomers had to be brilliant in order to determine that it is even there. Figuring out what Dark Energy is, and why it is there, will require generations of study by the very smartest of people. Ponder Dark Energy, or the mystery of consciousness, or the beauty of mathematics, or the beauty of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, or Wagner’s Parsifal Overture, and you will get geworfenheit-ed pretty quickly. Imagine the most complex game you have ever played; now imagine a game many millions of times more complex than that. This is how complex the game of life must be. There is no bound. It is the game of the whole, of everything. Asking about the game of life is, at start, like asking about the nature of everything. This takes us into territory marked by the tracks of countless scientists, philosophers, prophets, and poets: What is existence? Given the competition, this book is not going to be able to offer anything particularly profound. What can be offered, however, is a brief treatment of the nature of things when those things are viewed as pieces of a game. We will explore how game design might think about the world. The goal is to foreground certain aspects of existence that will be useful later for considering what sort of grand game might be afoot.

The Solid Pieces Let’s begin with the physical universe. After centuries of careful study, we have learned that the best one-word description of the natural world is strange. Our universe seems fundamentally unfathomable in numerous ways. For no apparent reason, the observable universe had a finite beginning at a point in time and space, and everything in it exploded from there. It has laws, such as the law of gravity, for which there is no known explanation. It simply is. Not only that, but gravity also seems to be set at a precise intensity that allows matter to clump into discrete little balls rather than become dust or one giant ball. This is good because we are clumps, and a clumpy universe is the only one that would allow us clumps to be, which is extremely lucky, or unlucky, depending on your frame of mind—odd in any case. Similarly incapable of comprehension is the nature of particle mechanics or the motions of space and time. Light moves at a constant

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speed everywhere and always, and time moves more slowly when objects are moving toward one another than moving away. Particles don’t have a fixed point in space until we look at them. Particles separated by hundreds of miles can affect one another. Such things have been repeatedly confirmed by experiments, yet the mind (mine anyway) seems incapable of knowing them intuitively. We are learning that most of the matter and energy in the universe is stuff we cannot observe. Every piece of scientific evidence leads to some answers but also more questions. We cannot even rule out the possibility that there are other universes. The cosmos appears to be just plain weird, far weirder than we can imagine. Now, within this situation, we humans sit and watch, and in our imaginations we see things and forces. It is important to recognize that the things and forces we think we see are not actually distinct entities or powers. There are no “things” as such. Rather, existence is a vast process that is constantly unfolding. “Ours is a world of happenings, not things,” in the words of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.3 For example, there is no planet Venus. Rather, there is a local equilibrium of interactions that moves according to a pattern of energy, and we humans have drawn a circle around it and written the symbols “V E N U S” next to it. But that act does not make Venus a thing. It only puts this system of momentum and energy into a file that helps our little minds work with it. In truth, the interaction system that we label as “Venus” is just a subsystem of a larger whole. Venus is part of the solar system, which is part of the Milky Way, which is part of the observable universe, which is probably part of some unobservable universe, which is part of some system of universes, which is part of who knows what. Venus itself is composed of subsystems, of course. The planet has rocks and gases that are made up of molecular and atomic interactions, all knitted together and moving according to flows of energy. But there is no natural differentiation, no hard boundary between the elements. Everything interacts with everything else in one huge process. All the way down and all the way up, the situation into which we have been dropped is one vast undifferentiated process unfolding in time. That’s it; that’s what’s in the box. Strategic reasoning must take account of what is and it must do so fearlessly. Therefore, as a first step, we have to be fearless about the what is of the situation Quoted in Samuel Matlack, “Quantum Poetics,” The New Atlantis 53 (2018): 47–68. See also Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (New York: Riverhead, 2017).

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into which we have been dropped. Our game “pieces” are not pieces at all. There is one game piece: a vast undifferentiated process unfolding.

Context Though the universe is in fact a single grand process, we are not typically raised to see it that way. We come to understand the world through various contexts provided by local culture. One way to think of these contexts is as systems of labels. The natural world is labeled and then explained to young people in terms of these labels. We put things in files and then speak in terms of the files. How could it be otherwise? We are ourselves local and temporary equilibria. A human body is a complex thing which must sustain itself against the forces of decay and disorder. It contains a brain that senses information and generates reactions. The subsystem that we label “person” is the result of eons of evolutionary pressure. One feature that has proved helpful in survival is the ability to reason in terms of symbols, that is, to circle things and label them as we have done with Venus. Humans have the ability to use these signs. Humans were created as part of the vast undifferentiated process; the process produced an entity that uses signs to talk about the process itself. Are the signs themselves part of the process? Yes—the word “Venus” surely exists. It is the thing “Venus” that does not exist, or, more accurately, has no independent status in reality. It is just part of a big whole. As are we. Consider: the atoms which constitute your body in this moment are not the atoms which constituted it when you were born. Indeed, every second the material composition of “you” is changing. Is the air in your lungs part of you? You believe yourself to be an entity, but the stuff that makes up this entity changes constantly. If there is a “you,” what is it? I will venture an answer for that question eventually, but for now, we have to begin with the reality that “you” do not have any special existence in matter and energy. There’s no boundary between you and Venus. We draw a line there, but the line is something we invented as part of our thinking. It is not a part of the physical space where we draw it.4 The definition of things as thing is both an ancient philosophical problem and a pressing policy issue today. Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the conundrum of Theseus’s ship. Theseus has a ship. He decides to take it apart, piece by piece. As he does so, he uses the pieces to build an exact copy. At what point in this process does Theseus’s ship lose its shipness? And when does the pile of removed parts acquire shipness? If he gives the pieces to his friend Cassandra, when does the shipas-a-thing pass from his ownership to hers? As for contemporary policy issues, see Joshua Fairfield, “Bitproperty,” Southern California Law Review 88, no. 4 (2015). Fairfield writes about “informational

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Life Is a Game

Getting down to this reality takes a great deal of effort, in cutting away the many layers of signs and labels through which we have been taught to live. The universe does not have cars in it, per se; rather cars are a temporary accident in time and space. There are no houses, and no people in them. There are no things, as such. The only thing is one thing, a flow of stuff, and we interpret it the way children look for shapes in a cloud. “I see a dragon!” they cry. But there’s no dragon, only water suspended in air. Similarly, the natural world is simply matter, moving. And that is the base natural environment of all decision. This vast clump of roiling matter is the game piece; there is only one.

The Game Piece Says Nothing about Meaning There is only one thing in the universe, a vast roiling clump of matter, and that is all. This thing bears with it no meaning. As the vast undifferentiated process unfolds, it does not create significance. If Venus were destroyed by an asteroid, nothing fundamental would be different. The atoms that used to be Venus would either still be around or be transformed into energy. The acts of moving atoms this way and that, or transforming matter into energy and vice versa, has no significance in and of itself. These flows and transformations, moreover, are sufficient to explain absolutely everything in physical reality. There was a big bang when all matter and energy popped into being. Gravity caused things to clump into stars and planets. On one planet, at least, matter combined in such a way as to reproduce itself; we call this “life.” Evolutionary processes honed this life into a wild variety of material clumps that we label “fish” and “armadillo.” One of these clumps, known to us as “human,” evolved the capacity for culture. Evolutionary pressures on culture allowed certain practices and behaviors to thrive, such as wearing clothes. Everything we see can be explained as the result of neutral processing of energy and matter.5 This flow of matter and energy creates many clumps that we label as things, but it does not create any significance in those things. It just produces the clumps. It is true that when we label and discuss these clumpy things in the universe, we assume that there is some significance to them. By giving things significance, thing-ness,” the idea that things are created in law through lists that assign ownership of a thing to a person. 5 The argument here relies on evolution as the engine that creates everything in the living world, from bacteria to baseball. However, the theory of evolution has recently come under fire, surprisingly, from within the scientific community. See David Gelernter, “Giving Up Darwin,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 2 (2019).

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we can order our actions. Since the equilibrium we call “us” has survived the pressures of evolution, we can presume that labeling things as significant has been useful to us. Staying alive promotes our type; we therefore label as “important” things that help us to live or that threaten us with death. The source of that importance is the question. Why do we assume that our life matters? As we look at the pieces of the game—the one piece, actually—we do not see anything that suggests we get victory points for staying alive. The same can be said of right and wrong. The process unfolding has no ethical implication. The system does not have anything that implies that it is more right for people to be here than not. Saving a person is not a good or bad thing. It is simply an event. True, we label it good or bad, but the goodness or badness comes from somewhere else, not the vast process. When I save a little girl from drowning, whatever is good about that does not come from the atoms that, at the moment, make up the little girl. It does not come from the energy I use to pull her from the pond. If it has any existence at all, it is not in the girl, or me, or the pond, or the sun that shines down on us when she finally takes a full, deep, glorious breath. All of these things are empty of goodness. They simply are. The same must be said for our minds. We may think we have minds, but if we do, those minds do not live in the atoms that constitute our brains right now. We have to be fearless about this. The reality, the what is, is quite clear: we label ourselves as mind-endowed creatures capable of right and wrong, of significance choice. But nothing in physical existence supports that labeling.6 It will be important for our later discussion to realize as well that in situations where there is no significance, moral implication, or mind, there is no freedom of will either. There is no entity to make choices and in any case, no choice has any significance. One cannot speak of “decisions” under these circumstances, unless of course one understands them as labels only. In this view, a decision is merely a label that people put on a certain subset of the process in its movements.

There are powerful arguments that consciousness as such is an illusion. See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1992). For opposition to the materialist view, see Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist New-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). It is striking that these questions are still being debated today, some 2,500 years after the birth of philosophy. There is apparently no account—or at least none satisfactory to contemporary philosophers—of how we can be in the natural world but also an outside observer of it.

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Is This a Materialist Game? Reflections like this have led philosophers into a serious debate about whether anything exists other than the material universe. As noted earlier, a strict materialist asserts that the physical universe is everything. If this is true, this universe is not a game. It has no players: there is no inherent boundary between a person and the physical environment around him. It has no strategies: there is no concept of choice, since everything is just a response to some physical impulse. The universe has no payoffs either: nothing that happens can be counted as a benefit or a cost. Under materialism, the universe is not even a toy: it cannot be played with because the alleged player—us—is just a collection of material and energy responding to ongoing forces. As we said earlier, if nothing else, this is boring. It is also a mistake that no game designer would make. If you open the box and all the pieces fall out, but they say nothing about victory points, you do the next logical thing: look for the rules. It is not hard to find the rules of the universe, at least some of them. One rule whose existence no one can deny is this: 2 + 2 = 4. That this is a rule is undeniable, yet it does not live in the physical world. It is a collection of notions that in themselves have no physical reality. The truth of this rule is implied by the way the universe operates. The universe teaches us that there is a set of rules called mathematics that exist and have truth value completely outside the physical world. Thus, it is the way the game piece operates that tells us something about rules of the game. The discovery of rules that exist beyond the physical plane of existence makes it difficult to accept strict materialism in a discussion of universe-as-game.

Is This a Subjectivist Game? The existence of mathematics suggests that there are rules to this game that are separate from the pieces. But this does not dispose of the second boring possibility we mentioned earlier, subjectivism. Subjectivism says that both the rules and the game piece are products of our minds and nothing more. Or perhaps the physical world exists, but it is only we who create the rules and any sense of significance. Perhaps the universe is a toy and we are free to create the game as we wish, inventing rules and victory conditions according to our pleasure.

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We have already said that this is boring. A man in a prison cell can entertain himself for a while by trying to throw a pebble at a certain dot on the wall, but the pleasure does not last long. Games are only engaging when the risk of losing is real and unavoidable. It is too easy to ignore or set aside the possibility of losing when we play games within our own minds. Mrs. Rattery could have cheated at solitaire, but it felt better to lose according to the stated victory conditions than to set aside those conditions and declare herself a winner. The ability to set aside the victory conditions makes solitaire a limited form of gaming. Games are most fun when the standards of victory are fixed, and this makes a subjectivist universe dull. A game designer would have reasons other than dullness for rejecting the subjectivist interpretation of the game. He opens the game box and finds a spinning thing inside, as well as some hints about the rules. There is no reason to conclude that the game is entirely within his mind, however. For one thing, there are parts of the game that he cannot change, no matter what he might think. He cannot change how the vast process unfolds, for example. The game piece evolves according to its own laws. The rules of mathematics are also unchangeable by a thought. They remain the same no matter what we think of them. They remain the same even if there were no humans here to think at all. There are many aspects of the game outside our heads. There’s more to the game than just our minds.

The Invisible Parts We have said that mathematical rules can be inferred from the way the universe operates. It is possible to infer many other invisible game-related things. Take victory conditions. It is possible, in games, to infer victory conditions from the nature of the pieces. Over the course of the last century, archaeologists found odd items in certain royal tombs of Babylon and Egypt. They were boxes. On top of the box was a grid of squares. Some of the squares had symbols etched in them. Inside the box were stones. There were two sets, each set having a different shape. The number of stones in the two sets was the same. The archaeologists claimed that they had discovered games that the emperors and their queens would play. Why? What reason did they have for making this conclusion? Well, the grid of squares looks like a space for fighting or racing.

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The pieces look like tokens or avatars. The symbols in the squares seem designed to set different squares apart. The whole collection looks like a set of equipment for people to make choices that lead to outcomes. And that is a game. We do not know what victory was, exactly, but we know that these objects had them. We can infer from the physical game pieces something about the invisible elements of the game—the rules and the victory conditions. In the game of life, we have a physical world that similarly allows us to infer rules and victory conditions. We’ve already spoken of mathematics as a set of rules. As for victory conditions, there is no question that we perceive payoffs— outcomes of events that matter to us. If we perceive that a certain event has a good outcome, or a bad one, there must be some overarching best outcome that for all intents and purposes represents winning. As with the games in royal tombs, we are not sure what victory is, but we know it exists. Rules and victory conditions are not a part of the physical world, yet they exist. Where? The universe evidently has a non-physical plane of reality. The rules of games and the conditions of victory are real in the same way that mathematics is real. Mathematics is not physical; “2 + 2 = 4” can be written into the physical world, but it would still be true and have the same meaning if all physical representations of it were wiped away. It would have the same meaning, even if there were no people here to see it, and even if the physical universe itself were to vanish. In the same way, the rules of the game of existence, and the payoffs and the notions of winning, would exist even if the physical world did not. Consider: we often play games without having a rule book. The absence of a physical rule book does not lessen the reality or importance of the rules. Not having the rule book does not mean there are no rules, it only means that we do not have a tangible record of them. Rules exist, just not in the physical world. They are part of the game, but we cannot see them. There’s more to the game than the piece, and those extra elements, though metaphysical, are as real a part of the game as anything. There are two other non-physical elements of life’s game worth discussing: freedom and information.

The Two Freedoms In order for the human condition to be a game, the players have to be able to make choices. Players must be free, and freedom is another part of the game

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that is not physical. There is no freedom inherent in the great unfolding process that constitutes the one physical piece in life’s game. If freedom exists, it has its existence in an intangible, non-physical way. Are players free? The question is complicated by the different forms freedom can take. At least since William of Ockham (AD 1285–1347), philosophy has dealt with at least two versions of freedom.7 One might be called “freedom-of,” which refers to our ability to choose, to have many choices, and to not be constrained or forced to do things. This freedom is our primary idea of freedom today. But there is an older concept, developed throughout the Western philosophical tradition and put into its most concrete form by Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225–74). This older concept might be referred to as “freedom-from,” and refers to the freedom from worry, stress, fear of failure, and mistakes. Freedomfrom comes from doing a good thing well. Freedom-from says that true freedom is not doing what you want; it is wanting what you do. Consider a pianist giving a concert. Under freedom-to, the pianist can hit any keys he wishes. He can even pour coffee into the piano. He can do any of these things, and so we say he is free under the notion of freedom-to. Under the other notion, however, he is not free if he does these things, because he is not playing the piano. Under freedom-from, the only way to be free in regards to “freely playing the piano” is to know a good piece of music and to play it well without effort, worry, or stress. What does this have to do with games? Under freedom-to, we can break the rules. We can cheat. We can make side deals. We can try to redefine the game. We can end the game; we can toss the table. All this is allowed under freedom-to, but not under freedom-from. Under freedom-from, we cannot break the rules— not because we are physically unable to do so, but because that would end the game, thus destroying the very event within which we were free to begin with. A man is free to buy Oriental Avenue and play Monopoly. He is not free to toss the table and play Monopoly. Tossing the table ends the game; it destroys his freedom to choose within the game. Applied to the game of human life, this distinction has a startling implication about suicide. Under freedom-to, we are free to take our own lives. However, we are not free to do that under freedom-from, because taking your own life ends the game. Dead men have no choices.

Nault, 96–105.

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As for what the rules do permit, there are some important nuances. Certainly we are not allowed to break the laws of nature or mathematics. What about other laws, like the law of truth or the law of morality? As it happens, the rules do allow us to lie and to be evil. We have that much freedom-to. But there are penalties, such that if we do whatever we want, we will not be free from bad consequences. Imagine a piano teacher telling a student to practice. “These are the rules,” he says. “Practice this piece two hours a day.” Under freedom-to, the student can practice or not. He is free to ignore the teacher. If he does that, however, he is not free to play the piano well. He will face the bad consequences of a bad performance. If he practices and follows the rules laid down by his teacher, however, he becomes free to play the piano well and does not face those consequences. By following rules and ignoring freedom-to, the piano student achieves freedom-from. Rules inhibit freedom-to but enhance freedom-from. In a similar way, the rules of life against falsehood, evil, ugliness, and hate do not prevent us from being free; they make us free. We can choose to break them, but then we will not live well; we will lose our freedom-from. Living in denial of the truth does not free a person; it wraps him in chains of lies that ultimately constrain his actions. Living in evil makes a person horrified by himself, and a person horrified by his own history is not even free to sleep at night. The soft rules of life, against bad things, must be followed or bad things will happen. The situation is similar to a game that has strict rules as well as a concept of fouls or penalties, rules that will probably be broken, perhaps unavoidably, and therefore are not grounds for ending the game. Instead, a punishment is imposed to deter the violations. We are free to commit fouls—under freedom-to, we can do anything—but since they are punished, we only attain freedom-from if we play in such a way that the effect of fouls is minimal. Put more simply, a team that commits a ton of fouls is not free to play the game itself. Such a team spends most of its time watching the other team take the benefits of its fouls; it watches the others’ free throws, penalty kicks, and power play goals. Similarly, a person who lies and cheats all the time is playing against the spirit of life’s game and spends most of his time helplessly watching other people do well.

Information Information is another immaterial thing in the box. Consider DNA. Your DNA plus the past interactions of all particles near your body is what produces your

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current body. DNA is the code, and it has molded the particle interactions near your body to produce everything from your hair color to your serotonin levels. The matter has changed, but the DNA has not. It contains information about what you are supposed to be. It is a set of instructions that is utterly unique in the universe. While DNA in general follows laws, your DNA does one thing and one thing only: it states the instructions that determine what you are and what you become. However, DNA itself is a chain of proteins, and you are a clump of atoms, and nowhere in this matter can we find the you. Whatever you are is not in the DNA itself but it depends on the pattern of the DNA. The pattern is not material. The pattern of DNA is information. Information is not material, even though, in order to have any effect, and has to be rendered on something material. In terms of game design, the rules are information: the ink on the page is not the rules; rather, the way the ink is printed on the page renders the symbols that we interpret in order to understand the rules. The rules are not in the ink, but live in the immaterial realm, like all information. The immaterial realm of patterns and symbols is vast. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, grammar and imagination produce all kinds of intangible things that are real to our minds.8 Grammar separates adjectives (“red”) from nouns (“flower”). Combining these, we can make the sensible construct “red flower.” But we can also make the nonsense construct “red cow,” which despite its absence on the Earth becomes real in the mind; grammar is only a reflection of the way we can think, and the way we can think includes the ability to combine adjectives and nouns in new ways. We can express such things as “red + cow + scales + wings + fangs + tail + claws + flying + fire-breathing + nasty.” We can label this new thing with new symbols, such as “dragon.” Our grammar lets us make meaningful statements about things that are but also things that are not, even things that cannot be. Why would this be possible? There is certainly an evolutionary explanation: having an imagination certainly benefits the dreamer. Well and good, but then, what are these constructs? What sort of reality do they have, if any? They are not part of the physical universe and yet, like DNA patterns and mathematics, they have real effects here. Money is an entirely imaginary object; it has no inherent value, yet we all assert that it does and we act that way too. In pursuit of money, we dig, weave, love, and go to war. We may, in pursuit of money, turn our own planet into an empty chunk of rock. Human imagination J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” Andrew Lang Lecture, University of St. Andrews, 1939.

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is not only part of existence in some strange way but it also changes existence. It is real, but not in the way that trees are real. All of this is critical to game design, naturally. Freedom, imagination, patterns, and mathematics—we cannot conceive of games without these things. Even the state of a game is information. The game state “Detroit leads New York in the bottom of the 3rd inning, 4-1” directly affects everything else that happens in this game. It is a summary of the history of play to this point. Similarly, in the game of life, history becomes information that, though immaterial, affects our choices and payoffs. History, or the possibility of history, is in the box of the game of life along with all of these other, equally invisible, types of information.

So: What Is the Game? When we open the box of life, we are geworfen into a vast, unfolding process. We sit inside a single moving thing, impossibly complex, that operates under its own power. The initial vertigo is strong, yet with some reflection the nature of the process becomes clearer. First, it is indeed part of a game. The vast unfolding process seems to be built for choices, strategies, and payoffs. Second, although the rules are nowhere to be found, they evidently do exist. The process can be affected but much of it cannot be changed. Thirdly, there are a number of elements to the game that exist only intangibly. We have to infer the existence of these pieces from our work with the vast, unfolding process. Most of the game remains shrouded in mystery. That’s fun! We should pause for a moment and reflect on this situation, how unexpected, amazing, frightening, awe-inspiring, and interesting it is. Let us go back only a few hundred years. Consider the standpoint of rational people in the year AD 1500. If we told them how many resources had been poured into pure discovery, they would be amazed. “Surely,” they would say, “You have discovered all there is to know?” And we would have to report that, on the one hand, we had discovered truths more amazing than anything they could have imagined. On the other, we would have to admit that we had not really discovered anything final. “The universe,” we would say, “defies our observation, as it defied yours.” We would also have to say that the smallest things are infinitely smaller than the things these people could imagine, and yet, we are not sure what happens at an even smaller scale. We have run hundreds and hundreds of miles on our voyage

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of discovery, yet all we see is more horizon. The world never seems to stop. It goes on forever. I would wager that our listeners would be in parts appalled, disheartened, frightened, and intrigued. It is an amazing mystery. Sometimes it is argued that this is depressing, but, from a game design perspective, it is very good. Strategy thrives on the unknown. The human condition is very interesting from standpoint of game design and decisionmaking. Look at it this way: it is easy to create a game without uncertainty. Flip a coin: heads, you win $1; tails, you win $1. But that is a boring game, isn’t it? It is also easy to create a game with nothing but uncertainty: flip a coin, and something happens, but we won’t tell you what it is—even after you flip. Also boring. No, the only interesting game is one in which you win with heads and lose with tails, and you don’t know which will happen. Limited uncertainty makes strategy worth considering and, luckily, that is precisely how our universe has been built. More than that: the game we are playing has this mystery, this limited uncertainty, at every scale and along every dimension. We could be talking about moving on a chessboard, or having a child: game design considerations are relevant. We could be talking about folding proteins in a molecule or designing an experiment about the Big Bang: game design applies. There are decisions to be made at every place in the universe, in every time, and at every scale. All of these decisions are part of the game, and for that reason, game designers have something to say. Because our existence contains vast realms of experience where things are neither completely certain nor completely uncertain, game design is relevant almost everywhere a human being casts her mind. Whatever else this odd existence of ours may be, it is fascinating for both game players and game designers alike.

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Evidence of Games in Life

All human concerns are games. —Plotinus (Enneads III.2.15, AD 270) Having thought a bit about the contents of the box, now we look for evidence that those contents, material and immaterials, lend themselves to gaming. True, thinkers throughout the ages have said life is a game, and we can make a grand argument that the universe seems interactive. But let us look instead for specifics. If life is a game, there ought to be areas of daily life that have the same structure as games that we know well. There are. In fact, there are more than we have space to cover; the neoPlatonist philosopher Plotinus believes that everything humans are concerned about is a game. An experienced gamer is able to see game-like structures in many of our interactions with society and nature. Example: What is a school but a competitive investment game? If you invest, you get points, and it becomes easier to get more points in the future. Countless board and video games have this mechanic. The more game mechanics you know, it seems, the more aspects of life seem to have them.

All Game Mechanics Reflect Some Aspects of Real Life One obvious reason that game mechanics are observable in daily life is that the game mechanics we create are generally modeled on some aspect of the lives we lead. It makes sense that, if monopoly is a model of a land market, we should see monopoly-like mechanics in real land markets. This is not odd. What is odd, or would be, is that we see aspects of monopoly in real life that are not necessarily derived from a model of land markets. If, for example, we saw actual real estate agents rolling two dice in order to move, we would be surprised and impressed

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at the way that life seems to be a game. It is these kinds of situations that provide evidence: aspects of daily life that look like games that are not themselves models of that aspect. The mechanics we will discuss here are mechanics that we do see in games and life, but not because the games we have in mind are explicitly trying to model that mechanic. These are mechanics of the human condition that resemble mechanics in games, even though no game explicitly sets out to recreate that specific mechanic.

The Universe: A Toy The universe is in some respects like a toy. Consider the toy called Perplexus, a large clear sphere that contains a little world of tracks and steps and tunnels. As you rotate the sphere, you control the movements of a small steel ball. There’s no goal, necessarily, but most people challenge themselves by trying to get the little ball from point A to point B. It’s interesting to interact with this little world in a plastic sphere. Am I the steel ball, trying to get from A to B? Am I the god-thinker, challenged with a puzzle of physical dynamics? Am I a competitor, trying to do something faster and better than someone else? The Perplexus was designed to engage a person in all these ways. The Perplexus was not designed to be a model of the universe, yet the natural world is like it in many ways. The universe is a vast and vastly interesting toy. It reacts to what we do. In physical terms, it reacts locally: when I push a chair into the rain, it gets wet. In informational terms, it reacts universally. By this I mean, we are able to conduct experiments involving truly vast scales and also truly infinitesimal scales, and the universe responds by giving us information. An example: Edwin Hubble was an astronomer who looked closely at the pinpoints of light in the night sky. Everyone had assumed these were all stars, like our sun. It was also believed that all the stars were contained in a thing called “our galaxy, the Milky Way.” True, the galaxy had trillions and trillions of stars, but still, that was it. One galaxy with lots of stars. However, as Hubble looked closer and closer at the stars, he discovered that some stars were fuzzy. And through a series of experiments, he determined that they were not stars but other galaxies. Imagine the moment when this realization hit him. There he is sitting in his office, looking at star charts, and it dawns on him that the universe is trillions of trillions times larger than he or anyone else knew. What an mind-shattering moment. As every scientist, every lover, and every poet will report, the world is

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full of these surprises. And these surprises come to us from all corners of human experience, the tiny and the vast. The universe responds. The universe responds to all of us, not just scientists. I learned this as a college student. College students do indeed poke their world, just to see what happens and sometimes what happens is interesting. For example: suppose your Hawaiian friend works for hours to make a delicious taro pudding, known as Kulolo, native to his island. Suppose you steal this pudding. If you throw it at something, it sticks. If you do this in the four-story stairwell of a college dormitory, you can stick it high up, on a wall, where workers would require a 20-foot ladder to get it—virtually impossible to retrieve. Later, you will discover that your university, for all its greatness, does not have a crew of workers assigned to the job of removing sticky puddings from high spots in stairwells. Thus the Kulolo remains where it is. If you remain observant, you will eventually learn that taro pudding can stick to a wall for some years—four at least, from my own observation—and harden into a rock-like substance, an apparently permanent decoration, one that for all intents and purposes might as well have been placed there by George Washington himself on his visit to my school in 1797. Disclaimer: it was not I who stole the pudding. I merely observed the event and its petrological denouement. I am certain the Kulolo survived the destruction of walls when our dorm, New North, was renovated some years after we left. Perhaps it is now in a biology museum somewhere, labeled as a mysteriously huge piece of guano, gifted by the Founding Fathers to my college in appreciation of its contribution to our young nation. And by such examples anyone—not just astronomers—can see that truly interesting things happen when they play with the universe.

The Universe: An Idle Game The universe moves under its own power. This feature makes the universe somewhat like a genre of video games called idle games. Idle games take advantage of a surprising fact about human play: people like to watch machines as they run. In an idle game, the user has limited and largely mindless choices. He is invited to click a button, say, and each click produces some resource—a cookie. When he has enough cookies, he can trade them in to get a better oven. With the better oven, each time he clicks on the button he produces ten cookies.

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Eventually he gets a still better oven and produces 100 cookies per click, and so on. So far this looks like a normal (if boring) game of resource production. The idle game takes things further, however, by removing the need to click. With enough cookies, the player can buy a baker who makes cookies for him. Every second, the robo-baker clicks the button. Each time the robo-baker clicks the button, 100 more cookies appear. The player does nothing. The program is running by itself. The player sits there and watches as the cookies roll in. While the player is no longer needed for baking, he still has options in how to develop the operation. Eventually, he has enough cookies to hire a second baker, doubling his production rate. Better ovens become available. Pastry chefs can be bought that double the speed of the bakers. There are new bakeries that double the productivity of everything. Grandmothers can be hired to speed things up still further. And so on. The idle game is a process of clicking buttons that make a number increase ever more quickly. Moreover, there is no puzzle about which buttons to press; typically, at any given moment, there is only one sensible choice in terms of price and effect. An idle game is not about winning or losing: it lets you win, and the only question is how rapidly you do so. Idle games seem to appeal to that part of us that always asks, “What happens if we turn things up a notch?” It lets you revel in the feeling of victory. Perhaps this makes modern people happy because, in our day, the joy of most success is short-lived. One of the first questions an athlete is asked moments after winning a championship is “What about next year?” Idle games respond to this by constantly increasing the scale of the effect. When you have 100 cookies, getting 200 cookies feels good. It does not feel as good when you have 100 million cookies. Indeed, getting 200 on top of 100 million makes no difference at all. There’s no psychological difference between 100,000,000 and 100,000,200. Two piles of cookies in these amounts would like exactly the same. Our brains can’t distinguish these two numbers. But an idle game does not have to give you 200 cookies, it can give you 200 million! And from a baseline of 100 million, 200 million looks very good. The idle game can continually give you this satisfaction, because every time your mind adapts to the new scale, the game adapts as well and gives you new rewards that are relevant at that new scale. The universe has the specific structural features of a huge idle game. In fact, it has the same scale-surprise mechanic as every idle game—even though idle games were not designed as models of the universe.

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At every scale, the universe offers new surprises, and the surprises scale to the current state of the observer. A young father discovers that little children are cute but can be awful at times. It is a profound realization. An old father discovers that, despite the troubles, parenting is a deep, sublime joy—that too is a profound realization. Both men experience the same sense of the profound, despite vastly different levels of parenting experience. In idle game terms, the young father gained 200 experience on top of 100, while the old father gained 200,000 experience on top of 100,000—different scales, same psychological reward. Young and old, rich and poor, brilliant and slow: all people, at all times, can poke the universe and watch it react in a way that is psychologically significant to them. The reaction may be good or bad, but it is significant. The events in the vast process have significance for us, and we can cause events to happen. Thus the universe gives us the core idle game experience of poking a button and watching what happens, poking and watching, poking and watching, in a way that scales to our current situation.

Life: Minesweeper Switching from the universe to the experience of life, we encounter mechanics similar to the game Minesweeper. Minesweeper is a puzzle game that starts with a grid of blank squares. When you click on a square, its contents are revealed. A square either has a bomb in it or nothing. If it is a bomb, you die. Game over. If not, you live to click again. Empty squares may give you additional information. Some empty squares are next to bombs, and if you click on them, they will reveal a number that indicates how many bombs are next to that square. If you click on a square and don’t die, and see a 3, it means that you’ve clicked on a safe square that has three bombs next to it. By observing the pattern of these numbers, you can deduce which squares have bombs without actually clicking on any of the bomb squares. You win the game when you have correctly identified all of the bomb squares in the grid. The people who designed Minesweeper were not attempting to model eternal aspects of the human condition. But they made a game whose mechanics are everywhere in life. As we play with the game of existence, it gives us signals— some big and some small—about dangerous things that lie nearby. When there’s nothing dangerous, we know that fairly well. Our mother’s love feels good and

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is good. No worries there. And when there are big dangers, they are obvious, as obvious as a revealed Minesweeper bomb: parachuting into volcanoes or poking a bear in the eye—certain destruction. And then there are the spaces in-between that are neither perfectly safe nor obviously dangerous. Life gives warnings, just as Minesweeper does. In life, information pops up when we encounter choices that are not bad things themselves but lead to bad things. Addictions come to mind, but actually anything whose pursuit becomes excessive or obsessive. Consider food. Everyone loves to eat. Everyone has to eat. And yet, there are patterns of eating that are downright dangerous. I love fried potatoes, I really do, and yet every time I enjoy them safely I should not ignore the big warning numbers that pop up, the calories, the fats, the weight—all these ominous numbers—announcing the presence of nearby bombs. I know that if I eat all the potatoes I want, I will become sick, and probably depressed, too. Gradually, I will die. I did not know this about potatoes when I was younger. For decades I thought that eating fried potatoes was more or less innocent. But over the years, the connection between eating, weight, emotion, and health became more and more apparent until I realized, it is dangerous to eat all the potatoes you want. I clicked enough squares that were near the eat-every-french-fry to realize that I have to set limits on how much I eat. I identified that bomb and now I know not to click on it. People in all walks of life report similar near-misses with various kinds of bombs. Alcohol, gambling, work, pride—there are so many things that seem so wonderful in small quantities that yet can destroy a person if mishandled. Life seems to be a minefield, filled with these interesting exploratory choices that, if taken wrongly, can lead down and down and down to very nasty experiences indeed, despite warning signs all around. That’s the core mechanic of Minesweeper. If life is Minesweeper, it is an amazing version of it. The dimensions of the grid are infinite. It goes on and on forever. No one can possibly identify all the bombs. There’s no win state. Instead, there’s a timer that clicks constantly. It does not click down, it clicks up. You know that the game will end when the timer hits a certain number, but you do not know what the number is. It is different for everyone. All you know is that when your number comes up, game over. Staying alive as long as possible is a core element of many games. Staying alive in real life seems to be part of life’s victory condition too. Life provides experiences, and the longer we live, the more experiences we get. Seeing the next level seems to be built into our experience as a positive thing. And this

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leads to a particular pattern of game play: explore the game—just like an idle game—but also watch out, because something nearby might explode—just like Minesweeper. We seek to keep playing, stay alive, and avoid potentially dangerous developments. The trick is we don’t know where those dangerous things are. We have to look closely at the many clues we are given.

Life: Role-Playing Game We spend life poking nearby squares and avoiding danger. We also spend much of life pretending and acting out different roles. This is like RPGs, where players act as if something were true when it is not. As if—what a fundamental notion in the playing of this game! In daily life, when we are confronted with any game or complex system that we don’t understand, we decide whether or not to play and then, if we do play, we walk into it blind, acting as if we have a clue about what to do. We have to dissolve the game vertigo that comes whenever we confront a new, complex system. The only way to do it is to poke the system and see what happens. Not knowing yet what the point of our poking may be, we poke more or less aimlessly, adopting different pretenses about why such-and-such a choice might be good. “I think this is a way to get oranges.” “If I go here, I can see more of this area.” “Pulling this lever apparently shares my power with others.” “This button looks like a way to change how I look.” All of these statements are hypotheses, conjectures, and guesses. To act on them is to play a game of pretend. This is what an artist does as he paints: he imagines the sky to be this shade of blue and makes it so on his canvas. The scientist does this as well: she hypothesizes that a particular process will cause a particular result, and then she runs an experiment to see. The entrepreneur does the same: he imagines a product and a market and then makes the product to see if the market is really there. Policymakers and game designers imagine rules and outcomes, then they make the rules and observe whether the outcomes happen—Imagine, Act, Observe. The middle part of this cycle is where as if lives. Proceed as if your assumptions are correct. Countless artists and philosophers have delved the deep implications of the play-acting aspects of life. Many have said that play-acting is everything in life. “All the world’s a stage,” says Shakespeare. This makes good sense from a game design perspective. We do not know the answers to so many questions. There are so many mysteries. We don’t even know for sure that we are here, as independent, choosing minds. Perhaps everything we do, everything that

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exists, can be explained as the outcome of physical processes—from the big bang creating matter and energy to gravity creating planets out of dust, to water and lightning creating evolving organisms, to biological evolution creating our species, to cultural evolution creating our thoughts. Everything is understood and explained. On this view, only by some miracle could we actually exist as freely thinking, choosing agents. Only if there is more to existence than particles and forces could there be players of this game. And while some such miracle is possible, due to the apparent presence of immaterial reality, as we said earlier, there is no way to know for sure. Sitting in this ignorance and lacking anything better to do, we all assume that we have minds and act accordingly. Yes, even the most materialist of philosophers, the most nihilistic artists, the most heartless scientists, with their angry books and speeches and YouTube videos: their earnest, passionate mode of life screams as if—they act as if their opinions matter, as if they themselves are significant, even though their philosophy says that none of us are significant. All people act as if they are actually people and not mere bundles of atoms. As if: humanity’s working hypothesis. When we live an as if existence, we are operating in a particular type of game, the role-playing game or RPG. In an RPG, the player selects a character and builds it with certain features and abilities. Then the player goes out into the world and gets involved in various stories, some trivial, others of worldwide significance. The character becomes a hero, completing quests that change the world in big ways and small. The RPG genre was not designed as a model of the human condition, but it describes frightfully well how often we approach things.1 Life plays out as an RPG of vast proportions. In childhood you are endowed with a persona and through the years you live it. You mold it along the way, of course—no RPG player worth his salt allows his character to remain unchanged. Nonetheless, at any given moment, your walking and talking and eating and working is all performed through a person that you believe yourself to be. All people believe themselves to be a certain kind of person—a conscious, thinking agent who chooses. As a person, everyone has tasks to perform, goals to achieve, and things to do. For most people, at most times, the goals are minor: “I must go to the store and buy a potato.” Some goals are quite large, on the order of great quests: “I must marry a good man and have children.” Some are quite vague: “I must honor my father’s memory.” Yet we all have them, all the time. Anyone doing something The inventors of Dungeons and Dragons—Gary Gags and Dave Arneson—were only trying to make a medieval combat game with fantasy features.

1

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is enacting personhood. In that enactment, he is doing the sorts of things that players do in RPGs—choosing tasks, gaining abilities, seeking rewards, building relationships, developing reputations. People play life as if it were an RPG. The similarity of life to an RPG goes deep. Even the more obscure mechanics are well represented. Consider a mechanic called dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). DDA appears in games because designers understand that players have different levels of skill and commitment. One player is young, quick-witted, with lots of time to devote to the game. Another is old, slow, and busy with family and work. How can the designer offer both of them a rewarding experience? Any puzzle or challenge in a game can be made harder or easier. If the designer chooses one set of parameters for a puzzle, it will be rewarding for a certain set of people. For others, it will be too hard or too easy. The designer wants to please as many people as possible, so naturally he would choose the level of difficulty accordingly. In terms of economic optimization, he would choose the design that maximizes the number of satisfied players.2 DDA enters the picture as a design that reacts to information about the player’s skill and commitment. During gameplay, the game collects data on how the player is doing. It then determines how hard the game should be. A game with DDA offers old, slow players like me a small group of slow-moving monsters with clubs. It offers young, fast players like my sons a huge crowd of swift monsters with swords. DDA allows a game design to appeal to a wider audience. How does DDA work? Suppose I exit the village and I am attacked by a giant harpy. I die in 23 seconds, because she does 462 points of damage to me while I only do 137 points of damage to her. Her damage-per-second is three times higher than mine—not a winning formula. As a player, I will respond to this situation by improving my play. I will certainly choose easier tasks, and try to find intermediate goals that I can accomplish, given the current state of my character and my own abilities. With time playing the game, my character will get stronger and I will learn how to play better. While I am working on these things, however, the DDA system secretly helps me out. The next monster I encounter, which normally does five damage per second now does three damage per second. And unbeknownst to me, the creature’s armor, which is usually 50 Strictly speaking, he would choose the design that maximizes progress toward his own goals. If he is trying to make money, he would choose the design that maximizes his profit. If he is trying to become famous, he would choose the design that causes the most discussion of his game. Maximizing the number of happy players is a good thing for almost all designers, whether they seek to make money, improve education, offer an artistic critique, or whatever else.

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in the default state of the game, now is only 40. As I fight the creature, I can’t tell whether my increased success is happening because I have learned how to be a better fighter or because my opponent has a thinner shell. All I know is, I beat the monster; I didn’t die. There is now a better match between my abilities and the difficulty of the game; DDA has made it less frustrating. DDA does a similar but opposite thing for a bored player, one who easily defeats early challenges in the game but soon finds things to be a bit tougher, for reasons he can’t quite identify. DDA secretly and quietly changes the game so that it better suits the abilities of its players. Now, doesn’t life have DDA? Take education. We begin in school as little children, all of us given similar tasks to perform. Yet within a few years, the brighter students are given more challenging material, and those who are comparatively less bright are directed to less challenging material. This happens formally in many school systems, but as any teacher will tell you, it happens informally as well. My high school English teacher gave one smart girl such a hard time for little mistakes, and I know that she overlooked similar things with me, because, you know, there were these glaring errors of style everywhere, many of which are to be found even today, on this very page; for example, run-on sentences, a constant problem in my writing and a terrible thing to do, but which I have done, for years, and Ms. Balzer, please know that I am sorry to have failed you. My point is, there is an implicit DDA in all teaching. The same applies for employment relationships. What manager does not assign tasks to employees according to their abilities? Those tasks are changed as the employee gets more skills. DDA applies to friendships as well. I have a friend who takes ages to finish his turn in the games we play. He gets distracted by conversations at the table; he’s loquacious in a most charming way. In order to help him focus, we try to sit quietly when he is playing. Parenting too has DDA components. My kids threw their socks in the middle of the room until the day when we all realized—unconsciously, I might add—that they were old enough to put their dirty socks away. And it happened. We all adjust our expectations of others according to what we believe they can do. Even the world itself has DDA components. There’s a mountain climber who lost his lower legs in a terrible encounter with frostbite. He made for himself a pair of climbing feet, with special claws, and ambles up and down the cliffs just as before. Now, he could have gone farther; a jetpack would get him to the top of the mountain faster, and a helicopter would be even better. But from a mountain-climbing perspective, it would not be as challenging to hop a ride up to the top of the sky—not as fun.

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We choose the amount of difficulty we want, whether it is through technologies and physics or even in choosing what our goals are. Don’t we all seek quests and goals that are interesting in some way? And that means, they are not impossible but also not easy. The difficulty of living adapts to our abilities. For most people, in most of human history, merely surviving was an interesting enough challenge. Today, the rich people of our world find the task of merely surviving too boring, so they seek out new challenges. The universe has built DDA into our very brains. The significance of this lengthy discourse on DDA is that it demonstrates the existence of very specific game mechanics throughout daily life—relationships, the workplace, hobbies, everywhere. We have argued at a global level that life is a game, and we have shown that life in general has the flavor of games like the Perplexus or Minesweeper. Here we see a specific mechanic from a specific game genre appearing in specific moments throughout life. It is as if we zoomed in the microscope and saw that, yes, even in the deep structure of daily life, specifically identifiable game mechanics abound.

