Chess is probably the most famous example of this kind of thinking. You might be familiar with The Wire, i.e. the show about Baltimore's problems? Well, that uses chess in the context of drug dealing. Direct parallels are drawn between the king and the queen and the organisation's leadership, for example. It's a 3 and half minute scene, just watch it and you'll get it.
Person of Interest does something much more interesting with chess. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the programme, POI was about a dude who was contracted to make a superintelligent AI (The Machine) to fight terrorism but had a moral crisis. During various flashbacks we see Finch teach the Machine how to play chess... we're clearly being set up to imagine something like The Wire's use of chess (which, if you didn't watch the video, might be described as "all the world's a chess board and we merely pieces"). The first lesson is about the number of possible games and therefore the seizure of possibility leading to the moral conclusion "simply relax and play". In the second lesson, I wouldn't say there's any obvious message but it's obliquely talking about sacrifice and The Machine's fallibility. And then we get the third lesson where Finch says:
It's a useful mental exercise... through the years many thinkers have been fascinated by it but I don't enjoy playing ... [it's from an era where people believed some people were worth more than others, I disagree]. I don't envy you the decisions you're going to have to make. [...] If you remember nothing else, remember this: chess is just a game, real people aren't pieces and you can't assign more value to some of them to others [...] people are not a thing that you can sacrifice. The lesson is: anyone who looks on the world as if it were a game of chess deserves to lose.
WarGames is a film from the 1980s but I like it so I'm not going to spoil it, which is a problem since while there's a really good example of what I mean in the film, it's also how the film ends. If you don't care, read on.
Of course, if we go to TV Tropes there are some arguments about the sense of WarGames conclusions:
This is obviously a trope but I'm not sure what the trope is called so I'm actually out of ready examples. But you probably understood what I meant from the off, right? People interpret the world through games or project real world interpretations on to games. It's like sports metaphors but without the baggage. Well, sports are games too so I guess they should count as possibilities.
Anyway, for contemporary Western society at any rate, my gut instinct is that the best game model or symbolic game or metaphorically promising game is President/Scum.
Oh, sure, it's a bad choice in the sense that the rules are not at all standardised but the basic bones are good. The feature I like most is that President is endless. Yes, sure, you can just play a single hand but the whole point of President is that the winner takes two cards of their choice (or the two best cards) from the loser, and the runner up does the same (but gains just the one card) from the n-1 player. This means the game features structural inequality that makes social mobility hard. And, as a card game, the luck of the draw means that starting positions are pretty arbitrary as well. The game even has FOMO/network capture since if you pass, you're usually missing out on huge opportunities to get rid of cards (345 consec can be brutal if you can't participate). And because the winner of the previous trick starts the next one, the inequality occurs between tricks within hands
Of course, I prefer to play President with rules that make the game more competitive but since this is the same as saying "making the game fairer", I also find that instructive. And as a special "treat" Forsher's rules to President.
=> (9, 9) alone. Play does not loop back around and so the longest possible sequence of values is, in order, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace, 2, Joker.So, what say ye, NSG? Are there (real world, not game theory) games that are good models of human life or behaviour?
