The other day, I read Annie Mueller’s notes on the book Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse, and a couple of things stood out to me.
To start, here are some definitions from the book:
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
[…]
Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.
[…]
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
I think everyone has that kind of person in their life who takes games very seriously – as if they matter – whether it’s your friend who follows cricket or football, or someone who takes boardgame night far too seriously. And you just know that this person has a strange relationship with rules in life as well. Maybe you are that person.
At this point, I decided I was going to pick this book up, but it was the next few quotes that made me stop in my tracks.
At which point do we confront the fact that we live one life and perform another, or others, attempting to make our momentary forgetting true and lasting forgetting? What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act – a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have forgotten.
[…]
The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided, or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
[…]
…all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.
A couple of years ago, I had a phone call with a friend of mine who’d known me since late teenage. The last few years had been pretty brutal for me in several aspects – the pandemic, of course, but also my parents’ health, my own health deteriorating, a lot of practical life stuff, and some personal experiences that had left my self-esteem thoroughly dented, if not smashed outright. I hadn’t enjoyed life in a while – I’d been white-knuckling life, surviving it, and I’d had enough of living that way.
In the months before the phone call, I’d methodically dealt with each of these things – setting up failsafes for things that might go wrong with my family’s health, cutting down on work, getting myself out of the different emotional holes I’d found myself in, getting my own health issues seen to, and starting therapy. I wasn’t feeling great, but by god, I was ready to start feeling great.
It felt, I told my friend, like I’d been essaying these roles in life – the good son, the good worker, the good friend, the good partner – and I’d trapped myself in these roles, forgetting who I was and what brought me joy. I’d spent so much time trying to prove that I wasn’t a waste of space, so desperate to do the right thing, that I’d forgotten what it had all been for – to have a good life. And I wasn’t sure what that good life meant.
“I remember,” I told her, “being a rather playful person. I remembering being silly a lot of the time. Was that real, or am I misremembering things?”
She thought for a bit, and agreed – yeah, I’d been a very goofy person, and it had all changed after some traumatic experiences in my mid-20s. Bit by bit, I’d started taking life very seriously.
Trauma changes you, as does age. You become very aware of the complexities of life, and if you try hard to control them, they start grinding you down.
This specific idea had been on my mind because of another phone call I’d had a few days earlier, with another friend who’d known me for even longer. He was going through a bad time, and at some point, he said, “You and I, we’re serious people,” and my internal reaction was, Wait, what? I don’t remember being a serious person. When did that happen?
Regardless of why it had happened and how, though, I didn’t relish the idea anymore. So I decided, that I would be a silly person again. It’s pointless to take life too seriously. You’re going to die, you’re wasting time being serious. It’s far better to be playful. You cannot control external circumstances, but you can approach them with a level of play. You ought to be living the life you want to live, rather than working towards living it.
To a great degree, the pandemic stripped away a lot of my illusions about how “important” things were – my work, particularly, which I’d attached a whole lot of meaning to, but also the idea that I could control the outcomes of things by the level of seriousness with which I approached them. It’s all laughable in the face of an unfeeling cosmos.
Carse seems to approach this from a Christian mysticism point of view rather than the existential view I came with, but he articulates my thought process better than I had at the time.
Since finite games can be played within an infinite game, infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully.
[…]
We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out – when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.
[…]
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candour, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.
And the key insight, and the conclusion on which I agree entirely with him:
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.
I posted Part 3 of the Krakoa Reading Experience on the blog last week, and it was handily the most popular post in a good while.
I finally caved and decided that we need a flowchart, which has been designed and peer-reviewed and which will be appearing in the next post.
I had no new books out last week, which is an intended effect of cutting down on work – I always felt weird when I had multiple books out every week. People think “prolific” is a compliment, but over time, it just implies you don’t know how to select.
It was a light week when it comes to current work as well – a bunch of revisions, and I finished two books that I’d been working on since last month, but zero full issues of comics. I also submitted initial style options for something I’m starting next month that you haven’t heard of yet.