How to Play We have presented some real-world evidence that life has numerous game mechanics. Between the great thinkers, the abstract idea, and this limited evidence—which is backed up by daily experience—we have gone a long way toward taking the idea seriously. Life is a game. Really. A real game, bona fide. Very complex, but still a game. In any game, but especially a complicated one, the first question is, “How do we play?” It is a question not just about the rules but also about playing well. What is the best way to proceed in this game? If we take seriously the idea that life is a game, what should we do?

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The Strategic Layer

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. —Johan Huizinga I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die. —Shakespeare, Richard III To play a game well involves more than thinking hard. Playing well requires a mental toolbox filled with all kinds of gadgets. Thinking hard is important, but so are instant reactions, as well as gut feelings: intuition. This is what animals use when they play, as Huizinga reminds us. Good players cultivate good habits, and they pay attention to the ethics and norms of playing. Playing well involves a bewildering variety of practices. Things only get more bewildering when the game in question is the game of living as a human being. There is no game more complex or extensive. We do not even know what the victory conditions are. There is no simple advice for winning the game of life.1 The best we can do in the pages of one book is to analyze—break the problem down and develop general ideas about good and bad practices. The very first good practice is to do what we are doing right now—stop and think about it. Recognize that life is a game, that there is some notion of winning or progress to it, and that strategical game-thinking will be useful in getting there. This change of perspective, by itself, is enough to change a life. Thinking this way makes life intentional. When a student suddenly realizes that the Unfortunately, there are many books that promise a simple way to “win” life, but those books tend to define happiness in terms of money. And their “simple way” usually involves hard work, savings, and starting a business. All very good things, but not simple.

1

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classroom is a game not unlike the video game on their phone, their approach to education instantly becomes more game-y, which is to say, mindful, thoughtful, and intentional. One way to think about this change in perspective is to recognize it as a shift in the layer of thought. By layer of thought I mean the set of objects about which one is thinking. When we start thinking about life as a game, we start thinking about resources, feedback loops, power, teams, penalties, points, and all the other concepts that come to mind when gaming. Shakespeare’s King Richard, in the heat of battle, thinks about dice. All of these objects live on a layer of thought that is somewhere more abstract than daily life (which is about things like cheeseburgers and sleep [for me, anyway]), though not all the way to the Platonic Plane of the Forms. The layer where game objects live will be called the strategic layer. It is where we think in general terms about what would be best to do.

Layers In a few hours I will decide what hat to wear, which we might think of as the immediate layer. This is the layer of thinking where I make mundane decisions. Yet these decisions depend on some other decisions I have made, such as, what sort of person do I want others to think I am? We might call this the personal layer, where I decide what face to show the world. I decided some time ago that I would like to look like a kind, odd, harmless older man—an image I wish I could live up to more often than I do—and so today I will choose a floppy sun hat: a signal of age, fashion ignorance, and mild eccentricity. I will drive away in a car that represents a decision at a still higher level, one taken many years ago to express something about my wealth and taste (or lack thereof). The car layer might be thought of as the social layer of my thinking. And so on. The immediate layer is nested within the personal layer, which lies within the social layer. Each decision has a certain scope. The scope of a decision—the layer on which it takes place—has one main effect on our thinking: it takes some other decisions as given and unchangeable, while setting aside decisions taken on other layers. Having decided some time ago to represent myself to the world as a harmless old nobody, my decision to choose a certain hat operates under some constraints. Not all hats express light and gentle oddness in just the right way. A motorcycle helmet won’t do. Indeed no

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kind of helmet is suitable—pith, army, or construction. Yet there are a number of lightly goofy hats that would work. A ball cap is good, so long as it does not have some sort of angry message. On the contrary, an odd message is best, nothing hip, but rather something rather un-hip such as the logo of an ice cream stand (“Jiffy Treet”) or an obscure tourist site (“Valley Forge”). Having a number of hats like this, I do face a choice. But the choice is constrained by decisions at a higher layer. And similarly, the hat I choose constrains further decisions at lower levels, such as, whether to stuff the hat in my pocket—possible with a ball cap, but not with a top hat or a sombrero. At every layer, some things are taken for granted, and other things are available for change.

Strategy and Tactics Military analysts think in terms of layers and use terms like strategy and tactics to talk about the different layers at which decisions are made. Tactics refers to decisions about smaller scales of operation. Strategy is about decisions at larger scales. Generally speaking, the higher the rank of a military commander, the closer he is to doing strategy rather than tactics. A general has the job of moving his army many miles to encounter the enemy army. The location of the encounter is the battlefield. On the battlefield, a captain has the job of moving his squad of twenty soldiers to key points and engaging the enemy there. The general does strategy, the captain, tactics. Strategy involves larger units, operating over longer time scales, with more significant effects. Tactics involves smaller units, shorter time scales, and more localized effects. These terms are slippery, of course. An army is composed of several corps, with each having several divisions, and so on down to the level of squads. Where does decision-making stop being strategy and start becoming tactics? It does not really matter what we name the different layers, though. The key lesson from military analysis is that strategy and tactics are different. Decisions at the strategic layer involve different considerations from those at the tactical layer. Indeed the terms “strategic” and “tactical” are mostly useful in pointing out that it is time to switch modes of analysis. Military strategy, for example, can involve global political considerations: an army moved across a certain border will violate neutrality and bring a new entrant in the war. Tactics rarely has that problem. Yet there are issues at the tactical level that never appear in strategy. A captain has to worry about line-of-sight to enemy positions, something that is not a concern beyond the local battlefield.

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The concepts of strategy and tactics are useful for us because they apply generally to any game. Football teams, thinking strategically, decide what sort of team they will be: long or short passes, defensive- or offensive-minded. All season long, they perfect that style of play. In any given game, though, each team will make decisions based on current conditions. A short-passing, defensive team will still send the ball way downfield if there’s a player running open down there. If life is a game, and games have these strategic and tactical elements, life must have strategic and tactical elements as well. Some aspects of our thinking involve long-run considerations and large portions of the resources we have at our disposal. Other decisions are short-run and involve only a few things. Sometimes we are thinking about what sort of person to be, whereas other times we are thinking about what hat to wear.

The Strategic Layer Because life is a game, strategic and tactical elements naturally follow the same patterns in life as they do in games in general. Decisions occur on different layers, with differing scope. Here we aim to distinguish a strategic layer as distinct from the others, and so let’s break our decision-making down into three layers: the philosophical, the strategic, and the tactical. The philosophical layer sits at the most abstract end of the spectrum. It is where we decide on our basic philosophical positions. As we discussed earlier, every person is dropped into an existence here, in which very little is given or apparent outside the base material conditions. As we respond to this geworfenheit, we develop some very broad notions about Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Pretty and Ugly, and so on. The use of capital letters here is intentional: it is a signal that we are talking about things decided on the philosophical layer. We all develop notions here, although not all people think very hard about it or make conscious decisions. Nonetheless, we do all have these notions. Even someone who rejects them, who rejects the concepts of good and evil for example, by that very rejection proves that he has done some thinking on the philosophical layer. It is where our most fundamental commitments live. Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum, the tactical layer. This is the layer of everyday life. Nothing grand or tremendous is at stake there. We decide what hat to wear, what toothpaste to buy, what to say to our neighbor as we walk out the door. We respond to immediate conditions. Every living organism makes decisions at the tactical layer and we are no different.

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There are philosophical positions and tactical actions; what makes the tactics consistent with the philosophy? Connecting philosophy to action is the special role of the strategic layer. It sits between them and mediates downward from our grand positions to our day-today actions. Unlike the philosophical and tactical layers, the strategic layer can be ignored by people if they wish to do so or if it simply does not occur to them to be intentional about making their daily life coherent with what they believe. It is impossible to do this perfectly and we are all hypocrites to some extent. Nonetheless, there is a distinction between strategic thinking and philosophy on the one hand and impulses on the other. The strategic layer is the place where we take our grand positions and translate them into rules for daily life. Consider this example from daily life: a mother drops a child’s cookie on the floor. Should she give it to the child or throw it out? A mother whose grand commitments are to a love of nature, and an openness to experience may have long ago decided not to worry very much about her child’s contact with the natural world. A dropped cookie is of no more worry than a wild strawberry: whatever is on the floor is an element of nature (assuming the child is not in a nuclear power plant or a Philadelphia bus station) and if her baby comes into contact with that nature, nothing tragic would happen. This mother lets her daughter eat the cookie. Another mother who gives the cookie to her daughter is the one concerned about poor people and avoiding waste. However, consider a mother whose grand commitments are to personal safety. She will protect the baby from every risk so long as it is feasible to do so. Even though it is costly and wasteful to throw the cookie away, this mother does not let her daughter eat the cookie. A fourth mother—most that I know—avoids the conundrum entirely in favor of a five-second rule according to which food that touches a floor for five seconds or less is unaffected by the conditions of said floor. “Five-second rule!” she will declare, like a referee in the eternal maternal conflict between safety, health, and frugality. Note the aptness of the word “rule”: being a rule—not a tactical act or a philosophical position—the five-second rule comes from the strategic layer.

Thinking on the Strategic Layer In what way is the strategic layer different from the other layers of human thinking? Strategic thinking is its own unique brand of puzzling things out. It does not concern itself with practical details, and yet, it does not ignore practicality: a

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strategic rule has to work in the real world. It is not the place for thinking about the stars and the heavens, but it cannot ignore them either—a rule has to have some purpose. It has to achieve something of value. Strategy is a translation of broad observations and goals into general norms for action. Our commitments on the philosophical layer, the highest layer, give us the goals. Our senses, moderated by experience, give us observations of the world around us. It remains to decide how to act. The strategic layer is where we form our broadest notions of what to do. These are not strict recipes for action in all possible circumstances, but rather general norms. The strategic layer is where we define our basic stance toward the universe, a notion we will discuss in much greater detail in the next chapter. An odd but useful way for thinking about the strategic layer involves a sandwich. The top slice of bread is our philosophical position: Hedonist, Shinto, Worshipper of Cthulu, and so on. The bottom slice of bread is our actions, moment by moment: floppy hat, ball cap, bonnet, and so on. The strategic layer is the meat in the middle. It is where we translate Cthulu worship into a notion of appropriate headwear (”it must have tentacles!”). We then take this notion of appropriate headwear and use it to choose a specific hat.

Example: The Conundrums of Duty to the Environment Where I live, many people are quite concerned about the environment, especially global climate change. Their highest commitments involve a devotion to nature, and a belief that humans really ought to leave nature alone as much as possible. They feel that our presence here has become obnoxious to the other life forms that share our planet. On the philosophical layer, my neighbors are passionately committed to this Earth, its beauty, and its right to go on evolving much as it would have had humans not appeared. Now, my neighbors eat food, like all people. Food comes from nature, from this Earth. At some point, my friends have to decide how their commitment to protecting nature translates into the food on their plate. Quite a lot of effort goes into this decision. Should we eat beans or beef? Beef comes from cows, and cows fart. Their farts destroy CO2, which makes the Earth hotter, which melts the icecaps, which raises the sea level, which drowns Manhattan, which destroys an important source of museum tote bags. So we should eat beans. But some beans come from Del Monte, which is a big corporation, which injects disgusting chemicals and hormones into the beans to make them look plump and delicious. Better to get organic beans. No! Hold thy hand! Because by now the corporate system has co-opted the organic movement and turned it into a

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vast money-grubbing, labor-exploiting, false-advertised, deceptive, perfidious conspiracy against the original principles of local co-op organic farming. So we should buy locally sourced beans. And to fully show our solidarity, we should buy our beans at the farmer’s market, not the store—the big chain grocery stores now carry so-called organic and local beans—and we must transport our beans home in a small, fuel-efficient car that has all the right bumper stickers. That’s a lot of mental work, just to buy some beans. Of course, not everyone goes all the way like this. What’s most interesting is that my friends and neighbors exhibit quite a bit of diversity in their commitments. Some of them drive minivans, not small fuel-efficient cars. Many don’t have the right bumper stickers, and some shop at Kroger. Some buy beans in cans, and you do see folks downing cheeseburgers with gusto—“special occasions.” Where did all these decisions come from? Most of my neighbors would express a strong commitment to stewardship of our poor Earth. And yet this commitment is translated into different types of action. Somewhere, my neighbors—and I, for I care about the Earth too—have to decide how our commitment to the Earth translates into food purchases. That “somewhere” is the strategic layer. My neighbors are thinking on the strategic layer when they decide that when possible they will avoid animal-sourced food. They will make efforts to source their food locally. They will be skeptical of the claims of large food processing and delivery companies, understanding that such organizations seek only to make money, not to improve our health or the planet’s. People develop on the strategic layer a set of norms for putting their concern for the Earth into action. The strategic layer gives birth to the rules for living out our philosophical commitments. It translates fundamental notions of “what is” and “what should be” into notions of “what to do.” It translates ideology into action.

General Tips for Strategic Thinking How should we think about life strategy? What makes one strategy better than another? Making judgments about strategy is hard. As hard as it is to decide on life commitments, it is harder still to figure out how to live them. So many competing demands come into play. We have limited time. Our wills are weak. It is difficult to focus. Odd things happen, things we didn’t plan on. We often have no idea how our actions affect the world. We don’t know if the information in front of us is true. Calculating is difficult. Even more difficult is deciding when to stop

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calculating! In life, as in games, it is tempting to overthink a problem, to move deeper and deeper into a line of thought, even though each step is questionable, coming in the end to a bizarre strategy. Here is an example of over thinking, a bizarre, bad rule for life: eat cold foods. The overwrought reasoning would be as follows: suppose you are trying to lose weight. Studies show that we lose weight when we shiver. We shiver when we are cold. Body temperature depends on the environment. Our environment includes the food we put in our stomach. Therefore eat cold foods. Each step makes sense, but the final advice is silly. Over-analysis and other pitfalls like this make it challenging to develop sound strategies. We will have much more to say about choosing good strategies as the book goes on. Here we will offer a set of general ideas, learned through the general analysis of games, for separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the strategic layer of thinking.

Operational Goals Good strategy aims at an operational goal, a goal which is medium term, feasible, and observable. This is important because the goals given to us by our grand commitments are usually too vague to allow action recommendations. “Win the game” does not help us win the game. “Become a better dad” is a fine philosophical goal but a poor operational goal. While feasible, it gives no practical guidance about success. “Stop the next great Los Angeles earthquake” is poor operationally because it cannot be done. Operational goals are practical goals whose end is in sight. They are things we can actually do, and they should also be things we can see—so that we know whether we are attaining them or not.

Scores Keeping score is important. My weight loss app claims that the most reliable indicator for predicting weight loss success is how frequently a person records their weight. Whatever the victory condition may be, we need to pay attention to it. This can be overdone, of course. The point is not to turn all of life into a fastidious exercise in achievement accounting. It is rather to remain mindful in a concrete way of what is happening with respect to operational goals. If your philosophical goal is to be kind to the planet, and your derived operational goal is to eat organic foods, you should pay attention to how frequently you eat organic foods. People are often surprised when confronted with numbers

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about their behavior (“I ate THAT much cheese??”). We don’t necessarily need to track numbers, but being mindful enough that numbers do not surprise us is an important part of good strategic thinking.

Staying on the Right Layer Thinking strategically means carving out some thinking time from the demands of philosophy and tactics. There is a discipline to not thinking in the broadest terms nor the narrowest, because both are tempting distractions. The first temptation is over-philosophizing. Once our grand philosophical commitments are decided, it is important, for the time being, to stay off the philosophical layer. Two practical tips for doing that are (1) externalizing victory conditions and (2) staying practical. Externalizing victory conditions means, making them beyond our control. The goalposts should remain fixed. If you can move them, you’re not doing it right. Both Alcoholics Anonymous and the Catholic Church provide examples of externalizing the conditions of success, the former by having alcoholics meet with sponsors and report their drinking (or ideally lack thereof), the latter through the Rite of Reconciliation (“confession”). These practices create accountability. The fact that we choose our standards of victory at the philosophical layer needs to be hidden from our strategic mind; we need to keep the goals fixed as we think about attaining them. Staying practical means thinking only in terms of the feasible. If our strategic thinking keeps returning to impossible dreams and unlikely nightmares, we are running off to the philosophical layer. The objective is to develop a rule that can be imposed on our behavior today, right now. Anything outside our scope of action for the foreseeable future is out of the strategic discussion. The second temptation is obsession with specifics. If we are thinking about strategy we need to ignore tactical considerations, again for the time being. It is important for strategic thinking to understand the possibilities and limitations of daily life, but it is also important to get the mind up and out of daily life for these few moments devoted to strategy. Two concrete tips for staying off the tactical layer are to (1) avoid detail and (2) move on. Avoiding detail is important, perhaps obviously so, but it is such a powerful problem for strategic thought that it deserves emphasis. Strategic thinking often involves the structure of things, a listing or ordering of items or actions, broadly defined. Creating a structure is hampered if the mind begins to drill down on the first item in the list. This problem comes up whenever I teach a complex game;

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the first time players hear how objects are moved they typically want to know everything about that, even though they haven’t yet heard what the object of the movement is. Imagine you are explaining the automobile to a man from Mars. You would first give a general overview—an engine in a wagon that makes the wheels turn. If instead, at the word “engine,” you began explaining spark plugs and pistons, the teaching would go nowhere. It is the same with actions. If you decide to build a tree house and then immediately begin cutting branches, you have made a mistake; this may not be the right tree. Let the details take care of themselves when the time comes. Moving on means, not allowing odd, recent events to alter our strategic commitments. We should not drop a strategic commitment as a result of a single, isolated incident. The plan should only change when there is a pattern or other strong evidence on the tactical layer that something is amiss. We will not always live up to the commitments of the strategy we have developed; there will be times where we have committed to avoiding carrots but eat them anyway. Messing up one time is not a sufficient reason to abandon the strategy. A parishioner who misses Mass one week should not abandon a commitment to weekly attendance. As long as going to church seems strategically wise—a judgment that takes into account events and possibilities that stretch over decades (and millenia, if you believe that)—it should continue. One-off events, even things that violate our core principles, should not be allowed to overturn our commitment to those principles. We should keep our eyes on the prize.

On Victory Conditions Life is a game with decision-making on three layers: the tactical, the strategic, and the philosophical. But we have not addressed a glaring question: What is the goal of all this decision-making? What is the purpose? If we were in a game, the answer would be obvious: to win. However, even the commitment to winning can be made problematic. Many people play games not to win but to have fun. For them, winning the game is just a way to order and prioritize actions. The victory conditions give them a score indicating how well they did. Doing well, however, is also a goal that some people don’t care about. Some people play just to make friends. Some people play a game just to annoy others. Even if we are playing a game, the goal of decision-making is not obvious. We all have to determine what the goal is.

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Awareness of the overall goal happens on the philosophical layer. Indeed it is probably the most important achievement on that layer: Learning the answer to questions like Why am I doing this? What is the point? Before crowing about “winning the game of life,” we have to think hard about what “winning” is. The goal of human life—not a small topic, is it? Rather than attempt to argue that there is one and only one way to win life, let’s proceed on the understanding that people come to their own conclusions about the purpose of life. They develop on the philosophical layer ideas about life’s meaning and what constitutes living well or doing the right thing. These ideas dramatically affect everything else. They serve as the victory conditions for our actions. We get victory points in the game of life every time we make a choice consistent with these broad commitments, whatever they may be. The fact that people develop broad ideas about life’s purpose comes into better relief when we think like a game designer. The basic question of “what is this life for” has, like so much else in human experience, been modeled in actual games. Game scholars have confirmed that many games seem not to have stated victory conditions at all.2 Consider for example the genre of virtual world games, such as World of Warcraft. In these games, the player creates a character and then sends her on a series of quests. Completing quests increases the character’s powers, which enables her to complete more difficult quests. This goes on practically forever. Factually speaking, of course, there is an end to the questing. It is possible to do every single quest in a game such as this. It would take many thousands of hours, however. In practical terms, from the perspective of the player, the game simply has no end. It is misleading to ask how one wins such a game. What’s at stake is not winning and losing, at least not in any way defined by the designer. Rather, the stakes rest in the player’s mind. What is the player trying to do? Success in this context is a question of the player’s ability to meet whatever goals he may have for his play. For one night, the goal may be to kill a certain monster and obtain a certain piece of treasure. The player may fail one night and try again the next. At a broader time scale, the player’s goal may be to gain a higher level of power, become the leader of a player guild, explore dark regions of the map, or become wealthy. The game’s design certainly facilitates these goals, and many others, by reporting all kinds of statistics about each player’s achievements. There is no winning as such, but there is succeeding and failing. Mike Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2018), 90–2.

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Games like this present players with this strange outcome of success without victory. But it is not strange, really. Life is like that. We all die. Our powers are limited. For many people, the good times in life are temporary. They are successes, not victories. Success, or victory, or survival, or happiness, or something else? The goal of living, of thinking, of deciding, is determined at the very top of the decision environment and its effects trickle down to all the other layers. In the second half of the book we will go into much more detail about how specific notions of life’s purpose create specific pathways from philosophy to strategy to tactics. Here, let’s think about a few broad categories of victory in life.

A Catalog of Victory Types At one level, all this discussion might seem pointless because the obvious goal of life is to be happy. But it is not so obvious. It is hard to be happy; if it were easy, we’d all be happy, wouldn’t we?

Victory: Be Happy We talked earlier about the two freedoms: freedom-to and freedom-from. Which one makes us most happy? Under freedom-to, we get to do whatever we want. That certainly can make people happy. This importance of freedom-to was demonstrated to me powerfully on one weekend in November 1989. It happened that I was in Berlin when the Wall came down, and I was witness to hundreds of scenes of people enjoying liberties they had never had before. I recall a couple who were struck dumb by the sight of a stack of green peppers in a grocery store—something they had apparently never seen before. Simply being able to travel freely brought many to tears. The communist system, as I experienced directly, left people with very little scope of action. When it was broken, the joyous reactions of the newly freed people testified to the importance of basic freedoms—freedom-to—for simple happiness. However, freedom-to is not always pretty. Plenty of people make themselves miserable through their own choices: to drink, to smoke, to be promiscuous, to overeat. They would be happier if someone or something prevented them from making these choices. Ideally, it would be their own self-control. Speaking

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personally, more self-discipline would have prevented my own bouts of overdrinking, and I would have been happier for that. But in the moment, selfcontrol did not feel like the road to happiness, thus I drank too much. Today, I realize that it is when the desire to drink is absent that I am happiest. And this is freedom-from, freedom from behaviors that I know will make me miserable. Food is another example. There was a time when eating all the fatty meats we could was a good idea from the standpoint of short- and long-run happiness, as well as survival. That’s because there wasn’t much fatty meat available. Today, fatty meats are about the cheapest food around, but if we eat all we want, we bloat up into great big land whales who slosh around in our great big cars, miserably driving our great big selves from one burger joint to the next. (Disclaimer: I’ve been obese. Oh yes.) Eating is good clean fun, but at some amount of weight, the joy is all gone. Most obese people in my experience are not smiling. Under freedom-from, we are most happy and most free when our behavioral interests line up well with the known standards of good living: eating right, drinking light, sleeping, exercising, and being nice to other people. In the moment, however, we are always tempted not to live this way; there’s leftover double-pepperoni pizza in the fridge right now, and I want it, and freedom-to is encouraging me to just go ahead and eat it, just because I want to and I can. But that kind of freedom would make me unhappy. Happiness and behavior—it is a very complicated relationship. Choosing “Be Happy” as a victory condition provides no reliable guidance about what to do.

Victory: Making a Difference Perhaps victory in life is to have a positive impact. A friend of mine referred to this view of life as “moving the needle.”3 Working for positive change seems noble, but again, having an impact is a complicated goal. The goal of making an impact can blend into a desire to exert power, which can be nasty, even among fourteen-year-old girls. My god-daughter, who I will not name so as to protect this now-adult woman from shame, once expressed similar motives in a game. There was a certain type of card that everyone needed, and she chose to collect and hoard these cards. We asked her, “Jacinta Courter of Verona, New Jersey, who will one day move to South Carolina, why aren’t you using up your Locomotives so that they return to the pool, where Many thanks to Bill Grasso for this insight.

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everyone else can get them?” And she replied “Because I don’t want to,” clearly code for “Because I want to mess everything up.” Sociopathic megalomania is bad wherever it appears, but is especially tragic among the young. In most cases, however, making a difference means something positive. Even with positive change, there are issues with scope. What does it mean to “make a difference?” The difference might be a very small difference; it may not move the needle enough for anyone to see it. For many people, an impact isn’t significant unless it involves something global. They prefer a very small change on a global issue to a large change locally. This is odd in that our local impacts are very much larger and much more significant for their recipients, and are easier to see. One thinks of the father who spends every waking hour obsessed with work in the belief that through his work the world will be a better place. Meanwhile, his children languish, ignored. Honestly, how likely is it that our work, or any activity targeted outside our families and communities, will actually have an impact on the course of human affairs? Very small, unless history decides to throw us into the gears in some significant way. And if that happens, we will surely know! Meanwhile, who is more significant for my neighbor, me or some faraway businessman, activist, or writer? Who is more significant to a kid than his parent? How much better an effect on the world we would have, if we only made sure that our local impacts, small though they may be, were very, very good? In any case, having an effect on the world is easier said than done.

Victory: Telling a Heck of a Tale Perhaps we win by having an interesting life. Perhaps the goal is to get together with interesting people and have interesting times. One thinks of the fascinating characters in history—Don Giovanni, Cola di Rienzo, Lucrezia Borgia, Gabriele D’Annunzio—who spun such tales of life that we still talk about them. Naturally these people were all Italians. I suppose people in other countries lead interesting lives too, even if they lack the flair of my adopted countrymen. Making a good story could be introspective. To have a good run of life might not mean that you entertain others, but rather that you experience amazing things yourself. Wilmer McClean was an ordinary farmer leading an ordinary life until his house got shot up. That was on July 21, 1861, when thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers descended on his farm to fight the Battle of Bull Run, the first battle of the American Civil War. Afterward Wilmer had had enough of war, so he moved south and west, to the wilds of western Virginia.

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He settled in a little village where, four years later, thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers descended on his farm to fight the Battle of Appomattox Court House, the last battle of the American Civil War. They shot up his house again but had the courtesy to end the war right after, Lee and Grant signing the final papers right there in Wilmer’s parlor. Poor Wilmer McLean entertained nobody, but he certainly saw interesting things. But what if you are not as fortunate as Wilmer McLean? We talked earlier about the problem of boredom and how it is a serious problem in our times. It is hard to do interesting things in a meaningless time. Being “interesting” might induce someone to mindlessly follow the famous or do something dangerous. To be the hero of our own novel is not enough; it has to be a good novel that leaves us as the hero and not the villain.

Victory: Membership For some people, life is going well when they are loved and respected by others. We are formal members of communities of different scale: neighborhood, town, city, country. We can, if we choose, participate in all kinds of groups: families, churches, clubs. Work makes us members of still other communities. And then we have informal networks: friendships. Being a good member of groups is for many the best thing in life. Social connection also may reflect a desire to be proud of yourself, to have self-worth. Some people hope only to make their parents proud. Some people just want to have friends; they just want to belong. From this social point of view, success is to be known and warmly accepted by others. If life’s victory is social connection, then reputation is an important consideration. When I play board games, I try to sustain a reputation for trustworthiness. I might lose a game one night by failing to stab another player in the back, but my reasoning is that all the people at the table will see that I am trustworthy. This ought to help me build future alliances. I’m not motivated in this by altruism or the desire to be nice, but rather by the cold, hard facts of game theory—if you violate your alliances, people have no incentive to ally with you. Being a consistently nice guy is unquestionably the shrewdest approach to any long-run series of games with a social component. Gamers who fit this operational profile are often referred to as “socializers,” but there is a darker side to being social. Being social can also involve having social enemies. Ostracizing those whom we don’t like, making fun of them, and

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even hurting them, unfortunately, are a part of being connected to others. These uglier actions mark the line between, for example, a healthy love of country and a dangerous nationalism. It is where the celebration of one’s culture becomes ethnic atrocity, and where living a faith turns into persecution of heretics. In game studies, the dark side of social play is called “killers.” It refers to people whose measure of success in a game is how much they can dominate others. For some players, power is the ultimate measure of game success. Power drives many real lives as well. Power, prestige, and dominance can also be seen as victory conditions, and not very innocent ones at that.

Victory: Peace At the other end of the spectrum are victory conditions involving the search for peace. But how does one do that operationally? There are meditative practices, but it can be difficult to keep out distractions and worries. Helping people find peace is, ironically, one of the great contributions of modern games. Not a few games—idle games, discussed earlier, are a good example—are not about doing anything. The point of the game is to occupy the mind and bring about a sense of flow, in which we lose track of time and have no worries. During this stressful period of writing I find myself often taking refuge in a simple game called 2048. On a 4 x 4 grid, numbers pop up and you move them around to join with other numbers. When you join a 2 to another 2, they form a 4 and release one of the two previously occupied spaces. Join a 256 to a 256 to form a 512. It’s a game of endless rearrangement, with no apparent purpose other than to occupy the mind, put the player at peace, and help the player procrastinate when he really should be writing Chapter 4. Peace is problematic, however. For some, true peace comes only from nothingness. Only a blurry line separates restfulness from depressed lack of motivation, not to mention laziness. When is it a mystic separation from the cares of the world, and when is it heartless apathy?

Victory: Virtue No discussion of winning life’s game would be complete without a discussion of the oft-proposed Big Win: getting to Heaven. Some people, on the philosophical layer, make a commitment of a religious or spiritual sort. In many religious commitments, there is this idea of an eternally happy end state for the soul, a

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Paradise or Heaven or Nirvana. In some of these points of view, there is a Hell or Underworld that is just as eternal but completely awful. And there are various concepts of in-between states: purgatories, limbos, waiting rooms, having your soul sent into the neighbor’s cat, and so on. In these points of view, the things we do in life’s game are rewarded in some way when the game is over. The body dies but the soul survives, and something is given to the soul as a result of what a person did during life. As with all the other ways of conceiving victory, the path of virtue is not straight. Religions are notorious for their long and detailed list of requirements; even the most mystic/spiritual community has its do’s and dont’s. And although there is some overlap, the lists are different. This leaves us with the problem of determining what moral advice is most likely to lead us to the Blessed Realm. It is like a game with hidden victory conditions, a mechanic which is uncommon but not unheard-of. Imagine a board game with no stated victory conditions. Each player has control of a small piece of land, a house, a few sheep, some seeds, a fruit tree, and a farmer. There is a market for buying and selling food and agricultural implements. A game with this structure suggests a few plausible victory conditions and a very large number of implausible ones. The game is probably not about collecting works of postmodern art or winning gold medals at the Olympics. It may be about producing food, making money, or having a large farm. It could be about having a reputation as a good neighbor. While there will always be some uncertainty about what the victory conditions may be, the critical point here is that the structure of the game reveals much about the victory conditions. The game’s structure dramatically reduces the number of possible goals, making it feasible, and indeed interesting, for players to think about what they should be doing. We can look at life the same way. The structure of life might tell us something about the legendary road to Nirvana. Moral discussions and arguments can be interpreted as a collective effort to determine what it is to win the virtue game. Everybody tries to be a good person. Everybody has an idea of what it means to be a good guy, and they try to live that way. Most people don’t even reflect on it; it’s ingrained in the way we think. The fact that we even talk about virtue, and indeed do so all the time, suggests that we are always guessing about the ultimate victory conditions of life. In talking about virtue and in trying to live virtuously, we are keeping an eye on the possibility that our actions matter for some standard other than our own happiness, peace, or impact.

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What Do the Teachers Say? This is just a short list of visions of life victory—ones that come to mind when we think about common patterns of thought and action. Anyone can have very strong opinions, that one goal is ridiculous and another is a matter of life or death. One could write volumes about the way we have been told to live our lives. Some say we should just make money and be happy. Others urge us to find peace. Others threaten us with damnation if we don’t follow all the rules. Given this bewildering variety of views of winning, all of them complicated in practice, it might make sense to ask what the wise people have said. There are ancient traditions that teach us how to live, associated with names like Buddha, Confucius, Mohamed, and Jesus.4 There are two striking—almost miraculous— facts about the teachings of these masters. First, the teachings have survived. Though they were first taught eons ago, the words still come to us today. So much else has decayed and faded, but not the words of these teachers. Second, the masters tend to agree on a number of things about the way to live, about what makes for a Win in life. Despite the different traditions, the recommended actions are often the same.

The Strategic Layer: Where We Can Agree The idea that differing philosophies can recommend similar approaches to living is worth exploring at some length. We have all seen how quickly discussions on the philosophical layer can get heated. The atheist cannot imagine why anyone would believe in some God who is obviously not there. The Christian cannot imagine why anyone would deny the existence of a God who is so obviously present in his creation. Both are frustrated by the Buddhists and Stoics who act like they don’t care. These people are all committed to radically different conceptions of the true nature of existence. Disagreements among them are threatening to their basic assumptions about life. The funny thing is, these disagreements disappear when the discussion moves to the strategic layer. Whatever the great teachers may say about God, the universe, and everything, they tend to agree on how to live. Or, more accurately, there is far less distance between the great masters on the way to approach victory conditions than on the There are remarkable similarities in the lessons taught by different traditions. See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

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conditions themselves. Take the Golden Rule, for example. The content of the rule is to avoid doing things to others that you would not want done to you. The rule combines so many aspects of virtue: sympathy, compassion, discernment, and even an amount of selfishness—we all would be happier living in a world ruled by the Golden Rule. And that is true, because the Golden Rule appears in virtually all the world ethical systems in one form or another. There are many other consistencies, too many to discuss at any length. The great teachers advise us to be peaceful and loving, be humble, have self-control, be chaste and live in moderation with respect to the many pleasures of the world, have respect for family and law, and be self-aware. These concrete ways of living are the Ways of a Just Man, the Road to Heaven, the Path to Nirvana, and the Acts Pleasing to the Great God Agadoobius, all at the same time. Far too much blood has been shed over differences in commitments at the philosophical layer. If all the great teachers are saying similar things, why is there so much fighting and, strategically speaking, does any of it make sense? The fighting that too often occurs between people of different religions and philosophies seems to be conducted by zealots who are near the center of their tradition. Yet right in the center we find the great teachers, saying the opposite of the near-center zealots. The zealots counsel death to heretics, whereas the masters counsel peace. It would seem that each spiritual or philosophical tradition is like a hurricane—as you get closer to the center, the force and violence of the winds increases. Then you break through into the very center, the eye, where the winds are at peace. The difference between the teachers at the center and the zealots nearby is in the way they use their teachings, that is, in how they translate their philosophies into strategies on the strategic layer. Zealots translate the teachings into hard-nosed opposition. The masters focus on the ultimate prize of living well and recognize that a life of philosophical strife is a losing strategy. It is not necessary, or strategically wise, for people of differing ideological commitments to struggle over those commitments. Life is not a zero-sum game. Everyone can win. There is room in Heaven for everybody. And therefore, any effort to slow down another player, to attack his base and retard his advancement, is a plain waste of resources. The effort would have been better devoted to advancing your own cause. Moreover, since the other player is likely following the same on-the-board strategy—because his master is teaching the same actions as yours—attacking him also prevents alliances that could be helpful. If attacking others’ philosophy is a dead loss and prevents valuable alliances, then philosophical layer conflict should be avoided at all costs. Philosophical

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conflict is unnecessary and wasteful. People should simply live in peace. One woman follows Buddha, a second Hildegard von Bingen, a third loves Nature alone, yet all find their way in peace to meditate on the same high mountain. One scientist studies genes because he wants to be famous; the other studies them because his scientific papers are a gift he offers for the greater glory of God; both are busy studying genes and can gain from being amiable to each other. By avoiding conflict about the philosophical layer, people are better able to pursue their operational objectives on the strategic layer. Now, why would it be the case that people cannot agree on philosophical commitments but can agree on strategies? Put another way, why is there more disagreement about philosophy than about action? The simple answer is that there are a lot more philosophies than smart ways to live. Think about the vast array of philosophical and ideological positions that one can take. Consider all the answers to the question: “What is the meaning of life?” There are thousands and thousands of possibilities. But now consider a strategic question, such as, “How should I treat my neighbor?” While there is diversity of opinion on that question, it is far less extensive than the diversity of the philosophies that speak to it. Simple strategies like “Treat your neighbor as yourself ” are produced in much the same form by dozens and dozens of different life commitments. When we focus on the philosophical layer, we find opponents and enemies everywhere. When we focus on the strategic layer, we find many friends. If two religions both teach the Golden Rule, shouldn’t all their members be at peace with one another? Yet they come to blows when they stop thinking about strategy and start thinking about ideology. In the end, who cares which version of God told them to get along? They should just do it. Practically speaking, how do we avoid being the howling wind near the center of a tradition, and become the voice of serenity that is actually in the middle? A handy answer is provided by our discussion in this chapter: just focus attention on the strategic layer. Earlier we discussed some tips for staying off the philosophical layer—externalizing the victory conditions and staying practical. Keeping these tips in mind might help people avoid unnecessary philosophical conflicts. In a conflict, ask the other person not what they think “winning” looks like, but rather what they think we need to do right now to get there. Don’t insist that they move their goal, rather assume that both of you have fixed and eternal commitments that can never be changed and proceed from there.

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Is There Strategic Truth? Despite the comparatively greater likelihood of agreement on the strategic layer, conflicts happen there too. Can they be resolved? There would be little point in engaging people about strategies if strategies were more like opinions than facts. It is hard to come to agreement on things like feelings, but there is more scope for getting along when there are facts which all parties are pursuing. If one person discovers a truth, there is the possibility that disagreements can fade away as more and more people come around to that truth. The existence of true strategies offers hope of common agreement. A true strategy is one that is best for achieving an objective, given the resources and circumstances in force. Finding true strategies is not only at the core of all good game play but also one of the most enjoyable things about playing. Now, some fairly popular philosophical positions hold that there are no absolute truths and that we cannot judge the reality around us. Needless to say, this makes judging strategic success hard. It is true that strategy is similar to taste and morals, in that it can be difficult to establish hard-and-fast truths. Yet we would be going too far if we said there is no point discussing whether one strategy is better than another. Consider the following proposition: (A) 2 + 2 = 4 Everyone would agree with this. Indeed, if someone does not agree, then we would be comfortable telling them that their brain is broken and they need to go fix it. Now consider this: (B) 2 + 3 > 4 Again, we believe we have the authority to tell someone who does not agree with this that they need to change their mind. In mathematical matters like this, we are confident about statements of equality and relative size. Does absolutely everything change when we move into less formal areas of judgment? Consider this: (C) Mozart > The Beatles In this expression, “>” means “aesthetically superior.” I love the Beatles, but this proposition seems to me undeniably true. It seems so true to me that I would be comfortable if someone who did not agree would be told that their brain is

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broken and they needed to go fix it. That is to say, I would be comfortable if someone were to exercise aesthetic authority here and tell people who disagree to educate themselves. However, many people, perhaps most, would not be so comfortable with aesthetic authority here. Perhaps it is all a matter of taste! And therefore, we might conclude, let’s not discuss it. To each his own. Yet what can we do when we confront situations where choices do have to be made? In the realm of strategy, the moment comes where we have to do something. We have to act. And this means, we have to choose one strategy over another. We are forced to judge. Therefore, let us push the example of musical taste a bit more. Consider this proposition: (D) Mozart > Sixteen drunken ugly men bellowing Nazi songs A number of people who would not have agreed with proposition C would agree with proposition D. Proposition D might even be universally accepted. It might be so strongly accepted that we would be comfortable using aesthetic authority that is, telling people who disagree with (D) that they must change their minds. On the other hand, the following proposition is much more difficult: (E) Mozart > Beethoven Very few people would comfortably claim that Mozart is generally aesthetically superior to Beethoven, and almost nobody would say that if someone disagrees, their brain is broken. This example shows that there are some judgments that are almost impossible to make with any authority. Some judgments are impossible to make, some are easy, and in between lies a continuum of judgments of greater or lesser aesthetic confidence. Strategy is more like aesthetics that mathematics. However, unlike aesthetics, strategy is about making life or death choices. Some choices work well, others don’t. There are real and important consequences. And therefore it is necessary that authoritative statements of “better” and “worse” strategy be given, even though strategy is not firm and objective. A useful concept for judging strategies and other things outside the realm of science and mathematics is the idea of “fuzzy orderings.” The aesthetic examples given earlier show that there is an ordering of best to worse in terms of music aesthetics. Somewhere near the top are the great musicians applauded by history: Mozart, Beethoven, and others. Down at the bottom are drunken fascists and monkeys banging on pots. The Beatles are somewhere in between. A fuzzy ordering looks like this:

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(F) {Mozart, Beethoven} > {Drunk fascists, monkeys and pots} It is impossible to make an ordering among the items in an aesthetically equivalent set, identified as such by braces { }. However, it is possible to make an ordering among sets, such that every item in one set is above every item in the other set. With this mindset, we can make sensible orderings of strategy and indeed exercise strategic authority. A sensible, if fuzzy, ordering of strategy finds the set of alternatives which seem the best. One can hope that there is only one item in that set, but often there are many. If so, then the set of best strategies includes all of the feasible actions whose outcomes are not obviously worse than all other members of the set. If marching to Zanzibar is worse than marching to Morocco, but better than marching to Kenya, then all three of these strategies are among the possibilities. The point is to eliminate strategies that are inferior to all of these three, such as “Stay here and do nothing” or “Have each soldier sing ‘God Save the Queen’ and then shoot himself.” Strategic authority is important for two reasons beyond effectiveness. One is education and training, as with the aesthetic examples: in order to improve our understanding, it has to be possible for people who understand things well to tell others how to change, authoritatively. Authority is necessary for teaching; we learn so much more quickly if we are obedient to obvious expertise. A second reason, though, unique to strategy, is in the concept of orders. Often in strategic situations we are not able to execute an action by ourselves. We have to have allies, volunteers, or hirelings to help us. Those people need to be told what to do. At the same time, it is operationally impossible to be completely specific. The person receiving the orders often must be given considerable scope for his own decision-making. Authority allows one person to give another person a clear set of possibilities, without forcing them into one particular action. In the area of strategy, confusion between opinion and truth can be fatal. If a wine expert’s instructions are ignored, nothing worse happens than a poor pairing between the burgundy and the beef. If we fail to make sound judgments (or any judgments) about wine, our gustatory experience will be so much the worse. If however a strategy expert is ignored or if we fail to learn how to make judgments in strategy, terrible things can happen. Just ask Neville Chamberlain. It is important to get strategy right. In the final analysis, the question of whether there is a strategy involving a Right and a Wrong is decisively resolved every time a decision leads to horror

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and misery. The leaders of Carthage had their debates about strategy, but when their Roman enemies had burned the city, killed all the men, and sold all the women and children into slavery, who could have said that all strategies are equal? When we stand amid the ruins of our projects, who can say that there is no way to judge something as vague as strategy? When a life has become empty, sad, and hopeless, who can say that there’s no right or wrong as far as strategy goes? Strategies do have a Right and a Wrong: you can see it clearly in the way things turn out.

