Game – Page 2 – Julian Wise

In which Our Hero finally speaks his native tongue

I did it! I clowned! Wahoo!!! !!!! !!!!

Here’s the sitch:

Our head teacher asks for five people who don’t speak Chinese. I step forward. She plays a Chinese song and we’re told to mime along. Then she turns down the music and says: keep going. Continue the song, in this language we do not speak.

I have been preparing for this my whole life.

I’ve always loved imitating sounds. Not faces, not gestures, sounds. The cadence of languages, sirens, shower water hitting my rubber duck. It’s always been a private delight.

Today I let it out. I imitated the music of a language I don’t know, and loved it. The audience loved it too.

It gets better.

On Friday I asked our teacher how to tell when something works. She said: you have to look at the audience and see.

I already knew that, but I needed to hear it from her.

So today I looked. I saw the joy light up their faces. One woman — the same who’d argued with me on Thursday — beamed with glee. My roommate was glowing, proud to see me not only succeed but to know I was succeeding.

And so I kept playing. Kept singing. Kept sharing that joy.

Good news: I have a skill people love.

Bad news: in America, this skill is considered offensive.

Five years ago at a rodeo in Wyoming, I was doing a southern accent for fun. My travel partner told me it was unacceptable. She thought I was mocking. Maybe she was right; maybe she wasn’t. Either way, I stopped.

Now, at last, I’ve found a place where the same instinct — my delight in sound and voices — brings laughter and connection instead of tension and fear.

Sometimes I wander around the house doing silly voices. Usually, people shut this down. But in clown, it’s beautiful.

Or maybe it’s always been beautiful, I just need the right place to perform.

🤡

[My travel buddy of the last two years would like to add this note about me: “I’ve also noticed when traveling that you [Julian] pick up the accent and speech pattern of folks you chat with. I often worry that folks will find it offensive, but, tbh, I think they don’t usually notice and seem to like it.”]

That which we call Our Hero, by any other game, would play as sweet.

What is a game?

A game isn’t one thing, but a cluster of traits that, in sufficient combination, make us recognize something as a game. None of these are necessary, but enough of them is sufficient to make something a game. Some of those traits are:

Competition and/or cooperation
Ability to win and/or lose
Use of toys, equipment, and/or pieces
Play
Fun and/or pleasure
Turns
Rules
A self-contained world, protected from life’s other elements
Practicing skills useful elsewhere

The trouble of defining game is the trouble of defining any abstract concept: when we say “X is a game,” we mean it has enough of the qualities we associate with games for our brains to light up in recognition. Hence our endless debates, like whether a hot dog is a sandwich.

Games vary across cultures because the pleasures of play vary too. At clown school, we seek a joy that’s light and friendly; in sport, the joy can be vicious, even cruel. Have you ever watched a professional tennis final? They’re clearly playing a game — but not playing games.

Defining abstractions always circles back to the Supreme Court’s test for pornography: we know it when we see it. Still, shared language demands some definitioning (now a word). And that task grows harder as meanings and technologies evolve: even “simultaneous” doesn’t mean what it once did.

I like games. Always have. And by that I mean: I like whatever fires my neurons to say that’s a game. I like them better than mere activities; give me competition or a timer, and I’m in.

So:

Games are hard to define.
Games share recognizable traits.
I like games.

I recently stumbled upon a definition for game by the philosopher Bernard Suits: “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” Elegant, but too narrow. It fits golf or chess, not politics or dating, where the obstacles aren’t unnecessary, just chosen. I don’t think “dating is a game” is metaphorical; I think it’s a real diagnostic description of how people behave in the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that definitional meanings work by family resemblance rather than rigid borders. I’ve always respected the man; nice company to stumble into.

Maybe that’s why I love games: they’re how we practice living within constraints — voluntary or not — and still find joy.

Life, after all, is the longest game we play.

Game on.

Tag: Game

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