on abstracting human life in games

Abstraction—and especially the abstraction of humans and their lives—has been on my mind a lot lately. It comes up in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (though I need to read the print version so that I can take better notes—I have fond memories of the audiobook but can’t recall the exact details of his argument). It also comes up a lot in Jacques Ellul’s writing, which I’ve been consuming a lot of lately.

To start this post, though, I want to quote from James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, a tricky but fascinating work of philosophy that uses an extended metaphor about games to reflect on two different postures toward life. One comparison he makes goes like this:

By relating to others as they move out of their own freedom and not out of the abstract requirements of a role, infinite players are concrete persons engaged with concrete persons. For that reason an infinite game cannot be abstracted, for it is not a part of the whole presenting itself as the whole, but the whole that knows it is the whole. We cannot say a person played this infinite game or that, as though the rules are independent of the concrete circumstances of play. It can be said only that these persons played with each other and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.

That is, those treating life as an infinite game treat other humans as complete, unabstractable persons. In contrast (and by implication, though it gets more explicit in other parts of the book), those treating life as a finite game are happy to treat other humans in abstract terms. Carse’s book considers games as a metaphor for life and life through the lens of games, and that makes abstraction of human lives interesting to me in both settings. Let’s consider two examples.

First, here’s a quote from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, about the famous efforts by the general manager of the Oakland A’s (a U.S. baseball team) to reduce baseball to abstract statistics and thereby get as many wins as possible on a tight budget. Lewis writes about a particular trade that involves doing a disservice to a player but, when abstracted, makes perfect sense to the general manager:

Now, suddenly, there is a difference between trading stocks and bonds and trading human beings. There’s a discomfort. Billy never lets it affect what he does. He is able to think of players as pieces in a board game. That’s why he trades them so well.

Here, Billy (Beane, the general manager) is, in the words of Lewis, treating real life as a board game. He’s playing Carse’s finite game by abstracting a human being into a piece on the board. This stood out to me for its almost engagement with the whole reason I listened to Moneyball in the first place: because I expected to hear plenty of this kind of story and to be horrified by them. Yet, Lewis only briefly acknowledges the moral danger in abstracting humans before moving on to his praise of Beane. It’s Beane’s ability to abstract, abstract, abstract that makes him good at his job—and the subject of Lewis’s book.

Let’s compare this with an almost opposite case. U.S. primary school teacher John Hunter got some attention a few years ago for his World Peace Game, an activity he would play with 9-10 year olds to get them to think through weighty matters. This is a board game, a necessary abstraction! Yet, note what Hunter does as one of his students is about to declare war in the game, in the spirit of making this board game more concrete and downplaying that abstraction:

“This is a thousand troops you’re risking,” I pointed out. “If your troops lose, of course, you will have to write a letter to their parents.” I have all the students write letters to the parents of any of their troops lost in battle. They can engage in war if they choose to, but I want them to understand at least some of the consequences.

Whereas Beane treats humans like pieces in a board game, Hunter insists that his students treat pieces in a board game like humans. He’s treating this as Carse’s infinite game, even though there are no concrete persons truly involved. I like this, a lot.

What I appreciate about Carse (and Ellul, and Graeber) is that they’re giving me some words to put to ideas that I’ve had for a long time about games. With any luck, I’ll get a professional chance to write up some of these thoughts sometime soon, but in the meantime, this blog post will do.

• abstraction
• David Graeber
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Jacques Ellul
• James Carse
• Finite and Infinite Games
• John Hunter
• World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements
• meaningful games