5

Stances

I have been rather too much used to the game to be soon overcome by a gentleman’s hints. —Jane Austen, Persuasion Jane Austen put much emphasis on the game of love. The games we play do involve big issues, and there is a metagame of all these issues together. The Game of Existence is the most important game we play, so it is important to get our strategy right. It is important to do things well on the strategic layer. This chapter introduces a concept for organizing our thinking about strategies: stances. A stance is a position from which one addresses the world. The term comes from combat, particularly the martial arts, and represents a particular static arrangement of arms, limbs, torso, and head. A particular martial arts move begins from a certain stance, such as the Horse Stance: legs spread apart, hips lowered, knees slightly bent, fists held against the sides at the waist. Different stances prepare the fighter for different moves, and offer different offensive or defensive options. In games, characters sometimes have the ability to assume stances like this. Place a warrior in Tiger Stance, and he does more damage but also takes more damage when hit. In Turtle Stance, the character’s defense is raised but his damage output is reduced. If there were a Ted Stance, the warrior would sit on the sidelines and eat fried potatoes. The stance is chosen prior to combat; it is not part of the fight itself. A stance is not a tactical choice, taken in the heat of the moment. It is chosen with a cool head, and is strategic in nature. A stance represents a general positioning toward whatever challenges may come. In the game of life, a stance is the combination of commitments on the philosophy layer—including victory conditions, if any—with a set of operational goals on the strategic layer. A stance is a philosophically informed plan for living. It is a conception of existence matched with some intentions for acting it

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out. A stance includes some idea of what the ultimate goal of this game might be; it specifies firm parameters for action, do’s and don’ts; it suggests places, times, and proper modes of interacting with others, partnering, joining groups, and so forth; it guides aesthetic thinking by separating the important from the silly; it even gives a language—special words and grammars through which to understand existence. A stance is a long-run approach to the cosmos. Here is a simple example to illustrate the idea. My son Malcolm had an interesting stance when he was three. On the philosophical layer, his fundamental commitment was that three-year-old boys should not wear long pants. This yielded a set of victory conditions involving how often he wore long pants. A day with short pants was a good day. Malcolm used his stance to decide that St. Mark’s Nursery School was not a good place of association, for that environment was filled to the brim with boys in long pants, especially in the winter. Even worse, the St. Mark’s teachers, on days with temperatures below zero, joined with his mother in an infernal alliance to impose long pants, by force, over his carefully articulated and loud objections. Thus Malcolm’s stance and its requirements caused him to come in conflict with powers in the world, conflict which he could not win, and which led to suffering. Yet his suffering moved him to eloquence in the poetic realm. In a dark moment he composed the following verse, which, happily for history, was captured by a nearby scribe: Too long pants Short pants is good for me Short pants is really good for me Good short pants is good for me

(Literary scholars will join me in applauding his playful de-centering of the hegemonic-adultist oppression of proper grammar.) Malcolm’s stance against long pants fixed the victory conditions, suggested norms of behavior, guided social interactions, and framed an aesthetic. It was a coherent and, until he learned about frostbite, an effective strategic approach to life’s game. The basic idea of a stance is discussed fairly frequently in different forms by different authors. To take some recent examples, British philosopher Roger Scruton, in The Face of God, writes about “the view from Somewhere.”1 We have to have a position in existence in order to look at existence. That position could be viewed as our stance. In this treatment, a stance is a location from which we Roger Scruton, The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

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approach reality. Polish philosopher Erich Przywara in his recently translated Analogia Entis discusses different approaches to thinking about goodness. The various approaches he refers to as postures, and they are in this respect quite similar to the concept of stance being articulated here.2 Stances can be good or bad—more on the judging of stances in a moment— but the critical point is that most people have them. Most people spend at least a little time trying to put together a notion of the meaning of life with some directions about what to do. Questions force themselves on us, about the game of existence, life’s goals, our resources and challenges, whether in the storm of tragedy and sorrow or in the sunny moments of bliss. We are surrounded by advice; no human society has ignored the cosmos completely. Given the nature of the field of play described earlier, we all face those moments when the game seems empty, and others where it seems alive with joy and possibility. In those moments stances are developed, whether consciously or unconsciously. One could argue that it is almost impossible to live without a stance, but that would be going too far. One can live without a stance. However, it would be a meaningless life, a life without any thoughts about what living is for. We breathe life into our days when we adopt a stance toward them. The labels we put on the various segments of the vast process unfolding acquire significance when we associate them with a purpose and a plan of action. “That’s not a bundle of atoms,” we say, “it is my daughter, and she needs me.” Above all, stances make the world interesting. Life without a stance is boring. There is quite literally nothing to do. With a stance, a certain bundle of atoms can be understood to be a princess in need of rescuing, in a cosmos where rescuing princesses is very, very important. It is fun to have a stance. A stance can be built throughout life. It can be founded, remodeled, and improved. A stance is an investment in the structure of our own selves. Through stances, we imprint on our minds our own views about the essential nature of this game, locking higher philosophical notions into place. This locking-in is necessary if our moves in life’s game are to get better over time. The brain is a limited resource; we can’t expect our brains to instantly provide deep guidance about every choice we make in the course of a day. We only have so much focus, attention, willpower, and cognitive ability. If we direct mental resources to one Graham McAleer, “All Valid Law is Analogical,” review of Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. J. Betz and D. Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018); at Law and Liberty, https​:/​/ww​​w​.law​​liber​​ty​.or​​g​/boo​​k​-rev​​iew​/a​​ll​-va​​lid​-l​​aw​​-is​​-anal​​ ogica​​l/, observed August 22, 2019.

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of these jobs, the others will suffer. Strategic thinking, too, is a precious mental resource. Stances conserve strategic thinking by giving us a pattern or habit to follow. Through stances, commitments become second nature. Aristotle taught that a man becomes virtuous by doing virtuous things; eventually, the habit of virtuous action becomes unconscious. Stances enable this transformation. We adopt a stance and, at first, concentrate on following it. Gradually its elements become a part of our being and no longer require as many mental resources to sustain. This frees up resources to work on other aspects of the stance, resulting in a gradual broadening and deepening of our ability to live up to our most cherished ideals. A stance is a form of investment in ourselves, in our basic character. Since stances are a self-investment that builds over time, it is fairly important to get them right from an early age. Having a bad stance is a serious problem. How long do we persist in behaviors and attitudes that are not good for us or for others! It is such a painful moment when we see that our stance is not very good at all. Then the stance has to be abandoned, and a new one built up. It is a ton of work! Therefore how wonderful it is when parents establish their children with a good starting approach to life; it is a gift much better than any material thing. Malcolm is much happier now, not having had his legs frozen off at an early age.

Choosing Stances Almost everyone has a stance. It’s just that some people have thoughtful, coherent stances while others have unconscious, incoherent ones. A collection of unarticulated goals and impulsive actions is a stance, but it’s just a bad one. Choosing stances is a matter of fuzzy judgment. In a moment we will go through a number of general criteria for judging stances, but first a disclaimer— judging existential commitments and the meaning of life is a matter for philosophers and theologians. I’m not in a position to say whether the principles of Manicheism are coherent. As a game expert, however, I can suggest ways to play a Manicheist strategy. There are strategically better and worse ways to pursue that particular blend of gnosticism and dualism. For reasons that are far too esoteric to explain (boring), a Manicheist stance that involves vegetarianism is probably more sensible, strategically speaking, than one involving meatism. The grand commitments of Mani are more happily met if you don’t eat meat. If I saw a Manicheist chowing down at a burger joint, I would admonish him

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on strategic grounds—“dude, you’re losing the game you think you’re in!”—and leave St. Augustine to scold his abominable philosophy. As an example of how game design thinking can effectively judge our stancetaking, consider the idea of choosing a philosophy based on how useful it is. Pascal’s famous wager has been criticized on these grounds—he should not have decided whether or not to believe in God based on how good it was for him personally. Such instrumental thinking is not only cynical but also costly. In the course of daily affairs, a philosophy that is chosen only because it is useful will become a philosophy of the moment. On one day, when I am in a law court with a Manicheist judge, it is useful to be Manicheist. On the next day I worship Jupiter because I hope to obtain office from a Roman senator. Tomorrow, when I try to gather donations from Christians, I will switch to their faith for the day. All these switchings waste precious time and resources. If you switch your commitments in pursuit of immediate gains, you will not invest deeply in any one of them. This means you will never advance in the quality of play. You will spend a great deal of time developing and implementing operational goals only to abandon them. Moreover, the switching of commitments in pursuit of gains is a circular exercise. For each of us, the development of a stance proceeds in four basic movements. First, we have to make a more or less unchallengeable initial assumption about the nature of existence. From this is derived some notion of victory or success in life’s game. The universe then provides the playing field and the pieces. Finally on the strategic layer decisions are made about how best to move the pieces. For example, a Catholic might begin with the understanding that there is a God in Heaven. The victory condition would be, getting into that Heaven. The universe provides the resources and tokens needed to achieve that victory. So then, lastly, we can develop strategies for making it happen. Looking at these four movements, it would not only be cynical to choose the initial assumption according to the hope of gain; it would be strategically circular. The concept of “gain” is empty until we make that initial determination about the nature of the universe. If we come to a conclusion because we believe it helps us gain something, this only means that we have already arrived at a conclusion, one that gave us the concept of gain that we are using. From this point of view, we can see that Pascal already believed in God before he made his wager, because he believed that the possibility of going to Hell was meaningful. So much for the accusation that a game-centric view encourages an instrumental approach to

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philosophy: on the contrary, the gamer sees that instrumentalism is strategically circular. This criticism of instrumental commitments illustrates how strategic thinking can be useful even if it says nothing about the content of our toplevel commitments. Our assessment of stances involves not the content of the commitment but only the process of arriving at the commitment and then the procedures of living it out. It is easy to make strategic mistakes when deciding one’s basic approach to existence. Here are four common problems.

Mistake 1: Ignoring Time and Uncertainty In any strategic problem, it is necessary to balance long-term and short-term effects. Deciding properly requires understanding the full pattern of conditions from the current moment into the distant future. Of course, the farther effects are in the future, the harder they are to predict. When you do not know exactly what will happen, your decisions must take into account risk as well. Dealing properly with uncertainty and the timing of effects requires quite a lot of focus and self-discipline, because we appear to be built to think mostly of the immediate moment, and we have a poor ability to assess risk. People are terrified of flying even though very few people are killed in plane crashes. Upon landing, we hop joyfully into cars and relax, even though the roads are covered with ample evidence of destruction, injury, and death. Skid marks, weaving drunkards, car parts, screaming ambulances, grieving mothers, yet we exclaim “What could be safer than driving! Mom, for your 95th birthday here’s a new 1500 cc Harley. Roar on down the road!!! And never mind a helmet, what could happen?” The point is, we are not built well to handle long-term uncertain effects, and this creates a serious bias toward the short term in our thinking. Overcoming this bias requires hard thinking about the future far away. While this is hard, there are tips for doing it well.3 For example, don’t try to guess how you will feel if you make a certain decision. Rather, examine the lives of people who have made that decision. Are they lives you would want to have? Are those people happy? Don’t assume that California weather will make you happier, rather, visit Californians and see if they are generally happier people (nope). Above all, you Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Stefan Klein, The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy—and What We Can Do to Get Happier, trans. S. Lehmann (New York: Marlowe and Company, 2002).

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should subject your philosophical commitments to an acid test of time: Will this work for me on my deathbed? How many old people think this way and seem to be happy with life? There’s nothing like an encounter with gentle old souls to reveal philosophies that work. Suicide data is helpful for discovering what doesn’t. Thinking about the big picture in this way requires a lot of focus and concentration, but it is important if you want to make the big decisions well.

Mistake 2: Indecision Whatever thinking one might have devoted to the true meaning of life, it is strategically unwise to ignore the issue and let things slide along. In no school of strategy is one advised to defer thinking about the ultimate goal. On the contrary, being a good game player means developing a clear sense of the ultimate goal and then working energetically toward it. If there is uncertainty about the ultimate goal, resources should be devoted to clarifying that. Playing the game of life may involve taking it easy, but you have to be decisive about why taking it easy is OK. Otherwise, you’ll be spending all your hang-out time worrying about whether hanging out is the thing to do. The Dude character in The Big Lebowski is famously laid-back, but he doesn’t just drift into it. It’s a decisive, firm commitment. When urged to get a job, he exclaims, “But . . . but . . . I’m the Dude!” The Dude is a way of life, an approach to the universe, and Mr. Lebowski is as passionately devoted to it as is any Sister to the Blessed Mother. We admire The Dude not (only) for his philosophy but for his commitment to it. He is a fine strategist. Everyone should follow the Dude’s example and make up their mind about what they are doing.

Mistake 3: Stubbornness A good strategist will tell you that it is important to review basic commitments from time to time and change them if necessary. On the one hand, this looks like moving the goal and can be self-defeating if it happens too often. On the other hand, a blunt realism about the nature of existence and our own abilities can lead, over time, to a correction in our view of what the world is about and what we can actually do. A man who feels he is losing his faith should pay attention to those feelings, for the same reason that a game player should change his thinking when he senses that victory comes more from gold coins than territories controlled. Shocking events in our lives sometimes have the effect of making us

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completely reconsider what the world is about. Epic failures sometimes convince us, finally and decisively, that we are not going to achieve some precious goal we had set for ourselves. It would be strategically unwise to stick to a philosophical commitment when all this contrary evidence comes pouring in. It is wise, of course, to be conservative about any change. Stances are vessels of investment, and switching philosophies shatters those vessels. Nonetheless, a person should always be open to the possibility of change on the philosophical layer—open, but conservative.

Mistake 4: Indifference Having arrived at some conclusion about life’s game, a person should make a good faith effort to live in accordance with it. Games are generally not won by developing a strategy and then ignoring it. If you have decided that carrots are the most important food ever to exist, then you ought to be getting carrots into your diet. If you’re not doing that, it should bother you. It will often happen that we believe a certain thing is important but are unable to center our lives around it. If this happens because of our failures and limitations, and not any lack of effort and intention, then it is not indifference. Being unable to live completely up to our philosophies is the normal state of human affairs since, for most people, our grandest philosophical commitments are supernatural. In this state of affairs, however, we should care about the distance between our ideals and our daily lives. We should be making an honest effort. If we are not even trying, then our so-called commitments are a sham. We use very negative words—hypocrisy, arrogance, self-righteousness—to describe people who boldly proclaim a philosophy and then calmly live in a different way. We are repelled by church people who are nasty to others. Just as incoherent, on the other hand, are people who preach endlessly about the emptiness of existence, the absence of any gods, the complete and utter meaninglessness of the universe, then calmly go about loving others and doing good deeds. It is wonderful that they do good things, but it doesn’t make much sense within their world view. To persist in this kind of state of mind, where daily life contradicts deepest commitments, is a sign of some kind of indifference to the entire question, as if the grand commitments don’t really matter in the end. Whatever this may mean for philosophy, it is certainly not good strategic thinking. To be unconcerned about the game is generally a good way to lose. Even someone who says “I am not living in accord with my ideals but I am satisfied by my life” has adopted an implicit stance in

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which his personal satisfaction is the most important thing. If that is the case, the person would perhaps be better off by explicitly recognizing that his true highest commitment is his own happiness, and then go about seeking that instead of whatever his stated goals may have been. By tolerating an incoherence between his philosophy and his daily life, our subject is fated to do worse according to any standard than if he tried to align his ideals and his choices.

How to Evaluate a Stance Philosophies appeal to us first through our hearts. Our hearts incline to beliefs about this big weird space in which we find ourselves. Our first reaction to geworfenheit is emotional. These feelings motivate us to think and explore and decide. They lead to conclusions and commitments, and these drive our strategy. The question is, given that the heart inclines to a point of view, what should a good strategist do? In order to make a strategy out of a point of view, the strategist has to adopt stances and continually evaluate them. Earlier we talked about what strategy has to say about the way we choose our grandest commitments; here, we are asking about the way we turn those commitments into actions. A stance is good or bad to the extent that it helps us move properly along the path we have chosen for ourselves. If life is a game, that path is aimed at some concept of victory, success, or, at the very least, playing well. If we think of this existence around us primarily as a challenge and an opportunity, then a good stance helps us address the challenge and seize the opportunity. If we view the challenge as sorrow and the opportunity as joy, then a good stance is one that helps us to be happy. If the challenge is evil and the opportunity is good, then a good stance is one that helps us to be virtuous. Stances are assessed based on how well they function. We can assess the functioning of a stance in many ways. Here are just a few.

Wholes, Parts, and Incoherence Stances are collection of ideas. To work well, the parts should fit with one another; incoherence is a problem. The philosophy should match the victory conditions, which should match the operational goals. These in turn should match the tactics. It goes the other way too—an action should be sensible given the operational goals that have been chosen. If a building is on fire and the

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immediate tactic is to get out, the action should be to run to the door, not order another drink from the bar. The tactic (“Escape!”) makes sense if one of the operational goals is self-preservation. But if you are a firefighter, the operational goal is to put out fires. The tactic of “Escape!” does not fit well with that goal. But suppose you are indeed a firefighter and your goal does involve putting out fires. Well, that’s not good if the victory conditions in your view of the game of life are to be safe at all times. And if your victory condition is to be safe at all times, that would not be consistent with an overall philosophy of helping others. A firefighter with all this in his head has gotten terribly messed up: ●●

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The meaning of life is to help others I am winning life’s game if I am perfectly safe My job is to fight fires At the moment, I need to escape this burning building I think I’ll head to the bar and order a drink

Each thought makes sense individually, but they don’t make sense as a group. As a stance, this combination of thoughts is not very good. Some inconsistency in stances is inevitable—we’re only human—but we can improve our stances by replacing elements when they start to create serious problems elsewhere in the system. The most common situation is when most of the higher-level ideas in a stance are fine, but actions and tactics need to be adjusted. More worrisome is the gnawing feeling that a large element in our stance is not working. It is important to address internal inconsistencies in a stance. Stances create habits of mind. As we noted earlier, Aristotle taught that we become a certain way by doing certain things. Scientists tell us that neurons that fire together wire together. If we adopt an insane stance, we not just doing something crazy right now, we are building a crazy mind for ourselves. A crazy mind is a bad choice engine; it gives silly decisions. That will certainly hurt us later in the game. Therefore it makes sense to try to get the nutty things out of our stances when we can. It is also worth saying that one stance is better than two. As hard as it may be to make actions within a single stance cohere, it would be harder still to plan actions when two stances are active at the same time. Having one approach to life while at work and a different one while at home may sometimes seem attractive, but the costs are high in terms of cognitive load—just plain thinking— and managing the expectations of others. We all know stories of someone who

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was a different person when they were away from the office, and the moment we discovered the difference was pretty shocking. “I had no idea Bob liked to pretend to be a horse!” Counselors will tell us that people have amazing abilities to compartmentalize, to have different personae in different situations, and to lead secret lives. That may or may not be emotionally healthy, but it is generally not good strategy. When a person leads two lives deeply at odds with one another, the discovery of his duplicity generally ruins both projects. Bob generally loses both his job and his “I’m A Horse!” club membership. Just as generals benefit from having a single coherent strategy, people taking an approach to life do better from choosing a single stance.

Scope and Level Evaluating a stance may involve some nested thinking. By this I mean, assessing strategies at different levels as appropriate. My son Luca talks about “the meta” quite a bit when discussing his game play. “It’s a good Pokemon for that kind of match,” he says, “but it is not good in the current meta.” What does he mean by “meta”? The issue is this. In a Pokemon Showdown match, the player picks six Pokemon to fight the opponent’s team of six. If we are looking at one match, a certain Pokemon X may be particularly good against the current opponent’s team of A B C D E and F. However, there is a game of wider scope here (“the meta”): the game of building teams. It may be the case that Pokemon X is terrible against the teams that are usually chosen. In other words, if it so happens that team A B C D E and F is rarely chosen these days, then Pokemon X is good in a match that rarely happens. It is good in that match, but bad in the larger game of team building. The meta, in Pokemon-speak, refers to the current equilibrium among team-building strategies. Strategy within a match is nested within a strategy of team building. The concept of the “meta” applies in life as much as it does in Pokemon. This is where culture comes in. A stance may make perfect sense in our own minds, but have terrible consequences given the stances that everyone else has taken. As a younger man, I really liked the color black, and I wore black clothes all the time. (I was being kind of a cyberpunk, you see.) At some point near the turn of the century, however, crazy idiots with guns decided that black was the best color to wear when shooting innocent people. One day I was walking along a street and a guy whose stance probably could best be described as “hippy” said to me “Hey don’t shoot me man.” I don’t even own a gun. Well, that made me think.

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It’s one thing to proudly display my awesome cyberpunk credentials, another to be taken for a murderous psychopath. I resisted at first, of course. “Who cares what other people think!” I exclaimed to the ether. “I know that crazy shootings having nothing to do with cyberpunk and video games!” But as the years went by, the association of “all-black” and “wacko” become more uncomfortable. While I still believe many of the things associated with the cyberpunks (We live in a machine! Escape while you can!), I don’t dress like that any more. Plus, I’m too old. Paying attention to the meta, I have adapted my stance toward clothes that don’t make statements likely to be misunderstood. Thinking about nested games also helps resolve difficulties and inconsistencies. If two operational goals are in conflict, which one has the wider scope? Which one is closer to the overarching goal of the game? Suppose our daily tactics function well for interactions at work, but not so well from the standpoint of long-run stress management. If our stance lays heavy emphasis on making a certain amount of money, then perhaps we need the work, and the stress has to be accepted. The health decision is nested within the job decision, so the job situation rules. If our stance emphasizes health first, then we had to better find a new job; in that case, the job decision is nested inside the health decision, and health concerns dominate the decision. Thinking about nesting is thinking about prioritizing conflicting goals.

Moving with Proper Speed The quality of strategy also depends on how quickly it moves. By this I mean, how much time it takes to decide what to do and then do it. In the military, analysts speak of OODA loops. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. A decision-maker in a fluid situation, such as a battle, goes through these steps repeatedly: determining the state of affairs, especially enemy dispositions and capabilities; situating oneself, to identify alternatives and goals, and to assess resources available for action; making up one’s mind; and then of course doing something. An widely attested and ancient axiom of strategy is that it is always better to move faster than your opponent. In this context, that means shorter OODA loops. The shortest OODA loop wins. A shorter OODA loop does not imply that you are always doing things before your opponent. Many times, the best thing to do is to wait. Napoleon said it is important not to interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. A shorter OODA loop does mean, however, that you are generally better

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prepared to take action. You have observed the situation more frequently and are less likely to be overwhelmed with indecision when events change. The German blitzkrieg of the Second World War is perhaps the classic example of short OODA loops leading to decisive battlefield outcomes. The Germans simply moved faster. At first glance, it might seem that the main reason for German speed was that they had more tanks—rapidly moving armored fighting vehicles. But even in cases where both sides had the same number of armored vehicles, the Germans still moved faster. The difference was that the Germans concentrated their tanks in whole divisions and armies, while their opponents spread theirs out among the infantry. As a result, the English and French started the Second World War using OODA loops suitable for infantry battles, the battles of the First World War. The Germans were using a much more rapid timescale, suitable to the speed of automobiles on roads. When the first German troops arrived at the French border at Sedan in early May 1940, the French High Command assumed they had a few days to assess that situation and respond. Five days later, German tanks were in Abbeville, 200 miles behind the French lines. That pace of development shocked the French commanders. They sat at their desks, staring at reports of German activity coming in from inconceivably distant places. By the time the French and British began to respond with any pace, the battle was over. With this in mind, a good question to ask of any stance is whether it improves the pace of decision-making. Here, again, we see why the risk of overthinking is genuine. A stance is not good if it involves constant recalculation and long deliberation in order to make mundane decisions (“Should I order a salad?”). It is also not good if it allows no time for proper consideration of important decisions. A stance is not good if it makes the wedding so important that the big day dominates all thinking, leaving no time to decide whether Mr. Jones is actually the right guy to marry. A stance should create OODA loops that are as rapid as possible given the time structure of the decisions being made. Big decisions should have longer OODA loops, whereas small decisions should have shorter OODA loops, and the preference for all decisions would be to move as quickly as prudence allows.

Flexibility A good stance handles many different kinds of situations. You never know what sort of actions you may have to take. It may be useful to think of a stance as a

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bundle of strategies that can be rolled out depending on what’s needed. They are all consistent with one another, but involve different functions. Think of these bundles as a collection of different functional abilities that you can deploy for different needs. The idea of complementary roles for handling complex problems has been made concrete in the context of combat systems in RPGs. There, it is common for each player’s character to have a different job to do. One type of character is a “tank,” whose job is to absorb damage from enemies. Another is the “DPS,” for damage-per-second, whose job is to damage the enemies. A third is “CC” or crowd control, who keeps some enemies at bay (by putting them to sleep or scaring them off) and selects others for focused attention from the group. And then there are “healers” whose job is to repair any wounds the party takes. If you are putting together a team of six, mixing these types produces a much more powerful team than choosing six of the same. A team of all tanks will be attacked by every enemy, do little damage, and can’t be healed; they would be ground down to death. A team of all healers will stay alive for a long while but won’t do any damage. Six CC specialists will also stay alive, by keeping enemies at bay, but won’t be able to do anything about killing them. And a team of six DPS will probably get one enemy down before their lack of defense, healing, and CC brings their doom. A mixed team is better than any of these. Two tanks stand up front and take enemy damage. A CC keeps any extra enemies away and weakens the enemies who come near. A healer makes sure the tanks stay alive. And then two DPS stand in the back tossing fireballs and lightning bolts. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. End of monsters. In the game of life, this sort of RPG combat thinking lends itself to some strangely compelling analogies. A good, flexible stance has all these elements. Tanking is taking damage; a good stance should allow you to take damage, that is, to deal with setbacks. DPS is doing damage; a good stance should allow you to go out and have direct positive influence on the goals you are pursuing. A good stance has a CC component, where you can choose which problems to take on and which ones to defer. And finally, a good stance allows for healing, for undoing the damage you may take. A stance that has all these components is better than one that relies on only one. Being robust against life’s challenges is great, but you need to let yourself recover and to be selective about what’s allowed to hurt you. You also need to be able to go out and confront challenges, do something about them. If your stance focuses too heavily on one kind of

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strategic strength, it will be fatally weak in some other area. Better to have a flexible stance, one that allows different strengths at different times.

Operating in Extremis A stance should be more than flexible; it should be robust to even the most extreme events. Amazing things happen in this game of life. Amazingly good things happen, and amazingly bad ones too. A good stance provides guidance regardless of what happens. One quick way to evaluate a stance is to ask, “What would you do if. . .?” We have often heard it said that, on the deathbed, no one wishes he had spent more time at work. Such thoughts act as a corrective to a natural obsession with problems that are right in front of us. If we step back and consider some hypothetical situations, our stances may look weaker than we thought. What if I were to find out tomorrow that I have pancreatic cancer and will die within the year? What if a truly wonderful man suddenly appears in my life? What if my fifteen-year-old daughter becomes pregnant? What if my son scores in the 98th percentile on an important cognitive test? What if my father disowns me? What if my company becomes an internet giant? Hypotheticals like this put stress on our stances. A good stance works well regardless of the externals. Of course, some things would have to be adjusted as the world changes. But certainly one’s assumptions about the true nature of life’s game or one’s basic goals in playing that game should not change because we have inherited $10 million or lost the use of our legs. If we imagine an extreme situation and think “Well, in that case, I would have to change my basic beliefs,” then the time to change those beliefs is now. As extreme as a situation may be, it could happen. Probabilistically speaking, we all face a certain likelihood of strange, wonderful, and terribly tragic experiences. Our world view ought to encompass these things and allow us to respond if they happen. Our world view needs to be ready to deal with immense suffering, because immense suffering is possible. It needs to be responsive to the possibility of great good fortune too, because—who knows?—we might get really lucky. Extreme situations require a stance to be flexible, adaptable, and deep. This is not to say that we should live as though the worst or best things are going to happen. That would be an entirely unrealistic stance; the wild outcomes in life are possible but unlikely. Our actions should not be directed to unlikely things. But our stances should have some space for them. There is a

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key distinction here—a stance is not an action. If my stance prepares me for the possibility that this plane will crash, then if we do plummet from the sky I will know for whom and to whom I will be praying. But that does not mean that I always take a parachute with me whenever I fly. A good stance does not assume that planes will crash; it just makes the mind and soul ready to respond if that does happen.

Living with Your Stances A strategy can be criticized for being infeasible. It may be coherent from top to bottom, but may recommend actions that cannot be performed. Late in the American Civil War, southern general Joseph E. Johnston was sacked when the northern armies under William T. Sherman came within a few miles of Atlanta. He was replaced by John B. Hood. Hood had felt throughout the campaign that Johnston could have been more aggressive, that he was not fully exploiting the resources under his command. Accordingly, Hood’s first action after taking over was to attack the northern forces. Hood devised a plan that involved secretly removing troops from one part of the battlefield and moving them overnight all the way to the other side. There, they were expected to march further behind the enemy, then attack from the side and rear. It was a brilliant plan, except that the soldiers could not do it—they could not march so far so fast, and then fight effectively, without anything going wrong. Things did go wrong; leaders took their troops the wrong way, the men got tired, the North realized what was happening too soon. The attack failed. It was not a bad plan, but it expected too much from the army. It is one thing to be optimistic, quite another to be unrealistic. In strategic thinking, realism is the safest attitude. Don’t count on luck, honor among friends, or incompetence among enemies. Don’t assume that information is accurate. Other people are just as weak and ignorant as we are. Moreover, they happen to have their own lives and will weigh the importance of things according to their own standards, not ours. Strategy is not a good place for dreams. Dreams inform the strategy, but the strategy itself should be absolutely cold. Stances can also be criticized for being simply unlivable, not because they are unfeasible but because they put a person in such an unhappy mental state that they don’t want to do anything. Terribly sad people cannot function. A stance that commits a person to an existence that bores him completely will not work. Positions that rob life of all joy, or expose us to constant threats of danger,

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cannot be sustained for long. True, we may dream of being an emergency room doctor, but after a few years we may find that we simply cannot take the stress any longer. What makes these stances unfeasible is not a physical constraint on carrying out the strategies, but rather an emotional constraint on sustaining the necessary motivation. Of course what is feasible for one person may be impossible for another. It is important to be realistic both about what we can do and about what we enjoy, so that we set ourselves up in a disposition in which we can actually function.

Fanaticism The goal of strategic thinking is not to develop an ironclad recipe for action in all circumstances. It is gentler than that. The idea of a stance is to take a general disposition toward life’s game, and use it to resolve the many difficulties and questions that arise. Fanatics create stances that have far too much detail and dictate actions with far too much specificity. A fanatic adopts a philosophical commitment, derives victory conditions, and then tries to concoct a stance that clearly regulates every conceivable decision. This is a sure way to lose. The problem is in misunderstanding the relationship between strategy and tactics. Stances are strategic instruments. Tactics are operational decisions on a lower level; they are nested within strategy and take strategic considerations as given. Yet they are not the same and indeed, in many cases, it is necessary to do things on a tactical level that seem to violate strategic commitments. A strategy may say “eat apples,” and yet at times we find ourselves needing to eat oranges instead. Only a fanatic interprets a stance that apples are important to mean that apples must be eaten always and everywhere. Another military example is useful. Adolf Hitler was a fanatic, one of the most fanatical fanatics the world has ever seen. When the Second World War turned against Germany, he commanded his armies to surrender no ground. This created problems with his generals. The High Command knew a thing or two about warfare and understood that sometimes it is necessary to surrender some ground in order to hold on at all. “If you want us to defend the nation,” they said, “let us retreat back to here, a stronger position.” Hitler would then overrule this advice and insist that they fight where they were. The result was a more rapid collapse of the German lines and an enforced retreat much farther back than the voluntary retreat would have been.

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Sometimes it is necessary to attack when your overall position is defensive. Perhaps the enemy has taken a certain hill that is critical to defending an entire position. If so, attack! Similarly, anyone attacking along a front has to do some defending too. A successful attack moves an army far forward, exposing it to counterattack from the sides and rear. These vulnerable spots have to be defended as the attack goes forward. Soccer teams have the same problem: as they send more players closer to the opponent’s goal, the risk of a powerful run the other way increases. Setting aside sports and wars, fanaticism in life’s game is easy enough to spot, especially in ourselves. At times, those of us who are trying to be conscientious about our philosophy or religion end up blindly following its every command. Religious zealots, completely mistaking the strategic advice given by their Good Books for tactical commands about what to do, have been motivated to do things like kill people whom their sacred text calls “enemies” and avoid food their sacred text refers to as “unclean.” Commitments at the philosophical layer should usually be understood metaphorically, not literally. The fanatic sees metaphors and thinks they are literal guides to action. Perhaps it is appropriate to treat the great texts of the philosophical world as literal guides to action; only philosophers and theologians can make that kind of judgment. It needs a strategist, however, to assess whether literal interpretations of philosophy and religion lead to desired outcomes. And of course, they don’t. Fanatics have this pattern of choosing actions that defeat their own goals. Every political madman who shoots a perceived political enemy sets his own cause back by years. Every zealot who passionately follows bizarre customs that he thinks are dictated by his favorite text also wastes immense amounts of time, time that could be used to preach and spread the word. Worse, obsessing over such minor things keeps a believer from being true to the core of his religion. Instead of being nice to others, he spends his time worrying about whether he tied his shoes in the correct way or if today’s sacred tuber is Yukon Gold or Russet. These may or may not be philosophical or theological problems, but they certainly are strategic problems. If the point of life’s game is to get into heaven, and you spend all your time worrying about shoes and the sacred potato, you’re going to lose. We can perhaps avoid fanaticism in our own stances by staying mindful of the way rules are used in games. Are all rules supposed to be followed all the time? Surely not. Some rules are meant to be broken. For example, basketball has a complex set of rules that include things as varied as running into another

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player as well as punching him in the mouth. If you run into another player in the course of play, that’s called a foul, and there is a minor in-game consequence for it. In a typical game there are dozens of fouls. It is expected that these rules will be broken. Now if you punch somebody in the mouth, that’s called a blatant technical foul and gets you kicked out of the game. That’s not a rule you are expected to break. And then there are such unwritten rules as you are not allowed to drive a tank onto the court. Doing so would end the game immediately. Not supposed to break that one. So in basketball, some rules are written, some are not; some rules are supposed to be broken, others aren’t. We are being fanatics when we are carefully following rules that are supposed to be broken from time to time. Why would such rules even exist? Why even have a rule when you expect to break it? The answer is that rules are not only restrictions but also aspirations and guides to behavior. My wife has a rule against being late to functions. Like all of us, she does not want to be late. She breaks that rule constantly. She’s always late. Does the fact that my wife breaks her own rule against being late mean she should abandon it? Certainly not! Instead she holds onto it and pays attention to how well she is doing. The rule serves as a guide and aspiration for her journey. I have a rule against being pathologically early that serves the same role. I’m always waiting impatiently by the door. Does that mean I should abandon the rule against getting ready too early? No, it means that I need to work harder to live up to that rule. My wife and I have more general rules about not driving each other insane with our attitudes toward lateness, but they get broken all the time too. Still, they are good rules to have. When designers create games, they keep all of this in mind. One of my favorite games, Twilight Struggle, is about the Cold War. It can end in a nuclear war, and if the war breaks out on your turn, you are the one who loses. Now, this mechanic would seem to have no point: Why would anyone start a nuclear war on their turn, knowing that doing so would lose the game? Instead, the designers could have simply banned any move that led to nuclear war. The designers created the mechanic as it is because players can make mistakes. There are plays in the game that allow the opponent to kick off the war during your turn, not his. If a player does not look far enough down the chain of effects of his choices, he might do something that starts the war without realizing it. A rule against nuclear war would remove this interesting aspect of game play. The rules as written allow for this mistakenly self-defeating behavior. In a similar way, when we adopt stances we should keep in mind what the different rules are like. Which ones are central to this lifestyle, and which ones

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represent more of a guideline or aspiration? How does the stance respond to failure to follow a rule? Perhaps it is too brutal; perhaps it is too lax. If we have only a binary conception of rules—follow them or fail—we are likely to fall into fanaticism. Instead we should have a softer and more merciful conception of rules. State the rules clearly and boldly, but then accept the reality that many of the rules of a stance will be broken in some way or another.

Irresponsibility Fanatics treat strategic rules as inviolable tactical commands, but you can also make a mistake in the other direction. Irresponsible people treat tactical decisions as strategic commitments. It may make perfectly good sense perform a given action at a given time, but that same action, if turned into a general strategy, can be disastrous. Today I had something to celebrate with my family, so I ate some ice cream. If I made “Eat Ice Cream” a general strategy for life, I would be happy for a while but soon enough would be dead of obesity. Considerations change when a decision involves life as a whole and not the immediate moment. They also change when our decisions involve the well-being of others. I may want to be a peaceful person, but if I became the leader of my country, I should not go into negotiations asking for peace at any price. The things I am giving away might mean nothing to me personally but everything to my people. Moreover, history shows that countries who naively seek peace are the first ones to be attacked and destroyed. Individual people can be peaceful without any conditions, but nations cannot be. It is irresponsible to take tactical elements of a stance and apply them to strategic concerns.

How Stances Change: Crisis Those who are adept at handling stances are using more than strategic logic; they also have strategic wisdom. Managing stances well requires considerable experience, humility, and agility of mind. Most people have to admit, like General Hood, that some of the strategies we have picked out for our lives are impossible for us to execute. In strategic affairs, the perfect is the enemy of the good. By the same token, some people have to admit that they could be doing much more to live up to their commitments. I keep having the experience of realizing to my

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amazement that I am not as nice a person as I thought. I go through experiences like this: after some introspection I come to understand that my Arrogance Score is 40. Well, that’s completely unacceptable. Saint Francis had his down to 5 or below. My dearly departed mother-in-law was probably a 2. So I deplore my terrible arrogance and pride. I work against it, try to do better. Then some event occurs and I realize in a flash that my Arrogance Score is actually 400! Gah! How embarrassing! I had no idea! Taking advantage of experiences like this require quite a bit of agility and willingness to grow. Unfortunately, this little story reveals something important about stance change—it is generally painful. But pain is the price of wisdom. Suffering is food for the soul. Generally speaking, people do not make significant changes to their basic approaches to life in a peaceful, smooth process. Stop and consider: How many people do you know who have made major changes in their lives based on a calm process of thinking and deciding? Introspection is not usually the source of major change. Crisis makes things happen. This bit of reality is the source of the truism in games that there is nothing like a devastating loss to make a player re-think her strategy. There is ample evidence that crisis is the main driver of strategic change. Therapists will tell you (as mine have told me) that change usually comes from having overwhelming problems. Nobody walks into therapy looking for a few ideas on some possible new directions. They come because their son no longer talks to them, they’ve been fired from six jobs in a row, they’ve had so many one-night stands that the mattress is pounded down to an inch, or they’ve been mandated there by the same court that issued the restraining order. The phrase “mid-life crisis” speaks to the failed dreams and desperation that, after twenty years of adolescence, fuel major changes in people in their mid-thirties. Crisis leading to change is also a central teaching of twelve-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which we will discuss a little bit later. Programs like that have a concept called “hitting bottom,” which is where a person with a problem finally realizes that they can’t go on. The mantra is that nobody actually changes their behavior until they hit bottom. Hitting bottom, of course, is not a happy thing. More often than not, it is horrible. Terrible experience seems to be the main cause of personal growth. Military history confirms that strategic change tends to follow rather than anticipate events. Earlier I described the shock felt by French generals in the Second World War when German tanks rapidly crossed the countryside. Why

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did the Germans and not the French have this radical new approach to war? Well, the French won the previous war, the First World War. There was no crisis in French military affairs after that war. Since they had won by digging in, digging in was their approach to the Second World War. By contrast, the Germans lost the First World War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the German army was reduced to a minor force. They were not allowed to build tanks or airplanes. Having a second-rate military was a serious crisis for the Germans. Out of it came a passionate determination to develop superior strategy and tactics. They had plenty of time to do that; the army was so small it was essentially a big officer corps with no men to command. The idea of tank armies appealed to the Germans as a way forward. To the French it seemed like merely an interesting concept. The Germans were proved right by the events of May 1940, as this interesting concept rolled across the vast fields of France. Compared to crisis, not many other things can be said to be major causes of change. It is commonly believed that we can cause major change in other people by talking to them, persuading them. No. Have you ever been persuaded about anything truly significant by a conversation? Neither have I. It’s a shame, but my usual reaction to forceful arguments of friends and strangers is to work harder to determine why they are so wrong. Everybody is like this, it turns out. Jonathan Haidt has conducted excellent research into moral reasoning, and it seems that our rational discussions have little to do with it.4 Haidt proposes the image of a rider on an elephant. The elephant knows what it wants to do, and goes off and does it, carrying the rider along. Sometimes two elephants come in contact. They can’t talk to each other, but the riders can. Each rider tries to explain to the other why his elephant is doing what he is doing. If the other rider criticizes his elephant, he counterargues as to why the elephant is doing a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, the elephants go about their business untroubled by the chatter going on up above. In this metaphor, the elephants are our emotions and unconscious impulses, and the riders are our conscious minds and our capacity for language. Haidt’s studies show that we adopt a basic judgment toward a verbal statement or an argument the instant we hear it. We then work on developing some sort of rational-sounding response. We decide first that it is wrong, then we try to come up with nifty sentences expressing its wrongness. Or, we find the argument acceptable from the very first, and then we open our minds to the reasoning. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012).

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Haidt argues that change is possible (the rider can nudge the elephant in certain directions) but only as a result of a long-run back and forth between ideas and experiences. The role of moral argument in this process is not that we adopt what others say; rather, conversations give us the chance to practice moral thoughts that we have. This means that the reason we should be open to the ideas of others is not because we will drop all of our commitments if we allow them to be right, but because we learn by listening. Argument is a moment of sharing, and it is good for that, but it does not lead directly to deep personal change. During crisis, the elements of a change in stances are likely to come from observation of the experiences of others, typically, those who have gone through crises of their own. People don’t change their minds based on what others say, but on the lives they lead. Earlier I mentioned happiness researchers who advised examining the experiences of others as a guide to our own likely experiences. Instead of trying to guess what life will be like with a new stance, we should look at the stances of other people and decide whether their lives are lives that we would like to have. If people actually do this, it means that stance changes should move in waves across the population, especially if there is a wave of crisis. If one person figures out an amazingly wonderful way to live, then that stance should ripple outward as others see and imitate. Unfortunately, this imitation will also happen if people are fairly good at lying about how happy they are. Anyone thinking about changing stances should be brutally honest in making assessments of the lives of others. When we look enviously at someone who earns mountains of money, we also need to pay attention to the costs of all that money. What did they have to sacrifice to get there? Were there moral compromises? What were the effects of long hours at work? What’s the relationship history—are there solid connections to spouse, children, friends? What’s their standing in their community? What is their facial expression, their mood? In other words, the person deciding whether to change needs to see all aspects of another person’s life. But people don’t typically share everything and, more problematic, there is a systematic bias against sharing negative information. Research shows that people tend to describe things as being much rosier than they are.5 Nobody says, “I really should not have bought that car.” No, they say, “The car only goes 30 miles per hour, it guzzles gas, it gives off a foul order, and I only get it out of the garage twice a year. But there’s no feeling like rolling down the road in a bright green 1956 Chevy! You should Gilbert, 151–71.

