I'd like to get back to work. I didn't actually quit drinking until the 4th; at present I'd like to report that with my new found sobriety I'm feeling great and I have plenty of energy, but that's just
not the case.
Though I'm not in the greatest shape, I have been using this downtime to study poker a little and to read a lot and think a lot. Here's something from my man Kurt Vonnegut in
Palm Sunday.
Using the Socratic Method, he asked his little class this: "What is it an artist does--a painter, a writer, a sculptor--?"
He already had an answer, which he had put down in the book he was writing, a book which would never be published. But he would not tell us what it was until the end of the hour, and he might discard it entirely if our answers to his question made more sense than his. This was a class composed entirely of veterans of the Second World War in the summertime. The class had been put together in order that we might continue to receive our living expenses from our government when most of the rest of the university was on vacation.
If any of us came up with good answers, I now have no idea what they might have been. His answer was this: "The artist says, 'I can do very little about the chaos around me, but at least I can reduce to perfect order this square of canvas, this piece of paper, this chunk of stone.'"
A few months back, I was going to attempt an essay comparing and contrasting the games and the sports that we play to real life. I had a vague notion of where to start, but I couldn't find the hook on which to hang it. Vonnegut's professor just nailed it up for me. I'd read
Palm Sunday once before, at least 25 years ago, and I think it was that passage above which was what I had wanted to use to start my essay, though I'd long since forgotten where I'd seen it. And now here it was again, finding its way back to me.
So his mentor is talking about artists, but I think that we can say similar things about athletes and gamers. Like artists, we can do nothing about the howling chaos of our lives spent with other people, but whenever we are at play, we can know and can reduce to perfect order our desired actions based upon the rules of the game.
I'm not saying that there isn't chaos: the shape of the American football seems to be devised specifically to increase chaos. And I'm not saying that there isn't a random element--some games are nearly completely random--but for all games, their element of randomness is steady and predictable and depends entirely upon their rules, with the singular exception of the actions of referees or umpires.
Now just think about how upset players and fans get about the aforementioned. It's because these officials bring the element of the flawed real world into the idealized world of sports and games.
Now if I have a pair of sixes in hold 'em, assuming that no one else is holding or has discarded a six, my chance of flopping a set is always roughly 12%, every time. Real life doesn't work that way.
In contrast to a game, if I decide to text an old love interest whom I haven't contacted in 10 years, I estimate that her chances of texting me back may run anywhere between 0% and 70%. Does that mean that I should split the difference and call it an even 35% chance that she'll text me back? Absolutely not, because I'm talking about a range of ranges--people are a range of ranges--not just a single range like you'll have most of the time in sports or games.
I have no idea how her life has been going these past 10 years. She could be recently divorced, happily married, or anywhere in between. And me, if I text her, will I be drunk and maudlin, or will I sound funny and upbeat, or will I come across as plain creepy? Or will it be some mixture of all three, the old triple range merge...?
It's much more simple in a game. You make a speech check, the software assigns a certain percentage that you need to hit based upon knowable criteria, and it rolls the random number generator. And if you fail, you load up a previous save and try again, of course, if you're a nitty save whore like myself.
Games and sports bring a comfort to us. If you fail, you do so because you did an inferior job compared to your opponent and/or the designated obstacles, or because you were unlucky within the knowable randomness set by the rules, or due to some combination of the two. Or the refs blew the game for you--in which case you're allowed to become upset.
In the real world, you can fail because someone doesn't like the look of you, or because they really like the look of someone else, or maybe they like the idea of what the other person can offer them. Or you fail for reasons that no one will ever figure out, no matter how deeply they look into it. Or you succeed in spite of all this, due to hard work, or not working at all. So you can see why we like games. They stamp a little order onto things, and give us clear winners and losers (and only the occasional tie-ers).
Speaking of games, I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4 during my extensive downtime. And Subby has grown to be pretty badass.
The sad thing is that I'm going to have to delete her if I want to move on and get back to playing and studying poker like I should. I will. I will. Just a few more quests...
Last edited by suitedjustice; 06-08-2019 at 03:45 AM.