You Did Realise You Were Inside the Game, Didn’t You?

The hardest things to see are the things you are inside of. Once something becomes the unquestioned environment you live in, think through, speak from and use to make sense of everything, you stop noticing it as a thing at all. A fish probably doesn't spend much time wondering about water. You don't notice the language you're speaking while you're speaking it. You don't consciously study the rules of a game once you've learned how to play. You simply play.

That may be why one of the strangest facts about human life is also one of the easiest to miss.

You do realise you are inside the game, don't you?

I don't mean metaphorically, and I don't mean spiritually, at least not in the vague sense these words are often used to make life sound more mysterious or interesting than it actually is. I mean structurally.

GAME is the most accurate word I know for describing what we are involved in.

Not because life is like a game. Not because thinking of life as a game is a useful mindset. Not because we can sprinkle a few points, challenges and rewards over our lives and make difficult things more fun. I mean that the structure of human experience is the structure of a game. There are limitations, rules, boundaries, other players, objectives, obstacles and consequences, and there is uncertainty about what will happen. There are things you want and things that can get in the way. You enter the field and then you play.

GAME isn't something we add to life through gamification. GAME is what is already happening.

A game is what happens when a player accepts a set of limitations in order to pursue an outcome. That's all. Take away the limitations and there is no game. Take away the possibility of losing and winning becomes meaningless. Take away the boundaries and there is no field to play on. Take away uncertainty and there is nothing left to discover. Take away problems and there is nothing left to solve.

And yet this is the strange thing about being human. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to escape the very limitations that make the experience of being alive possible. We want no problems, no uncertainty, no pain, no rejection, no failure and no limitations. We imagine that freedom means somehow transcending the conditions of the game altogether, finally arriving at a point where nothing can go wrong, nothing is difficult, nobody can reject us, our body no longer causes us problems and the future contains no surprises.

But if you succeeded, what exactly would be left? What would you do with an existence in which there was nothing to overcome, nowhere you couldn't go, nothing you couldn't have, nothing to discover, no uncertainty about how the story ends and no possibility that anything could go wrong?

You wouldn't have found freedom.

You would have ended the game.

And once you see GAME this way, the question changes. Instead of asking, How do I get rid of my limitations?, you start asking, What can I do with the limitations I've been given?

That is a very different question.

The Strange Relationship We Have With Limitation

Most people have a complicated relationship with the things that limit them. Their body. Their age. Their childhood. Their personality. Their circumstances. Their money. Their geography. Their responsibilities. Other people. Time. Death. They experience these things as evidence that they are not free.

And of course, from one perspective, they are right. Human beings are undeniably limited. We cannot do anything we want. We cannot go anywhere we want. We cannot become anything we can imagine. We cannot control what other people do. We cannot stop time. We cannot escape the physical reality of having a body that gets tired, sick, injured and eventually dies.

But the mistake is assuming that limitation and imprisonment are the same thing. They are not. In fact, limitation is the essential requirement for play. There is no such thing as a limitless game because the moment there are no boundaries, no obstacles, no objective and no possibility of failure, there is nothing left to play.

Try it. Imagine a game with no rules, no boundaries, no objective, no obstacles and no possibility of failure. You could do anything, but because you could do anything, nothing would matter. You could go anywhere, but because there was nowhere you couldn't go, going somewhere would lose its meaning. You could achieve anything, but because achievement required nothing of you and failure was impossible, achieving it would become pointless.

The tension would disappear, and with the tension would go the game.

The whole point of a game is that something is difficult, something is in the way and something is unknown. You don't know whether you are going to win. You don't know exactly how you are going to get there. You have to respond to what happens. You have to work with the pieces you have been given.

That is what makes it a game.

And this changes the question we ask about freedom. We ask, How do I get rid of my limitations? The better question is, What can I do with the limitations I've been given?

The Icarus Problem

This strange relationship with limitation is captured beautifully in the story of Icarus. Most of us know the simplified version. Icarus and his father Daedalus are trapped, and Daedalus builds wings from feathers and wax so they can escape. He warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun because the wax will melt.

