Gaming, and the Burat

I remember, one lifetime ago, when I handled one semester of ludology (or game studies - "the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them") in a Manila university. It was a team-taught course, and I handled the philosophy part of it - the aesthetics of games, the question of embodiment in gaming - but not its ethics, to my regret. (Maybe that's what spawned this post.)

Now, in this lifetime, I can - abashedly, however - call myself a gamer. Of just one particular game and server. I did play some other console games and other MMORPGs, but not as investedly as I do in this one. This month's event in this server is what's called Conqueror's Path, and my school - MP - holds the lead by 3 to null, mostly because we have more players in MP (~4 parties) than in SG (~2 parties), the rival school. (There's supposed to be three schools, but the other one - Phoenix - is a deserted wasteland of cow skulls and tumbleweeds.)

After last night's win, some of the guild members of my school were challenged to an 8v8 by some SG, so those of us MP who were game went for it. Long story short, the 8v8 degraded into trash-talking about pilots and donors and spoon-feeding and... you guessed it, penises.

The members of the MP guild who participated in the 8v8 were telling me what went on and what was said - I didn't participate in the 8v8 because I had more important things to - like get my beer out of the fridge. So I was regaled with stories in our guild chat about how this particular player said this, and then this particular player answered so-and-so this way. 

So here's where this post really starts: I asked a question. I was wondering why the trash-talking went on for so long. Being a person who conserves energy (i.e., lazy), I don't really engage in confrontation, verbal or otherwise, even when I get angry - because I rarely get angry. Anger wastes so much energy and gives worth to the issue when there is otherwise none. 

The question I asked the guild chat was, "Well, what do you answer to someone who just answers you with 'penis'?" I meant for it to be a rhetorical question - in my head, there is no arguing or talking to be done if the conversation partner threw a "penis" around. But then one of my schoolmates answered, "'Well, if it's penises you're after...' is how you should answer." 

So then I replied, "But where would the conversation go? You are two characters in the middle of a game, in the world of a pandemic, and you are throwing... penises... at each other?"

I realize now that I missed the point of gaming, all this time, even when I have taught philosophy courses about it. When you are in the game, play it. There is an avenue for intellectualizing the game and bringing in the real world in the game, but that avenue is not within the game. Hence in trash-talking you can talk about someone's mother being unfuckable or fuckable or what have you, and still it's part of the game. Unless you are of a very specific bent of mind within the game, you take trash-talk with a grain of salt - you don't go running to your mother and tell her what this person told you about her. 

You play the game, while you are in it. It's very easy now to see why so many people would consider life a game, because of its rules, its competition or cooperation, its tactics and strategies, its objectives and methods.  But that is incorrect: games are part of life, and life is not a game. The end of a game is winning; the end of life is death. No logical or hermeneutic correlation could be made if both the objective of life and of games is at issue.

You play the game, while you are in it. Hence your understanding of the game is a very application-based one: you know its rules, you know its dynamics, etc. So the inverse is, while you are in a game, you cannot understand it (at least in the second-order level of understanding). You can only intellectualize the game when you are not playing it. 

(This is the connection of life with games, then. Life is likened to a game, only because while you are alive, you cannot at the same time understand it. Yes, yes, we all know that line, "A life well-understood is a life well-lived," but it, like me, missed the point. You can understand games while living only because games are a part of life, not life itself.)

So my question about penises - stands both inside and outside the game, games being part of life itself. The question about the penis in the game is inside the game, because it is part of the game to talk about penises. At the same time, the question is outside the game, because I was trying to intellectualize the game and its culture while being part of it: The question only exists because I am part of the larger culture of humanity, where we do not, in reality, throw penises at each other.