Books I finished reading last week –
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee: A very enjoyable collection of essays by McPhee about his process for different books he’s written, several anecdotes from publishing. I don’t think I learnt much new other than seeing an illustration of Cal Newport’s principle of “work at a natural pace”.
Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke: Rather than being a book specifically about attention and how social media affects it (which I thought it was going to be), it’s a book about dependencies that don’t immediately read as addictions, how they are often encouraged in society, and different ways we can tackle the underlying causes. I wouldn’t say it’s essential reading, but I didn’t regret reading it either.
New X-Men by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Igor Kordey, Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo et al (reread): As I’m working on my Krakoa posts, I’m checking out older X-Men runs, particularly ones that everyone says you should read. For once, it’s a run I’m familiar with.
I read some volumes of this a year or two after it came out (I think I found vols. 3 and 7 in a half-off sale), and eventually did read the whole thing and loved it at the time.
It was easy to get protective about this run – a lot of it was ignored or immediately overwritten, it was the designated “outré” run that went against a lot of X-Men history, the sullen queer child in the otherwise-normie room.
Plus, Hickman was supposed to be drawing on this when working on Krakoa, melding the innovations of this with the more “traditional” Claremont stuff.
Except that’s not how it comes off reading it now. Claremont, for all his flaws, is not a traditionalist, though he might look like one from 2011 or 2024. If anything, Morrison’s work is colder and more sexless than Claremont’s hot-blooded fetishism.
And while this run is in fact innovative, forward-looking and brash, it’s also incredibly erratic, confused about what it wants to say, and too concerned with big moments over good character work.
It’s also strange to watch this run kick off with a genocide of 15 million people taking place within an hour and then just not deal with it for three volumes – a whole year within the story itself.
Ignoring all the political and social implications of this, let’s look at this just as an in-story event.
You know how some ideas have so much gravity within a story that you can’t make the story about anything else after that?
For example, there was a shitty Bollywood romcom a few years ago, where at one point the heroine reveals that she’s invented a 100% friction-free material to make things that never stop, and then it goes back to being a romcom, and for the rest of the movie, I’m thinking, Fuck this, she invented a perpetual motion machine.
This is like that. Sure, the characters mention the genocide in between quips about each other’s hair, and a lot of what happens in the meantime is very interesting, and then after volume 3 they begin to explore some of the reactions of the world to the genocide, but for three volumes, I’m going, Fifteen million dead. What about that? A striking misjudgement of tone.
The art, though, holds up better than I remember. Quitely’s work is marvellous – he mostly leaves Morrison to worry about story and dialogue and focuses on design and small character expressions to hang on to, all of which is aided by Comicraft’s great graphic design work for the first few volumes which does a lot to make the book feel sexy. (I’m very sure that at least some of the design inspiration for Krakoa comes from here – the bits that aren’t directly part of Hickman’s or Muller’s toolkits, that is.)
Van Sciver’s art has a grainy, skeevy quality at the best of times, but while that shows up in the early issues, most of it is … pleasant enough.
John Paul Leon and Bachalo provide guest art – Leon’s first issue is excellent, a grounded story about people connecting, while Bachalo’s chaotic energy fits the issues that he’s drawing.
I think when I first read it, I thought realistic art was more impressive, so I found the Jimenez issues the best of the run and dismissed too many of the other artists, but I have a wider frame of reference now, and I see much more to appreciate here.
Speaking of which, I feel Igor Kordey was hard done by. The reputation is that most of his work on New X-Men is bad because he was doing two books at once and madly rushed the work on this. But in practice, you can see that in only two issues, which are clearly messier and have been drawn far quicker than the rest.
The best of his work on this has a dark, earthy quality – what EVS might be going for if we attribute him that much intentionality – his figures have weight, they move, they’re sensual and very present.
