Has reality always been a game?

My philosophical reaction to an interesting essay series

The New Atlantis is publishing an interesting series of articles titled Reality: A Post-Mortem. The series, written by Jon Askonas, is looking at the “collapse of consensus reality” - as driven by modern technology and social media.

The series is worth reading for the sociological analysis but the opening essay, Reality is Just a Game Now, has got me thinking about a different, more philosophical question: has reality always been a game? Or to be a little more precise, has our lived reality always been a game?

That might seem like a very strange question and it is definitely one that requires some motivation. To make that work, readers will need to put aside any pejorative connotations they associate with the word ‘game’.

So what does it mean for someone to be playing a game? Given we are tackling a philosophical question, we try to provide a high level conceptual definition. If you take that view, any game, whether it is chess, hide and seek, football, a caucus race or the games involved in politics, has two intrinsic parts: a set of arbitrary rules (sometimes but not always clearly defined) that players agree to follow within some real physical and logical space.¹

To make this less abstract, let’s consider football (whatever that means for you). For a game to be football, players have to follow a set of rules (often including a number of unwritten rules) with a particular type of ball on a certain size and type of ground. However, the rules that make the game football are entirely arbitrary from an external perspective. There are no rules of physics or psychology that define which players are allowed to do what to the ball with what parts of their bodies. The different forms of football are so different because they have made different arbitrary rule choices.

However, the rules are not entirely arbitrary when viewed from a perspective ‘inside’ the game. Football, of all forms, has evolved over many years and most of the rules today reflect learned experience about what makes the game work well. To put it differently, while the rules might be arbitrary in a macro sense, it doesn’t mean they can be arbitrarily changed. For example, if all the players at the FIFA World Cup were allowed to use their hands, the whole competition would cease to have much meaning.

Another core aspect to the game is the reality that it exists in. To again look at football: physics, human physiology, psychology and the constraints of Euclidean space are all vital to making it work as a game. Change many of these - perhaps make gravity half as strong - and the game would cease to function as it currently does. The arbitrary rules are essential to the game but so is the physical reality.²

The importance of the underlying reality comes through when we try to come up with new games. Many of us have had the experience, possibly as a child, where we came up with a great idea for a game that just didn't work in practice. It may have been too hard, or too easy, or boring, or too complicated. When tried out within the broader reality, some ideas really don’t work as functioning games.

To recap the point, a game is made up of some arbitrary, human determined behavioural rules that players agree to adopt as they act within an underlying reality. But surely this same point also applies to human cultures and languages?

A culture, for example, is made up of many ultimately arbitrary decisions (do men wear trousers or dresses?) that make strong internal sense and are also shaped by the reality they exist in (e.g. warm versus cold climates). Some ideas for a strong culture fail in practice (see the history of utopian communities). Yet there are many vibrant cultures that are internally coherent if mutually hard to understand, just as there are different forms of football that don’t make that much sense to those who play the other forms.

Human languages are also a mix of arbitrary rules in the context of reality.³ The fact that chien, hund and inu are the words that refer to the same animal is ultimately arbitrary, but the nature of reality means that all of these languages need a word for a dog. Similarly, the grammatical rules of a language are - from an external perspective - arbitrary. But they have an internal coherence that can be badly disrupted if some rules are changed.

Importantly, language and culture strongly shape the way we live and experience reality. This is obviously true of the social dimensions of how we live but also extend as far as how we conceptualise the way we inhabit space and time. Thus, if language and culture are structured like games, then we can argue that lived reality has always been (like) a game.

I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether this means that reality has always been a game. Or perhaps it merely shows that humans love games so much because games closely mimic lived reality. Whatever you decide, it is worth thinking about games as an analogy for how we live in reality.

For example, if the way we interact with reality changes - perhaps the weather changes or we get injured - then the games we play and how we play them necessarily changes. Similarly, as digital technology changes the way we interact with reality, then culture and languages also necessarily change. For Jon Askonas, these are heralding the death of a consensus about what reality is. His series is worth a read.

1. While most games have winners and losers, there are exceptions. So I haven’t included any ‘win conditions’ in the analysis. It doesn’t significantly change the analysis either way.

2. This applies, albeit in a different way, to chess. If you try to play chess within a world with a different geometry (e.g. where straight lines meet) or different rules around objects and position (perhaps two objects can inhabit the same space) then suddenly the game of chess would lose meaning.

3. For reference, there obvious similarities with Wittgenstein’s concept of a ‘language game’. However, Wittgenstein was interested in particular behaviours within languages, whereas the argument here is concerned with a macro view of language.