Games People Play

sus

sus

Moderator
linebaugh said:
Is there a difference between a game and a performance? When I'm with very old close friends there's game like mechanics in the mix- roles we adopt, a kind of call and response type protocol- but none of the anxiety and insecurity that I'd associate with 'social games.' Feels instead like were all members of a band performing the hits. Is their a distinction? is it even worth making?
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I think games can be cooperative! James Carse a theology guy writes about infinite games, where the goal is basically to keep the ball in the air. (You don't win by ending the game & cashing out, but by continuing it.) Good conversation as a game e.g.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
version said:
Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too forward. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. (Being and Nothingness: An Essay On Phenomenological Ontology, Routledge, 2000, p59).

The power of Sartre’s example depends upon the tension between the would-be automatism of the waiter’s behaviour and the awareness that, behind the mechanical rituals of the waiter’s over-performance of his role is a consciousness that remains distinct from that role.
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@snav isn't this split Bleuler's conception of schizophrenia?
 
sus

sus

Moderator

> Whoa, the games people play now
> Every night and every day now
> Never meanin' what they say now
> Never sayin' what they mean
> While they wile away the hours
> In their ivory towers
> 'Til they're covered up with flowers
> In the back of a black limousine
 
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snav

snav

Well-known member
suspended said:
@snav isn't this split Bleuler's conception of schizophrenia?
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Probably closer to RD Laing, for whom schizophrenia is really about the split in the subject. This was kind of known in Bleuler's time (1910s) but didn't really flourish theoretically until the 50s.

suspended said:
@snav Has an interesting Watts quote I hope he shares, on this subject
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Watts is working off Laing in attached, especially because it was Laing who pioneered the idea of the "knot" in the schizophrenic but also normal psyche.
 

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Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Gurdjieffians may consider this in terms of having your attention seized and swept up into a sort of phenomenal rapids.
 
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