The “second talk” below is even less coherent, and in fact does not really talk about “Olympics” at all. It is simply continuing to talk about “games.” But since it nevertheless arises from the same occasion as the scattered essays before and after it—namely, the holding of the Olympic Games—I still name it “Second Talk on the Olympics.” Had I not written it at this moment, it might perhaps have been filed under the “nonsense” series.
However, although it stands together in the title, the folder in which it is placed on the blog has been changed. The first piece, because it focused on the cultural style of ancient Greece, was filed under history and museum pieces; this article, however, does not involve history at all, so let’s count it as a play-and-leisure piece.
These past few days I have mainly devoted my energy to watching the Olympics. I am not a sports fan, and I only become this absorbed in sports programs during the World Cup and the Olympic Games,
In the previous article I spoke about the Olympics as a “game” containing one idea or another, but I did not offer any further explication of the concept of “game” itself. What, after all, is a game? What characteristics and kinds of games can there be? What kind of game is more interesting?
What the previous article first mentioned was the spontaneity of “game,” that is to say, a game is certainly not something forced upon one; it must instead be something one actively takes part in and enjoys. This is the most fundamental meaning of the word game.
But not every spontaneous activity can be called a game. For instance, when I sit in front of the television watching the Olympics, I am also doing so entirely of my own will and with enjoyment, but I think such activity cannot properly be called a “game.”
Mere viewing can be called entertainment or leisure, but it always sits a little awkwardly with the concept of game.
Thus another important element implicit in “game” is a certain “interactivity,” or, one might say, “practicality.” These two ways of putting it are equivalent: practice implies interaction. But in explicating the concept of “game,” the word “interaction” makes things a little clearer.
A game is always some kind of interactive, communicative activity. A game always brings out both the “I” as player and the “object” as stage, prop, or opponent. To “play” is always to “play with…” there is always mutual exchange in it. When a person is playing, he is also dealing with the world in an active, participatory way, and is not a mere spectator. Of course, even the most plain and simple act of “looking” contains active involvement. In this sense, there is no clear-cut boundary between “game” and “non-game”; all human activity in a certain sense has a gamelike quality. Yet there is after all an obvious difference of degree here: we are more inclined to call those activities with more pronounced interactivity games.
The “interaction” here includes not only contests between people, but also the player’s interaction with the game’s implements, and those “implements” may be real objects or concepts or pictures in the mind. Thus activities such as a person playing chess against himself in his head also count as games. What this interactivity amounts to is that I am always manipulating or arranging certain things; in short, I am actively exerting influence on certain things while receiving corresponding feedback.
As the topic seems to be drifting farther and farther away from the Olympic Games, I had better rein myself in for now, and slowly expand on it later when I write seriously about the philosophy of games. Here I bring “interactivity” to the surface only to point out that since interaction is the core of games, different forms of interaction will correspond to different forms of game.
The Olympics is undoubtedly a form of game, and this form of game—namely, the “competitive” form—rests mainly on interaction between people. But games of course are not limited to competition alone. In fact, competitive games are more popular among boys, whereas the games preferred by girls are rather different in style. Whether dolls or jumping rubber band, girls’ games in general place more emphasis on creating intimate relationships rather than hostile struggle, while boys care more about the outcome and adversarial nature of the game.
But I do not want to overstate the supposed differences between male and female games. A detailed discussion of this difference would lead the topic onto another track, so let us set it aside for the moment. After all, whether boyish games or girlish games, games that lean more toward competition or games that are more leisurely and diversionary, they share many of the most basic characteristics, such as spontaneity and transcendence, and the creation of order and harmony. Of course, we also have to note that in terms of the emphasis on rules, the pursuit of honor, and an aggressive spirit, boys’ games are more typically expressed. In the general impression, boys are indeed the more restless and playful by nature; compared with girls, boys often are more enthusiastic about games, and perhaps this really is the result of nature. Thus we should not be surprised at all: why does every “civilization” always begin from a patriarchal society? We may also perhaps more easily understand why the ancient Greeks were always so intoxicated with men—male narcissism and homosexuality are among the most prominent features of ancient Greek culture.
I am certainly not advocating patriarchy. I only want to show the diversity of “games.” You should understand that when I use competitive games as an example in my explication, that does not mean this is the whole of games. When I praise the ideas nurtured by certain games, that does not mean insisting on those ideas to the bitter end is a good thing. As the saying goes, solitary yin does not give birth, and solitary yang does not grow; in any pair of tensions, being excessively fixated on either end is not a good thing. This of course also includes oppositions such as “good—bad,” “right—wrong,” “true—false”; these seemingly incompatible concepts are often both sides of the same game.
