Part One: The Game We're Born Into

What is the nature of this game we're born into, and what is our predicament as players?

The idiom “money game” denotes various monetary aspects of society. This project starts by asking, “What if we took that phrase literally—what kinds of insights would we derive about society and its members? What would be the mechanics of the game, and what imperatives—moral and pragmatic—would we face as players? What would it mean to win?

I. The Game You Are Born Into

1.1 The Case for Society as a Game 

My argument has the following structure (each line being explained further below):

1. Society (you could substitute “modernity,” “civilization,” “the socio-economic paradigm”—I’m just going to stick with “society,”) is a construction. 

2. Society, as a construction, has the following features: Rules, Rewards, Objectives, Penalties, Players, Strategies, a Space in which it carries on (denoted as ‘R—S’ for short). 

3. Features in lines 1 & 2 are sufficient for any organization to be considered a game. 

4. Society is a game.[1] 

My argument can be put more simply in this form: If society is a construction and it has R—S then it is a game. Society is a construction and has those features. Therefore, it is a game. 

             1.2 Initial Objections 

Objection A: As a deductive argument, this argument is valid, so if it fails, it's because there’s a false premise. Premise 3 seems weakest. One could start by stating that 1 & 2 are not, on their own, good enough to guarantee that your organization counts as a game (as in, an oxygen atom on its own is not sufficient for water, you need also two hydrogen atoms). Put differently, one could argue that there are counterexamples, cases where you have an organization that satisfies 1 & 2 but is still not considered a game. 

            I want to double down and say that not only is R—S sufficient for x to be a game, I think it’s also necessary. In other words, I think we can define a game as any organization that includes Rules, Rewards, Objectives, Penalties, Players, Strategies, Space: RROPPSS. If R—S then game, and if game then R—S. We have a biconditional, where each entails the other (If water, then H20 , and if H20 then water). In Section 1.5 I’ll discuss each of these elements in greater detail, and we will discuss whether or not this is the correct definition of a game.

Comment: The truth of #2 seems indisputable, although someone could argue that features R—S are not necessary for society, meaning you could easily have a society without R—S. That would be fine, because I’m not arguing that society is necessarily, inescapably a game, I’m merely arguing that our society is a game. 

One might respond at the outset that society has many different objectives—how could anyone say that society is one thing, or that there is one singular objective in society!? And given that it has multiple different objectives (or, rather, its constituents have multiple different objectives) at best all you have is multiple different games being played—everyone, perhaps, playing their own.

1.3. The Single Objective 

This is more complicated territory and connects to questions about the metaphysics of society itself: Is society self-determining? Is society an emergent property greater than the sum of its parts? I don’t think we need to figure any of that out here, though. When defining society in terms of its objective or the objective of its members, the relevant phenomena is like water settling in a canyon, everyone’s independent objectives essentially meeting, or settling along the same low place, inexorably drawn to the same low, steady flow—and that is cash flow. Money. Money is the single objective of everyone in society by necessity. 

The reader may respond: “Of course not!” and “The time with my family is priceless,” or “I don’t garden for money, I garden because I like to garden.” My response is here is probably too obvious: you need money for everything that makes time with your family or gardening possible. This doesn’t just include the raw materials (food, clothes, and shelter for your family; soil, seeds, a spade, and a hose for your garden), but for the time itself. That is to say, even if somehow all those materials were a given, you are having to pay for other things (your phone bill, healthcare) with money for which you have to spend time working—and that is time that you could have spent with your family or gardening. 

If money as the single objective in society seems still too narrow (and many games have additional objectives), let's say everyone wants the following:

-       Time to do things we want that bring us pleasure (or if pleasure is too reductive, let's

just say a positive mental state or P-state)

-       Space to do P-state things in (how much and what kind of space depends on the thing)

-       Freedom to do the P-thing without interference (including security) from others (i.e. “negative liberty”), and resources (including power) to be free to do P-thing with (i.e. “positive liberty”)

________

-       P-state activity itself: whatever that is to you. 

Time, space, freedom, and P-state activity: TSFP. In this society, money is required for all four. Even if P is truly costless for you (let's say, daydreaming), you need money for TSF so you can do P. So, money is the single, ultimate, procedurally prior objective in our society, in this game—the money game.

