Why games matter

 Games matter because they are symbolic of the struggle.

What is this "struggle"? I am thinking of struggle here in terms of Emanuel Lasker's book "Struggle" where he tries to talk about struggle as a general category and extends it to basically all fields of human endeavor. Basically the struggle is personal and polyvalent. Everyone's struggle is different. And people's struggle takes place over many different fronts. The struggle can be spiritual or it can be political or both. It can be physical in terms of like doing physical training. It is basically about how one proceeds in the world and deals with issues that are arise.

So games are symbolic of the struggle. But this can be said of all art. Art expresses conflict and resolution. So what is special about games. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an art of agency. So for me, games are actually practice for the struggle. In games we try to resolve conflicts ourselves. These conflicts take a wide range of forms.

So, meaning in games comes about through the expression of these conflicts and resolutions. In a sense these conflicts are limited to the mechanics of the game. But for a lot of gamers the choices they make in the games are more than just simple calculations of win loss percentages although there are gamers like that also. Basically the choices are part of their identity. This has both to do with the games we choose to play and the strategies we choose to adopt in playing. Just like in the real world, these identities can become traps. But in games like chess or go or magic, even though at the top level players have to be able to handle a variety of situations we still talk about style. Players still have an identity. Jesse Kraai is a GM and also has a PhD in philosophy. In a video I can't seem to find anymore he talks about players style as representing their chosen ways of interacting with the world.

It is possible to abuse this notion to some extent. Perhaps to overstate it or to interpret gaming choices that are primarily practical in terms of Freudian psychology (as Fine did in one of his books). I think at some level this symbolism is often quite personal. So it is impossible to look merely at someone's games of chess or go and tell what kind of personality they have. But for the person playing the games they are representative of conflicts and resolutions that can't help but have personal meaning.