This is a great text. One of your most important ones, I think.
After some serious engagement within the political space for the past 6 years I am also now convinced that the only available frontier for meaningful political change is outside of it. You ca neither create a "safe space" for yourself from a corrupt system, nor change it for the better by becoming a node within it. You have to disengage completely, create or enter a different game. A political game as totalitarian as that of today will always be interested in you, but there are ways to escape it. Why are you not playing them?
Blockchain is the only way. Somehow the Regime failed to destroy it when it had the chance. And now it is starting to eat the regime itself. Finance will be the first to be "gamified" in its unique crypto-digital style. It's too late to stop it now. That this development was overlooked really does speak to the level of short-sightedness that the regime suffers from nowadays. Attempts to control it will be made, but this is a fundamentally different game, with fundamentally different rules. Central banks will make digital currencies to compete with bitcoin? If you are trying to compete with it, you are playing by its rules. If you are playing by its rules, you will lose. Nay, you have probably already lost. Just as your rules are designed so that it doesn't exist, its rules are designed so that you don't exist. You can't win a game rigged against you. How ironic that the regime would forget that.
The point about non-seriousness is also spot-on. Any serious political message, in fact, any serious intellectual discourse at all, has to be shrouded in irony. This is how I read any text nowadays. If the tone is serious, then the content is surely nonsensical. Either for purposes of expanding the author's power or bootlicking so that he is not crushed by someone else's power. Serious texts always play by the rules (of the game), therefore they have nothing interesting to say. Ironic texts on the other hand...
Society has not only reached late-stage Eastern European communist totalitarianism, but surpassed it in its contemporary insanity. The similarities are truly striking, especially for someone coming from such a country. The regime is so insecure in its power that it has to comprehensively ban all kinds of true speech. Not just political statements. So the only way to speak (anything of value at all) is ironically. This was already apparent in the meme campaign of 2016. Now even ironic (true) speech is starting to get banned en masse in the public space (social media).
So what happens? More and more people start to exit the public space and into cryptographically-secured private channels. First to centrally-governed consumer-targeted applications for cryptographically secure private communications (Telegram), then to decentralized proprietary servers for direct peer-to-peer communication such as Urbit. And this is only the beginning. Insofar as the application of blockchain in this sphere is concerned, we have barely scratched the surface. As the scalability issue is being resolved, after finance, next will come communications. We are witnessing the beginning of emergent privatization (in the sense of disintegration into private channels) of public (political) space.
"blockchain" has besides its popularity within certain niches not achieved any empirically substantial use case besides greater fools business models based on artificially scarcity.
there’s few use cases for cryptographically proving the validity of some sequence, like some historical record of an asset, but most uses of the blockchain are completely missing the point.
there is value in securing encrypted channels, but the underlying algorithms for proving it don’t need to be necessarily called “blockchain”, because there’s a million better (and more secure) ways to achieve it (that don’t optimize for “decentralized” (lol) networks).
got TCP/IP access in 1988 and developed a sense for BS cycles. logical consequence of unhindered hash farming will be decentralized DIY nuclear power plants exporting the cost of risk to the rest of us.
Nice mapping of the social domination game this was, but gotta make some comment on the fact that your view of games is almost cute in its old-fashionedness when seen from the perspective of modern digital gaming.
"Secondly, they have an implicit meta-rule that strictly prohibits changing the rules. To change the rules is to invent a new game, which cannot be done during play. Different games, with different rules, coexist simultaneously, rather than replacing each other successively.
Thirdly, rule sets permit outcomes, without ever dictating them. Rules and strategies are mutually independent. Strategies compete within the rules, rather than over them. Strategic modification of rules, or the adaptation of rules to strategy, is essentially corrupt."
These two priniciples are simply false when looking at modern gaming, where part of the whole game is to discover rulebreaking exploits, which may get patched depending on the game in question (mostly a different between competitive and solo-gaming). In sologaming the whole of speedrunning is based on methodically exploiting and breaking the rules of the game, up to and including rewriting the code of the game from inside the game itself to achieve a better time. That this has to be done from inside the game is of course an important (almost invariant) rule of the game of speedrunning. Still even in speedrunning its rules are continually rewritten depending on the new exploits found.