Icarus flies too high. The wax melts. He falls into the sea.

And the lesson we are often given is, Don't fly too high. Be careful. Know your limits. Don't get too ambitious. Don't overreach.

But there is another obvious part of the story that we seem to forget.

They were trapped on an island.

The wings were the solution. Daedalus built them. They had to fly. Yes, flying involved danger. Yes, there were limits to how the wings could be used. But the existence of those limits was not an argument against flying. The point was to understand that the wings had rules.

You could fly. You just couldn't fly indefinitely in every direction and at every height without consequence.

The fact that there are limits to how high you can fly does not mean you shouldn't fly.

It means flying is a game with rules.

The limits don't disqualify you from the adventure.

They qualify you for it.

The Human Experience

At the most objective level, the human being is – Aliveness (life itself) housed in physical carcass, described by a story.

This aliveness is currently happening through an extraordinarily specific and limited construct. You have a body. You have a name. You have a history. You have memories. You have relationships. You have a personality. You have a collection of stories about who you are.

And because these things are so immediate and convincing, it is very easy to mistake the construct for the whole of what you are. You forget the distinction between the player and the character. You become Jaemin. Or Sarah. Or David. Or whoever you have decided you are. And then you spend the rest of your life defending the character.

This is not an argument against being human. Quite the opposite. Becoming completely immersed in the human experience might be the whole point. The player has to take the game seriously enough for it to matter. If you are playing chess but constantly thinking, none of this is real, you aren't really playing chess. You have to care whether you win. You have to experience the tension. The possibility of losing has to feel real.

Forgetting doesn't disqualify you from the game.

Forgetting is the qualifier.

The Game Only Works If You Forget You're Playing

Imagine for a moment that you are God. Not the old man with a beard sitting on a cloud. I mean the limitless aliveness of the universe. Everything. Nothing outside of you. No boundaries. No beginning. No end. No physical form. No death. No possibility of being trapped because there is nowhere you are not.

What would you do? How would you play?

You would have a problem.

You have no limits.

And you can't play without them.

So imagine that limitless aliveness wanted to experience a limited game. Structurally, what would be required? A body. Time. One particular person. A physical form. A family you didn't choose. A country you didn't choose. A body you didn't choose. A set of circumstances you didn't choose. Problems. Uncertainty. The possibility of losing.

And then, for the game to actually work, you would have to forget what you were. Otherwise there is no real tension. You would always know how the story ends. You would always know you were safe. You would always know the limitations were temporary. You couldn't really enter the game.

The point is that if limitless aliveness wanted to experience a limited game, forgetting would not be a malfunction.

It would be structurally necessary.

The player has to forget they are playing. The actor has to forget they are acting. The character has to believe the story.

Forgetting doesn't disqualify you. Forgetting is what qualifies you to play.

But You Have Forgotten So Well That You Think You're Trapped

And here is the problem. The game works. It works extraordinarily well. You have forgotten so completely that you no longer think you're playing. You think this is all there is. You think the character is the whole story. You think the limitations are evidence of imprisonment. You think your circumstances define what is possible. You think your history defines who you are.

And so you begin trying to escape. You try to become unlimited again. You try to get rid of fear, uncertainty, pain, failure, limitation and the parts of yourself you don't like.

This is why the search for freedom can become so miserable.

You are trying to escape the conditions that make the experience possible.

The rules aren't the problem.

Without them, there is no game.

The Five Rules of the Game

If GAME is the most accurate word for what we're involved in, then it becomes useful to ask what the rules actually are. Not rules in the sense of commandments. Rules in the sense of realities you encounter whether you like them or not.

These are five.

1. Life IS unfair.

There is no cosmic referee handing everyone an equal starting position. Some people are born into extraordinary circumstances. Some aren't. Some people get sick. Some don't. Some are loved well. Some aren't. Some people work incredibly hard and lose. Some people barely seem to try and win.