1.4 Argument Revisited 

Let's return to the argument now that we’ve seen a few objections: 

1. Society is an organizational construction.

2. If and only if an organization has R—S, then the organization is a game.

3. Society has R—S.

4. Society is a game. 

I’ll note here that Premise 1 is really needed, as per the definition of “game” given in 1.2. I retain Premise 1 because, while certainly not all constructions are games, and games occur in nature sans construction, it's helpful to note the contractualist / contractarian basis for society in that it allows (and encourages) social change—a change or abolition of the playbook. I do think “games” take place in nature, in arrangements that cannot easily be said to be constructions. R—S seems present when peacocks are showing off their feathers to attract a mate, or when spiders lay web-traps for flies.

I’m not interested in exploring whether all of nature is a game in this way. I’ll just note that, where life is concerned, we may have neglected from our game criteria “intentionality” (the aiming at an object by some responsive but not necessarily conscious system) as a necessary feature. I definitely would not want to call the goings-on in the asteroid belt or the ethane lakes of Titan “games.” Perhaps in the selfish-gene manner, all of biological life at least could be, in a much broader sense, a game, but again, not what’s at issue here. 

A final objection I’ll consider quickly here is the idea is: Sure, society contains R–S, but maybe it contains or consists in so many other things that its “game-ness” is lost, like, a molecule can have H20, but when combined with other atoms, it is no longer water. 

This would be to deny the biconditional in Premise 2, arguing that the conditional arrow only points from “Game” to “R—S.” In other words, you can’t have a game without R—S, but you can have R—S without it being a game. Yet, unlike H20, I can’t think of an organization that contains R—S which are obviously disqualified as games, which is to say, I can’t think of any negative (lacking) feature which is itself another necessary condition of gamehood.

One may imagine other societies without R—S that would, in turn, not be games. R—S may not be a necessary feature of societies full stop, but they are a necessary feature of our society. They are essential to our society, in that were they to disappear, our society would be substantially different, indicating a revolution or collapse had taken place. The reason for this is discussed in 1.3: people live to feel positive mental states (P): be it pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, eudaimonia, etc. When people do not feel these things, they often, sadly, choose to stop living.

The objective in society, as in nature, is to feel good: even if you are a masochist who feels good when you feel pain; ascetic monk who feels good when you deny yourself pleasures, are a hard-core altruist who feels good when you donate every dime you have; a Millsian who’d rather be “Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” even if you are a puritanically religious person who outsources all “pleasure” to the afterlife; even if you are someone who gets some satisfaction or comfort from relishing in self-pity and misery.

I think to desire to truly feel pain or negativity for negativity’s sake is a contradiction. It’s contained within the structure of desire that its aim, its telos, is something desirable, which is good. This is Aristotle's basic and lasting insight that the good life or positive mental states are the ultimate ends of all activity, what is pursued for its own sake. If you were alone on a spaceship or wandering the Arctic, part of no society, and in no social sense could be said to be in a “game” you would still seek positive mental states: P. Our society is gamified because R—S (the constituents of a game) are the means for getting TSF, which are the means to getting P. And the objective therein is money.

RROPPSS  → TSF → P *arrows are not entailments

Society could perhaps be ungamified if you could achieve P without R—S. I can’t see how you could ever not need TSF, but TSF are not constituent features of gamehood. Society could be ungamified in a monetary sense if you did not need money to get TSF, via the hurdles of R—S. But in this game, you do. You need money for the clothes, the food, the electricity, the water—at an absolute minimum. I’d like to now take a closer look at R—S and how it's coded monetarily.   

1.5 R—S Explained in Context 

The rules, rewards, objectives, penalties, players, space, and strategies that constitute the mechanics of our society (again, the economic domain of society and perhaps society more generally), are concerned with the production of TSF. If R—S all arrange themselves with TSF as their objective, then we can see money as present at every interval. Society is a game because in order to get P, you need TSF, and in order to get TSF, you need R—S, and R—S is a process of controlling, transferring, and (in our society, in the majority of cases if not every case), growing your money.

