
If a lone, unkempt, person, standing on a soapbox were to say that he
should become the Prime Minister, he would have been diagnosed by a
passing psychiatrist as suffering from this or that mental disturbance.
But were the same psychiatrist to frequent the same spot and see a crowd
of millions saluting the same lonely, shabby figure - what would have
his diagnosis been? Surely, different (perhaps of a more political hue).
It
seems that one thing setting social games apart from madness is
quantitative: the amount of the participants involved. Madness is a
one-person game, and even mass mental disturbances are limited in scope.
Moreover, it has long been demonstrated (for instance, by Karen Horney)
that the definition of certain mental disorders is highly dependent
upon the context of the prevailing culture. Mental disturbances
(including psychoses) are time-dependent and locus-dependent. Religious
behaviour and romantic behaviour could be easily construed as
psychopathologies when examined out of their social, cultural,
historical and political contexts.
Historical figures as diverse
as Nietzsche (philosophy), Van Gogh (art), Hitler (politics) and Herzl
(political visionary) made this smooth phase transition from the lunatic
fringes to centre stage. They succeeded to attract, convince and
influence a critical human mass, which provided for this transition.
They appeared on history's stage (or were placed there posthumously) at
the right time and in the right place. The biblical prophets and Jesus
are similar examples though of a more severe disorder. Hitler and Herzl
possibly suffered from personality disorders - the biblical prophets
were, almost certainly, psychotic.
We play games because they are
reversible and their outcomes are reversible. No game-player expects
his involvement, or his particular moves to make a lasting impression on
history, fellow humans, a territory, or a business entity. This,
indeed, is the major taxonomic difference: the same class of actions can
be classified as "game" when it does not intend to exert a lasting
(that is, irreversible) influence on the environment. When such
intention is evident - the very same actions qualify as something
completely different. Games, therefore, are only mildly associated with
memory. They are intended to be forgotten, eroded by time and entropy,
by quantum events in our brains and macro-events in physical reality.
Games
- as opposed to absolutely all other human activities - are entropic.
Negentropy - the act of reducing entropy and increasing order - is
present in a game, only to be reversed later. Nowhere is this more
evident than in video games: destructive acts constitute the very
foundation of these contraptions. When children start to play (and
adults, for that matter - see Eric Berne's books on the subject) they
commence by dissolution, by being destructively analytic. Playing games
is an analytic activity. It is through games that we recognize our
temporariness, the looming shadow of death, our forthcoming dissolution,
evaporation, annihilation.
These FACTS we repress in normal life
- lest they overwhelm us. A frontal recognition of them would render us
speechless, motionless, paralysed. We pretend that we are going to live
forever, we use this ridiculous, counter-factual assumption as a
working hypothesis. Playing games lets us confront all this by engaging
in activities which, by their very definition, are temporary, have no
past and no future, temporally detached and physically detached. This is
as close to death as we get.
Small wonder that rituals (a
variant of games) typify religious activities. Religion is among the few
human disciplines which tackle death head on, sometimes as a
centrepiece (consider the symbolic sacrifice of Jesus). Rituals are also
the hallmark of obsessive-compulsive disorders, which are the reaction
to the repression of forbidden emotions (our reaction to the prevalence,
pervasiveness and inevitability of death is almost identical). It is
when we move from a conscious acknowledgement of the relative lack of
lasting importance of games - to the pretension that they are important,
that we make the transition from the personal to the social.
The
way from madness to social rituals traverses games. In this sense, the
transition is from game to myth. A mythology is a closed system of
thought, which defines the "permissible" questions, those that can be
asked. Other questions are forbidden because they cannot be answered
without resorting to another mythology altogether.
Observation is
an act, which is the anathema of the myth. The observer is presumed to
be outside the observed system (a presumption which, in itself, is part
of the myth of Science, at least until the Copenhagen Interpretation of
Quantum Mechanics was developed).
