When I was a kid, video games were a niche interest outside the mainstream. Something nerds did. The general consensus was that gaming was unproductive, escapist, and sometimes even harmful to the mental health of children and teenagers. Today, the image of gaming is obviously very different. But one thing remains the same: those who don't play … don't realize that they are also gamers.

There's a good passage in episode 166 of the podcast Weird Studies, I'm paraphrasing freely:

A gamer sits in their room playing a video game. Someone else opens the door and says: You know you're not actually Zagreus, right? You're just a nerd with a controller. The mistake here is assuming that the person in the doorway stands outside all games — which is of course false. They're just playing a different game: secular materialism. If you're playing Monopoly, you can flip the board. But then you're just playing a new game called Flip the Board and Be a Dick. You are always in a game. There is no default.

I recently talked with a friend about David Foster Wallace. He gave a well-known commencement speech in 2005 (that I very much recommend) titled This Is Water. He opens it like this:

Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish, who nods and says: "Morning, boys. How's the water?" They swim on. Then, after a while, one of them looks at the other and asks: "What the hell is water?"

Wallace is pointing at our "default setting" - an automatic, unconscious framing of reality that is hard to detect. He continues with another story:

Two guys are sitting together in a bar in the Alaskan wilderness. One is religious, the other is an atheist, and they're arguing about the existence of God. The atheist says: "Look, it's not like I've never tried the whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month I got separated from the camp in that terrible snowstorm, completely lost, so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, 'Oh God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this storm and I'll die if you don't help me.'" Now, in the bar, the religious man stares at the atheist. "Well, you must be a believer now," he says. "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, that was just a couple of Eskimos who happened to walk by and showed me the way back to camp."

The point is not that both interpretations are equally true. The point is that they are both playing, and that the one who doesn't notice is most dangerous to themselves. Secular materialism is not a neutral starting point. It is a game with historically specific rules, assumptions, and scoring systems. It doesn't start to look like a game until you meet someone playing a different one, and realize that both of you are filling in the gaps with different assumptions and rules.

The Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou told the following story:

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know that he was Zhuang Zhou.

Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Zhuang Zhou is pointing out that the distinction between being awake and dreaming is yet another false dichotomy. The point is not that one of the options is correct. The question of which game is "real" is the wrong question. The atheist and the believer argue about what happened in the snowstorm. Zhuang Zhou doesn't ask what happened - he asks who it is that remembers.

In our society, the standard rules of the game are to maximize growth, measurability, and scalability. A very clear game. The problem is that few understand it as a game, they see it as the default. It gets worse when you think you're playing one game - say, making music - but you're actually playing another: maximize growth, maximize reach.

Everyone is a gamer. The hard-core materialist. The musician who refuses Spotify. Me, having just written this newsletter about how we're all gamers … I’m playing a game called I'm Telling You About the Game.

Depressing, some might think. Liberating, I think. As long as you believe your game is the baseline of reality, that you've finally found the right one, the true one - you are trapped. A bird leaving its cage only to fly into another. But when you see that it is a game - your game, among countless possible games, something happens: you can choose to play it calmly and wholeheartedly, precisely because you know it's a game. Not in spite of it. Because of it.

Bless,
CM