The rules, which are laws, policies and norms, delineate how to do this: control, transfer, grow your money. For instance: how much you have to pay in taxes, what things you can own / buy / sell (e.g. steel, silicon chips, etc.), and what things you cannot (human children, enriched uranium, etc.). The rules concern how to derive, possess, and relieve ourselves of capital. Be it digital, physical, paper, coin, or Bitcoin, the rules are concerned with the possession and transference of capital, and money, as Marx saw, is the unique form of capital in that it stands in or is transferable for all other forms of capital.

Furthermore, in our modern iteration of the money game, MCM^’ is many players’ initial objective—how to take the universal capital (money), acquire a commodity, inject that commodity with value (in Marx’s view, labor value expropriated from an exploited workforce) and sell it to make more money, or profit. This is true if you own a business—even if your business is just selling the eggplants you grow in your garden, or if you own stock in businesses, even if it’s just penny stocks.

The question of rules is fundamental to the nature of the money game, something I don’t plan to delve into too deeply here. I’ll point to one interesting take on this topic, though, where Katarina Pistor has argued in the The Code of Capital that law is prior to capital itself, that the legal attributes of priority (who has first dibs on something), durability and universality (the value of an object’s extension through time and space, respectively), and convertibility (e.g. selling land for cash and likewise), are necessary features of capital itself (pg. 19). They engender capital. If Pistor is right, the rules of the money game (at the most general level) include instructions, like those Pistor mentions, to make capital (including money) exist, as well as how to derive, possess, and transfer it (at the operational level). It may make sense, then, to think of games within games here, but can the game that comes before the creation of capital itself be said to be a money game? And what is this greater game?

Alternatively, if Pistor is wrong, then how do the rules of the money game make use of the existence of capital, and where then does capital come from? Perhaps from some other game that co-exists with but does not subsume or contain the money game nested within it? These are interesting questions that I don’t plan on taking up here. 

The rewards include money itself or something that gets you closer to getting money (a promotion, a nice suit), and of course whatever “P” is to the player—whatever money can buy. The objectives have already been stated: it's money first, then TSFP. Penalties are loss of money, or various forms of being restricted or locked out of the game, including prison or exile. Death is also a penalty, either directly, as in capital punishment or assassination (or, in a more complicated case, war), or in suicide, particularly in cases where suicide is the result of some form of struggle or failure (real or perceived) to reach the objective. The obvious examples here include cases of mental illness (depression, anxiety, etc.) that culminate in suicide (or death from dangerous coping strategies such as in drug use, risk-seeking behaviors, unhealthy diets, etc.) that are compounded by stress (again, real or perceived, or, put differently, relative to one’s particular variation of the objective, that is, the particular amount of money they see themselves as needing to achieve a P). 

There’s a lot to be said as well for the death one risks as they violate rules as a certain group of players, which, for immigrants, people of color, indigenous, women, people with disabilities, children, LGBTQ folks, and other “minority” groups (racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation) have historically just been demanding basic respect, dignity, safety, wages that allow for survival and a modicum of comfort, a right to work, or protection from having to work. However, a fuller discussion of this is definitely outside the scope of this work. 

There’s also something to be said about refusing to play the game and the consequence which could be starving or being relegated to eat food so devoid of nutrition it leads to a premature death; likewise for exposure to the elements, social alienation, etc. Of course, outright refusal aside, this is a fate imposed on many historically and presently as they are systematically locked out of playing the game, or denied key resources to be able to play effectively (the apt and oft-used idiom “not on level playing field”). 

To approach the point of penalties from a different direction, I’d argue that work itself can be a kind of death-across-a-continuum. The idioms “soul-crushing job” or “mind-numbing work” speak to this experience, as do recent shows like Severance, in which one’s non-work self is literally killed off (albeit temporarily) when one enters the workplace. As Vicki Robin wrote, “making a living is really making a dying.” This is, of course, in degrees, and major variables likely include how much autonomy you have at work and over your schedule (are you your own boss, or part of a co-op or worker self-directed enterprise?), how much agency or decision making power you have over, say, what happens to the profits and products of your labor, or what ingredients go into them (are you on the board of directors, are any of these decisions up for vote?), along with the general nature of the work and workplace (including colleagues).

