The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy by Bernard De Koven

Author:Bernard De Koven [De Koven, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262019170
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

7

Encore

We now know it can happen—despite all our attempts to find a way to end a game—that we get too involved. We find ourselves in games that we can’t get out of.

Something happens to us when we try to keep a game going longer than we should. Yes, there was a time when the high we achieved through the game was so high that we all became excellent together. Yes, we played that game well and, through it, achieved a state of absolute health, of encompassing wellness. But now that game is over. It’s over, in part, because it was as fine as it was. We wanted to make it happen again, exactly as it happened before. But we can’t.

A well-played game is never the same—never well the same way. As soon as we experience it, we change because of it. It is too powerful an experience. Its effect on all of us is too strong.

The game, because we were able to play it well, renewed us. And now we are newer than the game can be. We need a different game. We need a game that is as new as we have become.

We tried to keep the old game going. We tried to prolong it as much as we could. No, we didn’t want to change anything about it. We wanted to make it last.

We made more and more interludes, instituted more and more rituals. We reached a point where it was taking us two hours to play a game that might have lasted only fifteen minutes. But somehow we could see that the harder we tried to keep it going, the smaller the game became. The opportunity to play the game, to play it well, shrank until it was barely accessible, until we were more honoring the memory of what the game had been for us than giving life to what it could become.

Yes, we were able to play it well indeed. We could challenge each other deeply, completely. But that particular wellness and that particular challenge is no longer what we are looking for. It’s the same, and we have become different because of it.

I don’t think there’s a game that’s large enough to stay as new as we are. I don’t think we would be able to play such a game. It would be too big for us to handle.

I think that in looking for such a game, something else happens to us. We begin to change ourselves in order to stay in it.

Thus, the master chess player can recognize herself as a competent, fully functioning human being only when she is playing chess. Thus, the professional kite flier is no longer able to delight in the calm that comes between winds.

You jump the hurdles faster than you or anyone else has ever jumped before. You make new records. And then you spend the rest of your life trying to do it again. The rest of your life!

Yes, you had indeed been excellent. You were so

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