For example, the tension between “indulgence—restraint” is unified within games. A game is undoubtedly an indulgent activity, but the possibility of this indulgence must be guaranteed by restraint, because a game is always an activity of active participation. It is not a matter of laying aside reason and letting desire spill forth unchecked; rather, it is actively using reason to design or choose activities that satisfy oneself. Human beings are creatures not easily satisfied; sheer cathartic outpouring of animal instincts is not enough to make a person content. After a momentary pleasure comes greater emptiness and boredom. Because humans are temporal beings, human beings can, and must, allow a future that has not yet happened to enter into their present feeling. People know in advance the greater emptiness that will follow once a brief pleasure has been satisfied, as well as the more lasting delight that may be obtained if one applies a proper measure of restraint and planning; thus those who are able to choose often prefer the latter.
Every game is such a plan by which people are able to indulge themselves in a restrained way, no matter whether the desires released within it are the most primitive or the most complex. Even in the most primitive appetites of eating and sex, we can see the game of restraint. For instance, a child may leave his favorite item on the plate until last, thereby leaving the greatest pleasure for the end while also making the whole meal more delicious, and preserving a more lasting aftertaste after the meal. This kind of behavior—actively designing the order of food—can also be said to be a kind of game. And adults, in activities that release sexual desire, also know to first enjoy rich “foreplay” such as conversation, kissing, and caressing, rather than venting desire as soon as it arises and leaving it at that.
People will find that appropriately restraining one’s desires not only increases the pleasure obtained when that desire is finally satisfied, but also allows one to enjoy, even when the desire ultimately is not fulfilled, the various preparatory activities that came before. This is also one of the roots of so-called “the important thing is participation.”
“Game—seriousness” is another pair of opposites. Here “game” is often used to refer to an attitude toward affairs that stands in opposition to “seriousness.” But what, exactly, is the attitude of a game? If the attitude of a game is “not serious,” then what does “serious” mean? In ordinary usage, it seems that the attitude of a game means some indifference to the result, and simply taking pleasure in oneself. Seriousness, by contrast, often means keeping the larger situation in mind and being conscientious and responsible, while also bringing to mind a stern, unsmiling image.
Yet the so-called attitude of a game and seriousness are both different aspects within games. When we stand outside the game, what we see is the player, intoxicated with a self-sufficient game world, being indifferent to the utilitarian aims outside the game; however, if we move closer and look, when we are inside the game world or on its edge, we may instead see the most serious attitude. Board games are a typical example: silence while watching the game, no regrets after a move—chess games always require participants to follow strict etiquette and absolutely do not allow players to be frivolous or unbridled on the board. The Olympic competitions are like this too: if you are actually participating in the game, then a “game attitude” is not allowed. You cannot be careless toward the game you are taking part in, or toward its rules and opponents; you must take them seriously and treat them seriously.
Thus, even if you still refuse to believe that “focus,” “rigor,” and “seriousness” all originate in games, you must at least admit that they are not opposed to “game.”
A game always establishes a self-sufficient world of meaning, and things outside that world are irrelevant to it. Once the game ends, that self-sufficient world of meaning immediately closes up as well, and has nothing to do with the life outside the game. Thus those within the game looking at the world outside the game, or those outside the game looking at the world inside it, will both be “careless” or “indifferent.”
Therefore, when we regard some undertaking as a “game,” our attitude depends on where we place ourselves in relation to that “game.” If I stand outside the game, then this game is for me a matter of no consequence, a meaningless entertainment; however, if I always regard the game from the standpoint of a participant, then this game is for me an entire world of meaning.
If the whole world or one’s entire life were regarded as a game, what kind of attitude would that be? That does not mean being careless toward anything; on the contrary, everything is endowed with meaning, and everything is connected with me. And when the boundary of this game world begins to contract, what takes the place of game? Since games are those spontaneous, joyful, and independent-autonomous activities, what can be called “non-game” are those forced, painful, or heteronomous activities.
In other words, the distinction between the realm of games and “non-game” lies in this: the meaning of a game is closed and self-sufficient; the player does not care about purposes outside the game, nor is he commanded or governed by things outside the game. The player only needs to establish and obey rules within the game world, create and pursue meaning, and does not need to seek any further support. And once one steps outside the self-sufficient world of meaning, one enters the domain that people usually regard as “non-game.”
For example, people often say “XX is not child’s play,” meaning: you need to consider the consequences of this matter. That is to say, the matter does not have meaning in and of itself; there are other things beyond it that you ought to pay attention to, and this matter is closely related to those other things. For example, when people say “marriage is not child’s play,” they mean that marriage concerns all aspects of two families’ lives; it is not an isolated activity unrelated to anything else. It means you should not ruin a worse future for the sake of a moment’s happiness.
