Playing Games

23 January 2025

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: Sometimes you sit up and notice. I just sat up and noticed that we have a whole industry that promotes games, a whole world of games that we can play for money or just the fun of competing. Table games, machine games, sporting games, amateur and professional sports. We have the Olympics where the best athletes in the world compete against each other.

ABBY: Certainly, the casino industry is built on game playing. Countless millions of dollars are bet on casino games.

CINDY: People play all types of games in their own homes. Gambling games such as poker and other card games consistently. Monopoly and Risk and hundreds of other games too. Newspapers and magazines, online, off-line, all have games in them that you can play. Word games, memory games, and the like. Games seem to be endless.

ABBY: That brings us to this question I guess: Is life really one big game? Are we in our daily interactions with people just playing an elaborate game?

CINDY: Are politics a game? You have different sides with different opinions going up against each other. One or some win; some lose.

ABBY: You have debates between candidates. Head-to-head or head-to-head to-head and so on. These are actually just games they are playing to get our support or vote or for us to follow them.

CINDY: Maybe we should actually just take the word “just” out of your sentence. Maybe everything is a game? Are social interactions “just” games? Is the whole human world “just” playing games with each other and extend that to the animal kingdom too?

ABBY: Let’s extend this somewhat. Is the casino industry merely us playing games at a higher level or a more advanced level? Nothing more and nothing less than that? If I am playing slots and using credits is this just a game? Of course, it is just a game.

CINDY: How deeply are my emotions involved in the casino games?

ABBY: Maybe for some players it is a kind of life-or-death situation?

CINDY: Let’s turn this on its head. Your candidate for office loses an election. You feel bad. In some areas of the world, this will precede a war as the losing party tries to get victory by violence. Is all of this a part of an elaborate game-playing-routine?

ABBY: You meet a bear in the woods – hopefully not on your street – and it signals that it is about to charge you. Are these signals a game? I mean this is real life. That bear can eat you. Is what the bear doing a part of a natural game it plays?

CINDY: And we have now come to what conclusion in all of this?

ABBY: I don’t know.

CINDY: I don’t know either.

ABBY: Does the bear know?