#2playerboardgames

There may be a lot more to the simple board game than meets the eye. From any kind of scientific perspective, a great many things are happening simultaneously each time you play a board game. First and foremost, at least two people are getting together with the express intention of spending some time together working on a common goal, that being the playing of the game.

In order to foster the right spirit, many games are competitive in nature, such that you are both attempting to play the game, to achieve the goal of having played the game, but you are also competing to affect the outcome of the game i.e. to win. This is a beautiful example of how games balance seemingly conflicting goals to allow the common goal to be achieved. Both players want to win, but more, they want to play the game. It is more important to play the game since the game cannot be won unless it is played.

Playing the game risks the opposite of your aims being achieved - you may lose. But people are always willing to take that risk if the game is good. Why?

With the best board games, you learn even if you lose, and those who go on to become the best players know this better than anyone. What then is this strange artifact, this thing that teaches us about itself and ourselves, while we play it? Looked at from a purely metaphysical perspective, we see games, therefore, belong to a subset of entities that humankind are somehow living in a symbiotic relationship with. If you look deeper still, we could go so far as to say that games are the universe itself and that they give us a glimpse into an alarming and fascinating property of matter - it can organise itself so that it can teach itself things.

Even according to the materialists, this is phenomenally weird. According to the purely materialist principle, matter organised itself into life, not the other way round. Matter is the pre-existent substrate of life. However, it is interesting to note that once it has organised itself into life and, by extension, human beings, they begin to organise other matter into games. These games utilise certain immutables, like the laws of physics (for the rolling of dice), as things with which the gamers can interact. Is there anything more profoundly fascinating than the idea of a substance (matter) which can be both alive and dead at the same time, animate and inanimate, and which can apparently have both of those two seemingly independent states of being interact with each other for mutual benefit. That is just weird.

I think that all board games are a form of Ouija, but Ouija is the oddest and most spooky demonstration of this weirdness. I would liken it to the radio. Playing one game is like tuning into one radio station, let's say it's Monopoly world. The players then channel the information of the Monopoly matrix for an hour or so. Same with other games. You might not think any of the information you get is odd or strange, since most of it is about Monopoly, of course. Ouija is like taking the same radio set and instead of tuning into one game, in particular, you move the dial around to pick up whatever is around, not just the stuff on the Monopoly frequency. Hence, more weirdness.