Now for competitive gaming I take Dota 2, as one of the most important esports, as an example. Here the name of the game is playing with an reinventing 'the meta', which is the tacit leaderboard of viable strategies that -importantly- get changed every patch. As there is a knowledge that every meta is imperfect and every meta can get stale, the rules of the game are periodically rewritten to allow for the emergence of new strategies and new meta's. Here we see a continual 'armsrace' between the rules and the strategies, where dominant strategies get phased out, which then create new opportunities to exploit the rules for different strategies. While some patches are of course better than others, it is farcical to suppose that 'the first patch' can be called the best one.
These principles may work for an ossified game like chess, but in this day and age most games just don't work like that anymore, exactly because the internet allows for way more complex rulesets that can be updated on the fly.
It's the developers of the game changing the rules, not the players. The players just download the new patch and off they go. So long as the newer "map version" is sufficiently fun to play, everyone is happy (even if it is quite tyrannical). If it sucks, everyone moves on.
Hate to break it to you but that's the name of the game, and it's not like it doesn't work well. Meta's get stale and exploited when the ruleset is complex enough, as there's always a gap. Patching in tune with the strategies bring dynamism.
But all this - from rule-changing (well, at least norm-changing) updates and metas to speedruns and emulating games which you then tweak and break - just means Old Nick is even more on point: one can "exit" straightforwardly ludic spaces and, in fact, this "exit" is nothing special whatsoever. So, this kind of exit can and should be effected in other spaces.
Although I suppose you do get a kind of difference with multiplication as a result and we get a glorious chaos instead of neatly segregated forks, but maybe even that can be gamed?
"rule changes" per patch are often only minimal adaptations. Extreme cases, with the most popular example maybe being "Hearthstone", the meta might get ploughed up, but the core strategical "archetypes" remain the same.
New rules are added and new strategical archetypes surface with new patches, while older archetypes can get fundamentally reworked. Reducing a game like hearthstone to laying cards on a table does nothing beyond clouding your vision.
If Dota 2 can be reduced to MOBA gameplay, what then is the difference with something like League of Legends, beyond these "surface adaptations"?
Still I don't want to inhibit to suggest to inhibit the forking in any way, as something like Dota 2 precisely spawned as a fork from Warcraft III. Still to pretend like Dota hasn't changed drastically over the years is ludicrous. Core gameplay stays the same to some extent, but especially in DotA there's the feeling of encountering almost a new game when one starts playing it again after multiple years.
Though a differentiation between the skeleton and the meat of these games could indeed prove quite useful, but I don't think it's useful to pretend like the skeleton itself does not allow for changes or that the strategies don't change and develop quite drastically.
development cycles in MMORPG are described by a process of frequent finetuned reballancing (nerfing/buffing), and constant adaption of the code base to cheaters as in other real existing areas in IT. the current networked security nightmares are mostly induced by the increased attack surface of an economic inballanced infrastructure, comparable to mono cultures in farming/foresting.
Lifecycle: game is invented or discovered which enriches all participants by increasing the complexity of the metagameboard which enables more fun subgames, this game thereby gradually out-competes other games in the game of best game to the delight of all players, however over time the winning game's capacity to transform the metagameboard reaches practical limits shifting the dynamic for players from positive-sum to zero-sum to negative-sum as the game now favours boring cannibalization strategies which reduces the complexity of the metagameboard, which opens up the possibility of new, better games that enrich all participants, siphoning players from the dominant negative-sum game and beginning the cycle anew.
Nick can do better—his Cold Anarchy piece, for example. But exiting into cryptographically secure private channels as a rebel rallying point (granted, a reader’s riff, not Nick’s)? If so, hold my coat, if you would, while I self-defenestrate. I mean, if bad guy power is that daunting, why curl up in a bowl of bits and bytes with Urbit sprinkle? Just die—or down a case of absinthe, sell your parts to the Red Cross, and then die. Instead, you game—you geek—you undermine rules—you choose a discourse. All this machine blab.
