Playing against fear

A friend of mind recently posted this intensely pessimistic piece by Umair Haque, with the comment that it feels overstated but maybe it isn't. I agree. Many aspects of the United States, a year into the Trump kleptocracy, certainly feel hopeless. The inertia hurts in particular. I remember someone writing a few years after the Sandy Hook massacre how that was the moment America stopped pretending to care about gun control; if lawmakers could watch twenty kindergarteners shot to death and do nothing, then nothing about the almost daily school shootings in 2017 should surprise us.

There were 109 civilians killed by US police forces in January 2018. Seven more were killed yesterday, February 1st. Most of the victims are brown. Most lawmakers don't even send empty hopes and prayers the way they do about school shootings. I'm not going to run through the rest of the litany of hopeless, intransigent pathologies inflicting my country—Haque does a good job of that, and also, everyone knows them.

As an expat academic, as a human being, it's hard to know what to do or feel in the face of this. When Twittler was elected, pundits threatened against the numbing effect that would occur from repeated exposure to his bigotry, idiocy, and criminality. It would become normalized, they warned. Banality of evil, here we come. The banality of hopelessness, though, is an equally treacherous problem afflicting the good people who don't know how to keep being outraged. How to keep calling Republican members of congress (I have two) who reply with form letters, explaining that I am mistaken and in fact poor people just suck. The news recently broke that my congressman, 62-year-old married father of three Pat Meehan, paid a female aide several decades younger than him $40,000 in taxpayer money over a sexual harassment allegation. Meehan was very recently kicked off the House Ethics Committee, "where he has helped investigate sexual misconduct claims."

Basically, it's looking real grim.

Rebecca Solnit wrote Hope in the Dark during the dismal months of 2003 when the USA, in opposition to truly massive protests all over the world, invaded Iraq. It was another moment when activism seemed to have failed completely, and Solnit's book offers some solace. Hope, she says, is "an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world" (109). She draws strength from the butterfly effect of social movements—how ideas that once seemed utterly impossible can quietly become normal, then popular, then inevitable. Activists shouldn't focus so hard on the wall-like solidity of the problems facing them, but rather search for the cracks, holes, hinges and doors—the wall itself might remain, but perhaps it can be made irrelevant. And she warns us not to forget that victory sometimes looks like nothing at all; sometimes, an awful thing that could have happened did not happen. We forget those victories that maintain positive status quos, but they matter quite a bit.

I've been thinking a lot recently about mis-play as activism and subversion. A while ago, I wrote a post about games as the flip side of the military-industrial complex. Last week, I wrote about feminist empathy play and mis-play. And I recently gave a conference talk on "Donald Trump" runs of the game Papers, Please, in which YouTubers mis-play the game with cruelly harsh additional rules about immigration that result in an inevitable loss of the game by Day 3 (hopefully I will get off my butt and article-ize that talk soon).

But at the moment, I'm interested in play as hope, and what play represents in a culture dominated by hopelessness. Like my friend, I am not sure that Haque is overstated in his analysis of the ubiquity and uniqueness of US pathologies. But assuming arguendo that he's right, what then?

Play is inherently hopeful. By engaging in play, you imagine a world other than the one you inhabit. Usually, you imagine yourself more powerful. You imagine a gun into your hand and a clear mission to fight evil. You imagine yourself exploring a fantastical world filled with creatures that you might befriend. Your relationship with the other entities in the system grant you that enhanced power—a group of people can only play "capture the flag" if the players all agree to invest the flag with symbolic meaning, falling into the fiction that the ownership of that flag really matters. Indeed, it matters enough that you exhaust yourself with strategems and sprints. Bernard Suits calls this the "Lusory Attitude"—you buy into an inefficient fiction in order to take part in play.

"Falling into the fiction that something really matters" sounds a lot like hope to me. But the thing is, games are designed to minimize the precarity of that fiction. We have established ways of maintaining the magic circle (the space within which the rules of the game hold true and the lusory attitude is maintained). Once enough players throw down their flag and whine "this is dumb," the game breaks because the fantasy of caring is broken. It doesn't matter anymore. And since life is not a game, the fantasy of caring breaks constantly. Every viciousness Congress visits on the vulnerable, every infringement on democracy inflicted by gerrymandering, every pessimistic analysis, break your ability to play. "The fiction that your effort matters is dumb," they whine, and throw down their flags. And you can only play effectively within a system that upholds the illusion that play is meaningful.

I don't have a magic bullet here. I'm not some great activist, and I'm not some great game designer. I'm also not arguing here that the world needs to become more "gamified"—look at the miseries Amazon is inflicting on workers in its warehouses and at Whole Foods, under the sick illusion that adding points and goals will make dehumanizing labour 'fun'. Gamification in the working world is, I think, the polar opposite to play. The bare-faced violence undergirding the 'fun game' of working in an Amazon warehouse means that it isn't a fiction that everybody mutually buys into, but a harsh fact. Play must be voluntary.

I think, though, that we can forget how much effort it takes to play for real. I forget it pretty often. Maintaining a lusory attitude, buying into a hopeful fiction, these can be acts of naivity (or, much worse, of ignoring the very real horrors of others' lives because you're too privileged to see their truth). But maintaining a sense of play can serve as an antidote in a world where nothing at all seems to matter. Games offer us that possibility.