A Gaming Guide

Within this forum, a place where the free circulation and exchange of objects and speeches can occur, the crypt constructs another, more inward forum like a closed rostrum or speaker's box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior.

Jacques Derrida, Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.

Here is a method and analysis of a specific mode of play. It is applicable to software electronic games where you play against a computer intelligence, games with the function of giving hints or suggestions for your next move. The idea is to take the machines hints from beginning to end, in effect letting it play against itself. Is it playing to lose?

We in turn, may find a strangely meditative mode of playing, and a chance to perceive the psychology of the inorganic machines in our hands. We are opened.

To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible through “opening yourself” (a desire associated with boundary, capacity and survival economy), but we can perhaps find a kind of openness towards the software game. We being solidly human, can attract the radical openness of the software, and be opened.

Allowing the machine to lead us, imperceptibly fleeing with us into a space at once personal and machine-like, (a crypt), a space where we can observe an exemplary process of self-reflectivity; the game plays against itself, and loses, always. Here is the height of letting go, of seeking non-activity, constructive despair.

It is a strangely exhilarating thing, to let the game decide how it will be played, and in it’s humility always letting my hand win. By playing this way we are perhaps allowing the game itself the move towards Bataille’s definition of a meaningful inner experience — despair. We are the vessel through which we can allow the electronic game to achieve that very human emotion, or at least its premises. As the player we become a tube, a shell, where the kernel of the moment, the game mind, passes on its way back towards itself.

It is also an exercise in the inorganic, an exercise in becoming, becoming a thing that feels. We are giving the machine of the game a measure of self-reflexivity, and giving ourselves, for a moment, the sense of being a thing, only acting out the decisions of the machine.

I feel this is a therapeutic moment for the game-machine. It is allowed to communicate with itself essentially, with me as the therapist, the listener, the intermediary.

As Leibniz insisted on the intimate relationship between human minds and logical machines, I can insist on the usefulness of taking programs as psychological entities. Leibniz’s research into calculating machines, symbolic logic and binary machines anticipated the digital microprocessors; and the monads he described have a purpose here; they are solitary and permanent entities, with no windows, individual perceptual units in the vast matrix of the universe. Still the monads carry within themselves representations of the entire universe, conveying the entire world, all monads including it in an infinity of tiny perceptions, in a way like every computer is a small representation of the whole universe of the internet. But I digress.

This is also a performance of ethics. To really feel something, to really experience and strive towards an idea of ethical conduct, we must sometimes play to lose, play against ourselves. Here we create — for the game-computers sake — a cyclic space through us, a forum, but, for the game-mind, not for ourselves. In this clear other — the game on my phone — I’m looking for the phantom of personal psychology. A space where no limits of the everyday hinders the experience, a space that allows for both despair and remove. A purer experience?

Sebastian Rozenberg 2012