You all sound like the World Dessicate you claim to want dead.
How bad is this?—it’s almost as bad as Yarvin, the chickenshit Pontiff who, like our Nick on a Bad Day, believes the Regime is all powerful when it’s really just a cripple. Get up and brush your teeth is my first command. And then everyone ditch the fright wigs and stop scaring each other.
This is a text brilliantly (and extremely lucidly) putting forward a political stance, although I wonder - if cheating is so ubiquitous in the game of Social Dominance, then how is it even cheating? It sounds like the trying to apply the four-point definition of a well-constructed game onto Social Dominance doesn't work. If we look at computer games: if they permit cheating, and they mostly do, there is code in them (the closest they have to a physical law, I guess), which literally allows the player to cheat. That doesn't sound like real cheating though, because the game permits it... or maybe it is? I think cheating in Social Dominance is something like this, and so I don't quite know what to make of how messy this above "simulation" of how rules work in games and society becomes a a result...
The consequent of a game's ruleset is the payoff, which in the case of Social Domination is irresistible to any well-socialized individual.
Nonetheless, as the distortion of the existing ruleset becomes ever more violent and arbitrary in the hands of the dominant players, the expected payoff for the weaker players tends toward zero.
As the default response from the weaker players correspondingly tends toward indifference, the significance of the meta-game increases. The dominant players are forced into the more difficult position of punishing indifference rather than denying access to the original payoff.
That is to say, emulation of the payoff structue of Social Domination would be unnecessary, even if it were possible. A newly hatched game need only offer payoff on the magnitude of indifference. The otaku phenomenon you mention is one such example of an indifference-parity game. Of course, better alternatives are emerging.
The dominants need not be beaten at Social Domination if the game's pot simply evaporates.
"Cheating is forbidden less than it is made impossible. Physics is like this. It proscribes nothing that can be done (as Crowley notoriously noticed)."
I think you come close to something useful here, though it is not really anything Antiphon did not write a very long time ago, the old nomos/phusis distinction. The fact is that games (nomos) are never impossible to cheat at, only phusis (nature) is impossible to cheat.
You also make a good point about the common law, legislation as tyranny (tho if you look at old cases, e.g. Heydon's case, it is more like medical treatment, on its own terms, and at this point in history, involuntary servitude, e.g. being involuntary incorporated into a district and involuntary represented by an attorney for that district was not abolish, ironically enough by parliament), but, again, if we remember that nature is the only thing that cannot be cheated, then we find that it is always physically possible to incorporate the slaves into these geometrical areas, to require them to adhere to representations made on their behalf by their attorneys.
And even if they say "I do not consent," well, nature does not require consent for me to govern (steer) you, the only question is whether or not I may apply the forces to you that cause you to be steered in the direction I wish you to go. Of course, I am not really steering you in any intentional way, I am simply a product of impersonal forces (the Greeks may have personified them as Eris...), the "I" is a product of nomos, not of phusis, as are all of the parts of speech, they are all customary distinctions that, if we physically analyze, we find only quantifiable vibrations, but even the nouns and terms we use to express these vibrations are...unsatisfying.
I get the sense you are satisfied, or at least not too terribly unsatisfied to suggest that games are not worth playing---the problem is that you can always represent a game (nomos) as a subset of phusis, which is always counterfactual: it is quite possible to move the pawn 3 spaces forward in Chess. So, as Antiphon suggests, publicly you should pronounce adherence to the rules of Chess, and that cheating is wrong, etc. but this is simply to disarm your opponents---if you can move the pawn 3 spaces while they are not looking, and it gets you closed to check mate, why not?
IMO the gamification is downstream of the University system, I mean, what is a University, or a corporation? At common law, only the King can create a corporation, that is, an invisible, immortal person, Le Roy est loriginall de touts franchises (Keil. 138). It's an Alice in Wonderland/Monty Python absurdity more than it is a game with rules. What you inevitably see as colonization of Indigenous people takes place is that the martial culture is replaced with the rule of law, which you correctly call a pleonasm. But, again, this replacement is a fake, a hoax, a joke, because even if you win on the Legal Chessboard, it is still the Sheriff who comes with a baton to enforce the judgement, you have simply been told that it is "just" that you should be clubbed over the head, because you submitted to an adjudicator, voluntarily or involuntarily.
