Analogies of game and play, life and death

In the dream beyond death’s gate?

Why, we are almost in the realm of Chuang Tzu..

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

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Oho — do we imagine we have escaped moral necessity by viewing life as a dream?

Calderón again:

I want to do what’s right, for it pays to do what’s right even in dreams.

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Ah, but games.

It was the quote that follows, about death and games, that drove me to write this post, and I believe it takes us deeper into the mystery of these analogies of life and death: Gabby DaRienzo is writing about “ussing game mechanics to encourage players to think about death and mortality” in her piece, Death Positivity in Video Games:

Death serves multiple mechanical roles in videogames — it is most commonly used as a thing you want to avoid, a goal you need to accomplish, or as a narrative device. While death is prominent in many videogames, we generally give it much less thought and treat it with much less seriousness than actual death, especially when it comes to the player.

And there we have it — the recognition that we care less or more, proportionately, about some things in games than we do in “RL”.

Some of that difference, it would seem is to do with the mechanics and “inworld” motivations of particular games — but it would be an interesting landscape to plot, game by game or genre by genre. Flight simulators need to be in close correspondence with the realities they are represnting in terms of turbulent air flows, fuel consumption, and landing strips, for iunstance — but if their clouds are visually a bit less than realistic, it’s no big deal. A Tibetan mandala-based game, on the other hand, might want to get the scrolled cloud-work so characteristic of Tibetan art and the Thirty-two Excellent Signs of a Buddha’s Enlightening Body exactly right — in Tibetan cultural terms. Strage, but true:

Each hair of a Buddha’s eyebrow is exactly the same length.

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Money, then.

In Monopoly, it’s everything — and life?

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