A philosophy of play (III): Suffering
Life is absurd. But there is one meaningful thing, one inarguable thing, and that is that there is suffering. Fine writing helps alleviate that suffering — and anything that puts meaning and beauty into the world in the form of story, helps people to live with more peace and purpose and balance, is deeply worthwhile.
Robert McKee
All games are based on suffering. This is what Torill Mortensen and I argued in our chapter “Asynchronous Transgressions: Suffering, Relief, and Invasions in Nintendo’s Miiverse and StreetPass”, included in the book Transgression in play and games, edited by Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen. Or, in more scholarly terms, “the core hypothesis of this article is that suffering is a central aspect of play, and play experience builds on short-term relief”. We did not want to limit this relief to a cathartic defeat of suffering through power, however — suffering is a central aspect of play because play presents us with controlled doses of suffering, as real as they are manageable.
Let me unpack this.
I believe the heart of games is not escapism or mindless gratification: there cannot be play without a minimum amount of suffering. I’m not (only) talking about difficulty or the art of failure described by Jesper Juul. Nor am I advocating the need for highly developed skills to play a game. Ludic suffering is not about hardcore gaming or virtual masochism. I’m talking about a more general, constant, and unresectable type of suffering: the one that comes from the simple fact of being alive.
Life is suffering. This does not mean that all there is to life is suffering, nor that we were “born to suffer”, and especially not that there is virtue in suffering. What it means is that there is no sentient being that does not suffer. I don’t know if suffering is useful (personally, I could do without it), but it won’t go away, no matter how many cures are promised to us by self-help and forced optimism. Some have tried to find benefits in pain, anguish, and sacrifice. Fine. This is not the point I’m trying to make. Exposing ourselves to suffering can make us learn how to better cope with it — but then again, if there were no suffering, we would not need to learn that. What matters is that even if we don’t find a use for it, suffering exists.
But there’s also more to life than suffering, as there is more than suffering in games. This is what Schopenhauer, in his most extreme writings, got wrong: there’s value in what lies between boredom and pain, however brief, however fleeting. Life, and games, give us plenty of reasons to love them and enjoy them — it’s just that we are limited in doing so if we start by denying suffering. Let’s try and understand it, then.
And what are we to understand, exactly? Suffering is unmeasurable, ungraspable. The word evokes so many meanings. There’s the suffering of illness, of old age, of death, the suffering caused by others, the suffering we cause ourselves. This is where the Buddhist concept of Duhkha comes in handy. Allow me to go back to our chapter:
In all Buddhist thought, Duhkha is the first of the Four Noble Truths (and, together with impermanence and non-self, one of the three marks of existence): suffering is part of life, “both ubiquitous and banal, neither ennobling nor a mistake” (Carpenter 2012, 37–38). Duhkha (“thirst” or “dissatisfaction”) includes all the states one feels when wanting something to be different from what it is: sadness, sorrow, physical pain, anxiety, distress, longing, dread, or boredom. Mark Siderits translates it as “dis-ease” and call it the sense “of not being at home with ourselves” (2007, 20).
Let’s rephrase it: life is dissatisfaction. We suffer because we are finite beings with constant needs, thrown amidst a current of never-ending changes. We are always going to need something, always wanting for something to be other than what it is. And to change that, we need to work for it. Both pain and boredom, in this conceptualisation, are forms of suffering. No matter how satisfied we are with our lives, we are always working to change something — or to keep things from changing.
How are games based on suffering, then? If Duhkha is an innate characteristic of existence and play is part of life, it follows that dissatisfaction is also an innate part of play. As a basic part of life, play and games must be made of the same materials — hence we play in and with suffering. We play by momentarily changing our world and aspiring to change a game state. We play in uncertainty, which is in itself a form of Duhkha. But do we play against suffering?
Sutton-Smith said that “if the world is a text, the play is a reader’s response to that text”. The escapist view of games would see this response as a “rejection of” suffering. The developmental, play-as-training-for-real-life view would read it as a “preparation for” suffering. The play-as-power-fantasy interpretation would frame it as a “triumphing over” suffering. As a variant of that, the “art of failure” view would highlight it as a “catharsis about” suffering. And all of them are correct. However, Torill and I decided to focus on a much less discussed aspect of this: suffering as vertigo. In this, play is seeking suffering and experimenting with a (partial) loss of control.
In his taxonomy of games, Caillois included ilinx, the kind of games based on “the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuos panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (2001, 23). Ilinx is surrendering to a shock, to a loss of control that destroys reality. It relies on the sense of immediate danger or loss of control but it is not, however, a reckless exposure to danger: Caillois stressess that it necessitates two special hallmarks: first, to be carefully separated from reality (and the nature of this separation is mainly aesthetic), and second, to have an assumed temporariness that guarantees the safety of the player (2001, 135–136).
Vertigo, or ilinx, is what drives us to ride rollercoasters, run a marathon, tell ghost stories, or practise extreme sports, but also to experiment with more humble limits of our selves. And (the nuance must be stressed) the exposition to suffering provided by vertigo is not fully dependent on control and triumph.
The special hallmarks of ilinx give failure, suffering, and pain a value in itself: for Caillois, its feelings of panic attract and fascinate, are pleasurable: “it is not so much a question of triumphing over fear as of the voluptuous experience of fear” (2001, 169). Caillois writes about how the child likes to play with his own pain, “for example by probing a tootache with his tongue. He also likes to be frightened. He thus looks for a physical illness, limited and controlled, of which he is the cause, or sometimes he seeks an anxiety that he being the cause, can stop at will” (2001, 28). Ilinx is about submitting to pain and failure, even to the sensation (or the illusion) of abandoning control.
Only once we understand this can we go back to the way suffering and vertigo serve as foundations for power, control, trimph, and relief:
Ilinx gives ludus a context and a state to avoid: “the desire to overcome an obstacle can only emerge to combat vertigo”, and ludus is “training in self-control” (2001, 31).
Even in games where failure is not possible (or, to flip the idea, where there is no clear victory state), we are pushed by a form of dissatisfaction that is harmless but real — a real want and need to change our knowledge of the fiction and the system, to change the state of the game, to change our abilities, to change our experience of suffering itself.
Play is a form of controlled exposure to suffering where overcoming this suffering is not necessary for games to be meaningful experiences. Every play experience, then, must have a threshold of suffering, a type of intensity the player not only tolerates but requires.
All games are based on dissatisfaction. But also, from this dissatisfaction they build a myriad experiences and pleasures. Or, to say it with Janet Frame, “life is hell, but at least there are prizes”.