A friend of mine tells a story about meeting a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, at the wine and cheese after a talk. The Justice asked my friend what he thought law was, and he rattled something off. The Justice, with a smirk, said "well, you have to remember they had the rule of law in Nazi Germany..." This is to say, Nazi Germany had a game. Whether it is a good game or not probably depends more on which side of the table you are on, rather than any sort of "game theory."
I really do get the sense that you are satisfied with the way things or, or, like many older people, have made peace with them. I wonder how you would write if you were deeply dissatisfied.
Loosely related note - have you read about EIP1559 and "miner-extractable value"? Ethereum's arc (of) dy/is/emonetarization is seriously going terminal this time - they're just giving up wholesale on objective transaction ordering to push the finance-inflated fees down. There's some fundamental experimental data about meta(-meta)-rules being revealed in this progression...
“ You really want to know how to stay alive? You get people to like you. Oh. Not what you were expecting? Well, when you're in the middle of The Games and you're starving or freezing, some water, a knife, or even some matches can mean the difference between life and death. And those things only come from sponsors. And to get sponsors, you have to make people like you. And right now, sweetheart, you're not off to a real good start.”
This is a great text. One of your most important ones, I think.
After some serious engagement within the political space for the past 6 years I am also now convinced that the only available frontier for meaningful political change is outside of it. You ca neither create a "safe space" for yourself from a corrupt system, nor change it for the better by becoming a node within it. You have to disengage completely, create or enter a different game. A political game as totalitarian as that of today will always be interested in you, but there are ways to escape it. Why are you not playing them?
Blockchain is the only way. Somehow the Regime failed to destroy it when it had the chance. And now it is starting to eat the regime itself. Finance will be the first to be "gamified" in its unique crypto-digital style. It's too late to stop it now. That this development was overlooked really does speak to the level of short-sightedness that the regime suffers from nowadays. Attempts to control it will be made, but this is a fundamentally different game, with fundamentally different rules. Central banks will make digital currencies to compete with bitcoin? If you are trying to compete with it, you are playing by its rules. If you are playing by its rules, you will lose. Nay, you have probably already lost. Just as your rules are designed so that it doesn't exist, its rules are designed so that you don't exist. You can't win a game rigged against you. How ironic that the regime would forget that.
The point about non-seriousness is also spot-on. Any serious political message, in fact, any serious intellectual discourse at all, has to be shrouded in irony. This is how I read any text nowadays. If the tone is serious, then the content is surely nonsensical. Either for purposes of expanding the author's power or bootlicking so that he is not crushed by someone else's power. Serious texts always play by the rules (of the game), therefore they have nothing interesting to say. Ironic texts on the other hand...
Society has not only reached late-stage Eastern European communist totalitarianism, but surpassed it in its contemporary insanity. The similarities are truly striking, especially for someone coming from such a country. The regime is so insecure in its power that it has to comprehensively ban all kinds of true speech. Not just political statements. So the only way to speak (anything of value at all) is ironically. This was already apparent in the meme campaign of 2016. Now even ironic (true) speech is starting to get banned en masse in the public space (social media).
So what happens? More and more people start to exit the public space and into cryptographically-secured private channels. First to centrally-governed consumer-targeted applications for cryptographically secure private communications (Telegram), then to decentralized proprietary servers for direct peer-to-peer communication such as Urbit. And this is only the beginning. Insofar as the application of blockchain in this sphere is concerned, we have barely scratched the surface. As the scalability issue is being resolved, after finance, next will come communications. We are witnessing the beginning of emergent privatization (in the sense of disintegration into private channels) of public (political) space.