There is a situation in which one game is part of a larger game world. This is common in more complex video games, in which during the course of the whole game the player may encounter several mini-games. These mini-games can themselves be regarded as self-sufficient games, but at the same time, by means of these mini-games one may obtain rewards such as coins or experience points. These rewards are meaningless within those mini-games, but meaningful within the larger game as a whole. Then we can say: the rewards obtained from the mini-games have a “higher” meaning than the mini-games themselves.
But if we are not within some game world, but outside the largest game world of all, then where will “meaning” come from?
Many people will push meaning onto others. For example, the meaning of my life is to devote myself to others (such as my children, my country, or God), but then to whom should the meaning of others be pushed? If my own life has no meaning, then why ask others to continue such a life? If everything is pushed onto God, then why would God create all this in the first place? Perhaps God was just doing it for fun, and only in that way does it make sense.
Many people also say that things like “truth,” “goodness,” “beauty,” and “justice” are the higher meanings. But where exactly are they “higher”? Where does their meaning come from? If their meaning still requires support from another, even higher meaning, then where is the highest meaning? Following this line of thought, one either takes the path of traditional ontology, doing everything possible to seize on one concept and declare it supreme, or one ultimately moves toward nihilism.
To find a self-sufficient meaning in the whole world and to take the whole world as a game are one and the same thing.
Of course, the concept of “meaning” is also part of language games; it does not possess any special mysteriousness. You can also understand this word as “interesting,” “fun,” or “exciting.” You can grasp the concept of “meaningful” by recalling the feeling of delight and fulfillment you have when playing games, while the emptiness you feel when a game is over and there is nothing to do can help you grasp the concept of “meaningless.” Of course, you can also link the concept of “meaning” with the warm feeling you experience when receiving care from others, or with the sense of achievement you get when caring for or defeating others; but these links are likewise established in the original game, because the earliest way human beings interact with the world and with others is precisely through games.
Of course, you may take what I have said earlier as merely playing with “word games,” and that is also a fact. I only want to point out the origin relationship between “meaning” and “game.” People often use the name of “meaning,” or the name of “higher meaning,” to exhort others to stay away from games. Outside of “game,” people cannot find meaning; on the contrary, they will lose it. I am by no means saying that people should immerse themselves in the little games right before their eyes and reject “higher meaning.” Human beings ought to have an upward striving. What I want to say is that this striving does not require us to move away from games; on the contrary, the pursuit of higher meaning is precisely part of the game. Forgetting games will cause people to lose themselves.
As one example, I want to say: regarding philosophical activity as a “language game” does not necessarily mean being careless about concepts, and still less does it mean denying the meaning of concepts. The player faces concepts with a more serious and more committed attitude, and creates meaning. On the contrary, those metaphysicians who forget the gamelike nature of language often fall into a frenzy of concepts; they construct isolated and self-sufficient conceptual worlds, yet forget their gamelike quality, venerating such worlds as the only reality and overstepping the limits of human cognitive capacity. That is dogmatism.
What is called “forgetting the game” means forgetting, and thereby overstepping, the boundaries of the game. For example, bringing certain aims or rules that originally belong within the game into the outside of the game, or introducing aims or standards from outside the game into the game itself. For instance, when you play chess, of course you must remember that the aim of chess is to capture the other side’s general, but if you only remember that you must capture the general and forget that you are in fact playing chess, and then directly pick up a piece and stuff it into your mouth, that is of course ridiculous. Or if you know only the game you like to play, but do not know that there can be other ways of playing—if you know only how to play Gomoku, and when you see others playing Go you judge it by the standards of Gomoku and conclude that they are just making a mess of things—then that too is of course a joke. But this kind of joke is actually not uncommon. For example, some people evaluate the quality of a person’s philosophical or scientific theory by the class into which he was born; others will use coercion and inducement to force others to “accept” their own theory; more commonly, people will tear a few words out of someone else’s context and insert them into their own line of thought in order to judge them.
In addition, if one pursues honor and forgets the game, departs from the spirit of play and fair rules, then one becomes consumed by vanity and loses one’s way; if one pursues victory and forgets the game, one turns into a savage lust for conquest; if one pursues order and forgets the game, one moves toward rigidity and dogmatism…
(Note: Of course, the boundaries of a game are not always, and should not always be, clear-cut. People are constantly modifying the rules of games, and overstepping the rules often creates new games. For example, in football, picking up the ball and charging toward the goal is of course a transgression of the rules; yet this may have inspired the emergence of rugby. In a certain sense, the activity of designing new game rules itself can also be a kind of game. And philosophy is precisely about reflecting on games: what kind of game am I playing? What are its boundaries and rules? Which written rules are unnecessary? Which unwritten rules have not been recognized by people? How might they be improved?… I have already mentioned related topics in earlier articles.)
August 13, 2008
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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