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get one, it will make you so happy!” Parents of young children are constantly miserable, yet when surveyed they say that having children is the best thing ever. And it is! But there’s a time pattern of the good and the bad, and wrangling toddlers is about the toughest thing imaginable, especially for those of us who are emotional toddlers ourselves. Luca: Want TV. Me: What?!?! There’s a game on! What about my needs you little narcissist! Fine. Ok, here’s your show. Luca: Want juice. (He poops)

Parenting gets way better, but not for a while.6 The issue with false reports of happiness is not that people are lying; it’s that people are trying to look on the bright side of their situation. But this tendency creates a problem for social change, in that it allows bad stances to spread far more widely than they should. One thinks of drug dealers in poor areas: their lives look wonderful—when they are out of jail. Money, cars, parties! It looks great! The part where they are in jail, or shot, isn’t visible to the people on the street. Selling drugs on a street corner offers a biased view of what the experience of dealing drugs is really like. As such it attracts way more people than it should. It would be good for the world if we could reduce the propagation of bad strategies, but the only real cure is an increase in strategic wisdom. In order to use someone else’s experience as a guide to their own decisions, people have to look carefully at many things—facial expressions, moods, major incidents (“We’ve only been mugged once on this train”), and so on. Some people live in an atmosphere of tension and sorrow about which they are not even aware; but others can feel it if they are paying attention. Often there’s an intangible positive atmosphere around certain people and places that attracts us in ways we can’t describe. We can’t describe it, but we know it when we are there. We know we have to get to that place ourselves. Developing these kinds of sensibilities is good for everyone. Aging helps. The longer you live, the easier it gets to connect the dots between the stances one sees out there in the world and later life outcomes. We all collect data. Journalists have remarked on the odd coincidence that the many media stars who die of suicide or overdose seem to do so in their late twenties. Hmm! Fascinating! But before moving on to the next piece of journalistic click-bait, It is amazingly wonderful having a sixteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old.

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perhaps we should think about what the data might mean for stances involving being a star. Could it be that stardom is overrated as a lifestyle? Food for thought. There’s a reason that poor mothers tell their kids to choose friends wisely—too often they’ve seen young people in bad peer groups go to jail or the grave. With time, consequences such as this become more apparent, even obvious.

The Process of Strategic Change The actual process of strategy change is marked by a combination of imitation and crisis. In games, players gradually accumulate information and ideas about the way other people play. Then a crisis comes; the player realizes his strategy is bad. Old patterns are not working. The player in crisis suddenly has to improvise, and so they change a few key aspects of their approach to the game. They replace them with elements of stances they have seen elsewhere. As the crisis abates, it becomes apparent that these new approaches do not fit well with other aspects of the player’s stance. Thus one change creates pressure to change something else and, over time, a new way of playing becomes the norm. This process can be traced in real-world examples of crisis, imitation, and strategic change. A woman is dedicated to her marriage but finds herself forced by her husband’s violence to seek shelter in a safe house. Living in the safe house is a necessary behavior, but it also is at odds with the goal of preserving the marriage. Sitting there in the safe space and knowing this is where she must be, the mother comes slowly to understand that other elements of her life have to change, particularly the dedication to her spouse. Similarly, the alcoholic does not wake up one day and decide to stop drinking. Rather, he finds himself sitting in the drunk tank down at the jail. Obviously something is not working; the man is completely happy to go on drinking but they don’t serve liquor in the drunk tank. Not only that, but they slap charges on him and impose probation, under which he can’t drink for a year. Something has to give; changes have to be made in approaches, goals, and methods. He has to develop new approaches to life; he starts acting like other people he knows who don’t drink. What begins as a prohibition against drinking becomes an entirely new pattern of living. The crisis forced him to use the information he had gathered, so as to play the game of life in a different way. Think of stances as if they were clothes. People try them on and see if they fit. Take in a little here and lower the hem there. Maybe with a different fabric.

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Add accessories—what sort of necklace goes well with this? I can find a belt that matches these shoes, which I adore. Each item has to be good and the whole thing has to work together as an ensemble. The only wrinkle is that these choices are not made at home in front of the mirror but in medias res. Developing life stances is like going to the party in a burlap sack and improvising an outfit after you arrive. And all too often, you’re not at a party at all, but choosing your new strategic look in a safe house or a drunk tank. The game of life can put us in completely unexpected places, and we need to have clothes, and stances, for all occasions.

Facilitating Change Crisis makes us change our stances, but the process of change is not obvious. What do you do when it is time to try on a new set of victory conditions and operational goals? Being brutally honest is absolutely necessary. Whatever else may be said about self-deception, it is strategically unwise. If something is wrong, if a person has established certain ideas about what winning life’s game would look like and he is not achieving that, he has to be brutally honest with himself about that reality. Otherwise, there is no motive to change. This is why crisis is such an integral part of strategic change: when he finds himself surrounded and outnumbered 5 to 1, even the most pig-headed general must admit he has lost the battle. Wise generals don’t try to persuade themselves that all is well when it is not. Wise players of life’s game don’t ignore the obvious objective conditions of their lives. The process of change also requires work. A strategist unwilling to do the work necessary to change is not going to make progress on anything. The work itself is often incredibly annoying and boring. Changing a stance means altering how we naturally respond to a situation. This involves repetitively reminding ourselves not to do things that seem natural, while forcing ourselves to do things that seem odd. Anyone who has seriously tried to lose weight—a change in eating strategies—understands. When I try to lose weight, I have to constantly remind myself not to eat at restaurants, even though everyone else in the world seems to be throwing juicy cheeseburgers into their gaping maws. Meanwhile, I have to remind myself, completely unnaturally for me, to eat raw vegetables. There is a process of constant failure and rededication to the task. Ignoring old cravings and developing new ones is like rewriting your brain’s strategic handbook. It takes a lot of work.

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Along with brutal self-honesty and willingness to work, strategic change requires humility. It is emotionally hard to work on changing our own strategies. The main barrier is pride. Players are generally proud of their strategies, and strategy is a mental skill. Players are proud of their brains. Admitting that we have made bad decisions is too much like admitting that we are not good thinkers, that we are dumb. It is downright embarrassing to admit that we have screwed up in life’s game. To admit that we have wasted years pursuing a foolish concept of “winning” life—it is hard to do. This again explains why crisis is so often involved: when we are suffering through a crisis we are forced to admit that we have made some poor decisions. It can take some time and repetition; when we keep having problems, we realize that it is our strategies that stink, not the world around us. I had a relative who went through a series of friendships that always ended in bitter fights; “I’ll never speak to them again!” It never occurred to them that they were themselves the common element in these fights. We may need to have a crisis so long, deep, and repeated to force us to admit that we ourselves need to change, even if that means admitting that we made some bone-head dumb choices in the past. The best thing to do with a bone-head dumb choice is not make it again. The past is past. It can’t be brought back. Only the future counts. The only thing worth doing is to decide what life’s game is really about and decide how best to move forward. Switching approaches like this is humiliating, yes, but it lets us play better, which feels better than anything.

Crisis Is Good, for Us and for the World This discussion implies that bad times are actually good for us because they help us refine and improve the way we play. Losing games is an important part of winning games. We should embrace crisis; it is the crucible in which we will cook up a winning way of life. The idea that bad moments are actually good appears in all kinds of places. We’ve all heard it said that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. Sickness is how the body builds up resistance. A mantra for start-up companies in the tech sector is to fail fast and often. Every failure increases experience and makes success more likely. Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to express how a roiling economy makes things better even as it destroys outmoded and ineffective organizations. Evolutionary thinking is full of ideas of competition and survival.

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Does this mean that to foster strategic change we should be encouraging everyone to be in crisis all the time? Certainly not. We can turn to game design for the reason. A good game does not put its players in crisis all the time. Nor does it withhold all crisis from them. No, it gives players just the right amount of crisis, just enough to be a challenge that does not overwhelm. Life’s game would not be very good if, to change your strategies at all, you had to undergo overwhelming experiences. Life would be very poorly designed if the only way to learn how to swim was to ride a tidal wave. It would also be a rotten game if you never had the chance to swim at all, if every pool was only a foot deep. There has to be some small crisis, that moment where your feet no longer touch the bottom. That is the moment where we change, adapt, and grow. If we want to facilitate strategic change, we need to encourage strategic wisdom, and we do this by having people encounter many small crises. The pattern of crisis is best if it is carefully adjusted to skill levels and gradually and appropriately increases in severity over time. There are already large-scale social efforts in this direction; education systems look like this to some extent, with their levels, grades, scores, and selective admissions. The goal of enhancing strategic wisdom is served neither by protecting people from crisis nor by destroying them with crisis, but rather by giving everyone the crises they need. In these first chapters we have developed concepts like strategic layer and stances in a general way. These concepts need to be fleshed out with extended practical examples. The second part of the book describes a series of stances and discusses their strengths and weaknesses as guides to the game of living.

Part II

A Catalog of Stances They walked on in silence till they got to the top of the little hill. For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country—and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook. “I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!” Alice said at last. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere— and so there are!” She added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is!’ —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed. —Kanye West When a modern musician and a Victorian fantasist agree on a way of looking at life, there’s got to be some truth to it. The first part of the book was a general discussion of a game approach to life. It was light on specifics; the specifics come here, in Part II. Each chapter in this part of the book identifies the key features of a particular stance and then assesses the stance as a game strategy. The previous chapter had quite a bit of material on evaluating stances. That material will be applied here, as we explore the good and bad elements of approaching the world in different ways. The question is not whether the stance is philosophically or theologically

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sound (the author is not qualified to judge that), but rather whether it makes sense in terms of game play. A game analysis of a stance is concerned with the coherence of a stance, its flexibility, its robustness, and so forth. The stances to be discussed are as follows: ●●

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The Hedonistic Stance: Seeking pleasure The Excellence Stance: Being free and building your best self The Heroic Stance: Making a difference, helping the world The Orthodox Stance: Going to heaven The Mystic Stance: Traveling in peace

The stances are listed roughly in an order that corresponds to how ethereal the goals are. As it happens, this is also an order of the analysis, from easiest to hardest— feeling good is a simpler idea than inner peace. There may also be an age effect in the order. Young people seem more interested in having a ball, old people in peace. Selecting the specific stances for review was difficult. There is neither empirical research on the relative frequency of approaches to life (at least not as defined in this book) nor objective ways to derive selection criteria. Moreover, stances involve much intimate detail, from deep personal commitments to daily rituals. Discussing these rather intimate matters in a concrete way requires examples, and examples can only be drawn from what an author has seen, read, or heard about. In the end, I chose stances that not only seemed to be popular but also that I had experienced myself to some extent. The chapters therefore draw on my own evidence; that is why references to alcoholism, economics, and Catholicism are more frequent. This is done in the belief that the author’s own experiences make things concrete and improves the discussion, keeping it down to earth and avoiding abstraction and reduction. However, there is a risk of bias in any personification of intellectual discourse—Mea culpa; it is hoped that these brief ruminations might be the start of a broader discussion that includes many other voices.

Incoherence and Irony There are two particular stances that we will not be a part of the discussion. This is not because they are unpopular or because the author has no experience with them (on the contrary, the author spent time in each). It is because these approaches to life are impossible to assess as stances. They would better be called anti-stances.



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One is the ironic anti-stance. We live an age dominated by irony; some people seem compelled to defend themselves from accusations of sincerity. This is like a player who keeps reminding everyone that he does not care about the game. The strategy of person playing this way is hard to assess because the ultimate goal appears to be not to play. This is a bad strategy as far as winning the game is concerned. Yet there are plenty of people who play this way, in games and in life. It is a studied apathy: “I just don’t care.” As to why a person might decide not to care, it is perhaps because a sincere commitment to victory exposes one to the possibility of failure. We can protect ourselves from this pain by simply avoiding the sincere commitment. By refusing to embrace any concept of victory conditions, the player prevents any stance from emerging. There is no stance to assess. While there is no stance to assess, the ironic attitude itself is subject to strategic assessment. It is a weak approach to a game if, as in the game of life, the game cannot be escaped. No one can walk away from the game of life. We are truly geworfen into this game and we cannot get out. To deny the geworfenheit or claim to be above it is to deny a fundamental aspect of reality, an aspect that hundreds of brilliant minds have recognized and pointed out to us: we are in a game. Even the allegedly ironic people know this. Consider the most ironic and skeptical person you know; scratch the surface and you will find a deeply hurt believer lurking just below the surface. Few alleged skeptics actually live like skeptics—they pursue quests just like everyone else. The attitude of irony is only an attitude, it is not a stance. A second anti-stance is incoherence. No one has a completely coherent stance; most people do not make a point of thinking long and carefully about affairs on the strategic layer. But for some people, the lack of attention to their strategies results in a set of victory conditions, strategies, and tactics that make absolutely no sense together—utterly incoherent. Or, a person tries to put two stances together, for example, by trying to be heroic while pursuing pleasure. Combining incompatible strategies is a recipe for frustration, in games as in life. Incoherence is just plain bad, not because it is important to be logical (although it is), but because nobody wins by throwing together a random bundle of strategic thoughts. An incoherent stance cannot be assessed beyond the fact of its incoherence.

Stances Not People If we did a survey, we might find that a certain percentage of the population considers themselves mystics, another percentage orthodox, a third percentage

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hedonists. We are not discussing those people here, though. We are talking about the stances themselves. Nonetheless, it is terribly cumbersome to write sentences like this: “A person pursuing the hedonistic stance would do X.” Or this: “The hedonistic stance calls for action X.” It is much easier to write: “A hedonist does X.” This is a nice shorthand that aids comprehension, but it runs the risk of being interpreted as a descriptive statement, as a statement about the actions of specific people. Doing so would require empirical investigation, which is out of our scope (perhaps in the next book). Therefore in the following discussions, the phrase “A hedonist does X” means that someone who is trying to live according to the hedonist plan would consider X a good move in life’s game.

Games, Commitments, Victory Conditions, Strategies As we discuss the stances, we will cover at least four things about them: 1. What does game design say about them? 2. What are the broad commitments that the stance calls for? What is the philosophical grounding of the stance? 3. How do you win? What are the victory conditions? 4. What strategies are generally used to pursue the victory conditions? What are the operational goals? After these core features are discussed, an analysis follows. Now, on to the stances.

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Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: But once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. —Voltaire The score never interested me, only the game. —Mae West Hollywood actress Mae West is famous for wanting good times and many of her on-screen characters are good models of the hedonistic stance, which seeks pleasure above all. The commitments are loose, the goal is feeling good, and the strategies are light. The hedonistic stance can be viewed as a default for many people: it’s the stance a person can develop when they think a little bit, but not too much, about life as a game. A little thinking leads a person to look for good feelings. This stance is about people who relax, take it easy, look for good times, and don’t stress too much about the future. Because it tends to be a default, the hedonistic stance is often the actual stance of people who say they are materialists, subjectivists, or ironic skeptics like Voltaire. People who deny having any end goals generally fall back to a stance that involves enjoying yourself. The claim that life does not matter is often just a move in a game of word-crafting that the claimants really enjoy. You can tell they enjoy it because they take their word-crafting seriously and express their ideas with passion. Foucault and de Sade offered nihilistic philosophies, and they may have been correct in doing so; but the game they played was ultimately about feeling good.1 University campuses have lots of folks in hard sciences and critical theory, fields where skeptical thinking thrives. Yet all these people seem to have a good time hanging out together at parties. They don’t talk about their philosophy; they drink good wine together and laugh. This is funny because there’s probably no two groups who despise each other’s positions more than radical materialists and

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Before we talk more about what the hedonistic stance is, though, let’s clarify what it is not. Many people say, “I just want to be happy!” Is this a stance, and if it is, isn’t it the same thing as the hedonistic stance? The answer is no, because there is a difference between goals and strategies. When people say they want to be happy, they are not offering a strategy for life’s game, they are just restating the goal. The strategic part of life does not lie in realizing that we want to be happy, it lies in figuring out how to do it. Stances are how we answer those questions. Each stance makes its own promises about how a person can live well, and most claim that living well provides ample amounts of “true” happiness. Of course, the content of true happiness is disputed between the stances; it is part of the stance’s assumptions to define what it really means to be happy. Because happiness itself is defined within stances and not shared between them, happiness doesn’t provide a stance itself. Stances provide strategies for being happy. The difference between “I just want to be happy” and hedonism is that the former is just a goal while the latter is a goal as well as a set of strategies, involving pleasure, for reaching that goal. Hedonism is also not motivation in general. Behavioral scientists generally assume that people do things because they want to. A person who does something, anything, has chosen to do that thing, and not something else. You could then say that the person has achieved his goals. If you label the achievement of goals with technical terms like “utility,” you can form sentences like “This person has increased his utility.” This starts to sound awfully close to “This person has increased his happiness.” But they are different concepts. While it is true that we are always motivated to do whatever it is we do, that does not mean that we are always giving ourselves pleasure, let alone making ourselves happy. Alcoholics are constantly motivated to drink, but they make themselves sadder with every glass. As for pleasure, I invite you to drink down the last ounce of cheap American beer that’s been sitting in a plastic cup in the sun. There’s no pleasure there. But some of us would drink it anyway. We need to keep this in mind—not the warm beer, the separation of strategy and motivation—because otherwise a discussion of strategies becomes hopelessly circular. “The captain did what he did because he wanted to do it.” This statement is always true but never helpful. We need to know why he wanted to make that move. We need to go beyond the fact that he had a motivation, to discover what the motivation radical subjectivists. Though scientists and critical theorists may be die-hard philosophical enemies, they often default to similar life strategies of enjoying themselves, even with each other. This is all to the good! L’chaim!

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was. In all games, motives are explained by strategies. In life’s game, motives are explained by life stances. These considerations also help us define the hedonistic stance a little better. If the goal of a hedonistic plan is feeling good, you could argue that all stances are contained in the hedonistic one. Here’s the reasoning: every stance tries to help us live well. When we live well, we feel good. Feeling good is the goal of the hedonistic stance. Therefore every stance is essentially hedonistic. Not being particularly good at philosophical arguments, I will leave this one alone. However, even if it is true, it is not very useful for strategic analysis. All it means is that we would replace the names of the various stances with a new name of the form “Hedonism: Stance A,” “Hedonism: Stance B,” and so on. The stances are still different, and therefore deserve separate analysis. In particular, they disagree on how to live well, and what sort of pleasures go along. It may be true that at some deep level, everyone is just trying to improve their own feelings. But even if that is so, the stances are different approaches to that goal. When we focus on the hedonistic stance as understood here, we are talking about a stance that targets the immediate pleasures of body and mind. There is an ancient school of hedonistic philosophy, but we are more interested here in the practical strategies of a hedonistic life. The unique spirit of the hedonistic stance was captured well in a T-shirt I once saw in a picture. The picture came from a political event where social norms about sex were being criticized. The shirt read, “Your body may be a temple, mine is an amusement park.” The body as an amusement park! A wonderfully precise expression of the hedonistic approach to life.

In Games In a game, a hedonistic player would be one who seeks constant positive reinforcement. This player does not like to delay gratification or grind away at meaningless tasks in order to get a big win. Take an example: in the early days of online virtual worlds, I was testing a new game and heard from another player that the game was tedious. His issue with the game was the travel. He did not like having to run from one area of the game to another. If a quest goal said “Go to Stormwind,” he wanted to be teleported there instantly. This I would classify as hedonistic play. The hedonist wants all pleasure, all the time.

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Game design tells us that it is not easy to give players constant pleasure, because they get used to it. There has to be some variance in the stream of reward. Moreover, there has to be some kind of challenge or risk, otherwise the game is boring. Serving hedonistic players the content they desire is a matter of adding genuine variety to the game and making sure challenges do not delay the reward too much. If life is a game, then, the hedonist is looking for a mode of life that involves a stream of varied pleasures with a low level of challenge.

Commitments The philosophical commitments of a hedonist stance are light. One could go back and rely on the arguments of the ancient philosophers, who laid out strong logical cases for drinking the best wine, eating the best food, having lots of physical pleasure, and everything else that feels good. But unless philosophy happens to be fun for a person, the hedonistic plan won’t recommend reading a lot of philosophy. Most people don’t find philosophy fun, which means that the philosophers of hedonism developed ideas that discourage philosophy in favor of coitus. Rather than rely on dry philosophical arguments, the hedonistic stance relies on human nature: if it feels good, why not do it? By asking whether anything is wrong with doing what we feel like doing, the hedonistic stance puts the burden of proof on others. The resulting strategic position is incredibly strong. There are so many moments in life where it seems foolish not to relax and enjoy yourself. Is it even possible to live without having some pleasure-seeking in your stance? Probably not. But the hedonist is not interested in limiting pleasure-seeking to a few moments. The commitment of the hedonistic stance is to build life around pleasures. Hedonistic plans are not just about the body (despite the T-shirt); mental pleasures matter as well. This stance recommends that people pursue the very best in culture, in movies, music, sports, and art. It is a life dedicated to improving one’s sense of taste, to obtaining the ever deeper pleasures of culture.

Victory Conditions Victory in the hedonistic strategy is very simple: feel good. Is the player enjoying himself? Then life is going well. He is doing what he hoped to do. Is he sad,

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angry, upset, ill, jealous, stressed, or scared? Then life is not going so well. Under the hedonistic stance, suffering is losing.

Strategies The ideal strategy of the hedonistic approach would involve an honest assessment of two things: time preference and pleasure-producing resources. In a nutshell this means: How much does the player care about the future, and how much money can he earn? This helps him deal with the main strategic problem of the hedonistic stance, which is the fact that by investing now—which is usually not fun—the player can reap greater pleasures later. By going to school, for example, a hedonistic strategist can build up more money for later life. But school stinks and later life is later, which is not now. It is an important trade-off. Later means a time period when we are generally weaker and less good-looking! The hedonistic stance, played well, forces a person to think hard about how much unpleasantness to suffer now in order to have more pleasure later. Pleasures come and go, of course. Some last a long time, whereas others are gone in a flash. It seems like the longest-lasting pleasures are mild and the most intense ones are over quickly. This pattern of big/brief rewards and small/ persistent rewards is found over and over in the reward structures of games; it is just another one of those weird ways in which life looks like a game. In games this reward structure forces players to think about the trade-off of effects over time. Do you choose short-term effects that are small or long-term effects that are large? A bit of analysis reveals that the hedonistic strategist should focus primarily on short-term effects. The problem with long-term pleasures, from the standpoint of this stance, is that they are hard to think about, hard to calculate, hard to plan for, and hard to bring about. Only a very smart person can do all this with ease. People who can easily think about long-term effects and plan accordingly can feel free to develop quite rich tastes. They might find it tolerable to eat bad food in the short-term in order to eat excellent food later. We might call this an enlightened hedonistic plan: it is the pursuit of pleasure done in a very smart way.2 The problem, once again, is with the future: it is not today. That is an important point for a species that ages. Even a hedonistic player who can If we fully extend the idea of enlightened hedonism, we are back in the position of arguing that every stance is a form of enlightened hedonism, because they all seek good feelings in the end. This results in a circular strategic analysis.

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plan well for old age should not generally commit to doing so, simply because most bodily pleasures are richer in youth. “Live hard, die young” captures the spirit. So does “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll.” But we can go much farther back. The idea of having a good time now, while the good times last, is quite old: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”3 Beyond managing the time aspects of the hedonistic approach, the good hedonist will pay close attention to his own desires and develop a very rich understanding of his likes and dislikes. He may also develop toughness about the world, learning to quickly reject anything that leads to bad feelings and energetically pursue things that feel very good. The hedonistic plan recommends a great deal of freedom, too. The planner needs to be free to pivot toward pleasures and away from pains. This means he needs his own resources and independence. The need for freedom in a hedonistic plan can affect long-run relationships with people or organizations. Any kind of long-run commitment is a problem for a feel-good approach, because commitments themselves don’t bring good feelings. A marriage license does not bring joy in itself. The hedonistic stance does not assign any weight to the marriage license; it assesses victory in terms of the pleasures a spouse may provide. A marriage license can be a problem in this strategy because it brings no joy in itself but may, in the case of an unhappy marriage, reduce the player’s access to pleasurable encounters outside the marriage. Indeed, most marriages experience a loss in fervor over time; it is a normal part of being together with the same person for decades. This does not mean that marriage has no role in a hedonistic strategy, but it does mean that any long-run commitment like that is held to a certain standard of joy: it has to be fun and stay fun. The hedonistic planner looks at organizations the same way—so long as working for this company remains enjoyable, he will stay. If it becomes less enjoyable, he will leave, and this is true even if he has a long-run contract. The hedonistic plan recommends getting out of such a contract, if the costs of doing so are not too high. Same thing for a friendship that no longer brings enough joy; if the amount of personal sorrow from losing the relationship is smaller than fun to be had once it is over, then the hedonistic stance recommends getting out. To be wise, a good hedonistic player will think hard about the true sources of good feelings. A feel-good strategy could lead someone to a long marriage, fine The phrase combines two passages of the Bible. Eccles. 8:15 says “There is nothing better for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful.” Isa. 22:13 says “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”

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foods and wines, excellent jazz, sublime travels, and long careers. That kind of life can be achieved with a lot of good planning and a deep feel for the way tastes evolve during life. But there are hazards along the way. When life’s unpleasant moments come along, the hedonistic plan usually recommends turning away or finding an immediate fix. That makes it hard to develop deep appreciation for sublime things. Not everyone develops an appreciation for jazz. A hedonistic player who fumbles his planning might be found in his old age listening to Rick Astley over and over, because he likes Rick Astley and that’s just the way it is. He’s never going to give him up, never going to let him down. And that is sad. Like every stance, the hedonistic approach is not easy to execute well.

Assessment The Practice and Theory of Feeling Groovy People born in the early 1960s (such as the author) came of age in the latter decades of the twentieth century, a period that future cultural historians might label the Golden Age of Feeling Good. After the Second World War, the cultures of the Western world took on a decidedly hedonistic bent. This was especially true in America, where in addition to the desire to have a good time, the means were readily available, not having been destroyed by the war. Frank Sinatra and his friends in the Rat Pack showed the way in the 1950s with a lifestyle of drinking, smoking, and hot parties. Then came 1968, the Summer of Love, getting high, feeling groovy, and tuning out. The party continued; in the 1970s everybody was grinding away at discos. Take It Easy! The 1980s are sometimes depicted as a course correction to all this partying, but then again, it was the “Me Decade.” There was just a change in strategy—the culture decided that the best way to serve Me was to make a lot of money. Money = fun! And so it went: decade after decade in which it seemed liked the main thing in life was to get a groove on in whatever way possible. We grew up in a world where the pleasures of life were considered very important. In the course of those years we experienced all kinds of strategies for feeling good. Beyond the practice, theories about pursuit of groove are found in the philosophy of Utilitarianism, which says that we should pursue those actions in which pleasure exceeds pain. Utilitarian theory has led to much theory about making money, especially in economics (the author’s PhD field). There are theoretical tools for analyzing the net benefits of all kinds of decisions, and

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smart hedonistic players should use them if they want to maximize lifetime’s net pleasure. Indeed if money is the key to pleasure, the good hedonist would be wise to study economics and business.

The Strange Reputation of the Hedonistic Life The hedonistic stance seems to be popular, but isn’t celebrated as such. It is like a movie that was successful at the box office but not critically acclaimed. Nobody writes opinion pieces about the importance of having a good time. I’ve already mentioned The Dude, an icon of taking it easy; yet we’re not genuinely proud of him, rather we laugh. With a few exceptions (porn stars and pop stars), we seem to see a hedonistic approach as a problem, not an achievement. Hedonistic plans seem to be something of a default but not one that people are proud of. People know that this stance has its problems, even as they live out many of its recommendations.

When Is It Smart to Live It Up? A truly hedonistic stance is going to be hard to execute well. Yet there are times when it is comparatively easy to do and indeed worthy of applause. My wife’s aunt, Helen, was nearing the end of her days and she was pretty well aware of that. She had fallen during the family Christmas gathering, and was starting to spend more time in the hospital with various ailments. The hospital was not a bad place for her, but it did lack one thing—cheeseburgers. Well, that’s not exactly true; hospitals have cheeseburgers. But they’re truly an affront to the concept. So she asked if somebody could bring her a cheeseburger, a real cheeseburger, a thick beef patty grilled to a slight charcoal color, juicy on the inside, cheddar cheese dripping off the edges, on a thick, soft bun, with crunchy little pickles, crispy lettuce, and a thick slice of beefy tomato. Some people might be put off by the request—doesn’t she realize that she’s in there for heart disease problems, what could be less healthy than a cheeseburger, it’s a heart attack on a plate, and so on. But those near her understood—the negative consequences of eating cheeseburgers are in the future. They make you fat and clog your arteries. That’s very, very bad—in ten years. Aunt Helen’s time horizon was considerably shorter. Maybe this was her way of telling everybody. So they went and got her a cheeseburger. I’m told she loved every bite. This story needs some clarification, because it can be read in two ways. One aspect of the story is a moment of pleasure: Aunt Helen decided to live it up a

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little. But our focus here is not on moments of pleasure; it is on a general strategy of seeking pleasure. The story has this aspect too: Aunt Helen’s general approach at this point was to go ahead and seek comforts, whatever they may be. She would try to enjoy the time remaining. And we can all applaud that. There is a right time to seek pleasure as the main goal of life. People who have spent their lives giving to others, as Aunt Helen did, are encouraged to enjoy themselves in their later years. Someone who has gone through sorrow or trauma can be expected to focus on personal joys for a good long time. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. These approaches to hedonism are confirmed by strategic reasoning in games, where we play differently as the game progresses. At the start of a game, it makes sense to work on projects that will produce victory points later. Once the final turns have arrived, however, such investments make no sense. Now is the time to pursue short-term gains. There is name for this kind of strategy—the end game. In the end game, don’t invest but go for points. The smart thing to do is get VPs, however possible. In the end game of life, the hedonistic stance makes more sense. We also learn from games that immediate pleasure can be part of a resource management strategy. We can think of pleasures as fuel for the journey. Indeed, this is one way to see them in any stance, hedonistic or not—we need to laugh and smile and eat, just to do anything. Pleasures are a resource, regardless of one’s approach to life. Because of their role as resources, it can be smart at certain times to make pleasures the sole purpose of life, at least for a while. In many games, disasters can happen, situations where random events (or bad play) can wipe out all the resources the player has acquired. If that happens, restoring those lost resources becomes the player’s only goal. For a period of time, this player will ignore everything else in the game—alliances, victory points, territory, reputation—in order to simply obtain a basis for operating. The analogy to life is that if a person experiences a disaster that wipes them out emotionally, robbing them of all their willpower or even their desire to live, then that person might be well-advised to seek nothing but comfort for a while: rest, refit, and recharge. Thus, there are a couple of situations where a hedonistic stance makes sense and is not too difficult to execute well. But in most other situations, being an effective hedonist is difficult. More than difficult, impossible.

The Impossibility of a Naive Hedonistic Strategy The most serious problem with any plan for a constantly pleasurable life is that it can’t actually be done. Most people don’t have constantly pleasurable lives.

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Only a very few, very fortunate people can be fairly sure that if they play their cards sensibly, they will never face deep suffering. For the vast majority of people, suffering is the norm. Some suffering happens because nature erupts in nasty ways: hurricanes roar, earthquakes rumble, and cancer blooms. Some of it happens because we can’t control ourselves or don’t want to; we hit each other, ignore each other, and use each other like objects. And then we suffer quite a bit because of what we do to ourselves. For most people, most of the time, moments of pleasure are the exception, not the rule. Successfully building an entire life around maximizing the most apparent moments of pleasure is a generally impossible task. As a strategy, it is almost guaranteed to fail. The failure of hedonistic approaches along with our preference to adopt them is probably built into us by evolution. What a devilish thing evolution is. Every animal has goals received as a result of survival strategies that worked for its ancestors. Pleasure is the reward for following those strategies and achieving those goals; little chemical spurts that make the animal happy. Yet, crucially, those spurts don’t last. Evolution doesn’t like animals that sit around happily. It likes animals that get up and do things. And so whenever an animal becomes content, the poor thing begins a gradual slide into discontent. No rest. The creature’s motivation systems constantly goad it to new efforts, none of which lead to long-run pleasurable feelings—just more goading. A naive hedonistic stance embraces this dynamic and lives by it. Sadly, it cannot succeed. Psychologists have discovered the existence of a “hedonic treadmill” phenomenon in mammalian reward systems.4 Whenever we succeed, the reward system raises the standard of success. Devilish! Recall how happy you were when you got your first paycheck and recall how much money that was. Now imagine getting that amount of money as a raise today. The thought makes you happy, yes, but not nearly as happy as the first one. Economists refer to this as the principle of declining marginal utility, and it seems to be a universal phenomenon in human physical pleasures. Whatever it is, sex, drugs, food, rest, adventure, or something else, the mind gets used to any given level of stimulation and stops releasing happy chemicals for it. If the player of this nasty game is a hedonist, there can be only one response: seek something more intense. That means either a similar pleasure that is more extreme or a different pleasure that has not been experienced as much. Either run faster on the treadmill you’re on or jump to a new one. People pursuing hedonistic stances often seem frantic, looking for the next big hit, even if it drives them into the very grave. Bruno S. Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008): 38–41.

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Consider mountain climbing. Climbing mountains is a thrill. Stand on top of the world! How exciting. But is one mountain exactly like any other? Of course not. Some mountains are higher than others. And some climbers feel a stronger rush from climbing a higher mountain. That seems bizarre; how is it that a few dozen feet in mountain height can matter in the hedonic response? The answer is that the reward system does not operate in absolute terms; it operates in relative terms. You get victory points not for achieving level X but for improving from level X to level X + Y. And the crucial thing is, the reward for Y goes down as X goes up. The higher the mountain you have summited, the higher still must the next mountain be in order to get the same happiness. Devilish! And thus mountain climbers are driven manically to pursue everhigher peaks. None of it would have aided survival of our ancestors. It is only the accidental application of a survival-relevant reward system to a survivalirrelevant challenge that happened to appear in our environment. So off they go, thousands of mountain climbers, seeking the highest peaks, even to their doom. For it is true, is it not, that the slopes of Mount Everest are littered with bodies of dead climbers? And what does one do after summiting Everest? Where is the next thrill? The hedonistic stance, pursued naively, is deeply incoherent. Those who pursue it and innocently follow its dictates are almost guaranteed to live a miserable life. Only by recognizing the trap of the hedonic treadmill and stepping off it can one actually achieve a long-run state of pleasure. The pleasures sought by the naive hedonistic stance are only achievable through something more sophisticated. Simply seeking happiness is not a strategically viable way to achieve happiness. Odd as this may seem, it is not odd at all in game design terms. Indeed very few games have a clear and direct road to victory. That would be boring. Instead, almost all games make the immediate hunt for victory a fruitless exercise. This forces the player to think, to plan, and to strategize. Applied to life, this design principle means that “the road to happiness lies not along the road to happiness.” This is not just a tag line for a fascinating game; it is a core feature of the human condition. In this way as in so many others, the game of life feels like a welldesigned game.

Enlightened Hedonism The earlier point is not that mountain climbing is bad, but that a naive strategy of simply pursuing good feelings rarely leads to a persistent state of happiness.

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“If it feels good, do it” is not a good strategy; it is self-defeating. If something feels good and you do it, you won’t feel good. But of course one does not have to be naive in pursuing good feelings. There is the possibility of an enlightened hedonism, a seeking of good feelings that is wise rather than naive. Taken to a logical conclusion, this would involve total self-control, lots of hard thinking about the sources of human satisfaction, a profound inquiry into the goal of human life and what it takes to be truly happy. In short, it would require a different stance. To adopt a seriously enlightened hedonistic stance is to drop hedonism altogether and pursue a different set of victory conditions, ones that do not emphasize immediate pleasure. But suppose the player stops short of this; let’s imagine a half-way point, where the player is still pursuing a hedonistic stance but is trying to be smart about it. There are workable plans that retain their feel-good goals, but just do it in a wiser way. The strategic problem becomes one of developing attitudes and researching information that helps the planner determine the most cunning way to sustain good feelings. A life lived this way is quite close to the game of Minesweeper discussed earlier in the book. By way of a review: in Minesweeper, the player clicks spaces on the board that reveal information about danger in nearby spaces. The strategy of this game distills down to a process of deciding where to click. In life terms, the enlightened hedonistic player decides where to seek his fun, and uses information from those activities to decide where to go next. He is always seeking something joyful that doesn’t put the entire enterprise at risk. This player is a mountain climber who makes a careful and honest self-assessment after each summit: How was I feeling up there? Short of breath? Weak? Was this one close to being too high? Do I think I can go a little higher? Jane was taller than me, stronger, and a more experienced climber, and she died on the next-highest peak. Can I climb better than she can? The hedonistic planner is trying to click a new space that does not have a bomb on it. In a hedonistic game of Minesweeper, what do the bombs look like?

The Danger of Addiction Addiction is a common bomb for even the enlightened hedonistic player. In an addiction, the player loses control of his own mind. He loses his ability to judge how feelings are affected by actions. Moves that will make him miserable seem perfectly reasonable, even mandatory. We see this in games, as players become

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obsessed with a goal that, due to shifts in the state of the game, no longer makes sense. “I will capture that farm if it is the last thing I do!” In this situation, the moves that will actually increase his victory points seem like a terrible idea, far too costly to execute. So instead the player keeps going back to the original, not-verypromising plan. In a similar way, the addict keeps going back to his drug, thinking there will be pleasure there, even though he is getting less and less pleasure. There are many definitions of addiction, but in strategic terms it is a form of strategic madness, an inability to connect actions and consequences. One way to think of addiction is that it dramatically reduces, even destroys, the consideration of the future. An alcoholic ignores effects even a few hours away. In an addiction, even the most cunning hedonistic player approaches decisions with the naivete of a child. The addict will do anything and everything that suggests itself as a source of good feelings right at this moment. Addiction also makes people who have other stances shift into a hedonistic ones, whether this accords with their long-run worldview or not. I recently read a story about a bishop in the Anglican Church who got drunk and ran over a man. Rather than see about him, she left the scene. Later she returned. When she realized how bad things were, she decided that her dog, who was in the car, needed to be taken back home. So she left the scene again and took her dog back home. We can be sure that all of this seemed to her like a good thing to do at the time. It felt right. However, it probably added many years to her eventual jail sentence. We can be pretty sure that the bishop was not generally trying to live a hedonistic stance, but being in the torpor of her drug, she allowed hedonistic plans to become the dominant ones. In response to this story, one could argue that it was the drug that caused the problems, not the addictive behavior. Yet the strategic way of defining addiction applies to patterns that don’t involve mind-altering drugs at all. I get addicted to games from time to time, and so do my sons. (My wife seems completely free of this inclination. Pasta is another story.) We find ourselves waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately walking to the computer. If asked whether we are happy, we say yes. Of course we are happy! We’re playing the game, aren’t we? But we haven’t showered, eaten, or taken our meds. We don’t have the faces of happy people. We don’t have the look of an intense athlete, concentrating deeply and energetically on the situation at hand. No, our faces are slack, mouths in a frown, eyelids drooping. We bark at each other rudely over little things. If forced to leave the game for a few hours, we are crabby the whole time. The minute we get free again, we go immediately to the game. It is the default behavior, from dawn till midnight.

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Now, I never observed this pattern in myself until I saw it in my sons. And this is the classic illusion of the addicted person: when you are in the grip of the drug, everything seems fine. But if you saw yourself from the outside, things don’t look so good. But it is hard to see ourselves from the outside. Only seeing my boys makes me see myself accurately enough to realize that I do the same thing. It is only because I see Luca going immediately from Tae Kwon Do to Realm of the Mad God, with no talking, bathroom, food, or anything in between, that I realize how important it is to him. We walk in the door, he goes to the computer. It shocks me when I see that. But it allows me to see it in myself. And this has nothing to do with alcohol clouding the mind. It is, rather, another distortion of the human reward system. Certain activities create treadmills that are easy to get on and very hard to get off. An enlightened hedonist has to learn how to steer clear of these treadmills, these addictions. Addictions go boom.

Dependence on Quick, External Remedies Another danger spot confronting the wise hedonistic planner is the need for quick remedies. Any feel-good plan interprets bad feelings as failure. The stance has no story to account for suffering, no interpretation of bad feelings as being anything other than bad. The feel-good approach only provides one response to feeling bad, and that is to do something to stop the pain. A wise hedonistic would recommend going about this prudently, to seek a way to alleviate pain and suffering, a way that is cheap, effective, and long-lasting. Unfortunately, much suffering is incorrigible in these respects. It doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions. Typically, long-lasting relief only comes after suffering is endured for a long time. This is yet another sign that life is a well-designed game: persistent effects require persistent effort. It’s balanced. But the hedonistic stance does not approach this type of problem very well. It does not provide resources for sustaining motivation and willpower through suffering. Hedonism does not have advice for people who are suffering, other than to stop the suffering. That’s cold comfort when the suffering can’t be stopped. It sounds like suicidal advice, and suicide is quitting, not winning. The hedonistic approach is very interested in, and perhaps dependent upon, quick fixes to problems. “Is there a pill for this?” Sometimes there is a pill, but sometimes the pill is expensive or, worse, misleading. The hedonistic stance, during periods of suffering, will have a bias toward believing in any remedy that promises to help. So many of us want to lose weight, and we keep believing that it

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can be done by some combination of fun activities, delicious but “better” foods, and pills. No! You have to stop eating so much crappy food. There is no quick and easy way to do it. There’s no way to sustain the joys of rich, tasty, yummy food while losing weight. The example of weight loss points to a second problem with quick fixes: even if they work, they are external. The hedonistic plan can become unduly dependent on external resources. This creates a high level of dependence on the world’s cooperation. If the goal is to feel good and I only feel good in a king-sized bed, suddenly I am bound to seek only those hotel rooms where I can get a kingsized bed. The hedonistic plan can be heavily encumbered with restrictions. No tomatoes. Only red onions. Italy, yes, but never in July or August. “I can’t be around that person.” “I need my morning coffee.” “It’s too cold to go for a walk.” Just speaking of temperature: Have you ever lived or worked with someone who obsessively adjusts the thermostat so as to obtain a constant temperature of exactly 72 degrees Fahrenheit? I have. Nina says she is freezing when it is 70 and burning up when it is 74. “I can’t do anything in here if it’s too cold.” “Yuck, it’s so muggy. Did you turn off the AC?” (No, I didn’t.) Constraints like this are more likely for someone trying to pursue good feelings in a smart way. The enlightened hedonistic planner works hard to learn what feels good and what doesn’t. But these discoveries become constraints. Knowing that windy days are supremely annoying, the hedonistic player has trouble doing anything outside on a windy day. This strategy starts to create a heavy cognitive load, as the planner has to predict how he will feel under the likely circumstances that await any activity. “Should I go to this garden brunch? It will be windy, but eggs florentine has no tomatoes. Felix will not be there, but Felicity will be. I hate plastic chairs. Hmmm.” In the extreme, even the wisest and most well-developed hedonistic plan can become an oppressive regime. The player loses all freedom and becomes a slave of his desires.5

Destructive Entitlement And what if the world does not play along with our desires? As it surely will not. This creates a problem of justice that is unique to the hedonistic stance: since the highest level commitment is that the player’s feelings are the most important Under freedom-from, a hedonist might decide to seek pleasure by redefining his desires so that he desires nothing and has nothing. But this is no longer a hedonistic stance; it is mysticism.

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thing in the universe, any violations of those feelings can comes to seem like a cosmic injustice. The feel-good approach to life has a bias toward the self. In this stance taking care of yourself is the only thing that matters. Being so focused on the status of the self, the hedonistic player risks becoming a narcissist. And narcissism is a level of self-love that goes beyond the healthy. Someone with a narcissistic personality disorder tends to view any bad thing that happens to them as a gross injustice. It is not just bad luck or another person’s oversight; it is a great tragedy, an outrage! The reaction to bad feelings becomes intense, far too intense to be healthy. A narcissist disappointed with his job launches a witch hunt, searching for whomever or whatever is responsible for allowing this deplorable state of affairs to occur. This then leads to the phenomenon of destructive entitlement, where the person is so intent upon seeking justice and revenge that he does things that make his life worse. You see this in the employee who is so angry that another worker got the promotion that he sabotages his own contributions and ends up getting fired. This is like the little boy who is so angry at being forced to share his toy that he breaks it. You also see it in the grown man who is so angry that his wife disapproves of his drinking that, instead of moderating a bit, he goes on even more binges and ends up in jail, where he can’t drink at all. Someone planning a hedonistic approach needs to avoid the risk of narcissism in order to avoid these self-destructive rages. It is the equivalent of accepting that losses will happen in any plan, and this means, even a person pursuing good times has to accept some bad times, and some situations where cool stuff goes to others.

Depression Suffering happens. It is also a mark of failure in a hedonistic stance. This makes hedonistic strategies uniquely vulnerable to depression. There are many ways to define depression, but generally speaking it can be seen as a persistent sadness and loss of interest. Depression can be understood in a strategic way as a loss of morale. Morale is the will to fight, to keep going, to play the game. Loss of morale is why most military conflicts in human history come to an end. Neither side is destroyed, but one side loses the will to keep going. Napoleon was still alive on the evening of June 18, 1815. He just decided he could not beat Wellington that day, and told his army to move away. He ordered a retreat; the retreat was interpreted by everyone,

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on both sides, as an admission of failure; consequently, troops and supporters began to see Napoleon as a lost cause; they drifted away; and therefore, he was a lost cause. The will to fight, to keep going, has a treacherous self-fulfilling nature. If a player decides a strategy cannot succeed, he stops doing the things necessary to succeed, and therefore he does not succeed. This makes perfectly good sense if he cannot in fact succeed, but it is a critical error if he actually could have done well. Depression is not mere sadness; it is a sadness that leads to a problematic and possibly dangerous loss of will. A depressed person cannot execute any stance successfully. Depression means not caring about anything. Hedonistic strategies face genuine risks of depressive episodes because of their inability to interpret bad feelings in a positive way. In a hedonistic stance, suffering has no point. It has no purpose; it does not purify a person, make them holy, or help them understand others. Even if it did, none of these things are part of the core commitment of the feel-good stance. In strategic terms, none of them are a reason to play life’s game. The only reason to play life’s game under a hedonistic stance is to have a good time. Not having a good time is plainly and simply a fail state. Since suffering is such an omnipresent feature of the human condition, even an enlightened hedonist may find himself dealing with bad feelings, and hence a sense of failure, for long periods of time. Therefore suicide looms large in a hedonistic stance, even an enlightened one. A person trying to run a hedonistic life campaign can find themselves facing suffering that will go on for years, even decades. Some people, the most unfortunate ones, enter periods of suffering that will never end. Is there then any point in continuing the game, given that the entire goal of life is not to suffer? In the ancient world it was common for a conquering army to sell into slavery all of the people from a captured city. This included everyone, from the poorest to the richest. Imagine a wealthy person, raised in a noble household, used to ordering slaves around, and then being sold off and becoming a slave himself. He will never see his family again, never have any possessions, never have decent food or a decent place to sleep, never be free to do what he wishes. This will go on for the rest of his days. Good times will never come again. What can the hedonistic stance recommend but suicide? Why not end the game and go into nothingness? The will to nothingness is real. No one can be forced to continue a game they no longer want to play. A player who knows he has lost a game can concede. True, the concession might not be accepted. I remember cringing once when I conceded halfway through a very long game, and my opponent Jeff the Barber said, “Let’s just play it out and see what happens!” Yes, let’s! Let’s spend twenty

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more hours enjoying the thrill of your armies smashing mine into ever-tinier bits. Actually, managing a flowing disaster like that can be kind of fun in a cathartic way. But the other impulse is to toss the board, which happens a lot too. (Jeff is a lot bigger than me, so I didn’t toss the board but played it out.) The equivalent of tossing the board in the game of life is to submit to the inner drive to nothingness. Alcoholics call it the “fuck-its,” the attitude that you no longer care what happens. “Ah, fuck it. Give me another drink.” Augustine of Hippo, in his Confessions, wrote about his feelings when he and a gang of buddies cleared a farmer’s pear tree of all its fruit, ate some of it, and threw the rest away. “I loved my own undoing,” he wrote. “I loved my error—not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security . . . to destruction in itself ” (Book 2, Chapter 4). That’s the fuck-its. They can blow up the wisest hedonistic plan. And I do mean “blow up.” A person with the fuck-its can do something in an hour that destroys an entire life. Recall the bishop who drove drunk and killed a man. The analogy between a hedonistically planned life and the game of Minesweeper is quite close. Make a wrong move, fall into the fuck-its, and boom. Game over; life over.6

Others The presence of others in the world presents a problem for even the wisest hedonistic stance. Most of us feel the pains and pleasures of others. These feelings can be quite strong, if the people are close to us. Yet we only manage our own lives. How does a hedonistic strategy handle the fact that there are other players whose progress toward victory affects our own victory? The hedonistic stance can have a zero-sum aspect: only one person can have the yacht that once belonged to Calvin Coolidge. The hedonistic approach recommends driving off other buyers of the yacht. It recommends controlling other people so that Like many people, I have had sorrows that I thought would never end. I have also harbored genuine skeptical positions of both types—materialist and subjectivist—at different times. In those times of skepticism, when sorrows came, the question of self-annihilation was a serious one and required a serious answer. One saving thought was that self-destruction could not possibly be the answer. Whatever was going on, whatever the game was, self-destruction could not be the right response. The discovery that my worldview made suicide seem reasonable was, for me, a reason to doubt my worldview. Those long periods of sorrow forced me to think harder about worldviews and their relation to action. Many of the ideas on this book were formed in sad times. If this part of the book is making you want to end the game, please don’t! Everyone will miss you! And there are other stances, more livable ones, which we will get to in a little while.

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their actions increase our happiness. A wise strategist, however, must recognize that people can’t be controlled, at least not easily. Even if their bodies can be commanded, their attitudes cannot be. One of the biggest and most important good feelings, of course, is to be loved. You can’t make someone love you. Worse, the more you try to force someone to love you, the less they will. Look at it from their point of view, assuming they are also pursuing a hedonistic strategy: “Here’s this person whom I don’t love, forcing me to do things I don’t like. This person is giving me bad feelings! What a jerk! I really don’t want this person around me!” This of course leads to rejection, which is one of the very worst feelings. The pursuit of love is perhaps the most tricky of the hedonistic problems. Not sex; sex is available in many forms. Love, however, is hard for the hedonistic strategy to obtain, especially in a world of hedonistic strategies. In such a world, everyone wants their own feelings to be positive. We generally feel good when other people do things for us, things we don’t want to do ourselves. But if we don’t feel good doing them for ourselves, why would other people feel good doing them? They don’t, of course. Nobody likes doing dishes. The hedonistic stance says you should do the dishes if you have to, but get someone else to do them if you can. If everyone has a hedonistic stance, then everyone is trying to get someone else to do the dishes. And if someone is pressuring you to do the dishes for them, feelings of love and respect don’t exactly bubble to the surface. They could bubble to the surface, perhaps, if hedonists make the right deals. Maybe one person does the dishes and the other cleans the toilet. If our partner does these things well and regularly, we come to respect them. Similarly, they can come to respect us too. But this happy state of affairs is dependent on terms of negotiation. Cleaning toilets is icky. Is this really a fair balance of responsibilities? If quid pro quo is a basis for love, it is a rickety one. Deep feelings of love and respect develop when someone does something for us that is not a quid pro quo, when it is freely given, for our sake. However, giving things freely, for the sake of others, is not part of the hedonistic game plan. It certainly does lead to good feelings, but again, if an action is taken because it leads to good feelings, it is not given freely for the sake of the other. And therefore it will not yield that person’s love. Doing things for others, for their own sake, is a weird source of happiness in that it explicitly attempts to avoid seeking happiness. It is so weird, in fact, that it makes no sense from a hedonistic point of view. This sort of thing belongs in another stance entirely, and will be discussed in later chapters.

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Love is not the only problem that others present to a hedonistic planner. Caretaking is another. Parents of young children are working hard and generally not having fun. If they are consoling themselves with the thought that the children will be a comfort when they are older, they are very often deluded. Many children grow up, go away, and never come back. Or, just as bad, they stick around and make problems forever. And, from the standpoint of a hedonistic strategy, an old person who needs care is nothing but a problem. When a person is forced to take care of another, with no expectation of reward, a hedonistic strategy is fairly barren. What can it recommend? Get rid of the burden? That’s not a hedonistic strategy, it’s sociopathy. Only a person with no feelings could get rid of their child or parent and not feel bad about it. A wise hedonist would not do that, anticipating the terrible feelings of guilt, not to mention the jail term if the mode of “getting rid of ” is nasty. The hedonistic plan leaves a caretaker in a state of meaningless suffering that will go on for years, leading to all the problems of depression and destructive entitlement discussed earlier. Since failure and sorrow so often attend human relationships, the truly, truly enlightened hedonistic stance might be said to recommend not getting involved with people at all. People are a bother! They make you serve them to get their love, then you wind up with little mewling dependents who barf on you then later take your car out and wreck it. Meanwhile your parents will eventually start demanding another spoonful of applesauce and a diaper change. Shake them off! Living without people, however, is lonely. A truly, truly, truly enlightened hedonistic plan (but not a merely truly truly enlightened one) stops short of shaking off all human contact, recognizing how lonely that would be. Rather, it recommends seeking the best feelings that can be had, while keeping relationships going. If mom doesn’t get her diaper changed quite as often as she wants, and I still get my cigarette, it’s okay. If my wife doesn’t know I’m in this hotel room with my secretary, it’s okay. Enlightened hedonism accepts some of these compromises. All of it very risky, of course. Once again, the hedonistic strategy is like Minesweeper. Don’t make any false moves, and everything should work out fine. Moreover, as the enlightened hedonic stance is modified (truly, then truly-truly, then truly-truly-truly enlightened), it looks more and more like a different stance entirely.

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When Pleasure Becomes Boring Hedonistic approaches don’t even work when they work. Imagine for a moment a person who has played the hedonistic plan perfectly. Unlike the rest of us, this player has never suffered. Never had a bad feeling. Enjoys the love and respect of everyone. Gets everything she wants. Eats rich foods without getting fat. Drinks fine wine without getting too drunk. Has no trouble getting out for exercise. She’s fit, wealthy, and surrounded by pleasure. This person has won life’s game, according to the hedonistic stance. She has pleasures, all the time. But in addition to her pleasures, we know this person has another feeling that dominates all the rest: she’s bored! What could be more boring than a life of endless pleasure? Think of it in game terms: here we have a game in which the goal of the game is to score 100 victory points. Each turn, you roll the die. If you get a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, you immediately score 100 VPs. You win! Yay! But once you win, all you can do is play again. And win again. Over and over. What could be more boring? The accusation that pleasure leads to boredom is not empty or feeble. The boredom of our current age has already been discussed in an earlier chapter. Here, we are diagnosing a cause: many people are pursuing a hedonistic stance and they are too successful. They seek pleasure and find it in abundance, leading to boredom. Boredom is not generally recognized as a significant public policy problem, but it should be. Boredom might explain certain crazy events in the past. People in the European countries were thrilled when the First World War broke out. For decades they had been shouting at each other about perceived slights to their national honor. Then the war came, and they cheered. How gratifying it is, they seemed to say, to finally be able to shoot someone! Is it possible that European civilization in the late nineteenth century was just too good, too easy, too comfortable? That people had become so bored at being comparatively secure and well-fed that they started to fret and worry about national honor—to the point of physical violence? Perhaps cultures cannot remain at peace for very long. Boredom sets in, and with it, a drive to shake things up. Perhaps the mania that led to the First World War was an example. That war certainly did shake things up. It created all kinds of new and interesting problems for people to solve, such as dealing with the loss of an entire generation of young men for no good reason. Boredom can be toxic when encountered in a hedonistic stance. If every pleasure that can be enjoyed well has been enjoyed well, what else is there to do?

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Once again, the hedonic stance recommends quitting the game. It’s over, you won, there’s no reason to keep playing. This is another version of the fuck-its, this time not among addicts but among very successful people. Pop stars seem to have everything to lose and nothing to gain from self-destructive behavior, yet they have this distressing habit of killing themselves. Boredom (and an adherence to hedonistic strategies) might be an explanation. “Fuck it. Gimme another hit.”

Too Many Contradictions The hedonistic stance is riven with internal contradictions. At the naive level, pursuing immediate pleasures quickly makes a person miserable. At an enlightened level, a hedonistic strategy, executed well, makes a person bored, which is again miserable. There is no general combination of strategies that cohere together. Happiness and strategy only come together well if the pursuit of basic pleasure is set aside for more sophisticated operational goals. In other words, the game design approach to the hedonistic stance recommends abandoning it for something more coherent.

Summary Among the stances we will examine in this book, the hedonistic stance is the least practical. There is a direct contradiction between the goal of the stance and the strategies necessary to accomplish that goal. Unlike some of the later stances, this apparent paradox does not resolve itself with deeper inquiry. Hedonistic strategies deny the importance of self-control, but self-control is fundamental to achieving any goal. There is no rescuing hedonistic stances from this paradox, which is probably why most people move on to some other conception of victory in life, something other than feeling good. It is often said that a life of pleasure is not fulfilling; not only that, it is strategically impossible to win.

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The Excellence Stance

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will. —Jawaharlal Nehru Notre Dame football legend Lou Holtz was known as a tough coach. One time he was featured in an advertisement where he was trying to motivate a customer service representative to replace his lost credit card, which he needs by tomorrow. The rep says “OK, we replace your card. One month.” That’s not good enough for the veteran coach. So he asks, “Do you believe in yourself?” When the rep answers “Yes,” Holtz replies, “Well, I believe in you too! And I need you to stand tall, get out there, and replace my card!” The rep exclaims, “You inspire me! Three weeks.” The excellence stance approaches the game of life as a quest for personal improvement. Victory in the game is to be the best you can be, to borrow an old phrase from military recruiting literature. Or, it is “to become the very best version of yourself,” in the words of the Catholic evangelist Matthew Kelly. People following an excellence stance motivate themselves primarily with respect to their own achievements. This is like playing a game to achieve not only the most victory points among all the players but also the most that can be achieved at all. Some gamers are not satisfied until they “hundred-percent” a game, until they obtain every available achievement, gather every token, collect every butterfly, and defeat every beast. Some games even keep a statistic of the player’s progress, not through the main storyline but in terms of doing absolutely everything that can be done in the game. To hundred percent some aspect of real life— cardio fitness, the corporate ladder, or correct grammar—is the essence of the excellence stance.

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Athletes are a good example of the excellence stance at work. In the story, Coach Holtz is using a motivational trick learned in the course of thousands of practices. If you ask an athlete who is following an excellence stance whether they believe in themselves, there is only one possible answer—yes. Because if they answer no, they are not operating under the excellence stance. They are not seeking to be the best they can be. They are giving up, and giving up is not permissible in athletic competition. Moreover, for people in this stance, accepting that they believe in themselves—that they believe in their ability to improve—forces them to accept whatever challenge lies ahead. By this line of reasoning, a coach can get an athlete to work very, very hard. And when all is said and done, after all the work, the athlete’s belief in themselves will turn out to be justified. They will run faster, jump higher, and hit harder. Working hard at something does indeed make a person better which, according to the excellence stance, is a good thing. The excellence stance shows up in lots of places besides athletics. It is popular in any realm that involves competition. Great political leaders such as the Jawaharlal Nehru have seen politics as a card game. Since business almost always involves competition, many workplace cultures encourage employees to adopt the excellence stance, to seek to improve themselves in every aspect of their lives. Given that most people make their money through work, the culture of personal excellence trickles down into many other aspects of life. Students are encouraged by teachers and parents to pursue excellence in their studies, not necessarily because it is good to be educated, but because the practices of excellent studentship translate well into excellent workmanship. Athletic excellence among young people—few of whom will ever be paid for sports—is similarly encouraged by reference to a transfer of excellence lessons from the playing field to the workplace. Indeed, norms of excellence are applied to almost anything that young people do (at least in the United States), on the argument that a young person should try to be the very best they can be at whatever activity is involved. Both sports parents and stage parents are commonly heard to say “I tell my kids, ‘I don’t care what you do, but if you’re going to do it, do it one hundred percent.’” That is, leave your heart on the stage, field, or test. If you are going to do something, be excellent at it. Excellence stances appeal to the successful; they also appeal to those who are failing. Self-help programs are another common expression of the excellence stance. Someone who is overweight can be motivated to try yet another diet

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because they feel, once again, that they really should not be overweight, that they should be better at weight control, and that they can be better at weight control. They can improve. They may be quite far away from what most people would consider “weight control excellence,” but the point of the stance is not to have excellence so much as to pursue it. The excellence stance emphasizes strategies of improvement and this, as we will see, gives it tremendous motivating power but also tremendous demotivating power. The basic tension is that a person pursuing excellence never actually attains it. However good a person may be at something, they can always get better. This means, on the one hand, that the excellence stance provides a constant spur to new activity. On the other, though, the excellence stance provides no victory, no peace. The job is never done. In the case of weight management— which I well know—large, early victories are always replaced with smaller and smaller ones, until even the greatest efforts at self-control yield almost no effect. Maintaining the low weight requires incredible effort and frustration. The will almost inevitably breaks. Weight is regained. At that point, the excellence stance kicks in again. “Do I believe in myself? Do I believe I can lose weight again?” Well, yes and no. No, because I have seen this happen over and over. But yes, because unless I say yes, I will not lose the weight I just regained. And so on and so on, in an endless cycle. Because excellence never actually attains perfection, perfection is always a possibility, and, under the excellence stance, it must be pursued. Many motivational phrases capture the spirit of the excellence stance: ●●

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If you don’t succeed, try, try again. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Straight is the path and narrow the gate. Anything worth doing is worth doing 100 percent. Those who abandon their dreams will discourage yours. No pain, no gain (or, no suffering, no growth). The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. A penny saved is a penny earned. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

People following the excellence stance achieve great things. They are life’s winners. However, the stance can be hard to execute over long time-frames, as we will see below.

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In Games The excellence stance appears in games as the achievement-oriented player, a type that has been identified in research.1 These are players with the goal of mastering everything the game has to offer. If it has quests, the excellence player wants to do all of them. If it is about getting money, the excellence player wants all of it. If it is about beating other players in some competition, the excellence player wants to dominate the leaderboard. The excellence stance is exemplified by the practice of hundred-percenting, as we just described. It is also exemplified by speed runs. Speed runs are competitions in which players try to move as quickly as possible through the game. Then they compare their speed to others, and try to become the fastest. Designers react to this set of preferences in a predictable way. It is generally better for the designer if players spend more time in the game; therefore, the design teams embrace the concept of collectibles with a warm heart. If the game has rivets, designers will hide lots and lots of them and make some quite hard to find. Designers also quantify achievements as much as possible, giving out little virtual badges as tokens of accomplishment when some achievement has been realized. What does this say about life? It says that those aspects of life that are difficult to achieve but are quantified and publicized in some way are most likely to attract players of the excellence stance. It suggests that people with this stance will be drawn to athletics and to the pursuit of wealth—two areas where achievements are hard, but success is both quantified and publicly known. It explains why sports have big trophies and rich people buy unnecessarily expensive cars.

Commitments The commitments of the excellence stance are centered on the improvement of humanity, beginning with one’s own person. The overriding command is to make yourself better so as to make everything better. This stance demands that its practitioner think hard about human excellence and choose which Achievers are one of Bartle’s four player types. The achievement motivation is also salient in Nick Yee’s work. On Bartle: “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs,” Richard Bartle (1996), https://mud​.co​.uk​/richard​/hcds​.htm. Nick Yee’s motivation scheme: “Motivations of Play in Online Games,” Stanford University Department of Communication (2007), http:​/​/www​​.nick​​yee​.c​​ om​/pu​​bs​/Ye​​e​%20-​​%20Mo​​t​ivat​​ions%​​20(20​07).p​df

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dimensions to pursue. Happiness and virtue are seen as by-products. That is, it is assumed that if a person dedicates himself to constant and serious improvement in domains X, Y, and Z, he will be happy. Moreover, in the excellence stance, to pursue excellence is the essence of virtue; it is seen as virtue itself. The excellenceoriented person, deep down, has contempt for people who don’t try to improve. They have sympathy for those who are trying but struggling, but only disrespect for those who let themselves fall into lesser states of being. The common term for such people is “losers.” The excellence stance is consistent with different overarching philosophies. Many religious and secular philosophies believe that human flourishing is important, and the excellence stance can be viewed as a practical strategy for making the flourishing happen. However, the focus of the stance is on the flourishing of the self. Thus the excellence stance is also consistent with a number of egotistic philosophies. A person whose main commitment is “looking out for Number One” could reasonably use an excellence stance to make Number One the very best person he can be. Excellence can even be a core approach for deeply mystical and spiritual philosophies, if those philosophies stress excellence in spiritual attainment. For example, one might (incorrectly) interpret Christianity as a command to become a saint. Becoming a saint would involve an endless striving for complete perfection in virtue and holiness. (Whether this actually leads to sainthood is doubtful.) Other philosophical commitments that lead to excellence stances include anything involving Darwinian evolutionary struggle. German fascism, for example, held that human life is a struggle for supremacy among different cultures and races. If your worldview involves such tribal competition, then maximizing your own excellence obviously becomes an important life goal: by making your own self better, your help make your tribe (country, team) superior to all others. The majority of commercial games are designed to appeal to the excellence stance—they provide ladder upon ladder upon ladder for recording achievement: levels, powers, badges, ratings, and on and on. Moreover, game designers make achieving excellence more satisfying than it is in real life. It could be argued that when culture emphasizes excellence, as ours does, it drives many people to seek emotional refuge in games, where succeeding is not only easier but more fun. The excellence stance appears almost constantly in athletic and health contexts. It seems that any personal commitment to the body leads by default into an excellence stance toward life. The connection between the body and the excellence stance is so strong, in fact, that one is hard-pressed to find any

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examples of athletic games that don’t emphasize comparative excellence. Hideand-seek is an example; it is also not an Olympic sport.2 If it were, there would be hundreds of people trying to get better at it. The core commitment of excellence is to improve: always, always improve.

Victory Conditions In the excellence stance, victory conditions are objective but also unattainable, in principle. For an excellence-oriented weightlifter, no amount of weight is enough. Even though it is a tremendous achievement to lift 300 pounds with one hand, it is better to lift 310 pounds with your pinky finger. If the lifter lifts 310 pounds, he knows it is better to lift 320. And so on. A weightlifter who does not lift more weight is either a failure or a quitter—a failure for being too weak or a quitter for not working hard enough. Excellence is about the pursuit of virtue, not its attainment. Yet how does one know that things are actually going well? What does success look like in the excellence stance? One answer might be, “whenever I feel that I have done well.” In other words, success is what we make it to be; we are seeking improvement on our own terms. However, the excellence stance vehemently rejects this approach to victory. The excellence stance, with its ethos of toughness and courage, is devoted to hard truth. If we assess success ourselves, what stops us from lying to ourselves about how well we have done? Though I am fat, I often convince myself that I have a done a good job eating today. Reality? Two bratwursts, thirty potato chips, three cokes, two truffles, and five mini donuts. And that was just dinner. But because I ate four bits of broccoli, I “did well with eating today.” The excellence stance is disgusted with this kind of self-delusion. And therefore, winning is not treated as a subjective assessment. In the excellence stance, you are winning only if you are getting better according to outside assessments. The stance emphasizes the externalization of victory conditions. These are cultures of improvement, and they develop norms about how rapidly a person should improve. This is a consequence of the devotion to hard truths. Someone who has been in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) for more than a few years is expected not to drink at all, and to treat a relapse as a terrific problem. This is because the program’s core belief that the only way for a The British comedy troupe Monty Python had a skit in which hide-and-seek actually was an Olympic sport. The hider went from London to Sardinia and was not found for eleven years. It is a hilarious reminder of the lengths to which people will go to prove their excellence in sports.

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drunk to drink responsibly is not to drink at all. In AA, there is no acceptance of “drinking around the edges” or drinking on special occasions. This commitment to total sobriety is expressed strongly and clearly to every new person. Indeed the whole point of the program is to give the drunk a firm point of reference outside of his own mind. You’re not sober until your drinking meets the sobriety standard of AA. While the AA sobriety standard is a cultural construction, an outside standard can also be objective. You either can or cannot slam dunk a basketball (Me: Cannot. Emphatically). If the point of food management is to reduce cholesterol to non-life-threatening levels, then it won’t be a success until lab tests show that cholesterol has fallen sufficiently. Then there are fuzzy notions like “good art.” How does a musician know that he is making excellent music? Certainly the critics will offer an opinion, as will the public. But perhaps their opinions don’t matter and perhaps the musician’s opinions don’t matter either (because the excellence stance does not allow self-assessment). Well then: Where does the standard of excellence in music come from? When a musician disagrees with his critics and the public, but seeks to keep his standards impersonal, he will have to reach to abstract concepts of beauty in art as expressed in history. Woe to the writer who takes Shakespeare as his standard of success! And yet, a writer being tossed off by critics may well compare his words to those of Shakespeare, to convince himself that the critics are wrong. Standards of excellence may be outside our minds, but that does not mean they are fixed or one-size-fits-all. Newcomers to an activity are always applauded for the tiniest progress. Advanced practitioners complain about how poorly they are doing. When I first entered the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA, the program that brings atheists into the church, or, Catholic school for grown-ups), all the old church ladies were going on about how hard it was to be a Christian, how sinful they were, how they could not possibly live up to Jesus’s expectations, and so on. Being an avowed atheist, I was thinking, That’s not true! It’s so EASY to be a Christian! Just, you know, don’t steal; don’t kill; don’t set houses on fire; don’t lie; don’t trick your grandmother into giving you her life savings and then blow it all on drugs and hookers; don’t be married with a kid and then have an affair with a different married woman and get her pregnant so that her husband thinks it’s his kid then admit everything and cause two divorces and then marry the woman you had the affair with and insist that your son from your first wife be the ring bearer; don’t sell your daughters into slavery; don’t acquire dictatorial control over an advanced industrial nation and

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use its abundant resources to slaughter 50 million people; don’t litter; and so on. Easy as pie.

The difference between me and the church ladies was in the standard we were using. They were trying to be saints, whereas I was trying not to be a devil. It’s easier. As the years rolled on, however, the problem of improving one’s virtue became more and more difficult. The standards of excellence are fit to the achiever.3

Strategies In terms of strategies, the excellence stance insists on the acceptance of hard truths. The first step toward excellence is a recognition of your own faults. I’m a drunk. I’m fat. I’m an obnoxious jerk. I’m weak. I’m depressed. I’m a knowit-all, arrogant, self-centered a**hole. I’m lazy. I’m impulsive. I’m mean. I’m inconsiderate. I’m sinful. But enough about me. Now yours! I’m a doormat. I’m a chicken, a coward. I’m stupid. I look like a skeleton. I’m poor. I’m an underling. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Among the whole vast catalog of human faults, everyone can find a few that, honestly, they’d prefer to ignore. Yet the hard truth comes down: I have failed. I am bad. The excellence stance recommends truth about flaws, and when the hard truth comes down on something that can be improved, the excellence stance immediately recommends one thing—work. Above all else, the excellence stance expects a person to work hard. To recognize problems but not work toward solving them is viewed as disgusting. There’s also a disgust for complaining, for expressing hesitation, pessimism, fear, unhappiness, or any sign of a lack of desire to engage in whatever it takes to get better. To complain is just naughty talk to a person following the excellence stance. Excellence devotees expect themselves to be engaged, optimistic, and accepting of no laziness or lack of will as regards the activities of improvement. Since the excellence stance requires regular improvement, its core strategies involve managing willpower. A person devoted to being the best he can be will learn that he must connect to resources and communities that help with selfcontrol. The aficionado of personal excellence is often a master of short phrases designed to change internal thought processes. This is another example of dynamic difficulty adjustment in real life, discussed in Chapter 3.

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The only answer to falling over is to stand up again. Are you hungry? No you aren’t. Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. HALT. You’re only cheating yourself.

To the person seeking excellence, it can seem as though the entire world is engaged in a conspiracy to defeat him. Temptations lurk in every corner. Most people around him don’t “get it,” don’t understand how important it is to be healthy, thin, powerful, sober, well-educated, successful, wealthy, saintly, or strong. The strategy toward others is therefore one of seeking allies and avoiding people who hold us back. Does this person understand the goal here? If not, we can’t be close. Excellence strategies suggest developing secret languages and cues so as to signal core commitments more clearly. A woman in a workout room full of guys becomes accepted if she casually names muscle groups in normal conversation. In the excellence stance, every facet of life—personal, communal, spiritual—revolves around making yourself better. Improvement—relative to an outside standard—is victory.

Assessment The excellence stance is ubiquitous in the world today, especially so in meritocratic cultures such as the United States. Just about everyone adopts elements of the excellence stance from time to time. This stands to reason. Contemporary culture leaves many people to their own devices, and without the tools and commitments of the excellence stance, perhaps nobody would ever do anything.

The Problem of Aging Notwithstanding its popularity, excellence has several flaws as a comprehensive life strategy. For one thing, it fights against the sands of time. We are all destined to stop improving at some point. Dead musicians play silent songs. Generally speaking, life after a certain age is a matter of managing gradual decay. It would be foolish of me, at my age, to become disgusted at my inability to dunk a basketball. If I were to adopt the excellence stance in terms of my athletic ability—improve, improve, improve—I would be guaranteeing defeat in the game I am playing. While volunteering at hospice (health care for the dying), I had a patient whose lungs were failing. He only had a few weeks to live. And yet, when he was

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short of breath after walking from couch to fridge and back, he would say that he needed to get into the gym for some physical therapy. “That’s all this is,” he would say. “I haven’t been exercising enough.” The excellence stance calls for this kind of toughness but most mature people do amend the excellence stance as they age. They adapt it to accommodate their new challenges and limitations. Success may be measured not in terms of improvement but in terms of sustained commitment. My elderly colleague Walter swims every day. I know he measures his times, but it doesn’t bother him that they are slowing. It would bother him terribly, however, if he were to break his lifelong practice of daily swimming. This personal amendment of the excellence stance makes the stance livable for the aging, but it comes at the cost of some inconsistency. One of the hallmarks of the excellence stance is the rejection of purely personal assessments of success. You’re not supposed to allow yourself to move the goalposts; you have to accept hard truths. When a committed fan of excellence, in his old age, does move the goalposts, it feels like a surrender, not a relief. It is a moment of humiliating acceptance, a moment of wisdom and maturity. One wonders how much awareness of such moments there is among young pursuers of excellence. Yet the time comes when we all must admit that constant improvement cannot be our path.4

Diminishing Marginal Returns There is a more difficult short-run issue with excellence as a stance—falling returns. Pursuit of excellence is bedeviled by diminishing marginal returns. To recall, diminishing marginal returns tells us that bang for the buck declines as you spend more bucks. This is a general phenomenon of human experience. The first french fry I eat tastes great. The second one tastes great, but not as good as the first. The third is still wonderful, but not as good as the second. The 35th fry is pretty good, but almost not worth eating. The 50th fry is not something I want in my mouth. The 112th fry represents a kind of gustatorial torture. The 4,567th fry represents a threat to my life. We see diminishing returns wherever excellence stances seem popular. Take weight loss. The first days of the diet are wonderful; the pounds slip away Even as I write the last edits on this book, I am aware that my powers of mental concentration are not what they once were. I have to accept that the book will not be as error-free as it might have been had it been written earlier in my life. But I had a lot more stupid in my head back then. There’s the trade-off: books by older people have less stupid but more mistakes. It’s hard to be excellent at everything.

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rapidly. The last days, however, are awful in terms of input and output. You’ve gotten near to your target weight but each additional pound is harder and harder to lose. There are good biological reasons for this: the body is built so that large fat reserves are shed more easily than small ones. There are also emotional reasons. On the first day of the diet, you gave up eating whipped cream directly from the carton. On the last days, you’re forcing yourself to eat nothing but celery. It is much more painful, emotionally, to reduce your eating when you already feel like you can’t eat anything. Similar limitations create problems for almost any kind of physical or mental excellence. Improving weightlifting or solving Sudoku puzzles are alike subject to diminishing marginal returns.

Positive Feedback Loops When an effort is subject to diminishing marginal returns, the excellence stance confronts a negative feedback loop, in which greater effort causes smaller gains, which discourages effort. There are certain human achievements, however, that are not regulated by diminishing marginal returns. In these few cases, it is possible for a positive feedback loop to occur, in which effort leads to larger gains, which lead to greater effort, and so on. These special areas where excellence strategies are effective are of two kinds: mechanical and conceptual. In both areas, effort becomes an investment that leads to greater future resources. By “mechanical investment in excellence,” I mean any effort devoted to improving how well one can execute the excellence stance. A person who applies an excellence strategy to his own self-control is going to reap the rewards hundredfold. There is hardly an activity on the excellence spectrum that does not have self-control as a fundamental requirement. By seeking excellence in self-control, willpower, dedication, work ethic, self-honesty, and so on, a person improves the mechanics of his own excellence tactics in other domains. A twelve-step program is the pursuit of excellence in a strategy of excellence. This is why such programs include explicit instructions to take assessments: the recovering addict needs to learn how to be honest to himself. He needs to focus on that, to become really good at telling the truth about himself. If he does not make it into a habit, his self-control around alcohol or drugs will suffer. Efforts like this, devoted to a person’s “excellence machine,” will pay off in the form of a better excellence machine—more honesty, dedication, and temperance.

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There are also conceptual investments in excellence, by which I mean efforts to excel at fundamental goods such as virtue and love. A man who seeks excellence in expressing love to his children will feel their love in return, and this will make it easier to love them in the future. As we have said, Aristotle taught that a man who consciously pursues virtue for its own sake will eventually pursue virtue unconsciously; it will become a habit. In twelve-step communities, this is the classic old suggestion to “fake it until you make it.” You may indeed crave a cigarette, but if you constantly act like you don’t, the craving will die away. The difference between pursuit of love and virtue, as opposed to weightlifting or weight loss, is that past achievements of these conceptual goods make future achievements easier: the law of diminishing returns is overthrown. In the case of love, your past achievements in loving others and serving them create a loving environment around you, in which it is easier to trust, to share, and to serve. In the case of virtue, doing good things repeatedly turns them into habits, so that they no longer require conscious thought. This frees up conscious thought for the next achievement. The game design concept here, borrowed from systems design, is positive feedback loop. A positive feedback loop is a process that gains momentum as it proceeds. It is like a snowball rolling down a mountain: the more snow it picks up, the bigger it gets, and the bigger it gets, the more snow it picks up. Getting bigger helps the snowball get bigger. This defeats the logic of diminishing returns, which is a negative feedback loop; here, returns are increasing. Positive feedback loops are incredibly entertaining and are a common feature in game design. Almost every economic system in a game has an increasing-returns design, at least in the beginning. Some games are nothing more than competitive positive feedback loops. Any activity that has a positive feedback loop like this lends itself to excellence-based strategies. The more excellence is pursued, the easier it is to attain. Since there are positive feedback loops in certain areas of excellence, these areas provide a sound basis for winning a life game designed around them. It is said that “virtue is its own reward,” and this can more than a metaphor. A person who has defined life’s game in terms of excellence in virtue, for example, will not only feel the sense of victory when his virtue improves; he will score more and more points as his ability to do virtuous things improves. Such a person can feel like a victor every day of his life. It could be said that the excellence stance makes more or less sense depending on the nature of the feedback loops in the areas to which a person commits.

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Possible Problems Managing an excellence stance in games and in life requires paying attention to certain unique problems. The curse of comparison. The excellence stance depends to a great extent on external validation of progress and dedication. Unfortunately, in any area of human endeavor, there is always someone better than you. Even if you happen to be the fastest woman on the planet today, you won’t be tomorrow. Even the pursuit of virtue occurs relative to the virtue of others, and there is always someone more virtuous than you are. This conundrum is what traps anyone trying to be a saint: there is always some person more saintly than you, either today or in the past. Good luck trying to beat St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Put another way, it will always be the case that only the top 10 percent can be in the top 10 percent. “Life is graded on a curve.” Excellence is relative. Responding to the relativity of excellence puts people in the uncomfortable position of creating personal standards which, as mentioned earlier, tempts them into moving the goalposts. There is no easy way out of the circularity of excellence standards: the pursuit of excellence is supposed to be “real” excellence, judged by the outside world, and yet living this way is practically impossible. The curse of comparison does not make the excellence stance unlivable, but it does make it difficult to sustain. Obsession. With the excellence stance, and indeed any stance that measures success by objective achievement, there is a risk of losing track of the greater context. The player can become tightly focused on achieving a certain number—120 pounds of weight, 3 percent revenue growth, 15 rosaries per day. Having concrete intermediate goals is helpful, especially from the standpoint of brutal self-honesty. However, an obsessive focus with a local goal can blind the player to the overall flow of play. The player may develop tactics for achieving the local goal that impede the overall strategy. A silly example: one way to lose weight is to chop off a limb. A more serious example is coffee during Lent: the story is told of a priest, addicted to coffee, who insisted on showing his command over the brown elixir by giving it up during Lent. The staff hated this, because without his coffee the guy became a complete jerk. Thus, while he was praying every day for strength against the temptation of java, everyone he worked with was praying that he’d break down and have a cup. Having that kind of negative effect on those near you runs directly counter to the spirit of the Catholic Lenten season. The priest thought he was winning Lent by abstaining from coffee, but actually he was losing it.

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Mindlessness. At the limit, the excellence stance might lead a person into the mindless acquisition of achievements: wealth, romantic conquests, power, fame, prestige, awards, offices, influence, and a host of other more or less meaningless achievements.5 The excellence stance, in focusing on personal improvement, seems particularly vulnerable to this kind of obsession. One thinks of the melancholy of the former high school sports star, now retired and woefully out of shape, who looks wistfully at his trove of trophies gathering dust. The hours! The hours that went into practicing free throws and passes and plays, for a glory that faded within a few years. Only later did he discover the relatively minor significance of sports achievement in the broader game of lifetime excellence. Now he envies his classmate who did nothing but study and went on to get an MBA. Very wealthy now. And yet, he too is wistful. He looks at his house, his cars, his clothes, his fine wines and funky art, and wonders about the hours! The hours that went into mergers and meetings and memos, all for these material things, which he now sees as pointless. Even Adam Smith, founder of economics, thought money was unimportant: “Wealth and greatness,” he wrote, “are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.”6 Both of these players have come to believe that they have wasted their energy chasing pointless achievements. Others never have this feeling. One wonders: What aspects of human excellence are truly worth pursuing? How does a player in the excellence stance know he is pursuing the right kind of excellence? What kind of excellence lasts unto death? Smell the roses. The excellence stance has no victory conditions at the end; it has no specific end state of victory. Rather, one is always in the process of either winning or losing—winning by becoming better or losing by not doing so. In some ways, this looks like the strategic advice one often hears, that “it is the journey, not the destination.” Certainly the excellence stance recommends a Some professors check their influence numbers too much. They check their WordPress hits, and their Twitter followers, and their Google scholar numbers, and their paper downloads. They do it every day. Sometimes several times during the day. Some of them keep taking “breaks” from their writing to see how their numbers are looking today. Or, they waste mental cycles on coming up with pithy tweets or thought-provoking blog comments. All that effort, just to make a blip on a social media site. Ha! What a load of horsefeathers. Boy, am I glad I am not one of those influenceobsessed professors. 6 James R Rogers, “Adam Smith on Society’s Exploitation of the Rich,” First Thoughts, at https​:/​/ww​​ w​.fir​​stthi​​ngs​.c​​om​/bl​​ogs​/f​​i rstt​​hough​​ts​/20​​16​/01​​/adam​​-smit​​h​-on-​​socie​​tys​-e​​xpl​oi​​tatio​​n​-of-​​the​-r​​ich, observed accessed January 22, 2016. The full quotation is “Smith considers the case of ‘The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition.’ The boy pours himself into his work, intending short-run sacrifice for long-term gain. But it’s all for naught; he has been deceived. ‘It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled . . . that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.’” 5

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tight focus on the journey. However, the focus is on the process of journeying, not the experience of the path. The seeker in excellence is focusing all of his mental energy on walking properly and swiftly up the mountain; the excellence stance does not recommend stopping and enjoying anything. Indeed, such “time-outs” and “celebrations” are seen as risks of falling off the path completely. Mere excellence, by itself, pursues a type of victory that offers few emotional consolations. Narcissism. The excellence stance is tightly self-focused. It recommends limiting one’s community to people who share similar commitments (otherwise your friends will constantly be tempting you to eat, drink, skip leg day, sin, etc.). Success in excellence games is entirely personal. This is inconsistent in a deep way, of course, because the community plays a large role in how excellence is defined. Moreover, it is hard to be excellent in a declining community. Of course, one could transfer the tactics of the excellence stance to the community, but pursuing the good of the community is best thought of as an entirely different stance, the heroic stance, and will be discussed in the next chapter. Misapplication. As we have seen, the excellence stance works well for some life concerns but not well for others, and there is little in the stance itself to indicate the difference. This means that someone devoted to excellence may think of it as the only response to any given situation. One thinks of Stage IV cancer patients who insist, “I’m gonna beat this.” No. No, you’re not. Cancer is fought by research scientists in laboratories far away. The patient’s role is to muster the will to live. If a person’s will to live is based on becoming physically excellent, it is based on a goal that will never be attained. A late-stage cancer diagnosis means a large decline in life quality, no matter what else may happen. In that sense, the cancer cannot be beaten. An excellence stance, which focuses on physically overcoming the challenge, is not appropriate and, in many cases, misguided. There are better ways to play the game of terminal illness.7 A second misapplication of the excellence stance is worth mentioning: imposing it on others. This is especially problematic in the case of parental imposition of excellence on children. All children are bad at everything; it’s in their nature. They will improve over time according to their experiences, skills, and interests. It is a wonderful gift to teach a young person how to speed up this process, but doing so requires a gentle touch. Failures can lead to self The author’s experience as a hospice volunteer suggests that the greatest consolation in late-stage illness comes not from a determination to return to an earlier stage in life but from seeking out important people and talking to them.

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contempt, hopelessness, and other damaging assessments of self and the world. A child psychologist could tell us how these things hurt the child’s emotions, but another concern is that they hurt the child’s excellence engine. Screaming at kids for their athletic mistakes is a sure way to turn them off from the entire idea of excellence. From the kid’s perspective, this is the case of an effort that yielded nothing but fatigue, injury, and shame. It would not seem a winning strategy. For the parent, a better way to teach excellence strategies is to focus on the mechanics themselves. That is, the parent should model self-discipline, commitment to hard truth, and a willingness to work. More than anything, a parent can model the acceptance of failure as a necessary part of learning. Knowing how to be excellent is important; knowing how to win any game requires playing it and losing a few times. Nothing improves a young person’s excellence engine more than a healthy appreciation of the need to fail often and fast in order to grow.