These variables contribute, of course, to Marxist-alienation, which I think finds its modern psychological correlate in dissociation (again, dramatized in Severance). When we dissociate, there’s this peculiar feeling of being, by degrees, outside one’s body, using one’s body as another tool. There’s a delay in the sensory input of the world, and a feeling of being “stuck in one’s head.” This state is a common trauma response, but I think it speaks to at least the phenomenology of alienation, the feeling of being a stranger to oneself, one’s activity, the product of one’s labor, one’s colleagues, and, as Marx saw, from the world entire (truer than ever in our tech-terraformed cultural landscape).

Dissociation / alienation is the antithesis of what’s described in “flow states,” where one loses all sense of self and time, feels fully embodied, as they engage in activity that is at the intersection between novel and predictable, challenging and achievable, and inherently rewarding (or “autotelic”). If one can be said to be fully alive when in a state of flow (as in racing down a ski slope, or lost in a violin recital), ironically when one is least aware of themselves, then in some sense they could be less “alive” across a spectrum as they fall out of flow and into dissociation consistent with most work in the money game. This death-across-a-spectrum is where labor is compulsory, entirely instrumental, objectifying (in Martha Nussbaum’s usage)—again, ironically when they are most aware of themselves (as objects they are manipulating, pushing through space and time).

Sidebar: the distinction just noted assumes two things. First, the phenomenology of “being alive” indicates something metaphysical about oneself actually being alive (in a more-than-biological way). Second, it assumes that the main variables therein would involve psychological presence / attentiveness to sensory information, embodiment, and activity on one end of the spectrum,[2] and being “lost in thought,” aware of one’s body as an object, and reduced to habitual or mechanical movements on the other. I think that the experience of “being alive” seems to take place across this continuum, although there are a number of examples that don’t fit easily into these descriptions, often less action-based, including contemplation (which Aristotle thought to be the only activity worth doing in itself). I think the metaphysical case of “being alive” is more complicated, especially because we’re talking in some ways about a disappearance of the self at the positive end of the spectrum. But we need not take that up here.

So, we’ve noted Rules, Rewards, Objectives, and Penalties. Players are straightforward—they’re us, humans, born into the money game without knowledge or consent (of course, a non-existent thing cannot consent, but neither can a baby being raised in the game). Unlike frogs placed in simmering pots, we’re hatched in water already at a rolling boil. In utero, we ingest our parents' stress hormones—cortisol and adrenaline, as they navigate the gameboard. We eat in rhythms indirectly determined by our parents’ eating schedules, which are in turn dictated by their work schedules. Before we are even fully physiologically distinct entities from our mothers, we’re material tokens in the money game, and we are born marked as future players and trained to be so. 

            1.6 Normalization

The same way those who grow up in certain enclaves that seem alien to the average person (pick your drastically distant culture, national identity, religious cult, etc.) are relatively at home in those environments (though they may question some extreme attributes that seem to cut against their basic self-interests), we grow up in an environment where money game-play is perfectly normalized. For example, a main function of education is, as Bowles and Gintis discuss, to train children to be employees—a designation accepted as basic and inevitable, and the value of education later indicated by what kind of job you qualify for, and the size of your salary, and later, what that salary can buy for you (early or any retirement? Legacy? Dynasty? Luxury? Escape from poverty?).

Every skill learned, every station occupied, every relationship developed is an opportunity to make or lose money. This fact is even more relevant in the “gig economy” (as Paul Mason writes) where, absent livable wages, workers moonlight as Lyft drivers, nannies, bartenders, etc. As the gameboard converts aspects of society that used to be independent (e.g., favors done by friends) into money-making enterprises, we see just how totalizing the money game can be. We see how quickly these facets become norms as they map evenly onto society’s foundation: money as required for TSFP.

To derive pleasure from existence and often for existence itself requires payment, payment in the form of a currency that required the sale of time and energy which, for the vast majority of people, was likely for a task that they did not want to do, which was certainly not autotelic in the “flow-state” sense. Yet, in every show that’s watched, and every example set, players are groomed to play the game. Having been groomed from birth it's taken for granted. Furthermore, as noted in the brief discussion on penalties, game-play can hardly be said to be optional, so treating it as natural or necessary can be a form of adaptive preference (More on that in section II). 

