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Comment by technotony | Hacker News Reader

If you are interested in taking this idea further, all life is game, I'd recommend the philosophy book 'finite and infinite games'. Can be applied to all kinds of aspects of human life, eg a startup is a game played by founders who win with a successful exit.

With this philosophy text, Carse demonstrates a way of looking at actions in life as being a part of at least two types of what he describes as "games", finite and infinite. Both games are played within rules, as agreed upon by the participants; however, the meaning of the rules is different for the two types of games. The book stresses a non-serious (or "playful") view of life on the part of "players", referring to their choices as "moves", and societal constructs and mores as "rules" and "boundaries".

In short, a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing the play.

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When thinking about games I have a feeling that it channels our survival / killing instincts into symbolic versions to gather the benefits (new strategies, pleasure, bonding, physical improvements).

I don't think all life is a game in this way; with a game we hold ourselves to the rules for their own sake - the pleasure we get from play is that of acting within the sandbox we've defined. It is a sketch of life, a model, a way to explore an idea. In the context of a game we might be adversaries, but I am intimately aware of the boundary, and that we are at play - our adversarial relationship is not "real". We often say, "It's just a game", and the just is crucial to the difference.

This is different from social mores, which are boundaries we respect because transgression has consequences we care about. There are real ends; it's NOT just a game. There is no space or context beyond what happens in life, as there is in a game (taking place within the shell of the true life).

The purpose of play, and playing games, is to prepare us for the actual contests with outcomes that we are invested in.

Of course we might USE play, and games, as tools in the course of achieving real ends (like the Olympics as a goal for furthering peace), but this is different from those ends (peace) being a game in themselves.

> This is different from social mores, which are boundaries we respect because transgression has consequences we care about. There are real ends; it's NOT just a game.

This just means the games can nest. In the innermost game, you treat social mores as rules to follow and try to excel within them.

But there is a surrounding meta-game where you weigh the pros and cons of transgressing the mores and consequences that leads to. In that game, the mores are no longer rules and transgressing is now a move.

Around that, yet another game where the moves are putting effort into changing social rules. And so on.

Why would you do that? It sounds very schizophrenic to me to make one self have such a distance to normal social and emotional life that one represent it to one self as a game. To treat a social overstep as a rule break instead of understanding emphatically that you have caused hurt i would consider schizophrenic / autism.

I think it is much more healthy, in a mental health way, to not re-present life and instead experience it directly.

For what it's worth, I'm not arguing that one should look at their life entirely this dispassionately. Just that their are multiple levels that we operate in where we deal with rules and consequences.

I don't mean "game" in the sense of "doesn't matter what happens". I mean it in the sense of "players interacting within a rule set".

Note that empathy and the feelings of others are hugely important parts of all of the games we play in life. An anecdote: my youngest daughter is one of the sweetest most naturally empathic people I know. She was playing Candyland with her older sister and won twice in a row. This got her sister mad because she wants nothing more to win. But my youngest daughter wasn't trying to win—Candyland is a pure chance game—and what she really wanted was for everyone to have fun. So she told her sister to play again and that she promised to let her win this time. She was trying to play the metagame of maximizing everyone's fun.

Except they don't nest. There is no boundary between the social mores 'game' and the transgression 'game', no point where the consequences are contained and the outcome doesn't matter. You're declaring them to be a 'game' because i am evaluating outcomes, but they aren't the same - the results continue to matter to my life.

Winning a large chess tournament with a significant cash prize would also matter to the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean that chess is not a game.

No, it means 'winning a large amount of money' is not a game. The chess doesn't matter in this scenario.

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