Summary The excellence stance is a commitment to being the best you can be, recommending self-discipline, hard truth, and hard work as strategies toward that end. Excellence strategies can make dramatic positive improvements in many areas of life. Most life games involve excellence in something; thus, whatever stances a person might choose, they will generally include a subset of approaches that are based on the tactics of the excellence stance. Despite being good at times, the excellence stance wanes in quality as life proceeds. A life game based entirely on personal excellence is sure to be lost, simply because we decay. I won’t be able to do anything at all when I become a corpse. I suppose I will be quite good at rotting away, but excellence in decomposition is a rather cheap victory.

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The Heroic Stance

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. —John 13:15 In January 1982, the city in which I lived shut down. There was a terrible snowstorm that day, quite unusual for Washington DC. I recall making my way along the snow-covered streets and finding it puzzling that, instead of the quiet that usually attends a major snowfall, the air was filled with sirens. I learned that there had been a fatal crash in the Metro; not only that, but a plane had gone down in the Potomac. Air Florida 90 had gotten too much ice on the wing, had crashed onto the 14th street bridge and plunged into the water. Most of the passengers died instantly, but a small group of survivors got out of the plane and clambered onto the tail section, the only part of the plane that stayed afloat. There were five of them there, and one in the water nearby. As seconds ticked by, the risk of death by hypothermia rose. Would-be rescuers stood helpless on the shore, knowing that they would die if they tried to swim out. They knew this because one man tried: Roger Olian, a sheet metal foreman; ice clung to him and the others dragged him back. A Park Service helicopter arrived, manned by pilot Donald W. Usher and paramedic Melvin E. Windsor. They lowered the chopper to just a few feet above the icy water and threw out a lifeline to the people on the tail. It was caught by Arland D. Williams Jr., a bank examiner. He gave it to another person. She was lifted to shore. The helicopter came back and threw two lines. Williams caught one of them and handed it to two other people, who grabbed the line together. Three were lifted off the wreckage, leaving Williams. Halfway to shore, two of them lost their grip and fell into the water. Congressional Budget Office worker Leonard Skutnik dove in to rescue one of the two. The helicopter went to where the other person had fallen, and

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paramedic Windsor stepped out onto the chopper’s skid and pulled her in. Then the helicopter returned to the tail section, but it had rolled over and submerged Arland D. Williams Jr., who, unseen by the rescuers, drowned. The story of Air Florida 90 tells us about heroes. They were all everyday people, completely ordinary. Yet they did something extraordinary in the service of others. That cold day, that morning, that hour, that minute, a call came to them out of nowhere, a call to be heroic, to give everything for the good of someone else. And they did. According to some views of life, there is nothing more noble than this. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the primary use of the radical freedom we experience is to make ourselves into heroes, simply because we can. To be heroic is also very meaning of life for certain religious perspectives: it is why we are here, to serve others, giving entirely of ourselves if need be, to leave a legacy of giving that lasts forever. The heroic stance is a commitment to causes outside the self and for all time. The heroic stance says that playing life well involves making a positive difference in the world. In the heroic version of life’s game, victory comes not from the ultimate success or failure of the cause but from the giving of one’s life to it. Great kings can be heroes, but so can martyrs.1 Because it depends on the altruistic giving of self, the heroic stance is about intentions as much as it is about acts. To what degree is a true giving of self even possible? When I tell myself I am sacrificing for others, I am also telling myself what a good boy I am. The consul who devoted his life to the glory of Rome obtained money, slaves, and renown as a result. There will always be rewards for doing heroic things, simply because the world likes heroes. As a result the heroic stance is like the excellence stance in being exposed to a certain level of fraud. A person deploying the heroic stance will have to make sure he is really being a hero and not a selfish, glory-addicted ogre. At its broadest, the heroic stance encompasses all humanistic approaches to life. Humanism is the selfless promotion of the well-being of all people, whoever they are, wherever they live. People who passionately devote themselves to the To clarify: The word “hero” in everyday usage is often applied to people who would not qualify as heroes under the definition I am using here. In particular, many sports figures are called heroes, but it is for their tremendous athletic ability, not their giving of self for others or the future. The boxer Muhammed Ali is considered to be a hero by many people, but he did not selflessly give his life for a cause. He was a great person, yes, but not in the heroic stance. His greatness fits in the excellence stance, because he struggled against discrimination and injustice until he made himself the heavyweight champion of the world. In everyday usage, “hero” can apply to someone we look up to, someone whose life serves as a model for our own. Here I am using hero in the more restricted sense of a person who gives his life for a good cause.

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greater good of the human race have adopted a view of life’s game in which heroism is the right strategy.

In Games The heroic stance appears in games as a desire for strong narrative. Game narratives almost always make the player into a hero of some sort, and the most popular narratives force the player into difficult choices that require sacrifice. Although there are plenty of games where the player simply dominates the environment, the most acclaim goes to games with narratives that leaven the heroism with suffering, sacrifice, and service. In the standard story arc, for example, the player begins as a poor, powerless boy. In Fable, the boy’s village is raided, his home is burned, and his parents are killed. Being orphaned and penniless, the main character has to make his way in the world, and this involves doing jobs for others. The demands of service never really stop, as quest leads to quest, up until the final quest where the final boss is defeated. The last challenge is often accompanied with an agonizing choice. In Mass Effect, for example, the character must choose which of his companions will survive. The character wins but carries the burdens of victory in the form of guilt over his choices. In these designs, game-makers appeal to the hero-in-waiting who resides in almost all of us. The fact that this narrative is so popular in games suggests something not-so-rosy about life. Perhaps life does not provide enough opportunities for heroism; perhaps real-life heroism is too risky and dangerous. A deeper reason may be a deficit of meaning: perhaps our real-life choices don’t seem to matter. In this sense, the popularity of the heroic stance in games serves as a criticism of our too-empty world.

Commitments The core commitments that drive heroic stances involve causes outside the self. As just mentioned, a commitment to the cause of humanity as a whole suggests a heroic strategy. Other causes might be the good of one’s family, village, or country; helping the sick; destroying an enemy; changing society; helping others lead good lives; making peace; saving the planet; correcting injustice; punishing wrong-doers; passing on knowledge. Causes like these are

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consistent with the heroic stance because each of them can demand the full gift of self. If you think it is of overwhelming importance that the noble gastropod achatinella fuscobasis not go extinct, then it makes sense to devote your life to the cause of endangered snails. If you do, you are acting consistently with the heroic stance. One overarching philosophical commitment in the heroic stance is to freedom. The hero makes himself into a hero by choosing to sacrifice his all. Saint Maximilian Kolbe chose to take the place of a man condemned to death. It is quite likely that Kolbe would have been killed anyway, but it was heroic to offer himself so that another might have a slim hope of surviving. Conversely, people who minimally obey orders to sacrifice for a good cause are admirable, but not supremely heroic. We admire all mothers, but the one who gives up a lucrative law career to stay at home and take care of her children has made a more heroic choice. Some readers will object that choosing to be a stay-at-home mom is not heroic but rather a self-imposed slavery. But the point is that this work is selfimposed. A slavery that we choose is not slavery at all. It is a freely chosen life of service for the greater good of others. It is the free choice that makes this move consistent with a heroic strategy. A second core philosophical commitment of the heroic is to the Good, especially the good of others. The good of the whole human community has been the object of many heroes: Albert Schweizer, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, St. Theresa of Calcutta, and on and on. The good being pursued does not have to be global, though. The point is to support the good things in this world, and to do that, the heroic stance calls for a commitment to the notion of goodness. Heroic stances demand sacrifice. It is not heroic to send $20 a month to feed the starving children in Uganda. It’s very nice, but not heroic. Heroic is quitting your job and spending 80 hours a week and every penny you own to launch an organization to airdrop food to Uganda. Or, heroic is to carry a 100-lb bag of cornmeal all the way from Muncie to Kiboga. Heroism depends on the resources and capabilities of the agent as well. A working-class grandmother caring for the five children that her sons and daughters have abandoned is a hero when she takes in another. Without great giving, there’s no heroism. There is a strong, but not universal, commitment to effectiveness in the heroic stance. For the most part, a person adopting the heroic stance will insist that his life of self-sacrifice should achieve something worth achieving. Earlier we mentioned the words of Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Grosso, “You have

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to move the needle.” The heroic stance says that life’s game is about making a positive and significant contribution to the world around you. There is an alternate view of heroism that deserves careful consideration, though. Existentialist philosophers in the past century such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre make the case for the “absurd hero” who gives his life for nothing. Camus relates the myth of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a great stone over a hill. The hill was designed so that Sisyphus could always get the stone to the very top, but never quite over it. Instead the weight of the stone would overwhelm him there at the top, and the stone would go rolling back down to the valley. Then Sisyphus had to go back down into the valley and start pushing the stone up again. He had to do this over and over, for eternity. Camus argues that this man is a hero. Even though he knows there is no point, he still gives up his life for this task. On this view, heroism comes from the surrendering of life to a cause, not the achievement of great ends. It is precisely because the cause is hopeless that devotion to it is so heroic. If you are giving your life for an absurd and pointless cause, no one can accuse you of doing it for self-serving reasons. Heroic stances are an excellent case of deep strategic similarities among people with profound philosophical differences. The martyr gives up his life for God, while the existentialist absurd hero gives up his life for the heck of it, there being no good reason to do it or not. Yet they might both sacrifice themselves for the same cause. In refugee camps, epidemic zones, and military hospitals, one might find materialist-atheist doctors toiling alongside Christian nurses, without any contradiction on the strategic layer. They both give their lives to help the unfortunate, one because it pleases God and the other because it doesn’t. The difference between them would not be in the strategies but in the need to make a difference. An existentialist doctor believes that none of it matters in the end, so having an actual effect on the problem does not matter either. The Christian nurse does think things matter in the end, so having an actual effect on the local problem is important. (If the Christian is working under an orthodox stance, however, he too will not be concerned about the lack of material effect, as we will see later.) A final core commitment of the heroic approach is zeal, perhaps fanaticism, in devotion to the cause. Because the heroic stance demands massive self-sacrifice, it has trouble dealing with doubt. A man worried about famine in Uganda is not likely to quit his job if he is not sure if anyone is actually starving there. Doubt may arise about the true state of the cause, as in this case, but it may also

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arise from myriad other dimensions. The player may be uncertain about what the cause entails; he may not know what to do; he might question whether the cause is actually important; he may not believe in his own ability to commit to the cause. Doubts like this necessarily put a brake on heroic moves. How important is it, really, to save achatinella fuscobasis? A man will usually need to be firmly convinced of a gastropod’s importance in order to give his life for it.2 The absurd hero, in a way, is the most fanatical and zealous. He accepts that there is no reason at all to go on the quest, yet he gives his entire life for it. He cannot be troubled by doubt because he has embraced all doubts, to the point that he believes nothing. Under these circumstances, to take up a heroic action is the perfection of zealotry; it is to believe completely in the value of the sacrifice, even though there are no earthly or heavenly reasons for doing so.

Victory Conditions The heroic stance is the first we have considered that has a final goal. There is a state of total victory in the heroic stance, and it is achieved when you become a hero. The soldier who throws himself down on a live grenade wins instantly. Even if all of his comrades are killed by a second grenade nearby, the soldier is a hero by virtue of his total self-sacrifice in an effort to save his mates. The heroic is a state that can be achieved. Indeed, once achieved, the heroic is never lost. Sir Walter Raleigh performed great exploits for queen and country, capturing Spanish ships and claiming huge tracts of land—truly a hero. On the other hand, he was imprisoned in the Tower three times, and executed after his third visit. Notwithstanding, Raleigh is still a hero. A few months in prison over petty things like romances and conspiracies are not enough to tarnish the hero’s shine. A person operating in the heroic stance wins the game of life, with certitude, should he ever become an unquestioned hero. For some people, this happens as the result of a long life of giving and work. Dorothy Day, the Catholic social worker, was not considered heroic in her youth, but in her old age was recognized as a tireless servant of the poor. For others, as we saw with Air Florida 90, the certifying conditions of heroism are met suddenly, unexpectedly, by complete surprise. Whether the result of a moment’s bravery or a life’s service, heroism, once achieved, certifies the player as winner in great game of everything. “We can learn a lot from the lowly snail,” argues John R. Platt at Scientific American: “Snails Are Going Extinct: Here’s Why That Matters,” at https​:/​/bl​​ogs​.s​​cient​​ifica​​meric​​an​.co​​m​/ext​​incti​​on​-co​​ untdo​​wn​/sn​​ails-​​​going​​-exti​​nct/,​observed May 19, 2017.

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What about people who never achieve the heroic moment? Dorothy Day might have died at the age of thirty-five having been the same woman, with the same attitudes and commitments, but never receiving the accolades of heroism that came to her later. Arlington D. Williams Jr. might have taken a different flight. Such people are potential heroes. They are not recognized as heroes—yet. They probably don’t recognize it themselves. Indeed, how many people know they are heroes prior to the events that reveal them to be so? We might think of potential heroes as winners in the game of life whose victory has simply not been certified. From the standpoint of the heroic stance, the critical characteristic is to have the true willingness and intent to sacrifice all for others. A person who truly has that, wins. In response to the doubt anyone can have about the heroism of their character, the game of life can be understood as having intermediate checkpoints along the way. Even though you may not have done anything particularly heroic, have you done something substantive and good for the world? This intermediate view of the heroic stance says that victory is promoted, though not fully attained, so long as you have made a substantive positive change in a cause that matters.

Strategies Given that the victory condition is to be prepared for the heroic, and become certified if possible, the strategies of the heroic stance are twofold. First, the player has to make moves that prepare him for heroism. Second, he must look for opportunities to execute that preparedness. Preparing for heroism is, like any self-molding, a lifelong struggle. The heroic stance calls for a certain kind of lifestyle and attitude. The potential hero has to be ready. If our idea of heroism involves risking our life to prevent violent crime, then the heroic stance recommends that we keep our guns cleaned, loaded, and close by at all times; it insists that we train regularly to be mentally ready for conflict situations, lest we shoot the wrong person and become a villain. If our heroic sacrifice is to feed the poor, then we should be ready with lots of pocket money when we go to a big city with lots of homeless folks on the street. Living a pre-heroic strategy should include a devotion to heroic narratives. There are two reasons for this strategy. On the one hand, heroic narrative is inspiring. When we watch an action movie, we see how society rewards the hero with esteem and the objects of his desire. We also see how the hero struggles. Many hero narratives begin with the hero struggling with his own mediocrity,

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his own simpleness. This is such a common theme that it has been identified as a core element human story-telling throughout history. Joseph Campbell identified the core story of humanity as the “hero’s journey,” in which the hero always begins as a rather unimportant fellow.3 This fellow receives a call of some kind which abruptly yanks him out of his simple surroundings and launches him on the path to saving the world. Followers of the heroic stance would want to deeply immerse themselves in narratives of the hero’s journey, as a constant reminder that the heroic call may come any moment. Heroic narratives tell the pre-hero that his current mediocrity, the passivity of his friends, and the apparent lack of important nearby quests, are no reason to be discouraged. The only important thing is to be ready for the heroic opportunity, should it come. The second reason pre-heroes should immerse themselves in heroic narrative is to learn. Consider the following tip from AA: “Put on your own mask before assisting others.” This means, you have to deal with your own alcoholism before you can save others. As flyers know, this sentence has been part of the standard pre-flight safety routine in commercial aviation for decades. Should there be a hole in the plane, all the oxygen will get sucked out, so everyone will need to wear oxygen masks. But because you can lose consciousness so fast, you should not try to help somebody else until you yourself are able to keep going. If you have your oxygen, you can easily help someone who is passed out by slipping their mask on. The oxygen will soon revive them. But if you try to help the other passenger first, you both may lose consciousness and perish. This situation is a definite risk for parents, most of whom would naturally put the mask on the baby first.4 They shouldn’t, and neither should a pre-hero try to help others when they are themselves too messed up to help. Heroic narratives tell people what preparation needs to be done and how to do it. The heroic stance calls its followers to training and preparation. No one can be a hero unless he knows what he is are doing and is capable of actually helping. Ask a police officer how he feels about working with armed citizens in a dangerous situation, and he will tell you that they increase the danger and should stay out. In other words, once the police arrive, the civilian’s heroic Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949). My wife clarified her expectations for me in dangerous situations at a very early point in our marriage. It happened casually; we were crossing a busy street with the stroller. She said, “Go in front of the stroller.” She didn’t think about it, just said it. Later I asked why, and she didn’t have a pre-formed answer; it just seemed right to her. We worked through it and came to understand that there was an unstated expectation: The man should take the impact of any object, including a speeding car, to reduce the impact on the baby.

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opportunity has passed, and any contribution is likely to be negative. The heroic stance recommends not only that the hero be prepared to act but also that he understand when he should back off. Training and preparation for being a hero can come in many forms. A person wishing to give himself in parenthood should spend as much time as possible around children. Someone hoping to give any kind of emotional support to others, such as an AA sponsor, should work hard on his own issues. It may well be that a person can train his brain to be ready for the heroic opportunity when it comes. Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo (the researcher behind the Stanford Prison Experiment) argue that playing games may prepare people for doing good in the world.5 In a game, we practice activities and reinforce thought patterns. Many games expect the player to do good things, like, save the captured child or cure the disease. Practicing doing good like this is an important chapter in the heroic playbook. Assuming the pre-hero is prepared well for self-sacrifice, he must then try to put himself in positions where sacrifice can happen for the good of others. In one sense this is easy, in another hard. Like a classic game-design trade-off, lowpayoff heroic opportunities are easy to find, whereas high-payoff opportunities are either never seen or impossible to complete. A person whose goal in the heroic stance is to save someone from a sinking ship will have to go on a lot of cruises before the opportunity arises, simply because most cruise ships don’t sink. Big, flashy, heroic opportunities are what game designers call a “rare spawn,” meaning, they don’t happen often. Or, they take the form of a “boss fight,” meaning, the heroic opportunity is there but completing it is an almost superhuman task. A good example is the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Everyone could see that there were people trapped in the upper floors of these buildings, but it was impossible to get to them. Many lives were saved, but many rescue personnel died trying to save more. That was a day of heroism, but the number of heroic acts completed was a small percentage of those that were available, because most of them were too hard. In general, the heroic acts that we all remember and talk about with amazement are either rare or really hard to do. A pre-hero should therefore not plan on achieving the victory conditions of the heroic stance through flashy heroics. Fortunately, the world is filled with opportunities for heroism at a lower level of intensity. These opportunities are everywhere and they are easy—in a sense. A Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo, “The Banality of Heroism,” September 1, 2006, at http:​/​/gre​​aterg​​ ood​.b​​erkel​​ey​.ed​​u​/art​​icle/​​item/​​the​_b​​anali​​t​y​_of​​_hero​​ism/,​observed May 20, 2017.

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person pursuing heroic victory through peacemaking will constantly face situations in which peacemaking is helpful—arguments, divorces, fights, negotiations, wars. The need for conflict resolution is everywhere. And in a sense, responding is easy. You don’t have to rescue someone from a burning building, you don’t have to resuscitate anyone, you don’t have to be in exactly the right place at the right time with the right tools. You just have to say good words. Sometimes a peacemaker will speak well, and other times not so well. Success will come and go, but it isn’t the end of all hope for the mediator if the divorce becomes bitter anyway. There will be other divorces to mediate, and so there is always hope that the peacemaker’s sacrifice is effective and helpful. A strategy of constant, small, and often-successful efforts to help is sufficient for victory in the heroic stance. While this low-intensity strategy of heroism is easy in the sense that it doesn’t require death-defying acts of superhuman strength, it is extremely hard in terms of consistency and longevity. The peacemaker above won’t score many hero points if he quits mediation after a few years and takes up golfing instead. To say that you have given your life for a cause in this low-intensity approach requires that you actually spend your whole life doing it. Moreover, it requires that your whole life is ordered toward the cause or, at least, does not harm the cause. A person cannot be a hero for the environment and also drive a dual-exhaust big-wheel pickup truck back and forth to work every day. Vrooom! *cough* *cough*. Finally, the low-intensity approach is hard because most acts of giving are not the most fun things to do in this life. Serving others can require hours of boring paperwork. It can be lonely; people managing a charitable organization will often find that there are many solitary hours in the office. It can be messy, as anyone can testify who has cared for the sick or for infants. Low-intensity heroism is easy to start but, in the end, it is no less hard to be a hero as a nurse or a priest than as a firefighter or a spy. Because it is hard, in the end, winning in the low-intensity approach to the heroic stance may be too much for some people. It requires attention to detail and a rigorous commitment to amending all aspects of life if necessary, and it has to continue in this way for decades. Not everyone can be Gandhi; not everyone has the willpower to maintain the heroic stance for a lifetime.

Assessment The heroic stance is more feasible than those discussed so far, on the whole. Depending on how it is interpreted, it allows a fully consistent approach to life’s

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game, from the highest assumptions down to the daily tactics. However, the stance has multiple conflicting interpretations, and evaluation depends on which concept of hero is being used. There are three broadly different approaches: 1. Commit to a good cause a. and await a single opportunity for displaying tremendous heroism, or b. patiently dedicate yourself to a mundane but important way of serving others 2. Assume there are no good causes, but dedicate your life to the good anyway. Strategy 2 is of course the existentialist approach, which we can identify as the absurd hero strategy. Strategy 1a conforms to Campbell’s hero’s journey narrative; such heroes being larger-than-life in many ways, we can refer to this strategy as a grand hero strategy. Heroes of daily self-sacrifice, strategy 1b, follow a humble hero strategy. Each has upsides and downsides from a strategic perspective.

Grand Heroism This strategy is hard to recommend. On the positive side, it can be a consistent strategy, because there are philosophical commitments that would imply that grand heroism as a victory condition in life’s game. One might commit to a god and focus on the god’s ostensible desire to be the dominant god on Earth. One would then train oneself for battle, awaiting the moment when the god could be appeased with a great martial achievement for his sake. One thinks here of suicide bombing as a life strategy. Whatever else it may be, it can be strategically consistent from its first assumption down to its final act. Beyond consistency, though, the grand heroic stance has severe limitations as a way to win life’s game. On most days, the grand heroic stance recommends nothing more than training and waiting. This can lead to hypocrisy; a person who has committed to being a hero does not look like one if he ignores mundane opportunities to help others. The grand hero might be observed sitting around sharpening his sword while people starve in the street outside. Unless and until the actual heroic event occurs, and is successfully completed, grand heroism scores few points. Moreover, there are tremendous risks in this strategy. It is a gamble. The opportunity for grand heroism has to arrive, and the player has to complete it successfully. Both are unlikely. You’re not likely to be in a plane crash, first of all,

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and if you were trapped in the tail section of a plane sinking into icy water, how likely is it that you would pass the rope to others? Then there is the question of accuracy in assessing the heroic opportunity. Just because the player thinks this is his big heroic moment doesn’t mean that anyone else does. We call to mind here again the armed civilian who tries to help the police. It is often not a positive contribution, even though the player thinks it is. Wanting glory is not enough; many circumstances must align in the right way before grand heroic victory can be achieved. Finally, the grand version of the heroic strategy is vulnerable to self-deception. In any game, it is important to understand clearly how things stand. The grand heroic stance doesn’t offer much information because it does not concern itself with minor opportunities for heroism. The grand heroic player rarely gets an honest appraisal of his readiness. In the absence of any information, it is possible to become cripplingly over- or under-confident. If the player becomes overconfident, he lapses into presumption: he assumes he is winning life’s game as a hero, it’s just that nobody has recognized him as such. An under-confident grand heroic player is dangerous: convinced that he will not win the game unless he does something amazing, he goes out in search of glorious sacrifices. The story is told of a group of German university students at the start of the First World War who, enthralled at the prospect of martial glory, went off and joined the army together. A few weeks later, they saw their first live action. Entering the battlefield, they were quickly pinned down behind a rock by French machine guns. They huddled there for a moment; then one of them charged out, shouting “For your academic honor!” The students rose as one and charged forward into the open field. And they were instantly killed. So much for martial glory. Pointless martyrdoms like this stem directly from the strategic thought process in grand heroism. It is a stance that can turn the player into a would-be hero desperate for observable victory points.

Humble Heroism The humble version of the heroic stance has much to recommend it. It can be consistent with many different philosophies. Virtually any basic beliefs that allow for goodness and altruism are consistent with a life game of doing good for others every day. Unlike the grand hero, the player of a humble hero strategy also gets regular feedback from the world on how he is doing. This stance is also flexible in that he can switch his altruism to a neighboring cause without losing points.

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A person who helps the elderly can switch to helping the sick and still sustain a lifework of serving the needy. There are some limits on the flexibility, of course; a person who says at twenty that his life cause is helping rabbits would be advised not to switch, at forty, to helping wolves. Radical changes of direction may make perfect sense from an altruistic standpoint, but from the standpoint of winning the game as a hero, it makes less sense. Switching too much only dissipates the good effects, quite possibly undoing some of them (as in the rabbit-wolf case). There are some reasons for concern with this strategy, however. Like all heroic stances, it is ultimately self-focused. Because winning life’s game requires that you serve others, there had better be some others out there to serve! This dynamic of needing problems to solve can lure the humble heroic player into a life pattern of imagining problems where they don’t exist, and then “solving” them. This is the do-gooder mentality, doing good things where they are not really needed. This is largely harmless to the world, but a serious problem for the player. The issue from a strategic standpoint is that the player can easily become overconfident in his heroism. He feels like a hero, but isn’t. Anyone who has been involved in administration knows what the word “busybody” means, and can well imagine a busybody resting on his deathbed thinking, “Ah, a life well-spent. I am proud to have spent decades making sure that our city implemented zoning policy 189-B.” The busybody effect (looking for problems that might not be there) can lead to obsession. The humble heroic stance says that victory points are scored whenever the player assists with some cause. But what is “assistance?” The goal is to make a difference, but relying on metrics (“moving the needle”) can lead to an obsession with changing numbers rather than actually helping. Poverty relief agencies typically issue end-year reports of how many tons of food aid they’ve delivered. If this was all they reported, it would reflect an improper obsession with getting food out the door. After all, the point of food aid is not to deliver food but to reduce hunger. It can be much much easier to do the former than the latter. One could make food available at one location only, cutting costs. More delivery, less help for the starving. This would obviously not be a good idea, and that is why most reports of charitable agencies talk not only about what the agency has done but also how conditions among their clients have changed. And here, the problem of diminishing marginal returns, discussed in the excellence stance, kicks in with vengeance. The first aerial shipment of food to a starving region goes immediately to helping the starving people right there, at the airport. Very effective. The next shipment goes into the nearby town; some transport cost and food spoilage, but still effective in reducing hunger. The next

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shipment goes to the next town, farther away, at more cost and with more food loss. And so on. At some point, more food aid just does not help very much. The agency’s report looks bleak: aid was doubled last year, but starvation went down only 1 percent. Creating new, positive effects in any cause is going to become more difficult as the cause succeeds. Having a positive effect at all is a trickier problem than it may seem, a problem that has bedeviled thinkers for centuries. Making true advances in human wellbeing is hard. Social scientists concerned with poverty and development have long struggled with the problem of making real progress. Poverty persists. A “good cause” is one that makes things better, but what does it mean to “make things better?” Students of public policy recognize quickly that any effort to help involves uncomfortable trade-offs. To reduce global CO2 output, the world might restrict industrial production. This would throw millions out of work, with the likelihood of starvation in places like India and China. Or, it would cost $5 million to give Jane Smith of 123 Main Street, Smalltown, United States, the kidney transplant she needs to live. But that money could also go to preventive health care for 100,000 poor children in Bigtown’s worst neighborhoods. The humble heroic stance says that you win by doing good; how much good is done by lobbying for $5 million to be spent on kidney transplants rather than children’s preventive health care? Beyond the trade-off problem, there is the happiness problem. What is human well-being? What does it actually require to make someone “better?” If you give a homeless alcoholic $5, he will spend it on alcohol. That does not help him, it hurts him. Similarly, if you give a child whatever he wants, you’re doing him severe long-run psychological damage. If we give $100 million in aid to a poor country, but in so doing completely disrupt their culture, breaking up families and villages, inducing demand for tempting but worthless material goods, creating corrupt bureaucracies: Have we really helped? Have we made people happier or better in some sense? In the end, it is not possible to succeed in the heroic stance unless the player has a firm and accurate sense of what it means to help. And unfortunately, social science is not well-prepared to answer that question. Since the Second World War there has been an obsession with economic growth and income as the sine qua non of “helping.” However, the good of the human person involves many more things than money, love, for example. Experts are unfortunately not able to agree on any way of measuring these mushier elements of human well-being. As a result, helping the world is an uncertain project. Players generally must guess what kind of help is truly needed and effective.

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Within the heroic stance, then, players are called upon to make judgments themselves about what helps; the heroic stance respects the freedom of the hero to decide what is best. This means, however, that heroic strategies can become recklessly self-focused and vulnerable to narcissistic takeover. By that I mean, the tendency of a man on a crusade to stop thinking of the good of other people, seeing them instead as tools to be manipulated as part of his great scheme. We all know the high school choir director who, completely crazy, sees her ensemble’s success as the most important thing in existence. She tells herself that she is serving the children, but the children are merely pawns in her personal game of self-aggrandizement. If the children are served at all, it is only indirectly. They may learn important lessons, but the major lesson seems to be, “How to deal with an out-of-control authority figure.” A person who simply must die as a hero, who has a terror of being insignificant, is not actually acting for the good of the cause. He is acting for himself, with the cause as his road to salvation. The problem with all this, from a strategic standpoint, is that it reduces the accumulation of hero points. The violin master who helps one student become world-renowned but coldly sends twenty others sobbing into obscurity—after taking their money—is a hero to one person and a jerk to twenty. If he is not helping all of his students find their way, whatever it may be, he is not serving them, and is not actually achieving his life’s aim of being a hero. He’s building an empire of self-esteem, not good works. These threats, that the impulse to serve might be replaced by an obsession to be a renowned person, to reach a certain number, or to solve phantom problems, keep the humblest hero awake at night. “Am I really doing this because I want to help the elephants? Or is it because I feel good wearing safari shorts at parties in Manhattan, talking about my last trip to Kenya?” The worried player naturally wants to see signs of genuine commitment to genuine causes. A clear sign of genuine commitment is heavy sacrifice. A billionaire can be a hero, but only if he gives a billion dollars to the cause. Thus some people interpret the humble heroic stance as requiring truly astounding levels of sacrifice, effort, and pain before the gift of self is “real.” This of course makes the heroic stance hard to execute. A life of truly humble sacrifice is a very hard one.

Absurd Heroism Like the humble heroic stance, the absurd stance has much in its favor. However, it shares many of the problems of the humble heroic stance (such as the risks of narcissistic takeover or becoming a busybody). If anything, those problems are

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worse, because the absurd hero’s stance is founded on glaring inconsistency. For the absurd player, there is no reason in Heaven or Earth to do what he is doing. The absurd hero is especially vulnerable to doing good things because they look good, or switching radically from cause to cause, or creating a controversy just because it’s funny. If the absurdist recognizes no reason behind anything, then the only reason to do something is because the player wishes to do it. The absurd player is radically free to care or not care about rules, victory points, and progress. For this type of player there is no inherent seriousness in the game. Whatever earnestness it acquires comes from the player himself. In some ways, this makes the game easier to play; the player can imagine the victory conditions however he wishes, since they don’t matter. However, it can also make it harder to play in that the game has no inherent meaning. Although it is a fun thought experiment to imagine playing a lifelong game while rejecting the idea of success or victory, it is not fun to actually live it out. It is hard enough to live a life of sacrifice when you think helping the poor is really and truly good; that much harder to do it when your world view admits that, in the end, there’s no point in helping the poor (or anybody). The absurd heroic stance does not provide many resources for dealing with the depression and loneliness that this approach creates. The absurd hero has to motivate himself daily. Being absurd, that motivation cannot begin with a first cause, a God or a command to goodness or anything of the like. For the absurd hero, there is no such thing. Thus, the motivation must spring from within his own heart. He must develop a commitment to the good that is entirely internal and receives no supporting evidence from outside his own head. It is a heavy burden. All of this has two important implications however. First, whatever the absurd hero does, he does for his own reasons. He’s not following a command or dictate. He is giving himself of his own free will. He is under no compulsion, from a game or a god, to give his life for a cause. Yet he does so anyway. Absurd altruism is absolutely pure, in this sense. And, it is harder to sustain, because of the nagging realization that none of it matters. A person who lives with such an utter incoherence between philosophical commitment and daily action is indeed bearing a heavy burden. In a way, carrying this incoherence, but doing good anyway, is part of the life sacrifice. The absurd hero gives up the comfort of knowing that God cares. If he nonetheless makes great sacrifices for a good cause, he has lived an honorable and noble life.

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Summary The three approaches to the heroic stance are all quite popular in the world today. Judging from the popularity of action movies and videogames, many people secretly crave their own grand heroic moment. The humble heroic stance is not as salient socially, but one sees it everywhere, in hospitals, day care centers, and family homes. There are many heroes out there. As for the absurd heroic stance, it is fair to say that this is dominant life game among the elites of contemporary culture. The people who write the news and give the lectures are not a religious bunch. They have long since abandoned any discussion of the ultimate questions with others, having learned in college that it is a fruitless exercise likely to lead to argument. In place of these discussions, our leaders have adopted a tolerant mentality that encourages everyone to keep their deeper commitments largely private. No one cares what you believe. However, they do care, deeply, about whether you are doing good. People are expected to do good, even though the culture as a whole does not talk much about the ultimate reason for doing so. It is a testament to the nobility of our times that so many people do so many good things, in a culture so devoid of existential grounding. Many people in contemporary culture are willing to accept the burden of inconsistency and give their lives for others, freely, without cause or expectation of reward. Perhaps this is the greatest love, this love for no reason. A religious person’s love is instrumental, done to please God; but atheist love is pure. It understands itself as nonsense and expects no reward. It defies the universe. It loves for the sake of love alone. Is it absurd? Yes. Does it help humanity? Yes. But: Is it a victory in a life game? That is hard to say. What is victory in a game without meaning?

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God doesn’t want us to be successful but to be faithful. —St. Theresa of Calcutta I have competed well, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. —St. Paul, 2 Tim. 4:7 We come now to the orthodox stance, which is more intricate than the others, requiring more discussion. Orthodox strategies, as we will see, involve a significant step up in complexity. The idea seems to be that a more complex approach, like a more complex game, provides richer rewards. The music of Palestrina is glorious in its beauty, but it requires many well-trained voices. Perhaps the same is true of stances: the most beautiful, elegant, and graceful life-moves can be made, but only by abandoning simplicity and embracing complexity in the realm of strategy. Who plays the orthodox strategy? There are famous examples, such as St. Paul of Tarsus and St. Theresa of Calcutta, who were lifelong believers. But there are many less famous people who follow an orthodox path—for example, in the hills of southern Indiana sits a community of about eighty Benedictine monks. The monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey spend all day following their motto, ora et labora (pray and work): they rise at 5:30 a.m. and pray Vigils and Lauds, then work for a few hours, then go to Mass; next comes breakfast, more work, midday prayer, and lunch. In the afternoon, it’s work, then Vespers at 5:00 p.m., then dinner; after dinner, an hour of relaxation, then Compline and the Great Silence until going to bed. They do this every day. One monk told me, “Monastic life isn’t hard. It’s relentless.” Despite this oppressive schedule of working and praying, the monks laugh quite a bit. They have an odd sense of humor. Brother Gustave needed back surgery and spent several weeks in a Louisville hospital. During recovery he was confined to his bed, barely able to move. This happened in mid-December.

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Once the doctors and nurses found out he was a monk, they all had the same reaction: they would come in and complain to him about Christmas. “I hate all the shopping.” “It’s just meaningless consumerism.” “I never know what to get people.” Brother Gustave, who could barely talk, had to just lay there hour after hour like God’s customer service representative, patiently listening to all these dissatisfied people. But he laughed, viewing it as an opportunity to lop a few days off Purgatory. In another tale, Brother Alfred had a conference to attend on a certain Thursday, but on the preceding Saturday, his dear friend Brother Alfred, ill, had taken a turn for the worse. He was dying. Alfred went to see him one last time and said, “Brother Alfred, I love you and I’m going to miss you very much. But I hope you die by Tuesday, because I want to go to your funeral.” Then there’s Brother Charles, who tells the story of his first day in the monastery. He was unpacking his things in his cell, and an elderly monk came quietly to his door and said, “Remember death.” Then he shuffled slowly away. Novice Charles was shaken to his core, asking himself, “What the heck was that, some kind of monk ‘hello?’” Yet, humble and obedient, Charles adopted the greeting as a practice and always gave it to later novices on their first day in the monastery. Eventually he had the courage to ask the older monk about the greeting and its meaning in monastic life. The older monk revealed: “Oh that? That was nothing. I was just messing with ya.” These tales reveal that the monks seem to be at peace with a number of things that cause much stress to ordinary people. They don’t seem to fear death, for example. They have a heavy work day, but they do not worry about their work. They think about God all the time, but they don’t seem to be glum, morose, or guilt-ridden. They are completely under the yoke of the Abbot, but they don’t seem resentful or restless. On the whole, they seem to be joyful, peaceful, and content. The monks of Saint Meinrad are playing life’s game according to the orthodox stance. The orthodox stance is the strategy of traditional organized religion. In organized religion, the goal is to get to heaven. That is the win condition. Everything in life is supposed to be ordered to it. Paradise, Nirvana, and the Blessed Realm await the person who has been good. Being good, in turn, is a matter of faithfully living according to the teaching of the religion. The orthodox stance is the only one that explicitly requires membership in a community. Monks follow the orthodox stance carefully, and the monks of Saint Meinrad, at least, seem to be winning.

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There are many examples of orthodox stances in the world of games and gaming. To be orthodox in playing a game is to adhere to a specific set of norms as to how to play. The norms are authored and certified by a community of players and go back in time a long, long way. The orthodox norms of the game dictate one’s approach to the written rules of the game as well as the unwritten social rules about the proper way to play. As an example, consider the religion of golf. There are written rules of golf but there are also rules about proper and noble play. The etiquette of golf is described in official documents of the Professional Golfer’s Association. It expresses norms in an authoritative way: “You should always enter the bunker from the low side at a point nearest to the ball.” There are no penalties for breaking these norms other than the disrespect of other golfers and the possibility of being banished to Golf Hell, where the group in front plays like snails and every green slopes 30 degrees. The orthodox stance refers to any set of strategies that involve belief in the divine and respect for the doctrines of a formal, organized religion. There are many religions in the world and not enough space to do them justice. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the strategic affordances of the different religions: which religion has the toughest victory conditions, which is the hardest to follow, which is the easiest to teach, and so on. Unfortunately, that project will have to await another book. This chapter will instead tend to focus on examples from the Roman Catholic Church, because it is a case of strong orthodoxy that is well known to the author.

In Games The orthodox stance is reflected in the world of games in a few ways. There is, for example, the popularity of “god games.” In a god game, the player is the supreme being. The characters in the game are completely under the player’s control. Sometimes this has an explicit religious overtone (Black and White) but sometimes the player is a god not because of a religion but because of his ability to manipulate the world of the little underlings running around on the screen (Banished). Then there is the appearance of religious orthodoxy directly in games, which is fairly frequent. It usually comes with both positive and negative coloring. On the one hand, games will depict the beauty of high religion, with glorious cathedrals (World of Warcraft) and charming, mysterious chapels (Kingdom Come). The simple people will pray, and the player’s heart is supposed to be warmed by their innocent devotion. On the negative side, those beautiful cathedrals are usually

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occupied by at least a few corrupt priests, and the fact that only simple people pray implies that the player’s character is rather too sophisticated for that sort of thing. Orthodox behavior appears in a third way in the existence of clubs, guilds, orders, and tribes that a character might join. Joining a faction requires earning the faction’s trust, usually by completing quests and following the group’s rules. This is an orthodoxy directed not at representations of religion in the world but at other representations of authority. Designers seek to appeal to players’ many-sided yearning for orthodox religion by creating elaborate institutional structures and a marketplace of loyalties. Players can choose whether they want to join something or be independent. They can act out in the game their desire to take a stand with respect to the idea of a formal church. And in some games, they can become the being to whom all game character’s thoughts must bend and from whom all in-game authority descends. In the world of games, a player can choose every possible position with respect to the godhead, from abject devotee to actually being the god. The wide in-game range of orthodoxy-related choices tells us that real life is full of uncertainty about these matters. If orthodoxy were the obvious choice in the real world, games would have organized religion without controversy. Similarly, if orthodoxy were out of the question, god games (which assert that there is a being out there, ordering everyone around) might not have much of a market. Religion seems to be a sticky thing, in games and out. The position of orthodoxy in games tells us that the core issues of spirituality are, as always, the source of internal conflict: Should I follow the dictates of a church or not?

Commitments Orthodoxy involves adherence to a set of specific, written rules derived from some kind of sacred text as well as a tradition of religious practice.

Belief in the Divine Being God: the first and perhaps most difficult commitment of an orthodox stance is to believe in the existence of a divine being. This can be grounded in reason, because there are indirect proofs of the existence of some sort of creative entity outside the material world. (“Who made the Big Bang?”) However, in the end, faith is a choice. Thus the orthodox stance begins with a commitment to some sort of absolute, eternal, universal, and omnipresent Being.

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Along with belief in a divine Being goes a belief in the reality of all kinds of metaphysical concepts, such as, Truth, Love, Good, and Beautiful. These are understood not as opinions but as real, universal, and absolute ideas. They are concrete, the argument goes, but our understanding of them is mushy simply because we are bound by space and time and they are not. As a result, there is always a variety of opinions about what they mean. The orthodox player assumes that these opinions are all anchored on something solid, eternal, and real. The divine Being can be understood in many ways. It may consist of one God, a pantheon of gods, or an impersonal holy spirit of Truth and Light. From a strategic perspective, all that matters is that this metaphysical Being cares about what happens here on Earth. It imbues all action with significance. The Being pays attention to what we do. Believing all of this would be trivial if the Being would be kind enough to appear to our senses the way ordinary objects do—as a carrot, say. I know carrots exist because I can see them, touch them, and taste them. The divine Being that drives orthodox stances, however, is notoriously hidden. Reasons for this lack of obvious presence have been developed; for example, it is because the entity that creates all things cannot be a thing itself, and it cannot be an object with a location in space-time; instead, its existence is outside of space-time and, thus, invisible within it. Or, the entity has created this world as a test, and during the test, the teacher is absent. The game design perspective has a different explanation for the hiddenness of God: a God who was obviously manifested everywhere would be boring. A hidden God makes the universe more interesting. It adds mystery. God’s obscurity makes the life game into a quest—find God. As Czech sociologist and priest Tomas Halik remarked, “Without the painful experience of a world without God it is hard for us to grasp the meaning of religious seeking.”1 The secrecy of the divine Being is a feature, not a bug. It turns life into a frightening, shocking, and, for some, wonderful quest.

The Afterlife Orthodoxy requires belief in a great reward. The Being not only watches what we do, it rewards us when we do well. It has standards of behavior, and if we follow Tomas Halik, Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us, trans. G. Turner (New York: Random House, 2009): xiii–xiv.

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those standards, there will be a reward beyond anything we can imagine. The reward comes after death, of course (which is why monks almost look forward to dying). It goes by many names: Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana. Whatever the name, the great reward is what the orthodox player assumes he will get, if he plays well.

