Hacker News Reader

Comment by kpmcc | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see a list of games the Buddha would play, as I don't think it would contain anything unless the game somehow pertained to discernment of the nature of suffering or the extinction of the cycle of rebirth.

View on HN

I'm playing Returnal at the moment and I'm sure Buddha would have found it pretty rad.

Cosmology of Kyoto resurrects you a bunch of times too

Outer Wilds sounds kinda close actually. With the new DLC I think it might be the best game I've ever played.

Outer Wilds is a gem! Very much looking forward to release on Switch, though it seems to have been delayed, since it was supposed to have been released this month. Haven't played the DLC, but I'm looking forward to it sometime in 2022!

I cannot play it for longer than 10 minutes without feeling motion sickness

That's a shame. You could try playing it in a smaller window or on a smaller TV I suppose.

Or VR. Just, immersion therapy.

snakes and ladders seems a candidate, if it dates back that far.

“The game was popular in ancient India by the name Moksha Patam. It was also associated with traditional Hindu philosophy contrasting karma and kama, or destiny and desire. It emphasized destiny, as opposed to games such as pachisi, which focused on life as a mixture of skill (free will) and luck.” … “ The morality lesson of the game was that a person can attain salvation (Moksha) through doing good, whereas by doing evil one will be reborn as lower forms of life. The number of ladders was less than the number of snakes as a reminder that a path of good is much more difficult to tread than a path of sins. Presumably, reaching the last square (number 100) represented the attainment of Moksha (spiritual liberation).”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_ladders

I think that would be eliminated by rule 3: "Games of marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places" since the pieces are really just representations of the player.

Those would be games you play with your mind in deep concentration. In Buddhism deep concentration is tool not a goal itself. The bliss you get from deep concentration was the only distraction that can be beneficial. Doing some specific exercises is sometimes called as "games".

Any flow state you can get into with games is not very interesting compared to fiddling with your own mind.

Number 2 on the list would seem to contradict that.

so Dark Souls basically

Yeah, that's the first one that came to mind. Sekiro as well, which explicitly has Buddhist themes and imagery too. I wouldn't say it's specifically a Buddhist game, but it absolutely has the themes of life, rebirth, and suffering.

Planescape: Torment would fit nicely as well

Sounds like Monopoly to me.

Monopoly is essentially a stationary Markov process. Decisions are so simple and clear that they essentially don’t matter to this characterization. I doubt the Buddha would find much of the nature of suffering in what is essentially a deterministic mathematical process. Any suffering created by playing Monopoly is really coming from within the players themselves. But, we can say that about most suffering, so there is no reason to play Monopoly to begin with, if all you desire is to know the nature of suffering....

[Cosmology of Kyoto]: You rang?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com