There is no guarantee that the game will be fair. In fact, every single person could make a valid claim that they have been hindered by circumstances that are simply not fair. Your childhood wasn't fair. Your body wasn't fair. Someone else's behaviour wasn't fair. The opportunity you missed wasn't fair. The hand you were dealt wasn't fair.

So what?

Who told you it ought to be fair?

Worse still, the moment you play your valid victim card, you have to go and sit on the bench while the game goes on without you.

Your grievance might be completely justified. The unfairness might be completely real. Neither changes the fact that the game is still being played.

Once you stop demanding fairness from reality, an enormous amount of energy becomes available for playing the hand you've actually been dealt and organising yourself from there.

Fairness is not one of the rules.

Playing is.

2. Life rewards desire, not deserve.

The universe does not distribute outcomes according to moral merit. You don't necessarily get what you deserve. You get what you pursue, create, negotiate, tolerate, attract, stumble into and sometimes simply happen to receive.

Deserving is irrelevant to the game.

Think about any other game you play. If the trophy was simply handed to the person who apparently deserved it more, there would be no point in playing. The trophy goes to the person who plays the game well enough to win it.

The game recognises desire.

Desire is the currency that moves the players around the board. It creates movement. It makes you choose. It makes you risk something. It makes you keep going when the outcome isn't guaranteed.

The question isn't whether you deserve the thing you want.

What do you want, and what are you prepared to do about it?

 3. The obstacle IS the way.

We keep imagining that the obstacle is what stands between us and the thing we want. But remove the obstacle and you often remove the game. The mountain is what makes climbing possible. The opponent is what makes competition possible. The problem is what makes solving possible. The fear is what makes courage possible.

The obstacle isn't necessarily interrupting your experience.

The obstacle is the experience.

The thing you keep trying to get rid of may be the very thing that gives the game its shape.

4. All we have is story.

You don't experience reality directly. You experience a story about reality. Something happens. You interpret it. You remember it. You give it meaning. You tell yourself what it says about you, other people and the future. And then you live inside that story.

Which means the story matters enormously.

Not because you can simply make up whatever story you want and pretend reality isn't real, but because meaning is not something you find lying around in the world.

Meaning is something you create through story.

And if you can change the story, you can change the game you're playing.

5. Everything is spiritual.

This is the clumsiest of the five names, but perhaps the most important.

Because there is no you standing over here and the universe standing over there. You are not a separate player dropped into an external game board.

You are the game and the board the game is being played on.

The body is part of it. The world is part of it. The other players are part of it. The circumstances are part of it. The awareness experiencing all of it is part of it.

You don't have to escape the world to find what is spiritual.

There is nowhere outside of it to escape to.

You Don't Have to Escape the Character

And this is important because the answer isn't to become detached from your humanity. You don't need to float above your life in some blissful state where nothing matters. You don't need to transcend the character. You don't need to become so spiritual that you are no longer interested in money, sex, achievement, adventure, beauty, relationships, success, failure or anything else that makes being human interesting.

That sounds so boring.

The point isn't to exit the game.

The point is to play it properly.

You are not obliged to continue defending the character you built in response to the accusation. You are under no obligation to continue being the person you were ten minutes ago simply because you have spent twenty years defending that identity.

You can update the story. You can change direction. You can become interested in something else. You can stop playing a game. You can start a new one. You can change your mind.

You can discover that the character you have been defending for twenty years was built around an accusation made by a child who didn't understand what was happening.

And you can stop defending it.

This is not an invitation to become a better version of yourself.

It is the opposite.

Because the original problem may have begun when you decided that you needed to become better than yourself, different from yourself, other than yourself, in order to survive.

Don't be me. Be better than me. Different from me. Other than me.

The game structure is not another reason to construct a more impressive character.

It is an opportunity to stop mistaking a defensive identity for the whole of what you are.

And this is where the game structure becomes extraordinarily useful for understanding insecurity.

Because insecurity is what happens when you forget that the character is a character and begin treating every threat to the story as a threat to your existence.