Obedience A third commitment is to obedience, specifically to an established religion. Orthodox strategies require following certain rules. The orthodox stance permits the player to actively interpret different situations and come to his own moral judgments, but, as a rule, he should try to live in the spirit and the letter of his chosen faith. The letter and spirit of the faith are maintained and taught by a formal institution, a church of some kind, and this places the orthodox player in community. As a result, the orthodox stance requires submission to training, leadership, and correction from others. It is a grouping strategy that accepts leadership.

Making God Real The orthodox stance requires a commitment to a theory of manifestation, a story explaining how the Being has influence in the world, despite its apparent absence. Miracles are an example of a theory of manifestation: The divine Being reaches into creation and knocks one proton into another, setting off a chain of events that cures the cancer, enables the genius, or makes the statue bleed. A more interesting theory, strategically speaking, is that the Being becomes manifest through our game play. Because the Being set up the victory conditions, and surrounded them with various commands, it has influenced what we do. The Being has not forced us to play one way or another, but it has made the path to victory go along one route and not another. People trying to win in orthodox fashion are likely to run along this path. Those who run along this path are the visible evidence of the Being’s influence. They are themselves the manifestation of the God. God becomes tangible here through the collective action of his followers. The idea that people are the manifestation of the divine has some support in economic theory, oddly enough. The social mechanism that makes the Being tangible is the same mechanism that makes money valuable. After all, why does money have value? By itself, money is worthless. A paper bill is a small scrap of paper, already covered with markings. You can’t write on it, wear it, or eat

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it. And yet, miracle of miracles, you can go to any market and exchange it for carrots. Carrots can be eaten; they have a clear and obvious value. Thus it all seems completely insane: the shopkeeper exchanges items with a clear value as food, for an item, a piece of paper, that is worth nothing. This is sheer madness until we recognize that there is another person—the farmer—who will also exchange carrots for these worthless slips of paper. And beyond the farmer there are countless others who accept the paper in return for other items: wood, fuel, clothes, and tools. Are all of these people insane? The answer is, yes and no. They are all crazy in treating scraps of paper as though they had the same worth as carrots. But because they are all crazy in the same way, their behavior makes sense. It can be rational to be irrational in certain situations, for example when you want to obtain something valuable in return for scraps of paper. A more famous example is that of Hamlet, who was considering killing his stepfather but feared being killed himself if found out. Hamlet acted crazily to deflect attention from his feelings, but he actually knew a hawk from a handsaw. Similarly, shared madness can enable important human behaviors. There would be no dancing if people did not come to the dance floor feeling a little nutty. With money, the madness is to assume that a valueless thing has value, and then, if everyone goes along, lo and behold it does have value. Assume something is real; have everyone act as though it is real; poof! It is real! This logic of mutually supporting assumption is a mechanism by which an organized religion makes its God manifest in the world. Jesus of Nazareth said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The actions of the 2 or 3, so the idea goes, make Jesus a real presence in the world. If everyone in the world believed that a certain paperclip was God almighty, then it would be, for all intents and purposes. Shrines would be built; reverence expected; festivals celebrated; all the trappings of religious performance, and all the related social effects, would emerge around the Holy Paperclip. This could happen even if some people didn’t believe it at all. It would still behoove the disbelievers to play along with the myth, for the same reason a person who disbelieves the value of money uses it anyway. To determine strategically prudent action, what matters is how society reacts. If the social world treats paper as money and a paperclip as God, then it is usually best to go along with those assumptions, whatever one may think of them. Thus belief in a divine Being, if widely shared, makes that Being a part of the real world. This social coordination argument only goes so far; it explains why anything can be money, or God, but it does not explain why certain things seem more

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likely to be valued or worshiped than others. Belief is more likely with certain versions of the Being than with others. However, these specific patterns of belief can also be understood in strategic terms. Consider money again: heavy metals were more likely to be used as money because they were small, divisible, and rare, features that made them easy to trade and hard to counterfeit. Similarly, some religious features are more likely to be adopted than others. For example, in most religions, the divine Being is typically depicted as Good rather than Evil or indifferent. There are gameplay reasons for this. Suppose we have a person on the edge of belief. He has always been a decent person, but in his heart, at this moment, he feels some kind of pull toward deeper belief. Then he sees two churches. One worships Evil, the other Good. He looks at the two congregations and realizes that each one is manifesting its version of the divine Being. The Evil congregation is going around stealing candy from babies, while the Good congregation is going around feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. If our hero joins the Evil church, he will assist in making Evil manifest in the world. If he joins the Good church, he will assist in making Good manifest in the world. He can ask himself, “Why would I make an Evil God manifest in the world, when I could instead make a Good God manifest here?” Once the player recognizes that he can be the hand of some God, he would reflect on what sort of hand he would like to be. Like most people, our hero would rather be good than bad, so he would choose to be the hand of a Good God.2 Because the vast majority of people have good hearts and seek goodness in the world, there are far more who would like to see a good God become real here. Thus, Good Gods are more likely to succeed here than evil ones. Because manifestation of the divine in social behavior has this strategic, game-theoretic basis, the age of a religious practice reveals something significant. An old religion must have a powerful strategic effect; otherwise its ability to coordinate people and make its God manifest would die out. Things supported by social strategic consensus can lose value; different forms of money have not only lost value but gone out of existence completely (beaver pelts, Confederate war bonds). Religious practices come and go. A church that persists for 2,000 years, however, is probably doing something right. There are religious practices in India that have continued in more or less the same form for 5,000 years.

I once asked myself, “Given the opportunity to make Jesus of Nazareth more real in our world, why wouldn’t I?”

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Something that survives so long must be moving its participants in a persistently credible and valuable way.

Public Acts of Worship The discussion of manifestation-as-social-equilibrium reveals a final commitment of the orthodox stance: it has a public face. Any stance can have its private moments, but orthodoxy is distinguished by requiring players to perform certain moves in the public eye. Catholics are expected to attend a public worship once a week. If you don’t attend Mass regularly, you’re not really following the religion. This requirement of public worship makes strategic sense: How can one know that people believe in a given religion if one never sees them doing it? Public worship makes the manifested God visible to others, in the form of all those kneeling people. Often, as with kneeling, acts of worship seem absurd. Why would God care whether people knelt before him or not? The absurdity of worship is not a bug, however, but another strategic feature. Strange practices are a way for the religion to make itself noticeable and therefore manifest. In the cult of the Holy Paperclip, imagine two forms of public worship. In one, the believers kneel and bow and make the Sign of the Clip on their foreheads. In another, they take sheaves of paper and use paperclips to clip them together. The latter, unlike the former, seems a normal use of paperclips and therefore makes worship invisible. If this were the case, how would anyone be able to tell who was a follower of the Holy Paperclip and who was not? Without that knowledge, there’s no religious community. The orthodox player must reveal himself to others, often through absurd acts, in order to gain the benefits of the community. Public worship reveals membership and also serves as a credibility test. How do we know that someone really believes? Economists who use game theory to study bargaining and negotiation have developed theories of “credible commitment,” and one finding from these theories is that a person can be relied on to keep his promises to the extent that it costs him to violate them. In a similar way, if it costs someone a great deal to do something, and he does it anyway, then we can believe that he really cares about it. Thus, one way to separate earnest believers from the lukewarm is to require absurd and difficult public rituals. Kneeling is uncomfortable. Kneeling before a wooden statue is humiliating. A person who willingly accepts the discomfort and embarrassment of kneeling in front of a statue in a public place must have some level of dedication to whatever beliefs are being honored.

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Victory Conditions The fundamental question at the heart of Christian morality: “How must I act in order to have eternal life?”3 In the orthodox stance, there is one clear way to win: go to heaven. Achieving this goal, however, is not easy. The available guidance is complex, but again this is a feature, not a bug. How interesting would it be to live in a universe where the path to salvation was obvious and easy? There are games like that, such as Candyland. The game has a path with different colored spaces, and a deck of cards with different colors. The player draws a card and advances to the next space of that color. It is impossible not to get to the goal. Candyland is one path with no choices.4 A mechanical hand could play the game 100,000 times and arrive at the goal every time. It is not possible to fail at Candyland. If the orthodox life were like this game, everyone would win, because there is no first or last in heaven. Add this feature to Candyland—it doesn’t matter who comes in first—and it becomes a game in which no one can lose and nothing happens. Children might enjoy a game like that, but adults certainly don’t. Mature people are interested in games where the victory condition is clear, but the road to victory is neither completely clear nor easy. That is precisely how orthodox conceptions of heaven work: the goal is clear, but the path is a challenging mystery. Religions do offer clues to the mystery of the heavenly journey. They teach people in general terms what the path to victory looks like and how you are supposed to walk it. In some cases, the formal documents about good living can reach to thousands of pages. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, a mere summary of the faith, occupies 825 pages. From a game design perspective, the teachings of a church can be interpreted in two ways. One sees them as rules: follow these rules and you will get to heaven; break one of them and you won’t. The other sees them as victory conditions: the closer you can get to following these norms, the more likely you are to win. The latter seems more sensible; catechisms don’t have the content that would be expected in a rule book. When designers write game rules, they expect them to be followed; otherwise the game breaks. When they write victory conditions, they are trying to direct behavior in certain ways without dictating what players do. If the Russians get three victory points for controlling Warsaw, the Russian player is likely to go there. It is an Nault, 92. In the words of Gareth, an English gamer frustrated at the agonized play of a colleague, “If you want to play a game without difficult choices, go play fucking Candyland!”

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incentive, not a rule. In a similar way, a religious catechism is not a rulebook but an exposition of the path to victory. The final question in this discussion of victory conditions is what heaven actually is. Nobody knows, of course, because nobody comes back from the afterlife to report on what happened. Therefore religions speak about heaven analogically: “Heaven is like a beautiful garden, with little white flowers.” There are some rather more abstract notions: “It is eternal union with God.” Whatever it is, heaven only needs to have one feature for it to serve as an adequate victory condition: it has to be great. So long as heaven is a lot better than any pain here on Earth, it serves its strategic role as an effective victory condition. Heaven is said to be so amazing and wonderful and glorious that everyone should want to get there, whatever it takes. It is the prize beyond all prizes. Entry into heaven is so good that it justifies any experience, any suffering, any work, any tragedy, and any surrender. Heaven is said to be so wonderful that every player in life’s game should, in terms of strategic rationality, do everything he can to get there.

Strategies The strategies promoted by the orthodox stance bear an uncanny resemblance to the strategies needed to win well-designed games. There is an aspect of ethereal beauty in the complexity of it all. We have already mentioned several features of orthodoxy that seem odd or cumbersome at first blush, but have a strategic explanation. Things like the hidden God and the difficult road to heaven are similar to games where there is mystery and challenge. An obvious God and an easy road to heaven would make for a boring game of life. Things are more interesting if God is absent while we are playing and if the victory conditions are challenging. This combination of mystery and challenge is reflected in the depth and complexity of strategies in the orthodox way of playing.

Behave Orthodoxy implies following the rules of a religion; the orthodox player is willing to go along with the institution in spirit and letter. In most cases—most religions being oriented toward good behavior—this means trying to be a good person. The religion gives much guidance about what “being good” entails, but the advice is often general rather than specific. The player has to interpret what it means to be good. This puts the player into an interesting dance with the religion,

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interrogating its writings while trying to discern what is required in specific situations. The result is a mix of religious command and personal judgment as to what is good and right. The orthodox strategy undertakes the work of discerning good and evil and tries to always find and execute the best action.

Seek Redemption Given that no one is perfect, an orthodox player needs to develop a strategy for dealing with mistakes. Most religions have some concept of recovery, a doctrine explaining how a fallen member can get back into the good graces of the religion. In the Roman Catholic Church, the doctrine goes under the name “redemption.” Redemption is the counterintuitive idea that good comes out of evil: when people do bad things, it forces them to turn to God for mercy, and turning to God is always a good thing. Faults are so important to orthodox strategy that one may even come to boast of them, as does St. Paul: We even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope. Rom. 5:3

These ideas of recovery and redemption are tightly related to game design approaches to player engagement. Game designers understand that players will keep playing a game as long as the game remains engaging. There are two fail states: boredom and frustration. A bored player does not have enough challenge; a frustrated player has too much. The ideal design is one where the challenge matches the player’s level of skill and interest. The player should never feel that winning is easy nor that winning is impossible. Rather, he should feel that winning is possible but requires ongoing effort. The player’s attention to the game is both needed and potent: it is necessary and sufficient for game success. Games with this kind of challenge structure are known to be the most engaging. Designing this challenge structure is difficult, however, because each player has different skills. Designers must create systems that keep all the players in the space between boredom and frustration. The redemption doctrines of orthodox religion (in this Catholic reading of orthodoxy, in any case) do exactly this: they adjust the challenge level to match the religious skill level of each believer. The idea of redemption is that bad behavior can be cashed in for points toward heaven, and if you have been very bad, asking for mercy gets you many, many points. Different religions have

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different ways of making the idea concrete, but the basic argument is this: a believer who is truly anguished at failing to adhere to the religion is, by that very anguish, showing himself to be a true believer. His anguish leads him to God, and this turning to God is treated as an extraordinarily good act. Thus the believer who falls and returns is higher than before. His failure was necessary for him to grow in holiness. This mechanism engages both saints and sinners. Saints: a saint is very good at religion and could easily get bored. “I know I’m going to Heaven. There’s nothing to do down here.” But instead a saint cares deeply about his faults, however small they may be. St. Theresa of Lisieux was upset at herself for being annoyed about a clicking noise made by another nun. St Augustine was anguished over stealing pears. These feelings made the saints turn to God with all the more fervor. These tiny sins engaged them with the game of God. Meanwhile, people with huge sins are also engaged. Consider the alcoholic. He understands his drinking is not good. One weekend he binges and winds up in jail. As a result of this awful experience, he resolves to stop drinking entirely. In the process of controlling his drinking, he discovers tools and tricks that help. In time he bumps into other alcoholics, and he shares these tricks with them. He goes beyond that: he commits himself to helping other alcoholics to stay sober. In doing so, the alcoholic is now doing more good in the world than he ever did before. He has redeemed the sin of binge drinking on that one weekend. It turned into something good. Thus, under the doctrine of redemption, even the worst sinner can go to Heaven because turning to God, in the pit of Evil, is a greatly moral act. Great sinners are therefore just as engaged in the game of God. The effect of redemption on strategy can be expressed in terms of systems theory. Without redemption, the moral life is a positive feedback loop that heads in a negative direction: 1. Sin 2. Therefore God hates me 3. Therefore there is no reason to be good 4. Sin more This process amplifies the amount of sin committed. With redemption, it becomes a negative feedback loop: 1. Sin 2. Therefore confess

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3. Therefore God loves me 4. Sin less This process dampens the amount of sin. The transformation of moral life from self-amplifying to self-dampening is the strategic role of the redemption and confession aspect of organized religion. There are many redemptive systems like this in games. In board games, they are known as “catch-up” mechanisms; they are designed to dampen the natural positive feedback loop that often comes with being in the lead. In some board games, whoever is farthest behind goes first. In videogames, a challenging task can usually be attempted again and again until the player succeeds; no progress is lost. Videogames often allow players to set the difficulty level. There are countless mechanisms for making every player feel as though success is possible, but not easy. Orthodoxy stresses the same thing: heaven is always possible, but never guaranteed. The religious virtue of hope is defined precisely in this way. To be hopeful is to balance between despair and presumption. This is exactly how a designer wants a player to feel at the start of a game: not presuming to have an easy time nor despairing of succeeding, but hopeful that success will be achieved. Balancing players between these two states is the purpose of complexity in games. Playing a complex game earnestly is like seeking redemption sincerely: always getting better, but never perfect.

Suffering Is OK Orthodox strategy insists that we accept suffering. This subverts our thinking about well-being. In the hedonistic stance, the most important thing is to feel good. Feeling bad, at any time, is a fail state in that stance. In the orthodox stance, feeling bad is considered, if not good, at least acceptable. A Saint Meinrad monk once remarked in a lecture: “There is no road to heaven that does not pass through the cross.” No one wins this game without going through suffering. This is the same as saying, in a board game, you cannot build enough power plants to win unless you destroy some of the ones you already own. Good game design, in fact, thrives on these kinds of trade-offs. It forces players into situations where they must give something up in order to advance. Players suffer in having to give up resources they have collected, in surrendering territory, in paying fines and fees, in taking damage, in waiting for cooldown timers. Without the penalties and costs, the game would be too easy and therefore

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boring. Unpleasant moments are integral to the game experience. No game is complete without them. The orthodox stance, at least in this Catholic version of it, treats human suffering the same way. Orthodoxy treats suffering is an unavoidable part of existence. It joins the player to others. It gives perspective. It challenges the player to cope and respond. The player would not be fully human without it. Suffering endows actions with deep significance; the possibility of either creating suffering or relieving it is what distinguishes heroes from villains. Without suffering, the game of life would have no meaning. Nothing in it would be important. The orthodox stance therefore recommends that suffering be understood as not some unacceptable aberration, but a normal part of life. The normality of suffering creates a strategic advantage: it allows the player to stay focused on the final goal. When the injustices of this world come raining down on our heads, the natural reaction is to seek revenge. This happens in games as well: if another player knocks you down, you will want to knock him down. Revenge strategies are a distraction, however. Hurting another player for the sake of hurting him, or attacking randomly in a blind rage, is typically harmful to the cause of winning. Rageful, justice-seeking behavior is tempered by religions; they urge followers to be at peace regardless of life’s tragedies and pains. Monks are cheerful not because they have never experienced tragedy, but because they can place tragedy in a coherent context that soothes the rage and sorrow. Thus the orthodox stance offers an emotionally healthy treatment of the pains of tragedy— accept, be healed, and carry on with the things that really matter.

Plan for Eternity The start of this chapter quotes St. Theresa of Calcutta’s advice that being faithful is better than succeeding at anything. The Benedictine monks work not to accomplish anything, but because they see God in their work, indeed in everything they do. The orthodox player is always looking at eternity, not immediate rewards. This takes some of the zest out of more immediate opportunities for “doing” religion. Take martyrdom. One would think that the orthodox strategy recommends that people die for their faith, but that is not so. Facing martyrdom in A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More is confronted by his daughter Meg, who does not understand why he might try to evade it. He responds: If he [God] suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can. And yes, Meg, then we can clamour like

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champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it’s God’s part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.

This seems an awfully passive approach to virtue: escape if you can. It is the precise opposite of the heroic stance. The hero actively seeks martyrdom and, if she gets it, she may win the heroic game. But she will not win the orthodox game. The suicide bomber is a case in point: those folks may go out with a bang and become heroes to their community, but they are not going to heaven, whatever they may think. Among the orthodox, the lack of zeal for martyrdom and other self-serving moments is intentional. Orthodox strategy plays for the long game.

Stability Orthodoxy plays well if applied with consistency and commitment; there should be stability of heart. The orthodox stance recommends picking a religion and sticking with it. Be respectful of old traditions. Do not clamor for instant change when conditions are less than ideal. Seek lifelong personal relationships and, of course, a firm and constant relationship with the divine Being, cemented by regular religious observance. The orthodox player is relentless and indefatigable. In every aspect of life, he seeks depth after depth after depth. The same short prayers, repeated thousands of times over the course of years, turn the hours and days into poetry, revealing an ever-wider variety of images and insights. The same texts, heard over and over again, gain new meaning. In strategic terms, these players are making many investments, doing many little things now that will pay off handsomely later. The orthodox player can feel victory coming, when his old age is filled with loving friends and family and a fond remembrance of many good deeds done in the past. Stability also implies a toughness in playing. Orthodoxy lays significance on everything the player does; every action can yield or lose a significant number of victory points. Nothing is trivial. Because it puts significance into everything we do, orthodox play can sustain motivation where other stances might make a player give up. In orthodoxy, a person’s life is seen as a vocation, a calling from God. Performing one’s vocation is one part of holiness. This means that the benefit is in the doing, not the state of achievement. A person who is pursuing his college degree for the greater glory of God will keep on going despite a bad test result. His vocation is to serve God by going to class and studying, and he will keep doing that until he feels the vocation lifted from him.

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Finally, stability implies finding a community and sticking with it. “Being in community,” as a strategy, has some paradoxical elements. At first blush, it might seem that the way to build a nice community of mutually supportive people is to be tolerant, to accept everyone, to extend the hand of friendship as widely as possible. No. Anyone who has been involved with a player guild in a game understands that opening the door to all comers is guaranteed to destroy all hope of community. In games, open-access communities (“pickup groups”) stink, in terms of both commonality and effectiveness. They are firmly avoided by gamers who create organizations, who use all sorts of barriers to keep out bad players: guild charters, achievements, applications, nomination requirements, and so forth. Truly effective player groups admit no one unless he has developed a strong reputation for effective play and emotional intelligence. In a similar way, church communities are more restrictive, not less, as they are older and more stable. The Catholic Church is more than 2,000 years old; its rulebook is heaviest in Christendom; it is hard to get in. Many people who want to be monks or nuns are turned away because they are not acceptable to the community. It makes sense: community is built on trust, and trust is encouraged by careful selection of new members, admitting only those who will live by the rules. In the same way, we don’t admit people into our gaming circles unless they are willing to avoid cheating and keep their tempers in check. Both game groups and orthodox religions have fairly strong expectations about the behavior of new members; being selective in this way is the key to stable and effective community.

Invest The orthodox stance assumes that the rewards come after life. The player has to be patient. On the other hand, this reflects good game design: games are more interesting when victory is not determined until the very end. Orthodoxy proposes three specific approaches to this situation: invest, invest, invest. How much to invest? Not everything, but quite a lot. In the words of Jesus of Nazareth: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

Live with Spirits The final entry in this list of strategic considerations is the ethereal. Orthodox strategies involve believing in the reality and concreteness of metaphysical

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concepts: Love, Truth, Good, even the divine Being itself. What else might be living in the metaphysical realm? The orthodox player (in the Catholic version, anyway) is comfortable with the possibility of angels and devils, with miracles and punishments and God-inspired winds that come along at just the right time. Interest in such things can go too far (as we will discuss in the Assessment later), but at a certain level, such spirits add richness to the player’s life. It is inspiring to imagine that there is a friendly angel watching, guiding, and whispering. Being prepared for something amazing to happen, being always aware that a miracle might take place, as unlikely as it seems, puts a frisson in a daily life that can otherwise be awfully boring. Two of these metaphysical possibilities seem especially relevant in the contemporary world. First, think of all the people who have died before us. A good number of them were holy by any standard. Now imagine them sitting in council, observing our lives and our actions in real time. All those gray-haired heads, with eons of experience and unlimited grasp of the Good, watching. When we do poorly, they offer a collective facepalm. When we do well, they nod their heads in approval. In game terms, this image is similar to the images we conjure of previous players of our games. The ghosts of the past watch over us; we play well if we play as well as they did.5 A second relevant image is the dark one. Who can think of the Nazi era and not have the gut feeling that something terribly evil was at work there? Mass murder and serial killing: no other species does anything like this. The mind and heart recoil. These acts are unnatural. Perhaps they are actually unnatural, that is, inspired by some evil influence from outside the natural world. This notion is acceptable to the orthodox player. If the orthodox player were to discover that serial child killers were urged into their acts by Satan, he would not be surprised. Does this make the world more grim? Absolutely. But it also gives the player a workable and motivating strategic context. Stopping child killers and resisting Nazis is no longer just something we do for the team: it is the command of God almighty. We are commanded to resist evil to our last breath. Resisting evil involves more than just being a nice guy. It involves awfully heavy and eternally important work. Because it allows for such significant quests, the orthodox stance is perhaps more motivating than any other.

In the game Dark Souls, ghostly images of previous players who died are used as hints about how to approach certain enemies.

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Assessment As with all stances, the orthodox stance has its upsides and downsides. We’ll start with the negatives.

God The orthodox stance begins with faith in a thing that is not apparent to the eye. This faith is given to something outside of this world, something absolute, eternal, and universal. Arguments may be made about how sensible this faith may be, but at the end of the day, the entity in which the orthodox person believes just isn’t here in the way a chair is. The operations of God are not discoverable the way the operations of the molecule are. The Jewish prophet Isaiah writes: “Truly with [Israel] God is hidden.” The hiddenness of God greatly disturbs the logical mind. Pascal wrote that “God is a hidden God . . . He has left men in a darkness.”6 That bothered him; in his main theological work, the Pensées, Pascal the mathematician repeatedly attempts to explain in rational terms why God would be so irritatingly absent. The arguments don’t come off well (otherwise all mathematicians would be religious today). It is hard to begin with the absence of something and conclude that it exists and is knowable. The number 0 was not understood to be an actual number until AD 700. Like 0, the concept of God is frustrating for the scientific, logical mind. Being forced to commit to the paradoxes of a hidden yet supposedly all-powerful Being makes the orthodox stance difficult. In the end, faith is a choice. It can be made acceptable, but not through solid argument and evidence. Rather, it comes to a person through a combination of rational argument and gut feeling. The orthodox player has to make this leap. The only person who would make such a leap is a player who wants faith. Wanting faith may itself be a problem. From a materialist point of view, wanting to believe in fairies and spirits is a sign of insanity. Letting the mind wander anywhere near faith is a terrible idea, according to the materialist conception: it fills the mind with false notions that distract from reality. It would be far better, in this view, to shield yourself from the nonsense. There are significant negative mental consequences from the choice to have faith. It is a commitment to a life of doubt, about existence and one’s own sanity. Pensées, 242.

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The divine Being is hidden, and yearning for a hidden thing may be crazy. The orthodox player lives in constant doubt about this most basic commitment.

Superstition When orthodox players choose faith, they open themselves to imagining that metaphysical forces are at work everywhere. At one level this is ridiculous, at another it is quaint and useful; but if taken too far it can be self-defeating and dangerous. Someone looking around for evil to defeat is likely to be evil himself. A person who thinks angels watch over his children may not give them proper medical care. The orthodox stance can lead to self-defeating theories about forces that are not there.

Hypocrisy First, a word about hypocrisy: it happens to anyone who makes a serious commitment to a moral standard. Good moral standards are tough ones; they make demands that are challenging to meet. As a result, we will all, at times, fail to live up to our standards. Hypocrisy of this sort is a sign of a person who is trying to be better. Then there is glaring hypocrisy: people whose lives are in glaring contradiction to their stated values. Religious people are often at fault in this way. Religious people can be obnoxious about the sins of others; they can be judgmental and sanctimonious, exactly the opposite of how they are supposed to behave. They can be supposedly full of love but offer nothing but snarling hate; devoted to peace but go about slaughtering their enemies; big, fat, lust-filled, wealthy, arrogant egomaniacs who claim to have given up everything for God; preachers who sell prayers for money; ministers who abuse the children in their care. The hypocrisy of religious people, their propensity to act in ways that directly and obviously contravene everything they supposedly hold to be sacred, is not accidental. There are several reasons why hypocrisy goes with the territory of orthodoxy. Religious people are called to be saintly, but being holy is beyond the ability of almost everyone. Nobody can hold themselves to all the rules in the catechism. In Catholicism, falling away from holiness is understood as a natural part of the process; it leads to reconciliation and redemption. But it can also lead to an attitude of self-excuse, which can lead to more than the occasional sin. Having a personal relationship with God can lead us to think we can convince

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God that such-and-such an action is OK and can be repeated again and again. A pattern of bad behavior can go on for years, with the orthodox player proclaiming his virtue all the while.

Passivity Orthodoxy encourages obedience, which can easily turn into a robotic approach to life. The orthodox player risks abandoning all strategic thought. He may assume that the rules of the religion clearly and simply identify what is to be done in any situation. But this would be a false assumption; the rules of religions need constant interpretation. As a monk once said, “I have concerns about anyone who is scrupulous in their religious practice.” Failure to think actively leads the orthodox player into two kinds of errors. On the one hand, the passive player will fail to notice things he ought to be doing. An orthodox player who mechanically goes to church every Sunday but doesn’t act on the teachings is putting victory at risk. On the other hand, the passive player will apply abstract rules in complex situations, leading to “church lady” behavior: heartless condemnation of anything and anyone who breaks the tiniest rule.7 Fundamentalism, legalism, and self-righteousness are the result of a simplistic and passive approach to doctrines. A more subtle and active understanding is needed to actually win the game and get to heaven.

Burdensome Next in this litany of problems is the trouble, the bother. The daily practice of orthodoxy is burdensome. As we explained earlier, it has to be, otherwise one’s commitment to the faith is not credible. Only someone who actually believed Catholicism would go through all the kneeling and praying and standing and reciting, not to mention mandatory Mass attendance at the bewildering multitude of Holy Days of Obligation. The Roman Catholic Starter Kit includes the following: ●●

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In defense of church ladies: in my experience I have encountered few that are actually like the character portrayed by Dana Carvey on the US TV program Saturday Night Live. On the contrary, they tend to be wise, gentle, and caring. A person would do well to end his life in the care of religious women. Moreover, I have it on authority that their cookies contain no calories.

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Catechism Rosary with How-To Brochure Holy Water vial Diocesan newspaper Books of sentimental prayers (12), assorted Saint candles (3), assorted Saint medals (5), assorted Prayer cards (382), assorted Portrait of the Pope Portrait of the Virgin Mary Portrait of Frank Sinatra

I have 6,000 books of inspirational reading that will remain forever in the tomb of my highest shelf. Sometimes it seems like two Catholics cannot say hello without pushing a prayer card on each other. Just managing the inventory is a pain. Quite seriously, though, every version of orthodoxy requires a time commitment. These commitments seem unrelated to the goal of the stance. If the goal is to get into heaven, how far is it advanced by saying another Hail Mary? Wouldn’t it be better to go out and actually help the world? To those who don’t feel the faith, the idea of wasting every Sunday morning in a church service seems absurd. Being orthodox is a serious commitment of time and effort to activities that do not seem particularly beneficial or noble.

The Evil Church Orthodoxy requires obedience. What if you’ve sworn obedience to an organization that is evil? Many Germans in the 1930s swore oaths of loyalty to A. Hitler. For all we know, the Roman Catholic Church may not just be a bad church; it may be the Whore of Babylon, the church of Satan, placed here specifically to lead people away from the One True God. If that were true, over 1 billion people who think they are going to heaven are not. In the twenty-first century, people have learned to be careful about swearing allegiance. It is an advantage of living in an ironic age—not obeying anyone or anything prevents a person from becoming implicated in the wrongdoing of an evil institution. This seems a justifiable point of view, history being what it is. Why obey the dictates of a church that burned Giordano Bruno? It was 400 years ago, but still. Any organized religion is managed by people, and people can be awful. Choosing to obey makes a person open to following evil commands.

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Tragedy Religions claim to relieve suffering, through doctrines of acceptance and forgiveness. Anyone who has experienced serious tragedy finds these doctrines petty, ridiculous, and insulting. I have witnessed the attempts of “church people” to offer guidance and support to a young mother of four whose husband had just died of lung cancer at the age of forty-four. Their consolations were ineffective, to say the least. In fact, they left their intended target more rageful than ever. My wife is a grief counselor, and she has learned that people often say terribly incorrect things to someone who has experienced loss. The more common trite, paternalist, inconsiderate statements include the following: ●●

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He is in a better place. I know how you are feeling—my cat died last year. The sun will shine tomorrow! I knew you were feeling awful, so I made you lasagna. I’m going to miss her more than you are! It will all turn out well in the end. This is all part of God’s plan.

(Counselors say that the best thing to do is to ask them how they are feeling. Then listen.) The last one—tragedy being part of God’s plan—is no reassurance to victims of tragedy and would result in church people being impaled on their own icons if the sorrowful were less patient. Seeing how a tragedy fits into “God’s plan” can take decades, if it is worth doing at all. Thus one of orthodoxy’s major problems is that it recommends the acceptance of suffering even to people whose suffering is unjust and unbearable. Telling such people to cheer up adds insult to their injuries. The claim that tragedy can be redeemed—that good can come out of bad—is often hard to believe.

The Problem of Freedom Switching now to less negative aspects of orthodoxy: the orthodox stance presents a player with a paradox in terms of freedom. As we have just seen, being obedient to others is fraught with risks. It also takes away a person’s freedom. When a player chooses orthodoxy, he also chooses to surrender some decisions to others. Solemn vows to that effect are required in almost every religion. But it flies against the spirit of our age to surrender autonomy. In a time that prizes

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so highly the freedom to do and be whatever we want, giving up freedom is a significant negative of the orthodox stance. However, recall the earlier discussion of freedom-to versus freedom-from. Orthodoxy requires that we surrender freedom-to, but it enhances freedomfrom. Religious followers are told not to do whatever they want. They are told to restrict and calm their interest in the things of this world. But as their interest in the world decreases, they are increasingly free from the stress and disappointment of not getting worldly things. Their freedom-from rises as their freedom-to declines. Orthodoxy encourages the self-control that makes more freedom possible. This dynamic is important because, as we saw with the hedonistic stance, doing “whatever you want” usually restricts a person’s freedom and, in terms of the orthodox stance, keeps a person from heaven. The alcoholic experience is again instructive: by drinking all he wants, the alcoholic puts himself in a position where he loses friends, breaks laws, and commits acts that restrict his freedom; as it happens, all this makes it harder to get into heaven. A monk puts himself in a position where he gains friends and follows laws, avoiding acts that restrict his freedom. The monk is more free than the alcoholic, and is more likely to win the heaven game too.

Coherence The orthodox stance has many faults, but incoherence is not among them. The stance is internally consistent. The core assumption, that there is a God to be worshiped formally, leads logically to certain life strategies, that lead logically to certain daily tactics, that lead logically to the victory condition. As a package, it fits together: believe in God, join a church, be a good person, go to Heaven. Coherence and internal consistency is an area where the orthodox stance shines in comparison to other stances. We have described how the hedonistic stance does not lead to its own victory condition; recklessly pursuing good feelings is a sure way to feel bad. Similarly, the absurd hero’s stance does not fit together; it combines radical denial of the Good with a commitment to doing good. It makes no sense; it is absurd, which is why the philosophers used that word to describe their kind of hero. In these cases, the stance does not work internally; it makes assumptions that lead to behaviors that point the player away from the victory condition. The orthodox stance does not have this problem. The behavior it recommends is the behavior that will achieve the victory condition it assumes.

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Does internal coherence matter? It certainly does from the standpoint of pure logic, but it might not matter from the standpoint of daily life. Many absurd heroes live comfortably with the absurdity of doing good while rejecting the idea of absolute Good. In a similar way, many people of faith live comfortably with belief in a hidden god. The orthodox stance involves doubt about the initial assumption, while the absurd heroic stance involves doubt about the logic of action. Is it better to have vulnerable assumptions and a coherent strategy, as with orthodoxy, or robust assumptions and an incoherent strategy, as with absurd heroism? Which is better, to have doubt about our faith or doubt about our logic?

Engagement Orthodoxy is fun. It is fun because it enchants the world. Orthodoxy fills the world with spirit. It makes actions meaningful and turns life into a quest. The importance of quests in games is well known; quests unify gameplay and theme. Playing the mechanics of a game may be fun by itself, but when playing is part of a quest, it becomes part of a narrative. In orthodoxy, each person’s life is a spiritual quest. The orthodox stance imbues all of life with holy spirit. It is a valid orthodox strategy to do everything for the greater glory of God. The humblest task can be made into a prayer: “Lord, I am weeding this garden for you; I do it in honor of your name.” The state of the garden thus becomes a matter of cosmic significance. It changes from task to quest. By completing quests such as this, the orthodox player weaves a story of a humble person’s journey with God. The enchanting of daily life is one of the great advantages of orthodoxy in the present age. The contemporary world is disenchanted and that makes it boring. Boring as Hell, one might say without blaspheming. Hell can be imagined as a place where there is nothing interesting to do, no significant actions, nothing but endless, endless boredom. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that the modern world, with its train stations and electric lights, was significantly worse for the human spirit than the world of faerie.8 Our disenchanted existence is like a card game where every player plays throws down a random card, nothing happens, the deck is reshuffled, a new hand is dealt, and a random card is tossed out again, over and over, forever. Being condemned to play that game forever would be Hell indeed. Tolkien, 73–82.

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Orthodoxy enchants the world by reminding us of that metaphysical plane of existence where live the spirits and universals such as Truth, Evil, and Beauty. If these things exist, and our actions work toward or against them, our actions have a cosmic meaning. A new parent will look at the sonogram and may suddenly realize that his actions do matter, because now he has a little baby who depends on him for a good start in life. And yet his sense of significance depends on something else: the parent has to accept that the baby matters in some way. Is the baby’s well-being significant? Significance is not to be found in the baby’s atoms; it is hidden from the world of space-time. The parent must decide whether the significance is there or not. The orthodox stance says that there is indeed significance in a human life, no matter how unimportant that life may be in human affairs and that that significance resides up above and beyond the material plane. Orthodoxy sees a metaphysical realm that gives significance to all people and all the world. Jesus of Nazareth told his followers, “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted” (Matt. 10: 29–30). John of Patmos wrote: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 21:4). No tear goes unnoticed by God. In the orthodox stance, all things, even the tears of a little baby, are said to be imbued with great significance. Everything is enchanted. For such significance to exist requires a prior step—faith in the existence of metaphysical things. The existence of such things, if true, must have some kind of miraculous quality to it. There is no evidence of Absolute Truth in the material world, just as there is no evidence other than our feelings that human consciousness actually exists. Philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that such metaphysical things must emerge from within physical matter, as though every atom had a little Soul wrapped inside.9 Or maybe there is a God who just waved his hand and made it all appear. Either way, the significance in which orthodoxy believes is not explained by natural causes. The universe may or may not contain the miracles necessary to create human consciousness, but it is much more fun to act as though it does. A world with good and evil is much more fun than a world without them. Without good and evil, what’s the point of going on a quest? The world is an empty place with nothing to do unless there is some commitment to metaphysical values like Truth and Falsehood, Right and Wrong, Love and Hate. Again, this is not the Nagel, 56–8.

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place to debate the validity of the various philosophies, but it is certain that people who believe in good, evil, devils, saints, quests, sin, and holiness have a much more fun game to play. The Sacred makes for a much better game.

Beauty Orthodoxy creates an audience for things of great beauty. Architecture, sculpture, painting, and music thrive when their goal is the depiction of the sublime. Travelers to Europe do not worship in the cathedrals, but they certainly do appreciate them. Those buildings were erected by orthodox players.

Awe A person committed to the orthodox stance may encounter moments where game play goes beyond the ordinary and feels like a glimpse of the infinite. The reader may reflect on a particularly sublime moment in a favorite sport: that home run, that world record, that miracle on ice, that moment in which the game opened a window into something much bigger than the game, something like the flow of existence, or a story far too grand to tell. Or, perhaps it was a sublime moment in connection to nature: a sunset, a mountain peak, a great storm. These are moments in which the sublime becomes real to us, and under orthodoxy, there is always a possibility that worship and events will combine to create a moment of unutterable awe. It is one thing to ratiocinate harmlessly on the assumptions and strategies of the orthodox stance, quite another to perceive directly its reality. The stance says there is a divine Being and that everything we do is important. On those assumptions, gameplay proceeds as usual. But it is not uncommon for players along the orthodox way to claim a direct encounter with God. For some, the assumption that God exists is not an assumption, they say, but it is a lived reality. Reports of encounters with the divine may all be bunkum, of course: “I saw Jesus in my toast!” But if we stop for a moment and imagine: what if the initial assumption of the orthodox stance were actually true—true in the same way that mathematics is true. It would be startling to say the least, and perhaps terrifying. It would mean that every action actually has significance that God is watching. Right now. Hints of the reality of God are awe-inspiring. When an orthodox player looks at the stars and sees the hand of God, a frisson of respectful fear arises at so great a creation.

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My family was visiting Rome and we went around to all the sites. Many of the ones that were said to bear great religious significance did not move me personally; they were primarily of historical and sociological interest. The Sacra Scala, for example, the “sacred steps,” are said to be the steps up which Jesus climbed for his audience with Pontius Pilate. Since they only came to Rome hundreds of years later, I had little belief in their authenticity. I imagined some local shepherd telling a gullible Christian envoy, “For 30 silver pieces I will show you the stones on which Jesus walked.” Then of course he takes the fellow to an old Roman latrine, whose stones end up in Rome as the Sacra Scala. Despite their doubtful history, millions of people have made their way to these steps and dutifully knelt and prayed there. Interesting, but not unsettling in any way. But then we took a tour of the excavations under St. Peter’s Basilica, the central building of the Roman Catholic faith. St. Peter is revered by Catholics as the first Pope, the recipient of a command directly from the mouth of Jesus: go build me a church and run it. Specifically, the command was: You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matt. 16: 18–19)

Peter is believed to have been martyred in Rome, and according to legend St. Peter’s Basilica is located over his burial site. Indeed, it was claimed that the altar of St. Peter’s is located directly over his grave. Some of that checks out; the area was a graveyard in the first century. Christian textual sources report Peter’s presence in Rome and even describe his manner of death (crucified upside down). Three hundred years later, Emperor Julian the Apostate wrote that the location of Peter’s tomb was being worshiped in secret.10 Peter, like God, seemed to be hidden from modern eyes. Our guide told us that for some reason, in the middle of the Second World War, Pope Pius XII decided to excavate the area under the altar of St. Peter’s. Several dozen meters underground, archaeologists found a necropolis, a complex of Roman mausoleums, as one would expect in an ancient Roman Julian the Apostate, Against the Gallilaeans (AD 361–3): “But the worthy John, since he perceived that a great number of people in many of the towns of Greece and Italy had already been infected by this disease, and because he heard, I suppose, that even the tombs of Peter and Paul were being worshipped—secretly, it is true, but still he did hear this—he, I say, was the first to venture to call Jesus God,” at http:​/​/www​​.ccel​​.org/​​ccel/​​pears​​e​/mor​​efath​​ers​/f​​i les/​​julia​​n​_apo​​state​​_gali​​le​ans​​_1​_te​​xt​ .ht​​m, observed August 23, 2019.

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graveyard. But they also found many scattered graves marked by humble stones. There was also an unusual series of small memorials, each one above the other in the layers of earth, the entire column being located directly beneath the altar of the Basilica above. The tour guide revealed that historical evidence and age data showed these to be altars of previous churches on the site, suggesting a practice of placing each new altar over the old. There was a devotion to one particular spot. As the tour went lower and lower into the earth under St. Peter’s, it offered views of more well-preserved Roman tombs and repeated glimpses of the different altars that were effectively stacked on one another. All very interesting. But of course, these altars were placed centuries after Peter’s lifetime. The punch line, I assumed, would come at the bottom of the stack, in a piece of ground whose significance could, at this late date, not be established. It was not surprising to me, then, to see that the bottom of the stack ended in a grave that was humble, not exalted. It appeared to be the grave of some Roman soldier. But then some disconcerting evidence about the grave was offered. The grave was covered with a slab that was apparently taken from another tomb, as if someone was trying to hide the identity of the person buried there. The slab was older than Peter. The grave itself was dated to Peter’s lifetime. Then we were shown the pattern of graves nearby. They were placed in a haphazardly circular formation, all roughly aligned around the central grave, pointing to it. The dates of the graves ranged from first century onward; these people died only a little bit later than Peter. It appeared as though the occupants of these graves desired to be buried as close as possible to this one grave, the one at the base of the column of altars, the column that went all the way up to the current altar in the middle of the Basilica. The guide reported that when the central grave was opened, it was empty. Nothing was found in the grave itself. However, directly over it was a small memorial, in stone. Next to the memorial was a wall. In the wall had been etched a small niche, and the niche had been lined with marble. Near the niche, a graffito had been scratched on the surface of the wall: “PETR...ENI” which is interpreted as “Peter is inside.” The niche, when opened, did contain a pile of bones. Pathology indicated that the bones were of a sixty-to-seventy-year-old man of robust constitution, about 5’ 7” in height. There was no skull, but legend says that Peter’s head is in Rome’s Basilica of St. John Lateran. There were no feet, but legend says that Peter was crucified upside down, in which case his feet would have been hacked off to remove the body.