Navigating these obstacles and sub-systems—schools, stations, communities, jobs, slang, pop-culture reference—is, of course, the terrain of the game itself, the gameboard one moves across which comprises or conditions an increasing amount of reality (the physical world and our conscious experience of it). Moving across the board one deploys various strategies to reach the objectives, which includes improving one’s earning potential, one’s market share, etc. – anything that helps increase proximity to the objective (from getting a hair-cut to lobbying a congressperson).[3]

We’ve touched on every aspect of R–S, except space. The space in which this game is played is, of course, the world. The game is global now. With rare exceptions, there’s nowhere you can go where the game so described is not being played in some way, where the objective of all activity is not P— to achieve positive mental states, and where that is only possible by way of achieving money (whether that’s the dollar, peso, yen, etc.). 

There are experiences in reality where one can be said to be living outside the money game. Types of these are often portrayed in film as dreamlike experiences, where senses are heightened and the passage of time slows. (LSOO dreamlike experience). Yet, these are likely always ephemeral. For those who are not off the board, meaning, they still need to work for TSFP, then they are psychological breaks from the reality of being players in the game. Their objective status is still one of being trapped in the game. (A separate question, explored somewhat in the film Inception, is whether it matters. While I won’t take a stance either way, I think the idea that it does, that escape can be psychological, is the basis for many addictions. This was emphasized in a recent NYT episode).

I’ll note that politics in this context is largely the attempt of one group of players to alter the rules in their favor. Whatever the identity of the winning group of players, the fact we’re all players in the money game will not change unless the underlying structure of R­­–S changes, where, again, the rules are the laws that govern the acquisition, possession, and transference of money; the rewards are money or improved access to it, as well as TSFP; the objective is to get money (and achieve TSFP); the penalties are loss of money, restriction or exclusion from the game, and death; the players are us; the strategies are widely varied, but almost always reduce to the attempt to improve one’s access to money; and the space in which the game is played is the planet we’re on and even the space outside it. 

A revolution would either involve the collapse of the R—S substrate, or its not being coded monetarily (in which case it would still be a game, as discussed in 1.2, just not a money game). Real change requires that it no longer be the case that money is the object and all else is bent towards it. Another reason why I leave Premise 1 (society is a construction), is to keep it fresh in the reader’s mind that society doesn’t need to be this way (a game). You could imagine a world where society is radically different (e.g. money was not the object or there was no money) without contradiction. Nothing about our laws of physics (determinism aside) or the principles of biology entails that the game need to be a money game. We can imagine a world where everyone is a Buddhist monk, living off what they forage from an abundant forest. In such a world (not arguing for its normative attractiveness), R—S would likely not exist (again, except in a deeper, perhaps intractable biological way).

What exactly we should aim for, and how we should respond to the fact of the money game, is what I take up in Section III. In Section II, we’ll look more closely at the mechanics of the game. A final comment before we move on:

1.6  The Emotional Tone of Games

An objection, or perhaps a barrier to accepting the money game view, could arise from the idea that games are silly. Games are something for kids to play, they are pretend and for fun. They are also specific, simple. How could all of the socio-economic paradigm be a game, on a continuum with Battleship, hopscotch, and poker?

Society is a game because it is an organization with R—S. It is metaphorically a prison, a battlefield, a riddle, a dance. When comedian Bill Hicks would end his shows saying how “society is just a ride, and we can change it anytime we want,” he was being metaphorical. Our society is metaphorically a ride, but is non-metaphorically a game. I have laid this out in terms of society having the necessary and sufficient conditions met to be a game:

·      Rules

·      Rewards

·      Objectives

·      Players

·      Penalties

·      Strategies

·      Space

The tone of games being generally silly or childlike, or narrow and simplistic, does not disqualify society from being a game. There are also exceptions to those standards: Roman gladiator battles, medieval jousting / dueling, and Russian roulette, to name three.

