Through the Lens of My Ludens Goggles

November 1, 2021

I've been thinking lately about what we, as humans, are supposed to do with ourselves. As in, what do we do when there's nothing that needs to be done? When things are settled down, we've eaten, our house is as clean as we'd like to be, we've got clothes on our backs with holes only in the right places, and there's still some time left in the day. What is it that we like to do?

It is common knowledge that kids love to play. They'll play anywhere, with anything; they don't need Mary Poppins to tell them to make a game out of it. But also, take five friends in their 20s or 30s, lock them in a room with a spherical object and one other thing, and they'll end up making a game too. The rules will be even less important than with the kids. When kids play with a ball, they take it seriously. It's the only thing in their life they can take seriously. It's their most serious game.

There are pursuits that we, as a culture, consider to be serious. Anything involving the accumulation of wealth is a serious game. Business is serious. Stock trading is serious. Investments. "The Economy." But when you look at the mechanics involved, it is no different than the games we play. The goal of the game is to make the big number increase. Try a new technique: if I lower this price, will I make more sales? Do I buy the billboard in the centre of town, or the one on the highway? The sports metaphors used by businesspeople are not metaphors at all; Business is Baseball. Stock trading is Poker. This is why eSports is the future. These games have the same mechanics as business, while being more fun, AND you still get to make real money. You'd have to be a fool to go to college instead of grinding in League of Legends.

The question is never whether or not what you are doing is playing a game. The question is how seriously you are taking the game. We love to play. We love to play so much that we are always playing. Philosophy is playing with ideas. Math is playing with numbers. Literature is playing with words. Film is play acting. You think physics is about science? No. It's about rolling a ball around and seeing what happens. Playing is about curiosity — play is: what would happen if I try this? That's science. Who's that kid playing in the patent office? The phone's ringing, but he's not picking it up. He's thinking about curved time. Wait. That's Albert Einstein. Smartest man alive.

Jane Austen understood all of this. Marriage was just about the only thing rich English woman were serious about. It was important, for your life. But Jane Austen saw that they were all just playing games. We look back now, with hindsight, and see that she was right. We can laugh at them now, but in 100 years, when our descendants are reading the Jane Austen Of Right Now, they will sound the same note. Can you believe that people spent days of their lives arguing about Bitcoins? All these different ways of inflating the value of data on a computer cloud. I just don't get it.

Think of some more geniuses of literature: William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Soseki Natsume, Jorge Luis Borges... Just keep listing them, if you want. What do they have in common? They are having fun. They write sentences that make themselves laugh. Every classic of literature is full of jokes. If you're not laughing, you're not making literature. You can't spend that long thinking and writing about people without realizing that we are, deep down, funny creatures. And when you realize how funny we are, writing becomes a game. What would happen if this type of funny creature had to talk to this other type of funny creature? What if they had to work together? What if they were... in Paris? What would happen? Let's try it out.

All art is playing pretend. Playing pretend is the essence of human fun. We have the ability to imagine different ways a situation could turn out. We predict what's going to happen. We turn out to be wrong. Oh! Interesting! Ha ha. We can imagine objects that aren't there. What would happen if they were actually there? What would it be like? Let's play around with that idea. Ah... Interesting! Ha ha.

All animals love to play. We all know about dogs and cats. Hyenas and lions. Elephants, seals, dolphins. Even fish like to throw rocks around! There's a lot of time in the day when you're an animal. You eat your meal, you get full, then what? You wander around a bit, try to find something new. You nudge at a rock with your nose. What's underneath it? That takes imagination. That's discovery. That's science. Who's that dog, poking under a rock with his nose? Wait. That's Albert Einstein. Smartest man alive.

Am I simply expanding the definition of play until it encompasses everything that humans do? Yes. Yes, I am. Although this may seem to be simple semantic manipulation, there is a purpose behind this. When you use a new word to describe an old concept, it makes you see it differently. I want you to see that we are playing, and that life is a game. I want you to see this because it makes life a bit easier to enjoy.

I used to beat myself up for not taking my work seriously. I couldn't treat my writing as a business. I couldn't see my work as work. Then, I would start to think about what was the value of art, anyway? Why aren't I instead doing something productive for the economy? Why aren't I starting my own business? But now I understand that I have simply chosen a different game to play. This is the game that I consider the most fun.

However, some may say that not all of life is fun and games. There are necessities to be taken care of. Necessities that are not always pleasant. I might perhaps label them contingencies instead, but I understand the idea. As the fun is sucked more and more out of the tasks that keep us alive, and people turn to addictive telephone applications and long-running television shows to keep their brains from falling out, the idea that life is a game starts to fall on deaf ears.

When an eagle swoops down from the sky to grab at a fish skimming below the surface, you better believe that the eagle is enjoying himself. The fish is probably enjoying himself too. It's a cat-and-mouse game. It’s eagle-and-fish. The fact that this is also a life-or-death scenario for both parties, while adding a dramatic element to the game, does not necessarily make it serious. It has more in common with League of Legends than it does a trip to the grocery store. The eagle and the fish are using their innate talents in order to succeed at a task; that’s the definition of a great game. When the task is important, that becomes also the definition of a satisfying life. It doesn’t matter who you ask.

As a human, the prospect of keeping oneself alive often involves much less satisfying tasks, tasks that use between 0 and half a percent of our innate talents. While a boring job gets you the money to pay for food, it never quite feels like you're earning a living; it feels like you're earning money to pay someone to let you live. Everything is abstracted; the fact that you are alive seems totally unrelated to what is happening. Life is no longer a coherent system. You don't understand what your body wants. You have to pay someone to visit a large room full of nightmarish torture machines in order to have a chance to allow your body to do something, anything, to keep it from slowly deteriorating. It's a sad state of affairs.

Our innate talent for imagination and discovery has led us here. Our passion for the game of wealth, and the luxuries that come with winning, have turned human society into a series of abstract, nonsensical games with a terrifyingly low fun factor. Such that people who come around saying they're going to "gamify" the workplace, by making it resemble more its nature as a servant to the already insipid game of wealth accumulation, are able to attract an audience, and make billions. Boy, it's a sad state of affairs.

Perhaps instead of gamifying life what we need to do is life-ify our games. Bring back the joy and passion that comes from using human powers to their true potential. We are smart, creative, ingenious creatures, with an intuitive sense that allows us to discover truths and fictions about the world around us. We are also physically strong, able to carry and throw objects, to run and jump and roll around. When these two factors work in conjunction, it's beautiful. That is why we are all drawn to sports. Nowadays, when we think of sports, we think of trades and general managers and big, sponsored stadiums, but the germ of the passion is the fact that we are able to see the human body and mind used in a way that feels real and tangible. Art has the same appeal: great music, writing, film-making. They use our human powers of abstract communication to express ideas and showcase the world in new ways. It's a beautiful thing.

And these are only the more showy forms of work. Farming, gardening, sailing a boat, carrying boxes — there is fun to be had in all physical labour, when the purpose is clear and the times for rest are plenty. It doesn't have to kill you for it to be work; the only defining aspect of work is being active for a purpose.

There are many satisfying forms of work in this world, but sadly only a lucky few are able to pursue them, with the rest left to watch and dream. And even the most satisfying work nowadays has the ugly residue of the Lord Mammon's dirty fingerprints. Work, activity, games; these are all a testament to the beauty of our existence — a testament to our creator, if we have one; or otherwise a testament to the sheer mind-boggling luck that gave us such bodies and minds.