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It was unsettling that so much of the legend of Peter’s tomb was being supported by archaeological evidence. It was extremely unsettling to imagine that the collective memory of a small cult of persecuted peasants could accurately record and store—and convey across hundreds of years—the location of a certain secret grave. It was unsettling because this same cult claimed to have recorded and stored a number of other bits of information, ones with far more significance, information which we tend to reject as mere legend. If the early Christians were telling the truth about St. Peter’s tomb, what other of their legends might be based in truth? Soon we got to the alleged tomb itself. We were able to look inside. A few moments later we came near the niche that says “Peter is inside” and could look at it. We then came up from the excavations, past basement walkways that contained chapels placed near the sacred stack of altars. These chapels, we were told, had served for hundreds of years as sacred worship places for popes and cardinals. Finally, we emerged on the main floor of St. Peter’s just in front of Bernini’s baldachin, whose twisting columns pull the eye up and up and up into the massive dome, just the latest marker in a long series placed over this one small spot on the earth. I confess that my general feeling was awe bordering on fear, an awe I am feeling a little bit even now as I write. It is unnerving to find competent evidence supporting a story you had assumed was a fairy tale. It opens the possibility that other enchantments might very well be real. And that thought is quite unsettling indeed. It is scary to sense that God really is watching and that our actions really do matter. It makes the game feel altogether serious.

Summary In strategic terms, the orthodox stance is separated from the absurd heroic stance discussed in the last chapter by only the thinnest of lines. This similarity emerges despite the to-the-death opposition they have at the philosophical layer. One can imagine a nun and a mathematics professor shrieking at one another about philosophy, then joining together to help an old lady cross the street. The mathematician does it out of an ungrounded commitment to the Good. The nun does it for the greater glory of a God whose existence is hard to believe. Nonetheless, they make the same choice of action. From a strategic perspective, the absurd hero and the orthodox believer look very much the same. In terms

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of daily tactics, there is almost no difference between doing good things for no reason and doing good things to satisfy a God that nobody can see. It may seem odd or inexplicable that someone would follow the commands of a hidden God, just as it is strange to see people who say they believe in nothing doing many good acts anyway. The goal in our book, however, is not to resolve whether this behavior is strange in some global, philosophical sense, but rather to analyze it as a strategy. Our purpose in this chapter was to ask how someone who has dedicated themselves to a God or a strict religion of some sort can play a strategically sound game in life. The answer is yes. Furthermore, one advantage of the orthodox stance is worth repeating: it is internally consistent. One may question the existence of the God assumed at the start, but, given that assumption, everything in orthodoxy checks out: group membership, obedience, doing Good, trying to get into Heaven, and so on. Orthodoxy is a strong stance in the sense that it demands much and offers much, much like a complex game. It says that the best way to live is to play by a set of rules. It sees the universe as a deep, complex game of virtuous thought and behavior. Orthodoxy offers heaven and its rules of admission as a set of victory conditions, difficult but not impossible, feasible for anyone yet a challenge to all. In its attention to metaphysics and self-control, orthodoxy seems to go against the spirit of an age which favors disenchantment and maximal immediate choice. At the same time, as we wrote earlier, the modern world seems to have an acedia problem; and if boredom with a disenchanted world is the problem, then orthodoxy’s enchantments are a solution worth considering. The orthodox stance is fun. Perhaps fun is not the right word for a lifetime of questing for God. It seems to imply that life is a silly thing, a trifle. But life is not a trifle. Indeed, it is a horrible nightmare for those whose lives have been marked by tragedy. The orthodox stance takes the affairs of life seriously, so seriously, in fact, that the weight of eternity is said to ride on every one of our actions. Therefore, let’s say instead that under the orthodox stance, life becomes breathtakingly serious, a most excellent, subtle, and engaging game—a game that allows the construction of elegant and most beautiful strategies.

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Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing. —Shakespeare, Richard II We are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us. —Vaclav Havel Vaclav Havel was a Czech playwright whose commitment to the dignity of the human person was so strong that he found himself frequently at odds with the government of his country. In the 1980s, his homeland of Czechoslovakia was ruled by a totalitarian socialist regime. Havel was thrown in prison several times, an injustice almost too hard to bear. One day, while sitting in the prison yard, he saw, over the wall, the crown of an oak tree. There it stood, free, while he stood imprisoned only a few feet away. Reflecting on the tree he became entranced, and a feeling of oneness washed over him. He sensed an impenetrable unity between himself and the tree and all things. His being could not be contained by prison walls; it was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Havel felt himself transcending the material world. His state of imprisonment did not change, of course, but it became less important. In 1989, Havel became the leader of a peaceful revolution that finally freed his country from dictatorship. How could a person be one with everything? Seventeenth-century German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s theory of existence holds that the universe is made up of tiny particles called monads. Each monad has been in contact with others from the beginning of time and bears within itself a precise record of all interactions. According to Leibniz, every interaction is a result of some other interaction, which is the result of another, and another, and so on, so that contact between monads carries with it

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a comprehensive record of all interactions that have ever occurred. Every monad is connected to every other; starting with one monad one can reverse-engineer the entire universe. All things are connected. This sense of infinite connection to the All is the basis of the Mystic stance. It attempts to transcend the categories of the material world and thus the game of life. The goal of the mystic is to be above the game while remaining in it. The difficulty, of course, is that we are all born into the game and are indeed convinced that many things matter both near and far away. Breaking away from these dependencies and emotional commitments is the central goal of mystic play, expressed so eloquently by Richard II in Shakespeare’s play of that name. One often sees such disinterested play in the world of games. Every parent knows how to do it. A parent plays above the game with his children. He rolls the dice and moves his pawn; he acts sad and thrilled and angry as appropriate; he secretly arranges affairs so that he loses every time. In the world of game design, this type of play is called metagaming or meta for short. It is still gaming, and it has its goals, but the goals are independent of the game being played. The goals of metagaming are to engage with the game in the right way, to arrange for a desired experience. Besides parental gaming, other examples of metagaming include the DM who runs a role-playing game and the teacher who uses a game in a class. Imagine a game being played by several players, where the designer sits nearby but does not intervene. In fact, most of the players do not know he is there. The designer simply enjoys watching people play his game; he loves to see their reactions, especially when the game goes well. Now, suppose that at some point one of the players comes to understand that the designer is watching. One reaction might be to play all the harder, to try very hard to win. Another, however, might be to join with the designer, to play in a way that helps the game become the game the designer intended. A player with this mindset might choose a certain action because it will trigger a fun mechanic. Or, he might advise a fellow player of an oversight in his play, so that all the players will remain competitive for as long as possible. He might suggest house rules to fix odd and unpleasant situations that have come up. His mind remains on the game but he has adopted a different perspective about it. He rises above the game; he loses all concern for winning and losing, replacing it with a comprehensive mindfulness of the gaming experience. He has risen from the game into the metagame. The mystic stance advises a metagame approach to the game of life. The player is encouraged to rise above the lifegame, to join with its designer, to become one with all players and all rules, to become mindful of the game in all its infinite facets.

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In Games The mystic stance is reflected in games not so much in the particular themes or mechanics as in the effect of gaming as a whole on the human psyche. Mystic stances, as we will see, invoke unstructured, unorthodox, individualistic transcendence. This experience is something games do well. When we play, we mentally transcend the here and now and make our way to a fantastic Somewhere Else. Game scholars refer to this other place as the diegetic realm, meaning, the world within the game. Sometimes this other world is explicitly identified as such, in online virtual worlds (World of Warcraft). In most games, the other world is taken for granted. In 1846—a board game about railroads—the players enter the world of nineteenth-century tycoonery, complete with tracks, engines, stations, and high finance. The point of the game is not to put players in a virtual world; it is to model the economic dynamics that made Vanderbilt a household name. The immersion in Vanderbilt’s world happens, but as an almost unnoticed by-product. Designers typically encourage this by-product and devote countless resources to making it feel right. That is to say, even designers who do not intend to make a virtual world game spend many hours working on the virtual world that the game produces. Immersion in the game world is known to be extremely important for player experience. When we look at this with the mystic eye, we see that designers are helping players transcend the real world and fly to the game’s world. The fact that this desire to fly is satisfied by games tells us that life is marked by flight, by the desire for transcendence. The fact that the satisfaction is produced by a wide variety of different games and mechanics tells us that much of the transcendence we seek is individualistic and unstructured. We do not seem to be looking for a particular kind of flight, just a flight to somewhere. Transcendence is served by movies and books as well. It seems to be a core service of all media, to take people out of real life for a time. This implies that there’s something about this life that makes people want to take a break from it, if not flee it altogether. What that something is, we can leave to the theologians and philosophers. In terms of game design, we can say that the mystic stance is served not by this game or that, but by gaming itself. Gaming is a natural activity of people whose goal is to transcend this place.

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Commitments The core beliefs of the mystic stance could be explored in great depth for many pages. Mysticism is a profound spiritual practice that has been independently developed all over the globe. Fortunately, we are not required here to demonstrate philosophical expertise about these foundations. We couldn’t if we tried; we are not a zen master. The author’s encounter with mysticism is through contemplative prayer in the tradition of Meister Eckhart, a thirteenth-century Christian monk.1 This tradition provides the examples that ground our general strategic discussion of mystic approaches to life’s game.2

Small Is Everything The mystic stance assumes that the affairs of the world, even the tiniest, are connected with the affairs of all the universe. Spirit exists in everything. A person can enter communion with animals, plants, rocks, air. He can also enter communion with planets, stars, galaxies, and the cosmos. Everything is one. There are no boundaries between one person and another, or between one thing and another. This idea coheres well with the “contents of the game box” discussion in Chapter 2, where the pieces of the game were described as one vast undifferentiated process unfolding before our eyes. That chapter stressed the absence of boundaries between things. This kind of boundary-less perspective is a core commitment of the mystic stance. Since small things participate in all things, small things are eternally and universally significant. The death of an ant is just as important as the collision of two stars. There is no hierarchy of importance.

I Am Nothing Within the vast process unfolding is a certain collection of matter, bound by energy, that I flatter myself to name as me. But this me is no greater or lesser than any other collection of matter and energy. Cyprian Smith OSB, The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004). 2 Another source of the mystic approach to games is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. 1

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Meister Eckhart wrote extensively about nothingness: I say the same thing about the man who has brought himself to naught in himself and in God and in all creatures: that man has assumed the lowest place, and God is bound to empty Himself totally into him. (Sermon 60)

For Eckhart, nothingness was a prerequisite to becoming filled with the divine.

The World Is an Illusion Material reality is a vast process unfolding, within which we are merely a stream of atoms and pulses of energy. Metaphysical reality, however, is a vast and glorious All. In the mystic stance, there is a great Being, an undefinable Spirit, that surrounds and enfolds all existence. This Being is the ground of whatever reality there may be. The world we see around, that pretends to be reality, is no such thing. It is a misleading set of impulses and motives and desires, many if not most of which lead us away from fully entering into the Being. The overwhelming reality of the metaphysical need not be seen in religious terms. Indeed, the most popular mystic strategies reject the gods of worldly religion, seeing them as a source of needless guilt, worry, conflict, and selfrighteousness. If the mystic stance has any spiritual element at all, it is never more than a calm recognition of the great Being.

Mind over Matter For the mystic stance, the body is a distraction, a source of unwanted impulse. The body is what forces us to keep playing this game which we hope to transcend.

Victory Conditions One could list many states of being and mind that proponents of the mystic stance recommend: embracing paradox, being comfortable with complexity and contradiction, being conscious of the interconnectedness of all things, being nothing, being impervious to the world, and mindfulness. However, none of these captures the fundamental attitude of the mystic stance toward victory conditions. They can’t, because the mystic stance explicitly states that there is no goal. The mystic stance explicitly rejects all of the victory conditions proposed by

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the other stances. Indeed it rejects the very concept of victory that we have been using throughout the book. There is nothing to achieve. There are no objectives. This creates a conundrum: What is the strategy of a person who has no objective? No conscious being can be without considered action, which means that no conscious being can be without strategy. That is the penalty of geworfenheit: we are thrown into a game whether we want to play or not. The mystic stance does recommend strategies (its self-help literature could fill a library), but rejects the idea that these strategies have a goal. We encounter a situation similar to that of the absurd hero, who acknowledges that the universe is empty of significance but undertakes good causes anyway. The mystic stance accepts that there must be conscious action and indeed recommends certain strategies. What it rejects is the idea that these strategies are to be directed to any concrete achievement. Considered action without a goal: this is a paradox. However, instead of treating paradox as a problem, proponents of the mystic stance embrace it. Meister Eckhart, in Sermon 4, taught that “the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.” The idea that my eye is God’s eye and that we see each other through this one eye is paradoxical, but the mystic stance urges its followers to love paradox: to see everything and nothing; to be and not be at the same time; to care deeply about the fate of others yet accept all tragedy without emotional or mental disturbance. The mystic stance accepts paradox and therefore can encourage its followers to act without an objective, to seek victory as a state of apathy toward victory. If there is a word for mystic victory, it would be transcendence. Transcendence is the goal of mystic action. The tangible personal benefit of this stance is to be freed from worry, stress, anxiety, and depression. Proponents say that the mystic stance is a road to true mental well-being. It is the only way to be truly happy. To win, they say, be at peace.

Strategies The mystic stance recommends the pursuit of transcendence and peace, but the road to peace is paradoxical. Do not think of peace as something to achieve. Instead, strive to achieve nothing, and peace will come. To win the game, then, stop trying to win the game.

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It sounds impossible. How can a person stop trying to win the game of this world? The mystic stance recommends several concrete strategies.

Empty Yourself Lose your cares and concerns. Says Meister Eckhart (Sermon 4): “God must act and pour himself into us when we are ready, in other words when we are totally empty of self and creatures. So stand still and do not waver from your emptiness.” A modern zen guidebook makes the strategy concrete. F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way advertises itself thusly: In this inspiring and humorous book, John C. Parkin suggests that saying F**k It is the perfect Western expression of the Eastern spiritual ideas of letting go, giving up, and finding real freedom by realizing that things don’t matter so much (if at all).3

Of course there have been many proponents of the F**k It mindset through the ages. One thinks of libertines and epicures, as well as stoics. Perhaps they were operating under the mystic stance more than anything else, seeking peace by losing all care and concern. When in doubt, f**k it. Or, as a monk once advised me: “Try giving up your need to be loved.”

Mindfulness A second practical strategy is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a habit of ignoring the past and the future, of concentrating on the present moment. Pay close attention to the people who are near you. Stop seeking significance in the great affairs of this world. We all seek power and influence and greatness, but in fact we have no effect on anything. We are small and helpless, as far as the great flow of existence is concerned. And yet, right next to us is another person. Our choices, our tiny, little choices, can have a dramatic effect on that person. A parent can approach his children in different ways. Children don’t ask to be born. It’s our fault that they are here. Accordingly, a parent can keep his kids’ well-being close to his heart, putting their needs first (including the need for limits and discipline; the recommendation is not to spoil the child but do what the child needs). Alternatively, a parent can use his children to enhance his own John C. Parkin, F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way (New York: Hay House, 2014). Earlier we argued that this same phrase—f**k it—was a signal of doom for the addict. It is a phrase with many meanings.

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well-being. Or he can keep them from getting in the way of his own pleasures. Or he can ignore them completely. A parent can create emotional tidal waves for a kid, capable of destroying his personality, capable of putting him on a horrible life path. But he doesn’t have to. The parent chooses. Is the kid here for me, or am I here for the kid? A mindful person thinks always of the beating heart of the universe that sits nearby at this very moment. He has no ego, no goals to accomplish. He sees no trade-off between his own well-being and that of a child. All eternity and existence is present at this moment in this place. Therefore, focus attention here and now, and give the children what they need.

Relax the Body The mystic stance places mind above body, but in order to achieve this ordering, the body must be somehow controlled, soothed, and relaxed. Otherwise its demands disturb us. Calming the body requires regular exercise, but not in the form of athletic competition. Rather, the body is given over to ritualistic movement, dance, and posture. The body is not ignored; it is treated like a loved one—cared for and cultivated. The mystic stance has perhaps the most strict attitude toward food and drink: a person should treat the body so that the body is healthy and wholesome. Taste and desire have nothing to do with it. Cheese fries? Poison!

Meditate To enable daily practice of these values, the mystic stance recommends silent contemplation. There are different schools of thought about the “right” way to meditate. For Christian mystics, it means unstructured prayer. For others, it involves silent reflection on key concepts. Meditation may involve focus objects or certain postures. There are some common themes across all forms of mediation. Meditation is silent. It is solitary. There is an emphasis on deep breathing and freeing the mind of all distractions. It is said that the highest moment of meditation involves a perception of nothingness and everything, a feeling of exit from this world.

Detachment A mystic player cannot really transcend the world. He is forced to stay here and play the lifegame until he dies. Yet he is called to lose himself and to practice inner

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peace. He is called to care about nothing, but also to be mindful of the people nearby. This can be strategically confusing, of course: What does it mean to care about nothing but be infinitely mindful of your immediate neighborhood? The ideal state of mind is detachment: the mystic player stays connected to the world but his feelings are not hurt when the world does what it always does. His body and his love are intimately and directly connected to all things, but his inner peace is impervious to the affairs of this world. This is the same attitude as a person playing a game at the meta level: Yes, he is playing, but the state of the board has no consequence for him emotionally. He is not absent from the game, just detached from it. His inner well-being does not depend on what happens in the game. Detachment can be viewed as a state of ultimate freedom-from. By surrendering all desires, the mystic feels completely unconstrained. Benedictine monks are known for going away from society, founding their communities in the middle of nowhere. They could be accused of rejecting the world. However, the correct term is not rejecting but renouncing: Benedictines have decided not to take the rewards that the world offers. They leave those rewards for others. Instead, they seek to do nothing, to become the empty vessels that Meister Eckhart recommends we all be. A Dominican friar, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe OP, once said this in an address to a conference of Benedictine abbots: The most obvious fact about [Benedictine] monks is that you do not do anything in particular. You farm but you are not farmers. You teach, but you are not school teachers. You may even run hospitals, or mission stations, but you are not primarily doctors or missionaries. You are monks, who follow the rule of Benedict. You do not do anything in particular. Monks are usually very busy people but the business is not the point and purpose of your lives. Cardinal Hume once wrote that, “we do not see ourselves as having any particular mission or function in the Church. We do not set out to change the course of history. We are just there almost by accident from a human point of view. And, happily, we go on ‘just being there.’”4

It is true that monks typically go off and build monasteries in the wilderness, but the point of doing that is only to find a good place to do nothing. If the world comes to them, however, the Benedictines have an open attitude. This goes under their vow of hospitality. A visitor to any Benedictine Abbey is welcome to stay and eat (try it!). Benedictines love the world and are kind and generous to Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, “The Throne of God,” a talk for the Congress of Abbots, Sant’Anselmo, September 2000, at http:​/​/www​​.domi​​nican​​s​.ca/​​Docum​​ents/​​maste​​rs​/Ra​​dclif​​f e​/​th​​rone.​​html,​ observed May 29, 2017.

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anyone who comes their way. But to live in the nothingness that is their calling, they must go off and be apart. It is this kind of generous detachment that the mystic stance recommends.

Assessment The mystic stance has one of the lighter touches as far as requirements and objectives go. It’s not that the rules are easy to follow, it’s that they are vague. What does it mean to be mindful? There are many ways to understand the commitments and strategies of the mystic approach. Predictably, this leads to a wide variety of outcomes. At times, the mystic stance plays out as a useless approach to life, incapable of meeting its own goals. At others, it seems deeply profound and enlightened.

What Happens after Stepping Away? The idea of stepping away from the concerns of this world is attractive but strategically problematic. Mystic stances involve a giving up, a surrendering of the need to control everything. “Let go and let God.” According to one of the other stances, the excellence stance, this is a sure way to destroy the player. In the excellence stance, surrendering and letting yourself go is the road to being fat, stupid, poor, and lazy. Within twelve step circles, the phrase “f**k it” is used often, but there it refers to a state of imminent danger. An alcoholic who gets the “f**k its” is about to go on a binge. He doesn’t care anymore. He’s tired of trying. Nothing is worth doing. There’s no point in being healthy. He gives up. F**k it. The contrast between the way alcoholics and zen masters use the concept of “letting go” suggests that the value of a stance depends on life circumstances. The mystic stance is probably something to avoid until one can be sure that letting go does not lead to self-destructive behavior. It is not supposed to lead to drug abuse; it is supposed to lead to peace. Therefore unless the strategies of mysticism lead to peace, they have to be avoided or at least practiced only under the firm hand of a guide.

A Nice Stance for Rich People The point just made, that the mystic approach is not feasible for everybody, is more general. Who has time to sit around and meditate all day? Who has enough

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money that they can stop worrying about work? Who has kids who are so wellbehaved that a person can “detach” himself from them? The day-to-day practice of a mystic stance would seem to be much more feasible for the leisure class than for anyone else. It is true that anyone can meditate and do a little yoga every day. But is this enough to achieve the peace that the stance promises?

Heartless The mystic seeks to find peace in all things, to become detached from the joys and sorrows of this world. This attitude can lead to callousness regarding evil. Anyone who claims to have a calm, peaceful answer to the death of one’s own child is lying. The mystic stance would suggest that everything is a tragedy, that existence itself is tragic, and that all tragedy, and all joy, is one and the same thing, the infinite breath of Being. It is a nice tale, but rather cold comfort.

Weird Religion The mystic stance can be carried out in community, but it is more often recommended as a private spiritual practice. As mentioned earlier, the mystic stance tends to see in orthodox religion more of an impediment than an aid. The point is to free yourself from worry, to be at one with the infinite love of all existence. An attitude like that just does not line up well with the requirement to eat fish on Fridays in Lent. Freedom from religious rules is one thing; freedom from all rules is another. Even mystics require some norms of behavior. And when the mystic is isolated, not in a community, those norms can shift; there can be much moving of goalposts. When we play games, improvising on the ruleset works just fine so long as everyone keeps the spirit of the game alive. Unfortunately, human nature is such that once a person becomes his own game master, all rules are off. A player who plays solo never encounters the opinion of another player. He has no way of knowing (and probably doesn’t care) whether the rules he has adopted are actually in the spirit of the game. This can lead to some strange interpretations of what the game actually is. Folks of a spiritual bent who operate outside religious communities can go off into some very strange notions. We have all encountered odd spiritual views. I recall having a lengthy conversation on a train that started sensibly enough but then gradually and slowly descended into a sermon on the dangers of allowing

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space aliens to control the government. Then there was the lady who professed a deep faith in Christianity, but declared that her own beliefs were closer to the true teachings of Jesus, which were given in India, when Jesus went there with his many wives and children.5 Predictably, the “true” teachings of Jesus validated the life commitments of this lady, a fact to which she drank, many times. Crafting your own religion rarely leads to the peace that the mystic stance targets.

Spiritual Laziness Being freed from all constraints in spiritual matters leads to spiritual lassitude. A person who is free from all constraints is also free from personal accountability. If your standards are all in your head, there’s nothing to stop you from adjusting them as needed so that you remain untroubled by conscience. The mystic stance is vulnerable to such a breakdown of accountability, leading to a vague spiritualism. People will say they are “spiritual but not religious.” This means that they acknowledge some kind of spiritual Being in the universe, but do not worship that Being within an organized religion. It is not specified what they think the Being wants of them or what they are supposed to do. Instead, the strategy here is to follow a vague moral code that includes most of the usual rights and wrongs, but is not strictly enforced or exposed to external scrutiny. Naturally, this strategy is fairly weak in terms of self-awareness and correction. Rather, it presumes that the player himself is doing pretty well in moral terms. He is trying; he is a good person, more or less; and this Being, whatever it is, is looking out for him and will help him along the way. This set of attitudes was given the name Moralistic Therapeutic Deism by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton.6 Their study of American teens revealed that many do see the world in moral terms, and they admit a belief in a God, but the God’s role is not to make any harsh or specific demands but rather to make them, the teens, feel better when they are sad. One wonders what Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has to say when a teen faces a choice that requires serious moral backbone to get right: You’re with a bunch of your friends, drinking. You’re all underage. Everyone is drunk. One friend is so drunk he can hardly walk. He grabs his car keys and heads I encountered more odd spiritual practices in four years of living in southern California than I have in the entirety of my life living elsewhere. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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to the door, saying, “I’m driving to Chicago.” You weren’t really listening; you only realize what he has done after his car is gone. Do you: A. Do nothing. B. Send him a text, “Hey man you prolly shouldn’t be driving but hey, you be you.” C. Hop in your car and go after him. D. Call the police.

Answer D is correct, as any mother will tell you: underage drinking citations are nothing compared to death and manslaughter. Answer C is one of the downfalls of the heroic stance. Answer A is what a misinterpretation of the mystic stance might recommend: “Let it go.” Answer B is what happens when the mystic stance turns into lazy spirituality. Because the player is interpreting the rules of his own game, everything he wants to do also seems to be morally ok. He develops a spiritually dangerous presumption: “I’m doing pretty good, right? If there is a God, he’s going to be basically cool with the way I live. Right? Right?” Moral lassitude causes genuine pain. Here are some real-world examples. ●●

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A man walked into his home one day and announced out of the blue that divorce papers would arrive the next day. “I wanted you all to know first, before the papers got here,” he said to his sobbing wife and children. In his mind, he was being considerate. Later, he reported being surprised at the intensity of the reaction. “What would they do in my shoes?” he said. “I’m unhappy.” A woman advanced in years caused an accident in which two motorcyclists were killed. Both were wearing helmets and protective gear. She said, “Motorcycles are death traps. They knew the risks when they decided to ride around on those things.” The cyclists’ church invited her to meet with them and accept forgiveness. She refused, but met with the pastor and accepted their gifts—grudgingly. A married man with a small son had an affair with a co-worker. She got pregnant. She was married too. They didn’t tell her husband. He raised the child for a few years, thinking it was his. The lovers then divorced both their spouses and got married themselves. They had the son from his first marriage escort his new wife down the aisle. A man had been abused by his uncle when he was a young boy. Years later, he confronted his father about it. His father said, “It was your own fault. You should have stayed away from him.”

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These are examples of a lack of moral backbone, of people convinced that they are “basically OK” with the great Being, whatever it is, when in fact they are committing acts that no reasonable moral system can support. Being “spiritual but not religious” may be comforting to its proponents but it causes sorrow for others. The mystic stance too often excuses the player from developing the moral fiber, the toughness, needed to act well in the world.

Strange Coherence On the positive side, the mystic stance has a deep coherence despite a surface layer of paradox. The mystic stance offers a cosmic perspective in which each person is nothing and everything all at once. It recommends detachment from all feelings and the pursuit of inner peace. This seems heartless and yet, proponents of the mystic stance argue that this detachment, alone, enables true love. A person who is hopelessly enmeshed in desperate feelings and needs cannot actually help anyone. Action can be self-serving. To stop serving the self, it is necessary to break away from it, which means become impervious to the storms of the world. Only then can a person reach out and help the world. The first step to caring is not to care. A fully detached, mindful person is empty of desires and can therefore become a pure instrument of the divine. The paradox between apparent apathy and actual concern is resolved by considering the presence of a third being, the divine Being that lies beyond this world. The Being is the source of all genuine concern and love. To make the Being’s love and concern manifest in this world is the best thing a person can do. This requires removing the Self from the process. The mystic stance teaches its followers to get out of the way. Getting the Self out of the way is an act of deep concern. And when mystics do this, good things happen, they lose stress, and peace descends. The mystic stance embraces paradox but somehow makes sense: assumptions, actions, and outcomes all cohere nicely together. This odd coherence is the same as that experienced by a parent playing a game with children. A kind parent abandons interest in winning; a considerate parent pretends to want to win, so that the children have fun; a skilled parent keeps the threat of his winning just real enough, but not too real, so that the kids are neither sure that they will win (bored) nor that they will lose (frustrated). One would think that a parent who abandons all concern with winning must surely ruin the game, but that is not the case. Abandoning the desire to win the game is the first step toward making the game good for others.

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It Just Works People who devote time to mystic practice generally report success with this style of playing. True, not everyone who meditates becomes a zen master, and we all know people who claim to be Buddhists but who act out in rage. Hypocrisy is a natural consequence to making commitments. We’re not perfect. But many of us imperfect people do seem to find peace by meditating. The author has encountered discussions of daily meditation from a wide variety of people: recovering alcoholics, therapists, monks, faculty, athletes, and friends. Meditation does good for everybody. It seems that anyone who adopts the mystic stance does move closer to its implicit goal of mental peace.

Universal According to the mystic stance, all is me is God is you is all. We are all one. The divine Being is not “over there” somewhere, waiting to be addressed or loved. The divine Being is here, there, and everywhere. To address God, address the Other. To love God, love the Other. Because the Other is me, and we are God together. Through reasoning such as this, the mystic stance offers its acolytes an infinite connection to all other beings. As a result, it is a universal stance, far more universal than the other stances. There is no competition in the mystic stance. No comparisons. No insiders or outsiders. It is a stance for everyone, without limitation. Consider the mystic interpretation of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. The Incarnation is the phenomenon by which the infinite, all-encompassing Being of God became manifest in the material world. The primary symbol of manifestation is the Annunciation, when the angel comes and tells virgin Mary that she has a baby who is God.7 However, a Christian mystic will argue that the Incarnation is going on constantly right now, all around us. Meister Eckhart taught that each person gives birth to Jesus in his own soul. When a person thinks about Jesus, he appears in our world. Thus, Jesus is incarnated in every person, whether they are Christian believers or not. Jesus had a body in Palestine 2,000 years ago, and he has a body today: us. The people are said to be the mystical body of Christ. He has no hands but ours. We are all the body of Christ, this teaching says; we carry his soul. The Nativity—Christmas—is when the baby is born. That, however, is a natural process. The miracle was in getting the baby into Mary’s womb in the first place.

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This is specialized stuff for deeply Christian mystics, of course, but it represents just one way in which mystic reasoning leads to the unification of all people. In the mystic stance, every person is divine. And if everyone is divine, there is no justification for all the pain we cause others. If everyone were to follow the mystic stance, the world would be as peaceful as our minds. It would be a world conscious of the possibility that everyone can win this game, and therefore everyone should play it at the meta level, aiding one another to success.

Summary The universal application of the mystic stance opens a breathtaking possibility: perhaps we could all just get along. That, indeed, is what most religious and spiritual leaders recommend. Never mind our differences; let’s live in peace with one another. It is a constant refrain in our world, and we should be thankful for that. Not too long ago, spiritual figures commonly urged their followers to massacre one another. How is it that the leaders of such disparate philosophies and religions have come to the same words of advice? Their agreement is strategic in nature, and stems from a deep, though relatively recent, discovery about the strategies of others. Namely, it has become common knowledge among most spiritual players that every other player benefits from peace. As a result, seeking peace has become a shared goal of just about everybody, no matter what their stance. Thinking on the strategic layer, as we argued earlier, leads to more agreement than disagreement. We can thank the twentieth century for this development. It taught everyone that warfare is good for nobody. Spiritual leaders seem to be in complete agreement about seeking peace, and in that commitment they have all adopted some element of the mystic stance. It is hard to find an effective strategy for living that does not have gentleness, kindness, and peace at its heart. And yet, less influential proponents of the different faiths constantly snipe at one another, figuratively and sometimes literally. The leaders are seeking peace, but their more rabid followers seem intent on destroying those who hold different doctrines. This contrast in behavior between leaders and followers has an analog in gameplay. It is a matter of confidence in victory. Spiritual leaders are above the game; they can be fairly confident that their own race has been won. From their

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perspective, they see everything that is beautiful and ugly about their faith. Benedict XVI was a Vatican insider before he was elevated to the Holy See; observers remarked that he “knew where all the bodies were buried.” Being at the very top allows the leader to act in an unruffled manner; not having to worry about his own standing in the game, the leader can emphasize commonalities and seek peace. Less powerful members of a faith have more reason to worry about winning the game. Their fidelity is not a bygone conclusion; their ascension to victory is less assured. Any player will be more aggressive and forceful if he thinks his success is in doubt. Thus, the followers of a movement tend to be more concerned with strict orthodoxy, whereas the leaders, at least in this age, seem to have switched over to a form of the mystic stance. And this seems to happen in many contemporary religious and spiritual movements. It is as though a person enters upon a spiritual path and gradually develops a certain zeal for it. The zeal intensifies until the pilgrim has become a rather rabid and aggressive proponent of everything that this path entails. He becomes ultra-orthodox. And then, suddenly, the pilgrim breaks through into a peaceful mindfulness about the path. He enfolds his zeal in an envelope granted by the mystic stance and becomes a calm, gentle ambassador of his faith. Near the start of this book we encountered the idea that philosophical communities are like great typhoons with peace at the center. The pilgrim’s journey is like that of a ship sailing toward that center. The closer it gets to the eye, however, the higher the winds. The winds are maddeningly strong as the ship nears its destination. But then the ship breaks through into the eye itself, where the seas are peaceful. The mystic stance embraces the idea that the different spiritual traditions of our world are like hurricanes. As a person gets closer to the center of the storm, the fanaticism he encounters rises until it howls about his ears. Yet when he comes to the middle of the faith, those who are deepest in practice and sensibility, he finds proponents of meditation and peace. Many of them are from his own spiritual tradition, but there are people from all traditions in the eye of the hurricane. That is because all the eyes are the same. The hurricanes are all distinct, but they all share the same eye. In terms of game play, the centers of these hurricanes are filled with players operating at the meta level of life’s game. They recognize that they all share the same goal: make it a good game for everyone.

Epilogue

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller. —G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy What purpose did [God] have in creating heaven and earth? None whatever. He gained nothing by it; he possesses every perfection within himself; he needs no one else. He needs nothing outside himself. The purpose of creation was simply to create. It was not for anything. It was like a game or a play; he did it simply because it was “fun” to do . . . the best image of God creating the world, and the holy man acting from within his own Ground, is not a master-architect planning a cathedral, or a master-engineer building a suspension bridge, but a child playing with a spinning top. —Cyprian Smith, OSB Throughout the book we have seen game-like structures embedded deeply in daily life. These seem to be sublimely effective. They are well-designed. The presence of beautiful game design in the human condition naturally leads to thoughts of a designer. Life is a game; perhaps God is the designer. That may be closer to the truth than other conceptions of existence. Existence is more than nothing; it is not a joke; but it is not a machine either, nor a school or a mountain or a play. It is a game and that is why God is hidden: the designer stays out of the game while it is being played. He has put the game together in such a way that it should engage the players and lead to the behavior and experiences he wants to see. There is something of a joke, a play, and a machine to the human condition, but combining them leads to the deeper truth: Life is a game. Life is a game. It has players, strategies, and outcomes. Nihilists will say that the goals are an illusion and that there are no significant outcomes. There are no real payoffs. The strategies lead nowhere; therefore, life cannot be a game under that definition. But are there really no outcomes that matter? In 1927, three-year-old Billy Gaffney was playing on the rooftop with his brother. A complete stranger named Albert Fish came by and led him away. Fish took the boy to a trolley car and rode

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off. Throughout the long trolley ride, Billy Gaffney cried for his mother. No one helped him. Fish took him all the way to a house in the woods and raped and murdered and ate him. Later Fish wrote a letter to Billy’s parents, describing in detail what he did. That was Billy Gaffney’s “outcome:” To live for three years, then be abducted, raped, and eaten by a stranger. Does Billy Gaffney’s outcome matter in some cosmic sense? Of course it does. But nihilists and materialists have to say no. It’s just atoms, they must say. They will also have to assign no significance to Mao’s destruction of sixty-five million of his own people. These are unsustainable positions for anyone with moral common sense. The direct encounter with evil destroys the possibility that there are no significant outcomes to this game. Life is a game because it has outcomes that matter, and these outcomes in turn endow our strategies and stances with heavy significance. The designer eagerly follows our moves, cheering for victory.

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Index acedia  17, 19, 188 Alcoholics Anonymous  55, 91, 130 Aristotle  74, 80, 136 Battle  48–9, 60–1, 82–3, 86, 96, 151–2 boredom  16–19, 61, 123, 169, 182, 188 Catholic  55, 75, 100, 125, 137, 146, 160, 166–7, 169, 172, 174–5, 177–9, 185 child ix, 4, 10, 35, 51, 115, 122, 140, 149, 154, 175, 195–6, 199, 201, 206 child abuse  177, 201, 206–7 confession  55, 171 consistency  150–1, 173, 181 cosmos xiii, 13, 24, 27, 72–3, 192 death  15, 27, 64–5, 68, 76, 84, 138, 141, 144, 150, 159, 163, 185, 187, 192, 199, 201 designer xiii–xiv, 8, 14, 18, 28–9, 44, 57, 128, 171, 190, 206, 207 devil  112–13, 132, 175, 184 eighty  80 evangelizing  1–207 evil xiii, 17, 19, 32, 50, 79, 165, 169–70, 175, 177, 179, 183–4, 199, 207 family  18, 44, 65, 90, 110, 119, 143, 157, 173, 185 father  6, 40, 60, 85, 201 Fish, Albert  206–7 freedom  27, 30–32, 58–9, 108, 117, 142, 144, 155, 180–1, 195, 197, 199 free will  125, 156 fun  3, 20, 22, 29, 34, 45, 56, 59, 61, 73, 99, 106–9, 114, 117, 120, 122, 129, 150, 156, 182–4, 188, 190, 202, 206 Gaffney, Billy  206–7 game design  x–xiii, 14, 18–19, 22–3, 33–5, 42, 44, 57, 75, 98, 102, 106, 113,

124, 136, 149, 162, 167, 169, 171, 174, 190–1, 206 game of life  ix, xi, xiii, xv, 2–3, 7, 9, 21, 23, 30, 34, 47, 57, 71, 77, 80, 84–5, 95–6, 99, 101, 111, 113, 120, 125, 146–7, 168, 172, 190 Geworfenheit (be-thrown-ness)  x, 21–3, 50, 79, 101, 194 goal xiii, 7, 23, 37, 54, 56–60, 64, 66, 72, 77–8, 80, 82, 87–8, 95, 98, 101, 103–5, 111, 114, 117, 119, 123–4, 128–9, 133, 137, 139, 146, 149, 153, 159, 167, 172, 179, 184, 188, 190, 192–4, 203–5 God  xi, xiii, 6–7, 64–6, 75, 145, 151, 156–7, 158–88 passim, 193–5, 197–8, 200–1, 203, 206 guilt  122, 143, 159, 193 Haidt, Jonathan  64, 92–3 happiness  xi, xiii, 47, 58–9, 63–4, 76, 79, 93–4, 104, 112–13, 121, 124, 129, 154 heaven  4, 7, 62–3, 65, 75, 88, 100, 138, 158–9, 163, 167–71, 173–4, 178–9, 181, 185, 188, 206 horror  69 Huizinga, Johan  x, 3, 6, 9, 47 human condition  x, xii, xiv, 2, 17–18, 30, 35, 37, 40, 43, 113, 119, 206 husband  131, 180, 201 incarnation  203 Jesus of Nazareth  xi, 64, 131, 164, 165, 174, 183–5, 200, 203 layer x–xiii, 47–57, 62, 64–7, 71–2, 75, 78, 88, 98, 101, 145, 187, 202, 204 materialism  19–20, 28 model  12–14, 36–7, 40, 43, 142 monk  17, 158–9, 171, 178, 181, 192, 195

Index mother  51, 72, 77, 91, 95, 180, 201, 207 murder  82, 175, 206–7 Nault, Jean-Charles  17, 31, 167 Pascal, Blaise  ix, 7, 75, 176 peace xiii, 62–6, 90, 100, 123, 127, 143, 150, 159, 172, 177, 194–200, 202–5 philosophy xi, 6, 17, 20, 27, 31, 43, 51, 55, 58, 65–6, 71, 75–80, 88, 103, 105–6, 109 play xii–xiii, 3–4, 6–10, 13, 22, 34, 38, 42, 44, 47, 50, 57, 62, 67, 73, 75, 81, 89, 100, 105, 111, 128, 137, 160, 163, 167, 173–4, 184, 190, 205, 206 quest x, 8, 18, 57, 105, 125, 143, 146, 162, 182–3 Rahner, Karl  6–7 reality xiv, 8, 10–14, 16, 19, 24–8, 30, 33, 43, 67, 73, 90–1, 96, 101, 130, 162, 174, 176, 184, 193 real world  14, 52, 161, 164, 191 redemption  169–71, 177 religion xiii, 13, 16, 63, 65–6, 88, 92, 159–61, 163–74, 178–80, 188, 193, 199–200, 204 rules xii, 1–2, 5, 7–8, 11, 23, 28–34, 42, 46, 51, 53, 64, 82, 88–90, 156, 160–1, 163, 167–8, 174, 177–8, 188, 190–1, 198–9, 201 Saint Augustine  75, 120, 170 Saint Meinrad Archabbey  xv, 158–9, 171 Saint Paul  ix, 6, 158, 169, 185 Saint Peter  185–7 salvation  155, 167 Satan  175, 179 serial killer  175, 206–7 sex  16–17, 105, 108, 112, 121

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Shakespeare, William  ix–x, 11, 42, 47, 131, 189 sin  17, 139, 170–1, 177, 184 soul, save while there is still time  3, 7, 12, 40 sport xiv, 18, 88, 106, 126, 128, 130, 138, 142, 153, 184 stance xi–xiii, 52, 71–5, 78–87, 90–1, 93, 95–6, 99–102, 103–205 passim strategy xi–xii, 1, 11, 35, 49–50, 52, 54–6, 58, 65–70, 71, 74, 77–9, 81–2, 86–7, 90–2, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106–9, 111–14, 117, 119–22, 124, 129, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143–4, 147, 150–3, 158–9, 163, 169–74, 182, 188, 194–5, 200, 204 subjectivism  19–20, 28 tactics xi, 49–51, 55, 58, 79–80, 82, 87, 92, 101, 135, 137, 139–40, 151, 181, 188 theology  6, 17 Tolkien, J.R.R.  33, 182 universe xii, 11, 21, 23–6, 28–30, 33–5, 36–40, 46, 52, 64, 75, 77–8, 118, 157, 162, 167, 183, 188–90, 192, 194, 196, 200 victory  ix, xi, xiii, 29, 30, 39, 55, 58–61, 62–4, 75, 77, 79, 101, 106, 108, 113, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 133, 136, 138–40, 142–3, 146–7, 150, 152, 156–7, 160, 163, 167–8, 173–4, 178, 193–4, 204–5, 207 victory conditions  xi, 28–30, 47, 55–7, 62–4, 66, 71–2, 79–80, 87, 96, 101–2, 106, 114, 130, 138, 146, 149, 156, 160, 163, 167–8, 188, 193 wife  1, 89, 115, 118, 122, 131, 148, 180, 201

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