Culture is also replete with examples of representations of games as brutal and complex: the shows Squid Game and Hunger Games are examples, along with Saw’s iconic “I want to play a game,” and classics like Richard Connell’s Most Dangerous Game. For the robots in Westworld, all of their society is a game for rich humans, which they are made to believe is real (or not a game in the way it is for the humans), as they are beaten, raped, and killed. Cersei Lannister states blithely, “When you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die.” In Succession, the brutal patriarch / CEO states, “It’s all a Game,” in S1.E7, and in Better Call Saul (Breaking Bad spin-off) Mike and Nacho discuss who is and is not “in the game” (and thus who is often ‘fair game’ to be killed). The proliferation of game-allusions in media may show a growing awareness of society as deeply (and darkly) game-like.

In Philip K Dick’s Game Players of Titan, a superior alien race forces the last surviving humans to play a game called “Bluff.” Winners gain properties and hope to renew their chances to procreate and repopulate the earth. Later in the book, the characters learn of a higher level of secret gameplay, where autonomy, sanity, and the survival of the human race is on the table. To the aliens of Titan, gameplay with earth could be as trivial as a game of monopoly between friends here in our world. It makes no difference to them, to their perspective, that the game encompasses the entire world for humans, conditioning all their decisions, values, and the way their life plays out. It’s a useful exercise (by no means a hypothesis) to imagine something similar in our case – once there was a non-gamified society, but aliens or a higher intelligence, for whatever reason, took some members of society, incepted the rules of the game into their brains, and provided the means to cajole the rest of society into play.  When the original alien abductees died off, the game then would live on, the aliens watching (like Leibniz’s view of humans as God’s playthings). We would be in a similar positions as the game players of Titan, where the world is at stake regardless of how it seems to an outside observer.

1.7  The Order of Games

In our case, it doesn’t matter that no one, at any point, said “start!” or “let the games begin!” A group of people can casually start kicking a ball or round object around, select two goals, and just organically start playing a game. Maybe a few others join in, and eventually the original two leave. The game continues. Rules are added, altered, or removed. Years pass. Now the ball is kicked through hoops, on certain squares, words are shouted as it lands, tokens are collected. The activity has rules, rewards, objectives, players, penalties, strategies to win, and a space in which it is played. At no point does it stop being a game.

If the players were forced to play in it, where refusal to play was exile into a harsh wilderness, the only logical option would be to try and get enough points to be able to exit the room. Some people have been in this room so long, kicking the ball around, collecting points that they have kids and families. Their kids are born into the game, grow up playing the game and think it is all there is. Some of the older players tell them: the game has always been here, it's always been played this way. Others say, “It’s a good game, you're virtuous for playing.” Still others are never told they’re playing a game. It's just normal life to them. They don’t recognize that there are other ways their social reality could be organized, other ways that resources could be produced and distributed. They don’t realize they’re being forced to play a game, or that the rules are arbitrary and likely written and rewritten against their interests—because they don’t realize they are playing a game, period. They just believe they are kicking a ball through hoops and shouting out words because “that’s just what you do. That’s how things have always been. That’s what my parents did. That’s what god wants.” 

And it’s not necessarily the case that the “forcing” of gameplay is top-down, coming from one small group of people. It is ultimately the result of everyone else collectively continuing to play, although there are of course some players who have a disproportionate influence on the game both continuing in general, and the rules remaining the way they are. But it is collective participation in game-play that, in one sense, keeps individual players stuck in it. Exploring how that works exactly—the relationship between the collective and the individual in terms of compulsory play—is outside the scope of this project (though we will say more below about how the game play is generally compulsory). We’ve one over the argument for society as a game with money as its objective. In Section 2, we’ll look at some of the implications of this view.

[1] I disagree with C. Thi Nguyen, then, who argues against attempting to conceive of all of society as a game. I think it is already so.

[2] It’s also not as if there is not internal life or thought, but that one is guided by a soft, intuition-like voice or can examine mental contents objectively without getting lost in them, experiencing a kind of “dream belief” (McGinn) which would not constitute psychological presence and likely be disruptive to flow.

[3]A final note about players, though this point may be inane, as briefly mentioned, they required intentionality. They need to be capable of forming goals. There’s a sense in which bots can do this, motion detectors, mosquitoes. Whether or not the money game as we play it is uniquely human, and whether to be a player requires a more complex, reflective consciousness and can form goals of which we are aware and can evaluate, is a further discussion I won’t take up here.