Learning To Play A New Game

So the other day, I was arriving at my son's middle school, because... um... well... I sort of forget.  I think he'd left something at home.  Given the number of times I have to pick something up or drop something off that has been forgotten, it all gets blurry.

When I arrived, there was a circle of tweeners out front of the school.  They weren't absorbed in their iPods, or milling about aimlessly.  They were playing a game together, actual human beings, facing one another and interacting.   They would strike out comically at each other, either making contact or not...and if not, they'd freeze in whatever exaggerated pose they'd ended up in.

It was not supervised, organized, or parent run.  There were no release forms.  They were just playing, in a self-organized game.

Huh, I thought, as I brought whatever-it-was-I was-bringing to my son.  I wonder what that is.  I don't remember that game.  I really had never seen it, not through my entire childhood, on in any of my years of time around children.

On Friday night, I drove what seemed to be halfway across the planet to my older son's varsity swim meet, at a rec center pool deep in the heart of what had been countryside back when I was in high school.  I was going to be a timer, which is actually a great way to get up and close and personal with the action.  I've done it enough to know that I needed not to wear shoes.

As I waited for the meet to begin, I noticed that while some teens were sitting cliche-oblivious to one another, absorbed in their pocket mind suckers, my older son was standing in a circle playing exactly the same game with a group of other kids.   Girls, mostly.  Smart lad, thought I.  Then, they played what was seemed a similar game, but with different motions and rhythm.  There was laughter and silliness.  It was good to see kids playing together, particularly on that night.

On the way home, I asked my older son what the game was called.  Two games, he said.  The one I'd seen at both schools they called "Ninja."  The other was called "Wa," and it was a motion and rhythm game.  They may have been out there somewhere back when I was a kid.   But they were not part of the life of middle schoolers and high schoolers in Northern Virginia back in the day.  Now, kids are teaching them to kids.  It's part of their culture.

Kids have always had their own folklore, their own stories, passed from child to child as a part of the child-world.  The fables and myths and games of childhood exist in a place apart from the dull and clumsy world of adults.  I fear, sometimes, that our kids are losing that, that we're cramming them so full of prepackaged entertainment product that their minds are becoming consumerist foie gras.

But the games continue...and they change.  That was a hopeful thing, important to see and feel this week in which all has sometimes seemed so trapped and hopeless.  What makes the world so alive when you are a child is the newness of it.  So much of what you encounter is new, and as you encounter it, the process of growing and living requires that you engage with it and figure out how or how not to integrate it into yourself.

And because everything is new to us, a totally new thing...a game, for instance, or a new way of doing something...can be taken in and lived out.

It's a skill we need to better develop, because it would serve us well as a people.  And perhaps that's part of what my Teacher meant when he said we can only enter the Kingdom as little children.

How can we be transformed, if we can never learn to play any new games?

House Rules

Back when I was the age of my kids, there weren't endless scads of screens to suck up every last moment of our lives.  You had to make do with appallingly low tech things like, say, decks of cards.   On the bus, on the way to school, we'd play War, or Poker.  It was pleasant, a simple distraction, a social pastime.

There was one card game, though, that I just wouldn't play.  I remember a group of boys getting all into it on the bus, and being pressed to join in.

The game was called "Bloody Knuckles," and the rules were basically this:

1)  Player 1 holds out their fist, knuckles up.
2)  Player 2 holds a pack of playing cards, tight and all together.
3)  Player 2 attempts to strike the knuckles of Player 1, as hard as possible, with the edge of the pack of playing cards.  Player 1 attempts to get his knuckles out of the way.
4)  They trade positions, and it repeats, until one or the other gives up.

I just couldn't see the point.

If I lose, I'm in pain.  If I win, I'm inflicting pain on another.  Neither eventuality is positive or desirable.  The game is...well...just...what's the word....stupid.  And as it's just a game, something that has no real hold over us, you don't need to play it.  So I wouldn't.

I explained my position to the kid asking me to play, at which point I was pronounced a wuss by one and all.  I simply shrugged.  They went on hitting each other.

I feel much the same way about global capitalism.

Economics is just a game, after all.  No no, you may say, but that's what economics means, after all, if you care about the root meaning of things.  Oiko-nomia, it comes from, in the Greek that we Presbyterians learn so you can doze off while we preach.  Oikos meaning "house," and nomos meaning "rules."   Yeah, that's house rules, just like in Vegas, baby.  It's not science.   It's not math.  It's not faith.

It's the game we choose to play to pass the time.  

For all of its dizzying complexity, global capitalism is a remarkably stupid game.  And it is a game, certainly as it manifests itself now, a whirling mass of derivatives and quantitative easings and reshufflings of the deck.  The level of anxiety and psychological pain we're inflicting on ourselves is entirely something we're creating.  It's not something that has any foundation in the real.

What is real is that the harvests in the United States of America have been solid for the last several years.  Thanks to climate change, they're not as great as they could be, but they're still bountiful.  In point of fact, there's enough food produced every year that no one need ever go hungry.

What is real is that there is adequate housing for everyone.  In fact, more than adequate, so much more than adequate that we're tearing down some of the excess.

What is real is that there are is enough clothing so that none need go cold, enough shoes that none need go barefoot unless they choose to do so.

And yet in the game we have created, we are fearful that we will not eat.  We are anxious that we will not have a home.  We watch the numbers on CNBC flutter back and forth wildly, a mad flock of trader pigeons spooked to exhaustion by the slightest movement, and we fret about our futures and our retirement and our children.

I look out at the bloodied knuckles of our collective psyche, and at the fear, and at the hunger in the world, and I think...what's the point of this game, again?

Celebrating Interfaith Conflict

Interfaith struggles have never made a tremendous amount of sense to me. Given that pretty much all of the world's religious traditions reject the idea of violence and embrace love for the other as somehow central to existence, it remains an amazing testament to human smallness that we continue to use faith as an excuse to have at one another.

This afternoon, in a moment of random faith-based dithering around on the internet, I encountered a lovely little side-scrolling flash beat-'em up, in which you can pit the iconic figures of all of the world's great religious traditions against one another. It's like that online classic Bible Fight, only for Unitarians.

The creators of the game have come under fire, predictably, from Islamic organizations outraged at the image of the Prophet. Why they don't like his nifty-keen flame attack is beyond me. The little game studio that made the game has since taken it off line...but, the Internet being what it is, it's going to be around for a while.

I'm more concerned, frankly, that the creators of the game imply that the Holy Spirit Attack can be used by both the “Father” and the “Jesus” character. That’s clearly taking the side of the Western church in the 880 Council of Constantinople, and exacerbates the filioque schism between Eastern and Western churches that began in the year 1054. The last thing we need to do is open up that can of worms again, eh?

And there is the little matter of the game folks totally misidentifying Krishna as Buddha. Oh well.

Even if it is just a tiny bit irreverent, the game is both funny and intentionally poignant. It clearly is a commentary on the religious hatreds that have torn and wracked humankind…even when those hatred are antithetical to the teachings of the founders of the faiths in question. As a follower of Jesus of Nazareth and a gamer, I’m completely in favor of such truth-telling.