The Great Game

The Great Game is the spiritual path of games. It is the way that we ascend toward the Good through games. This path is ruled over by the God of Games. This is the way that we live life as a game to achieve union with the Good. This religion is called Ludoismus. It is important to note that there is a huge difference between being good at games and pursuing games as a spiritual path although they are not totally separate either.

The point of The Great Game is the accumulation of wisdom. Those who are wisest are the winners even if they die poor and condemned.

You accumulate wisdom through reflection and analysis of life experience. This process can be by playing games in the right spirit. It can also be assisted by consuming art and philosophy, but also by creating art and philosophy. But like with many things there are people who are skilled at these kinds of things who clearly lack wisdom. So it depends on how you go about it just like with games.

In my life I have learned some lessons, but I feel I have stored up a lot of experience that I haven't properly digested or analyzed. I think this is true for many people. In some ways I feel I am entering into a phase of life where I will start to do the work of these things. These experiences in some ways are like the games I have played in my career. Reviewing your games and learning from them is recognized as one of the best ways to become good at games. They are lessons that improve your skill and understanding when you take the time to digest them. Other people's ideas as expressed in works of art or philosophy can be digested as well. These can be seen as like the books of problems or strategy that we work through to get better at games. But at the end of the day, those books are only really valuable when applied to the matrix of personal experience. This is why Art for Art's sake isn't that interesting. It may be a source of technical innovation but it lacks the value of wisdom.

Wisdom is like strategy in that it is higher order and more general. It is often expressed as principles. Knowledge is like tactics in that knowledge is often very specific and can, at times, be technical in a way that is disconnected from more general concerns. Abstraction that isn't actually grounded in life experience is hollow but so is technical knowledge with no wisdom to organize it or that can guide it at a higher level like strategy to tactics.

Calculation when it is done properly is the analysis of life situations, not with the goal of profiting, but with the goal of creating as much good as possible. This is done through a symbolic faculty. When done properly it is guided by wisdom.

So what is the point of all this if the basic definitions of these things are roughly the same as most people would commonly understand wisdom to be? I think there is some value in having a central metaphor to one's life. In that sense Ludoismus doesn't claim to be an exclusive path to Truth. It is just a model of a way to make sense of life and spirituality through the lens of games because otherwise the reflections about life can be too diffuse or too specific. A central metaphor can organize and give structure to one's interpretation of life.

Reading List

These are books that have something to do with the development of Ludoismus and the Great Game.

Of course there are many other books about games and about the people who play them. But most of them are more concerned with analyzing specific games and not so much with games as a window into something deeper. But I would mention a few. Some of these are works that could fit above but that just didn't make as much impact on me personally.