Game Over

They’re all playing games. It’s the only explanation I can think of.

The way a game is framed, victory is the only thing that matters. Accumulate your resources, destroy your opponents, be the last one standing, survive at any cost. Any sacrifice necessary is worthwhile, if you can win. That’s how the game is played.

When you take that viewpoint, and translate it into the real world, it’s a massacre. Pointless sacrifices made for worthless gains. That’s the world we’re in right now.

Everyone’s playing for a high score, ignoring the fact that the plays they’re making reduce the value of the points they scrape up. Raising money, the abstraction and quantification of a country’s productivity, at the cost of the productivity it’s meant to represent – it’s hard not to smell the doom coming, if you’re paying attention. Capitalism is a kid in a net cafe, thrilled at winning a round of Counterstrike, ignoring the clot that is forming in his thigh, blinding himself to the slow creaking of each victory bringing him closer to a grander and more final defeat..

It’s all about what we’re willing to sacrifice. Our government has proven itself willing to sacrifice our privacy and freedom of press – supposedly to uphold our safety, though, in point of fact, their policy of freewheeling military invention for nebulous causes in distant countries tends to be the genesis of most terrorist activity. Not that it matters, since the police appear to be more than willing to cut out the middle-man and brutalize us directly, so I’m not sure where the safety they’re supposed to be providing even lies any more.

What’s sad isn’t that it’s evil. What’s sad is that it’s stupid. What’s sad is that, if the people who are ruining everything right now sat down and actually thought this shit through instead of playing the game, instead of constantly plotting each move and counter-move, instead of finding the optimal strategy, instead of finding a path to victory, if they thought for just a few minutes about what is actually in their best long-term interests, most of it would stop tomorrow.

I love games, but only when everyone knows that they’re playing. Right now, we’re all just NPCs in their elaborate game of Civilization, of Sim City, of Total War, and beholden to the whims of people trying to achieve victory, whether or not that victory happens to map to any real-world benefit. Some of them ignore this, some of them tell themselves it’s part of a greater good, a battle that must be won, and some of them just don’t care. Very few of them, though, I suspect, realize that they’re sacrificing their own future, along with everyone else’s, just for a slightly better chance of victory, just for a slightly higher score on the leaderboards.

There is no victory, but the players can’t leave. The grand game continues, day by day, and we are crushed under its rules.