A game looks very strange,
unnecessary and ridiculous from the vantage-point of an outside
observer. It has no justification, no future, it looks aimless (from the
utilitarian point of view), it can be compared to alternative systems
of thought and of social organization (the biggest threat to any
mythology). When games are transformed to myths, the first act
perpetrated by the group of transformers is to ban all observations by
the (willing or unwilling) participants.<

Introspection replaces observation and becomes a mechanism of
social coercion. The game, in its new guise, becomes a transcendental,
postulated, axiomatic and doctrinaire entity. It spins off a caste of
interpreters and mediators. It distinguishes participants (formerly,
players) from outsiders or aliens (formerly observers or uninterested
parties). And the game loses its power to confront us with death. As a
myth it assumes the function of repression of this fact and of the fact
that we are all prisoners. Earth is really a death ward, a cosmic death
row: we are all trapped here and all of us are sentenced to die.Today's
telecommunications, transportation, international computer networks and
the unification of the cultural offering only serve to exacerbate and
accentuate this claustrophobia. Granted, in a few millennia, with space
travel and space habitation, the walls of our cells will have
practically vanished (or become negligible) with the exception of the
constraint of our (limited) longevity. Mortality is a blessing in
disguise because it motivates humans to act in order "not to miss the
train of life" and it maintains the sense of wonder and the (false)
sense of unlimited possibilities.This conversion from madness to
game to myth is subjected to meta-laws that are the guidelines of a
super-game. All our games are derivatives of this super-game of
survival. It is a game because its outcomes are not guaranteed, they are
temporary and to a large extent not even known (many of our activities
are directed at deciphering it). It is a myth because it effectively
ignores temporal and spatial limitations. It is one-track minded: to
foster an increase in the population as a hedge against contingencies,
which are outside the myth.All the laws, which encourage
optimization of resources, accommodation, an increase of order and
negentropic results - belong, by definition to this meta-system. We can
rigorously claim that there exist no laws, no human activities outside
it. It is inconceivable that it should contain its own negation
(Godel-like), therefore it must be internally and externally consistent.
It is as inconceivable that it will be less than perfect - so it must
be all-inclusive. Its comprehensiveness is not the formal logical one:
it is not the system of all the conceivable sub-systems, theorems and
propositions (because it is not self-contradictory or self-defeating).
It is simply the list of possibilities and actualities open to humans,
taking their limitations into consideration. This, precisely, is the
power of money. It is - and always has been - a symbol whose abstract
dimension far outweighed its tangible one.This bestowed upon
money a preferred status: that of a measuring rod. The outcomes of games
and myths alike needed to be monitored and measured. Competition was
only a mechanism to secure the on-going participation of individuals in
the game. Measurement was an altogether more important element: the very
efficiency of the survival strategy was in question. How could humanity
measure the relative performance (and contribution) of its members -
and their overall efficiency (and prospects)? Money came handy. It is
uniform, objective, reacts flexibly and immediately to changing
circumstances, abstract, easily transformable into tangibles - in short,
a perfect barometer of the chances of survival at any given gauging
moment. It is through its role as a universal comparative scale - that
it came to acquire the might that it possesses.Money, in other
words, had the ultimate information content: the information concerning
survival, the information needed for survival. Money measures
performance (which allows for survival enhancing feedback). Money
confers identity - an effective way to differentiate oneself in a world
glutted with information, alienating and assimilating. Money cemented a
social system of monovalent rating (a pecking order) - which, in turn,
optimized decision making processes through the minimization of the
amounts of information needed to affect them. The price of a share
traded in the stock exchange, for instance, is assumed (by certain
theoreticians) to incorporate (and reflect) all the information
available regarding this share. Analogously, we can say that the amount
of money that a person has contains sufficient information regarding his
or her ability to survive and his or her contribution to the
survivability of others. There must be other - possibly more important
measures of that - but they are, most probably, lacking: not as uniform
as money, not as universal, not as potent, etc.Money is said to
buy us love (or to stand for it, psychologically) - and love is the
prerequisite to survival. Very few of us would have survived without
some kind of love or attention lavished on us. We are dependent
creatures throughout our lives. Thus, in an unavoidable path, as humans
move from game to myth and from myth to a derivative social organization
- they move ever closer to money and to the information that it
contains. Money contains information in different modalities. But it all
boils down to the very ancient question of the survival of the fittest.
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