The Romans lived high thanks to conquest, and somehow also made their chief entertainments bloody arena fights. You’d think they’d have had enough of one thing. But societies don’t ever get enough of one thing: their thinking spirals inwards, to decadence, and narrow mental alleys. If you’ve got a problem, more of the same should fix it! Until, of course, it doesn’t.
We’re not so different. Our mental alley is left-brained, technocratic scientism. We all agree that optimization and efficiency are the way to go. For instance, to stave off global warming, buy more efficient gadgets! When the “conservatives” and “liberals” agree on something, you can be sure it’s a terrible thing.
Thus, also, do we now play board games about little economies that need optimizing.
I admit, I play European (Euro) board games. I’ve always liked board games: their little worlds, their symbols, their theater of action that’s so different from everyday life. I spent many days trying to recreate Fireball Island in paper when I was five, after the ads I saw on TV.
Euro’s aren’t overly popular, but they’re still indicative (symptomatic maybe) of our culture. It doesn’t seem at all surprising that when you sit down and play one of these games that (1) there will be a single, fungible unit you’re striving towards called victory points; and (2) that getting them is the one thing you care about, because whoever has the most wins, and there can be only one winner; and (3) you get them by pulling little levers and switches (metaphorically) in cardboard, trying to figure out an arbitrary system of rules, in order to manipulate it better (faster, cheaper) than everyone else.
This should remind us a lot of real life. Which means European board games aren’t flights of fancy or idle past-times: they’re recapitulations of our culture, with different window-dressing. We optimize our way through our careers, through dating, through the stock market, and now also through our entertainment. It seems we have only one way of thinking about things. Rather like the Romans.
Really, I don’t want to hate on board games. I enjoy them lightly. They’re fun puzzles. But don’t we have enough puzzles? Must everything be a puzzle? A competition? A series of empty, meaningless tasks ending in an arbitrary goal set by someone else?
What we’ve lost in our society has been recognized for a while, but it’s getting acute. Community. Cooperation. Meaningful work. Connection to land, to history, to real, solid things that don’t exist for us, or because of us. We, in the modern West, are all sick, and some just show it off better, with “epidemics” of loneliness, ADHD, numerous other diagnoses, numerous drug abuses, and random acts of violence. This ain’t a happy, well-adjusted society.
And yet we aim, in our desire to fix ourselves, to do more of the same. More efficiency (that’ll help the environemnt and profits). More technology, which will soon do the last interesting parts of your job, and even get you there too, so you interact with the physical world even less. More drugs, more medications. More, different, better chemicals.
It’s said, regarding science fiction, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This essay isn’t about capitalism: capitalism is a logical result of seeing the world as abstract, meaningless quantities to manipulate at will. This all started, it seems with the enlightenment, with protestentism, with writing. Well! We’ll have to go back even farther to get some grains of truth that aren’t more of the same. We’ll need imagination to even see it; and to recognize what’s different.
In Ursula LeGuin’s fantasy Earthsea novels, the protagonist’s people are unique in that they are not reborn, the way outsiders are. We come to learn that this is not a gift of the gods but the result of magical tinkering long ago: wizards (like the protagonist) entered the space between life and death, and built a wall to stop their rebirth. That magic altered their whole being and way of life, with very long-term consequences no thought to foresee. The parallels with modern, western science are intentional, but I think the magical parallel is even better. Any way of thinking is a kind of spell we cast on ourselves, and it revokes alternatives from us; it shapes all our actions, and thus the created world we inhabit.
Going back to the non-human world is one way we can hope to see something that isn’t (totally) part of our culture’s peculiar delusions. So too is looking at other cultures, religions and world-views. Along with just plain old resisting what we don’t like today, as hard as it might be. I’m not going to invoke any AI to do the creative work that humans once enjoyed doing, no matter if it’s 10-cents an image; or free. It’s never really free, if it destroys who you are.
Criticism and essays generally are, in their way, a part of modernism. They excel at identifying problems, but usually fall quite short at offering anything else up. That may be inevitable: creating a different pattern of life needs action, as much as reflection; and it’s going to depend on immersing ourselves in real things outside our own heads (see Matthew Crawford). Even looking at other people’s heads would be a step; as long as their not all striving in the same way, to the same goals, toward their precious victory points.
Exquisite Corpse writing might be a better inspirational game to play, if we want to have a break from left-brained optimization. (That’s where multiple people write in sequence and stitch the result together to get a madcap story.) That’s more akin to play than to a game: there’s no way to win, except to enjoy the creativity of your friends, and to laugh at the result; where combining ideas has no specific goal, but something very good may nonetheless come about. Where there’s serendipity, and a reaction to other people; language and images as well as math. Maybe we can play it in the forest, and get squirrels and the trees to play too — see where the acorn falls. But we care not because that acorn might make the winning move, but because we’ll laugh when it happens.