"blockchain" has besides its popularity within certain niches not achieved any empirically substantial use case besides greater fools business models based on artificially scarcity.
there’s few use cases for cryptographically proving the validity of some sequence, like some historical record of an asset, but most uses of the blockchain are completely missing the point.
there is value in securing encrypted channels, but the underlying algorithms for proving it don’t need to be necessarily called “blockchain”, because there’s a million better (and more secure) ways to achieve it (that don’t optimize for “decentralized” (lol) networks).
The (pretty much) same thing could have been said of the internet in, say, 1997.
And some did say it.
got TCP/IP access in 1988 and developed a sense for BS cycles. logical consequence of unhindered hash farming will be decentralized DIY nuclear power plants exporting the cost of risk to the rest of us.
Yeah. “I Have Erudition.” Anyway, what serious political engagement are you referring to?
Very based! Time to get on Urbit, folx!
the genius of cryptocoins lays in betting on the infinity of stupidity by trusting into the finitude of computation
then build a cosmology of galaxies of solipsism for the property regime of little machiavellian princes for planets with the population of 1
Nice mapping of the social domination game this was, but gotta make some comment on the fact that your view of games is almost cute in its old-fashionedness when seen from the perspective of modern digital gaming.
"Secondly, they have an implicit meta-rule that strictly prohibits changing the rules. To change the rules is to invent a new game, which cannot be done during play. Different games, with different rules, coexist simultaneously, rather than replacing each other successively.
Thirdly, rule sets permit outcomes, without ever dictating them. Rules and strategies are mutually independent. Strategies compete within the rules, rather than over them. Strategic modification of rules, or the adaptation of rules to strategy, is essentially corrupt."
These two priniciples are simply false when looking at modern gaming, where part of the whole game is to discover rulebreaking exploits, which may get patched depending on the game in question (mostly a different between competitive and solo-gaming). In sologaming the whole of speedrunning is based on methodically exploiting and breaking the rules of the game, up to and including rewriting the code of the game from inside the game itself to achieve a better time. That this has to be done from inside the game is of course an important (almost invariant) rule of the game of speedrunning. Still even in speedrunning its rules are continually rewritten depending on the new exploits found.
Now for competitive gaming I take Dota 2, as one of the most important esports, as an example. Here the name of the game is playing with an reinventing 'the meta', which is the tacit leaderboard of viable strategies that -importantly- get changed every patch. As there is a knowledge that every meta is imperfect and every meta can get stale, the rules of the game are periodically rewritten to allow for the emergence of new strategies and new meta's. Here we see a continual 'armsrace' between the rules and the strategies, where dominant strategies get phased out, which then create new opportunities to exploit the rules for different strategies. While some patches are of course better than others, it is farcical to suppose that 'the first patch' can be called the best one.
These principles may work for an ossified game like chess, but in this day and age most games just don't work like that anymore, exactly because the internet allows for way more complex rulesets that can be updated on the fly.
So you're telling me there's progressive gaming ...
It's the developers of the game changing the rules, not the players. The players just download the new patch and off they go. So long as the newer "map version" is sufficiently fun to play, everyone is happy (even if it is quite tyrannical). If it sucks, everyone moves on.
Hate to break it to you but that's the name of the game, and it's not like it doesn't work well. Meta's get stale and exploited when the ruleset is complex enough, as there's always a gap. Patching in tune with the strategies bring dynamism.
But all this - from rule-changing (well, at least norm-changing) updates and metas to speedruns and emulating games which you then tweak and break - just means Old Nick is even more on point: one can "exit" straightforwardly ludic spaces and, in fact, this "exit" is nothing special whatsoever. So, this kind of exit can and should be effected in other spaces.
Although I suppose you do get a kind of difference with multiplication as a result and we get a glorious chaos instead of neatly segregated forks, but maybe even that can be gamed?
"rule changes" per patch are often only minimal adaptations. Extreme cases, with the most popular example maybe being "Hearthstone", the meta might get ploughed up, but the core strategical "archetypes" remain the same.
New rules are added and new strategical archetypes surface with new patches, while older archetypes can get fundamentally reworked. Reducing a game like hearthstone to laying cards on a table does nothing beyond clouding your vision.
