The Madness of Playing Games

By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

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.


Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com