never just a game

Look at my pic/avatar really quick.

Charlie the Unicorn, "on a bridge". He looks frustrated, miffed, pissed. His reality is being shaped by two jagoffs with half a brain between them, and he's getting splinters for his troubled effort of going along and trying to fit in with the current paradigm.

Way long ago, as a child I wore this same face. The time I am thinking in particular is the first time I was into some Parker Brothers dice-and-marble contest on a tabletop, and some fool cheated. Or stomped me and gloated about it. Or wouldn't shut up about how great he was at it.

He see my sour expression, and rejoin gleefully:

"It's -just- a game, Pete...!"



Well, we might have been sitting in a kitchen, rolling dice, moving marbles over some cardboard whatever, or taking the funnybone out of a clown's ass with a pair of metal tweezers... but the idiot's behavior pissed me off. I didn't care that the venue for his offense was a game; the effect was still "real".

The idea that it happened to be a game and the excuse "it's just a game" is an easy one to put words to did nothing to mitigate my frustration or angst, or lessen the offender's jack-assery.

I learned at about 5 yrs old that it's -never- just a game. Ever. How someone acts when they're playing Risk is how they are in real life. Seeing them behave at play is looking through a prism that splits the various rays of their personal topologies into sharper relief; it does not obscure them.

It reveals them.

Time and time again in life, I saw this belief born out. In my ex wife as she played Risk, in my good friend from my teenaged years as he meta-ed his CCG deck to stomp others'. In my own sad style of chess.

It's never just a game.


As I got a bit older, and came across the virtual, I understood the same thing to be true about this place. IMs, blogs, avatar interactions... none of it is "real", all of it is a "game" of sorts, but to say that it is without effect is to mark yourself as someone who is not thinking.

I just finished reading an amazing article on an incident that took place in a virtual world called lambdaMOO; a text-based VR. The article is about a virtual rape perpetrated by one user against several others using a bit of software called a "voodoo doll", which enabled him to "take control" of the other personnas and thus commit the rape.

An amazing article; one that speaks to some very profound implications of the virtual medium as it evolves.

It's never just a game.