Hey if a game is the consensual overcoming of unnecessary obstacles, are people still playing a game if they’re being paid to play?
What if the game does not have money as part of the game?
What if being seen as playing the game is incentivised?
Is capitalism fundamentally violent?
Sure let’s start it off with some easy questions.
Alright let’s unpack this a little bit I guess.
First up there’s game. The definition of game I use, because I like it and it’s better than the others and it doesn’t involve asserting that may be Dutch imperialism was good actually, comes from Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper. This definition I summarise as:
A game is the consensual overcoming of unnecessary obstacles.
With a treatment given to each of those terms. The obstacles have to be obstacles, they can’t be immaterial or meaningless, they do have to be unnecessary in that you’re not required or incentivised in some particular way that you have to do it, and that’s probably because it removes that final entry in the list, the one I intend to dig into here. It is the consensual overcoming of unnecessary obstacles.
In this definition, if you didn’t consent to playing, it’s not a game. People can’t coerce you into being playful, they can’t make you have fun. This is important to me, especially when I was teaching kids how to play board games, because I needed them to understand they weren’t obligated to play just because I wanted them to. They needed to consent and the second they didn’t want to play the game, boom, they were able to get the hell out of there.
But okay now what is consent?
Don’t think I’m messing with you here, consent is a really challenging concept to get an entirely pure non-social reference for, because it has all these blurry edges about it. Consent broadly defined is an acceptance of a proposal; the game is a proposal, that you will do these things by these rules until such time as this state is reached, and the game concludes. When we talk about consent, though, we recognise that there is a need for consent to be freely given and freely withdrawn. It is not enough that someone consents, we need to know that they were able to not consent for that consent to be meaningful.
It is in this regard that we must ask the question of those people who are, in a capitalist society, playing a game in an attempt to make money that represents an essential instrumental need for their daily life. One example that could fit in this space is the blackjack counter, a person who is definitely playing the game with an advantage, but is doing so still with an uncertain outcome, moment to moment. Similarly, the poker rounder is in many cases playing a game as a job, working day to day to make sure they have enough money to make rent and other bills. In a much more extravagent sense, there’s the potential payout offered to soccer and basketball players, who are playing games in order to make money to have some form of remuneration, which is often so much that the bills and needs of those other players seem very small and unimportant.
Are these people free to not play this game? Are they free to not play the way they want to play? Are they free to remove consent from the game at any time?
In a truly mechanical sense, it seems yes, obviously they are. There are stories of football players refusing to play after a certain point, there are walkouts and there are strikes and there are even caterwailing collapses on the field. They have freedom to stop playing.
But the incentives are there, outside of their lives, that make the idea of them doing that extremely unlikely. There is a need to keep paying rent, to keep paying the bills. It is definitely a desireable thing to have the freedom to stop, it would make the situation of the bad poker player trying to pay their bills with the game a little less dire and depressing seeming. There is a surrounding system of systems, a threat present in all things, that an inadequate interaction with capitalism will result in homelessness, destitution and death, sometimes very swiftly.
There’s something to be said about how capitalism is violent; it abrogates your choices in your life because you have to be able to do things in a way that capitalism can deem acceptable. You don’t get a job because you like jobs you get a job because the alternative to getting a job is starving. The jobs you get then you have to select within the framework of meeting your needs, it’s not enough to go out and be really good at giving flowers to people, you have to sell flowers, you have to in turn, propogate the machine. It’s not really subtle once you know about it. I feel like for some who have this idea well-established, me just bringing this up is a blank paragraph, a well-duh.
It isn’t that violence is absent from other systems, not at all. Violence is something we have to consider in our relationships to reality at large. Anne Bogart describes art as violent; that art, is an act that once done, cannot be undone. For all the possibilities of the universe, the art removes one; the universe before was without that art and now it has that art, and a range of things that could be chosen are now no longer choosable instead. An actor sublimates much of what they are to the will of a director; they must execute on the play correctly (or correctly enough) that the play is executed, and while play is in the name, the director is imposing on the artist. Consensually, of course, and there’s a range of horny ways to see that relationship.
You could crudely summarise this as not only is there no ethnical consumption under capitalism there’s also no such thing as truly free play. That we’re all just making up a thing that works well enough in the shadow of the vast machine that’s going to kill everyone.
Anyway, here to play us out is Jimmy Buffett:
