The Name of The Game

Good evening Sunday;

I play a game with a group of people for my leisure time. It is fun, has rules and there is some risk involved. It has the same mechanics of any game. It uses dice to determine risk as well as the amount of consequences from that risk, but it is a much more open-ended game than many of you may be familiar if you have only played board games. The nature of the game is that risk is rewarded. It has no board or visual components. Occasionally it will have simple props we manufacture ourselves. The game is played using imagination and the movements of the players are based on creative descriptions while the players, themselves, sit together around a table. The game has been termed theatre of the mind and has been favourably compared with radio dramas and co-operative improvisation, especially because player collaboration occurs in lieu of a script in the latter case.

And I was thinking that what happens here, on this site, is not dissimilar to my game, especially as I have been reading the posts that complain about the nonparticipation of some people here: the people who block; who do not reply; and who ultimately cancel their profile when they have attention. There is a perceived risk here, albeit less than in face-to-face situations, and there is an element of storytelling going on that exists strictly within the projection of our wish fulfillment onto another. Therefore, we may take it personally when a stranger decides to block our communication or deletes his or her profile. The game in that scenario gets played only with ourselves unlike the game I played yesterday with two other people around my dinning room table.

And it got me to thinking.

One of the players is very risk adverse. This player has always been risk adverse but it was much more pronounced yesterday because there were only two players rather than the usual group of six due to summer holidays. He is never on time, but he was one-hour late. We were to start at 14:00 and carry through to 19:00. The game is an ongoing story so there is no winner or loser and no end game unless you consider life itself a game in which case you can make your own comparisons. So we started where we left off with 4 hours left to play together before breaking until August.

The adventure I had written and planned for the players to interact with would lead them on a journey of 100 miles from where they started and provide a little risky adventure. Prior to embarking on the adventure, the players had to do a little bookkeeping related to their finance, and I was going to make that a very small but interesting aside to the game. After all, we would not be meeting again for more than a month. However this player would not let us get to the adventure and mired us in a game of passbooks and bank notes. It was very un-fun, and it continued until just shy of 19:00.

Now why would anyone behave like that in a game such as ours where risk is rewarded? Why would someone so risk adverse even consider playing such a game? And I got to thinking about a profile I saw disappear – a profile that caught my eye after I read it. I also got to thinking about a message I had sent to someone asking her for us to get better acquainted, not an unreasonable request given the emphasis on this site. And I made the mental comparison between these two ladies and the player at my game yesterday. What do they expect from this site. Or more to the point what benefit do they get from being a member of this site? And my answer to both scenarios, the one with the player and the one with the two ladies was surprising: they want to maintain their distance from what they want. It speaks to self-esteem issues.

My player is an international businessman. And the charisma of these two women appealed to me. Based on their profiles, I would never guess they are afraid of success. But that is the name of the game.