These qualities are absent in the rushed issues, but the storytelling prowess is still there – you can always see what was intended – and it has a strange, abstracted energy, a Connor Willumsen-esque attempt to arrive at figures from the impressions they leave.
This isn’t to say those issues are well-drawn, but they’re not as bad as we might remember.
All in all, it was strange revisiting this. I’m not sure I will again. One of those runs where I’m glad that it existed, but that I don’t need to re-experience.
Television –
Baby Reindeer: A powerful, emotionally raw series about stalking. It’s based on writer Richard Gadd’s life, making it functionally auto-fiction, but the internet cannot be normal about these things, and decided to unearth the identity of Gadd’s stalker and thrust her into the limelight, which is just … a horrifying thing to do.
The series itself is far more complex – Gadd’s character Donny endlessly rebuffs our sympathies, even as we see his history with emotional and sexual damage (particularly in Episode 4, which is my favourite of the series).
There are weaknesses – you can tell it’s the writer’s debut show, particularly from the voice-over which is often more didactic than it needs to be (this seems an artefact from the one-man stage show the series is based on), and the ending is a bit of a fizzle – but nothing that dings the overall strength of Gadd’s characters and the things they are willing to do to each other and have done to them.
X-Men ’97: I enjoyed this show less than the internet seems to, but more than I had expected to. It’s often paced in a rush to get to the good bits of X-Men history without going through the build-up, and the dialogue is aimed at kids to an uncomfortable degree, but it has good taste in what parts of X-Men history to pull from, and the action is surprisingly well-choreographed (even though you can tell that they were starting to run out of the animation revisions budget by the final episode).
I’ve slowly been ramping up my movie watching after a dry couple of months while I was tackling work.
Godzilla Minus One: Fun movie, but come on, this isn’t as good as Shin Godzilla, let alone better. I’m sure it’s easier to like, being focused on one character rather than the ensemble of the previous movie, but if you like this, you owe it to yourself to watch Shin Godzilla.
Shin Ultraman: K and I finally watched the second film in Anno/Higuchi’s Shin trilogy. This isn’t nearly as strong as Shin Godzilla, but it does use a lot of the same techniques to great effect. In particular, the grounded way in which a lot of the VFX are shot makes the goofy action feel almost uncanny/eerie – there’s an estrangement effect that’s put to great use. But while there’s a lot to enjoy, it’s far too long, and doesn’t hold together well.
Pacific Rim (rewatch): Every time I rewatch this film, I like it more. I’m in absolute awe of the design of this movie, and the way action sequences are shot – Del Toro and his team are peerless in choreographing VFX shots to feel realistic and elicit emotional reactions from you. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Del Toro pulled heavily from the action scenes in Man of Steel in the way he designed the mecha-kaiju fights.
However, this time I also appreciated how well-constructed and well-written this film is. The first few times, I dismissed the first section of the film as a holdover from a previous script that had to be run through before we got to the “good bits”. But this time, I realised that you can’t lose any of it. The infodump belongs there, and the first big fight lasts a lot longer than I remembered it, actually giving you a whole lot of information about the functioning of the jaeger programme and its relationship with the world while still feeling like a prologue – it makes the film feel a lot faster.
A near-perfect sci-fi action movie.
Total Recall: Rounding out my viewing of Verhoeven’s rough “sci-fi satires of America” trilogy. This is the weakest of the three – Robocop is a more enjoyable watch, and Starship Troopers’s commitment to the bit is peerless – but there’s a lot to enjoy here.
I’d say the first half – everything to do with identity and politics – is strong, while the action-movie plot feels like an afterthought, but the creature effects are incredible, as are the VFX in the blow-out climax.
I like how Verhoeven, in some ways similarly to Lynch, wants to present you with the sexless, eternal white-picket-fence ideal of America before tearing it up with kink, sensuality and cosmopolitan diversity. The veil of perfection ends up looking perverse in comparison.
That should do it for this week. Something much less heavy next week, hopefully.