If Dota 2 can be reduced to MOBA gameplay, what then is the difference with something like League of Legends, beyond these "surface adaptations"?
Still I don't want to inhibit to suggest to inhibit the forking in any way, as something like Dota 2 precisely spawned as a fork from Warcraft III. Still to pretend like Dota hasn't changed drastically over the years is ludicrous. Core gameplay stays the same to some extent, but especially in DotA there's the feeling of encountering almost a new game when one starts playing it again after multiple years.
Though a differentiation between the skeleton and the meat of these games could indeed prove quite useful, but I don't think it's useful to pretend like the skeleton itself does not allow for changes or that the strategies don't change and develop quite drastically.
development cycles in MMORPG are described by a process of frequent finetuned reballancing (nerfing/buffing), and constant adaption of the code base to cheaters as in other real existing areas in IT. the current networked security nightmares are mostly induced by the increased attack surface of an economic inballanced infrastructure, comparable to mono cultures in farming/foresting.
HerMETAic Dota 2.
Lifecycle: game is invented or discovered which enriches all participants by increasing the complexity of the metagameboard which enables more fun subgames, this game thereby gradually out-competes other games in the game of best game to the delight of all players, however over time the winning game's capacity to transform the metagameboard reaches practical limits shifting the dynamic for players from positive-sum to zero-sum to negative-sum as the game now favours boring cannibalization strategies which reduces the complexity of the metagameboard, which opens up the possibility of new, better games that enrich all participants, siphoning players from the dominant negative-sum game and beginning the cycle anew.
it's hard to take you seriously non-seriously when you spend so much time non-seriously seriously complaining about the rules of other people's games.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WarGames
How about a nice game of Unrestricted Warfare?
Nicely ties in with niche construction sci-hub.se/10.1007/s10682-015-9802-7
“The technological platforms for it are almost in place. Begin to use them, and they’ll arrive faster.” Any specific suggestions on this front?
Urbit.
Thanks
Nick can do better—his Cold Anarchy piece, for example. But exiting into cryptographically secure private channels as a rebel rallying point (granted, a reader’s riff, not Nick’s)? If so, hold my coat, if you would, while I self-defenestrate. I mean, if bad guy power is that daunting, why curl up in a bowl of bits and bytes with Urbit sprinkle? Just die—or down a case of absinthe, sell your parts to the Red Cross, and then die. Instead, you game—you geek—you undermine rules—you choose a discourse. All this machine blab.
You all sound like the World Dessicate you claim to want dead.
How bad is this?—it’s almost as bad as Yarvin, the chickenshit Pontiff who, like our Nick on a Bad Day, believes the Regime is all powerful when it’s really just a cripple. Get up and brush your teeth is my first command. And then everyone ditch the fright wigs and stop scaring each other.
Hello.
This is a text brilliantly (and extremely lucidly) putting forward a political stance, although I wonder - if cheating is so ubiquitous in the game of Social Dominance, then how is it even cheating? It sounds like the trying to apply the four-point definition of a well-constructed game onto Social Dominance doesn't work. If we look at computer games: if they permit cheating, and they mostly do, there is code in them (the closest they have to a physical law, I guess), which literally allows the player to cheat. That doesn't sound like real cheating though, because the game permits it... or maybe it is? I think cheating in Social Dominance is something like this, and so I don't quite know what to make of how messy this above "simulation" of how rules work in games and society becomes a a result...
The consequent of a game's ruleset is the payoff, which in the case of Social Domination is irresistible to any well-socialized individual.
Nonetheless, as the distortion of the existing ruleset becomes ever more violent and arbitrary in the hands of the dominant players, the expected payoff for the weaker players tends toward zero.
As the default response from the weaker players correspondingly tends toward indifference, the significance of the meta-game increases. The dominant players are forced into the more difficult position of punishing indifference rather than denying access to the original payoff.
That is to say, emulation of the payoff structue of Social Domination would be unnecessary, even if it were possible. A newly hatched game need only offer payoff on the magnitude of indifference. The otaku phenomenon you mention is one such example of an indifference-parity game. Of course, better alternatives are emerging.
