The Game

There�s a game that I play with my friends. You can play it too, if you want. It�s very simple. It doesn�t have a name; we only know it as The Game. There are only two rules: you are always playing The Game, and if you ever remember that you�re playing the Game, you�ve lost, and you have to say �I�ve lost�. It is spectacularly unrewarding. Its beauty is its futility.

Subtle refinements can be made to pile on the misery of participation in The Game. Techologically literate players soon seized the opportunities that text messaging brought to make others lose. In a subtle twist, messaging from a non-player�s phone became the most elegant method to destroy another player. Knowing that any message could cut the thread of the Sword of Damocles, the very bleep-bleep of the phone makes the player aware of their situation, and consequently they lose.

The inventive sadist can truly shine at The Game. I recently received an email. All it said was: �You lose on the toilet.� Now the quotidian experience of voiding my bowels results in loss in another way. It�s Pavlovian: I shit, I am then conditioned to lose and then I am shit.

Why play this game? A simple answer would be that my friends and I are a peculiarly twisted bunch of fuck-ups. However, I prefer the explanation that The Game allows one to delight in pointlessness. Too much of life is spent setting and achieving goals. It is extremely liberating to wallow in meaninglessness.

Remember, everything only happens once. Stating this is not an exercise in page filling obviousness. Life would have so much more point if, after a specified amount of time, say six months, we could start all over again. Then planning and preparation would come into their own. You could use the first run as a practice, and then lead your life the way you actually should, the next time around.

The way life is, and barring intervention by a God-like power will continue to be, we have to accept that once something has happened, it will never happen like that again. Before any event has occurred, it�s over. There�s no point. We have total freedom, because we never have to relive anything. This is the counterpoint to the dark side of The Game. But you always have to have suffering to appreciate pleasure, and so, if you have decided to start playing The Game, you�ve lost, and so have I. Have fun and enjoy life.

David Peter