Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Games are stories that we participate in; stories are how we understand ourselves and the world. Games are sets of choices that lead to outcomes, operating within parameters inside and out of our control. As we choose, or play, the story unfolds. Doors open and close.
I used to love playing The Game of Life. I thought it offered me a look at how Normal People lived.
Nonetheless, I still balked at some of the choices you have to make in the game. When you land on “spend a zillion dollars on plastic surgery,” or “buy a second car,” you can’t opt out. Even little me was clear: That’s not how I would live my life.
Still, I loved playing The Game of Life, and felt good about retiring a millionaire. Now, the idea of doing that, or of senescing at Countryside Acres (the other option) only leads me to contemplate late-life acts of ecoterrorism.
Being alive is terrifying, and also beautiful, and also finite; grappling with this combination of realities is our job. Fear of death, and questions about the point of being animals with such huge brains, have created both centuries-old and burn-fast-and-hot societal structures. This is literally the stuff of life.
There’s plenty of commentary on the nature of our lives as finite, and how little control we have. Life is a game, board or not.
Perhaps you’ve seen Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin around. One person recommended it to me, then another, and another. Whenever I keep turning different corners and finding the same thing around the bend, I try to listen to that.
T3 follows a few characters over many years, during which time they play and develop video games together. When I read the book, I’d never played a video game, and mostly hadn’t been interested in them.
But these characters drew me in; playing a game is a way of both being so in your body, so absorbed, and of completely leaving yourself. It is both the avoidance of a decision and an exercise in constant decision-making. The characters learn that playing a game allows you to know someone intimately, while also not knowing them at all.
Leaving behind the games themselves, the meta-structure of the story in T3 is about life as a game: you choose, and doors close so you can advance to the next level. You let an opportunity pass, or make a wrong choice, and you lose a life. Or, you get real chances to go back and replay, following a different path.
This is how you make a good game. The play has to be fun and engaging, the details vivid. And the broader story has to meet those standards as well, to hold your attention over time as conditions change.
This is also how you make a good life. Each day has to be okay enough to wake up and do it again, and each year has to feel like a level up from the last, or at least a compelling-enough successor.
We could even claim that life and games both require play, and each is a crucial element of making the other playful. Life without games makes for a dull existence; games without life are ungrounded simulations of reality.
The choices you have in The Game of Life are prescriptive of a certain kind of life. So too are the options for fun, and for risk. Finding the balance of obligation and spontaneity, or expending energy on others versus yourself, is what makes your real-world Life alive.
When I was with Gabriel a few weeks ago, they set me up to play a bit of Kentucky Route Zero, the *drumroll* first video game I’ve ever played. I had no idea what to expect! Wiggling little knobs is fun. This game is nice and slow; it’s beautiful, there’s good music, the characters are compelling. There’s mystery but it’s not too scary, and the world-building is well paced.
Back at home, I was excited to play more KRZ with my partner, who has long enjoyed video games. We’ve spent plenty of time talking about them, and I’ve believed that enjoying science fiction and a good story do predispose me to liking games. After years of such talk, we sat down to play. It was still fun, and also a totally different experience than my first time through.
I know there are more ‘open world’ games than this one, where you have endless options and can play for countless hours. This game is a bit more linear, but playing with two different people led me down two different paths. I really disliked Burlington when I came up here for college ten years ago, but I love it now. The same place is different when your people change. As with games, so with life.
Sometimes I get stuck in a funk, for a day or a few or longer. It’s not as bad as debt from plastic surgery or the burden of the second car, but it isn’t fun; it feels like forgetting how to be alive. Play is often what helps me get unstuck, and reminds me to test out different ways of being alive. Among the looming structures that shape life, there is space for play, for freedom within the bounds. We make the board.