The dominants need not be beaten at Social Domination if the game's pot simply evaporates.
"Cheating is forbidden less than it is made impossible. Physics is like this. It proscribes nothing that can be done (as Crowley notoriously noticed)."
I think you come close to something useful here, though it is not really anything Antiphon did not write a very long time ago, the old nomos/phusis distinction. The fact is that games (nomos) are never impossible to cheat at, only phusis (nature) is impossible to cheat.
You also make a good point about the common law, legislation as tyranny (tho if you look at old cases, e.g. Heydon's case, it is more like medical treatment, on its own terms, and at this point in history, involuntary servitude, e.g. being involuntary incorporated into a district and involuntary represented by an attorney for that district was not abolish, ironically enough by parliament), but, again, if we remember that nature is the only thing that cannot be cheated, then we find that it is always physically possible to incorporate the slaves into these geometrical areas, to require them to adhere to representations made on their behalf by their attorneys.
And even if they say "I do not consent," well, nature does not require consent for me to govern (steer) you, the only question is whether or not I may apply the forces to you that cause you to be steered in the direction I wish you to go. Of course, I am not really steering you in any intentional way, I am simply a product of impersonal forces (the Greeks may have personified them as Eris...), the "I" is a product of nomos, not of phusis, as are all of the parts of speech, they are all customary distinctions that, if we physically analyze, we find only quantifiable vibrations, but even the nouns and terms we use to express these vibrations are...unsatisfying.
I get the sense you are satisfied, or at least not too terribly unsatisfied to suggest that games are not worth playing---the problem is that you can always represent a game (nomos) as a subset of phusis, which is always counterfactual: it is quite possible to move the pawn 3 spaces forward in Chess. So, as Antiphon suggests, publicly you should pronounce adherence to the rules of Chess, and that cheating is wrong, etc. but this is simply to disarm your opponents---if you can move the pawn 3 spaces while they are not looking, and it gets you closed to check mate, why not?
IMO the gamification is downstream of the University system, I mean, what is a University, or a corporation? At common law, only the King can create a corporation, that is, an invisible, immortal person, Le Roy est loriginall de touts franchises (Keil. 138). It's an Alice in Wonderland/Monty Python absurdity more than it is a game with rules. What you inevitably see as colonization of Indigenous people takes place is that the martial culture is replaced with the rule of law, which you correctly call a pleonasm. But, again, this replacement is a fake, a hoax, a joke, because even if you win on the Legal Chessboard, it is still the Sheriff who comes with a baton to enforce the judgement, you have simply been told that it is "just" that you should be clubbed over the head, because you submitted to an adjudicator, voluntarily or involuntarily.
A friend of mine tells a story about meeting a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, at the wine and cheese after a talk. The Justice asked my friend what he thought law was, and he rattled something off. The Justice, with a smirk, said "well, you have to remember they had the rule of law in Nazi Germany..." This is to say, Nazi Germany had a game. Whether it is a good game or not probably depends more on which side of the table you are on, rather than any sort of "game theory."
I really do get the sense that you are satisfied with the way things or, or, like many older people, have made peace with them. I wonder how you would write if you were deeply dissatisfied.
Why not have serious political philosophy since life is too short to have non-serious political philosophy?
What are the rules of this game?
Can't believe nobody's shilling defi games/coins in the thread - seems appropriate lol. Are you coming out as a degen? $BADGER $ONDO $LIX to the moon
Loosely related note - have you read about EIP1559 and "miner-extractable value"? Ethereum's arc (of) dy/is/emonetarization is seriously going terminal this time - they're just giving up wholesale on objective transaction ordering to push the finance-inflated fees down. There's some fundamental experimental data about meta(-meta)-rules being revealed in this progression...
“ You really want to know how to stay alive? You get people to like you. Oh. Not what you were expecting? Well, when you're in the middle of The Games and you're starving or freezing, some water, a knife, or even some matches can mean the difference between life and death. And those things only come from sponsors. And to get sponsors, you have to make people like you. And right now, sweetheart, you're not off to a real good start.”