Make a Game of Life

In North Loup, Nebraska, where I spent my boyhood summers with my grandfather, the television pulled one signal out of the sky, channel 10/11, and when the picture dissolved into snow the day still had eight hours left in it. A boy in a town like that learns the oldest technology on earth. Boredom is a raw material. A long afternoon wants shape, and shape comes from rules: the stick is a bat because we agree it is, the crack in the walk is a foul line because we say so, the score matters because we decide it matters. Nobody sold us that afternoon. We manufactured it ourselves, on the spot, out of dust and agreement, and the dust became the best part of the summer.

A half century later I stand in a government room in New Jersey holding a paper number, and the boy I was would not recognize the man doing the standing. The room has rules posted on every wall. A number board hangs over the service windows. It has turns, tokens, a clock, and a clear condition for winning, which is walking out with a small plastic card. Every element of a game is present except one, and the missing element is the player. I came in as a defendant. So did the rest of the folding chairs, all of us clutching our numbers like subpoenas, taking the wait personally, convinced the room had been built to insult each of us in particular.

That conviction is the mistake, and it costs more than any wait ever could. Taxes, work, the licensing counter, the insurance call, the school form, the security line: each arrives with published rules, defined turns, and a condition for winning. Each is, in its bones, a game. We suffer them as wars, and a war takes everything personally while a game takes everything procedurally. The war reading turns every posted rule into a personal insult, while the game reading files that rule away as intelligence about how to win. One room, one clerk, one number in your hand; the difference lives in the posture of the person holding it.

Children know this in their skin. Hand a pack of them an empty lot and they will legislate it inside four minutes, chalk lines, no-crossing zones, a jail by the fence, penalties argued with the heat of a supreme court, and the stricter the rules grow, the harder the playing gets. Hand a grown man a room that has already been legislated for him and he sulks. Somewhere between the lot and the licensing counter we stopped reading rules as the beginning of fun and started reading them as the end of freedom, and that shift, quiet and thorough, is where the modern misery lives. Rules kept their nature the whole way. Our posture migrated, and posture, unlike rules, sits entirely inside our own jurisdiction.

The scholars arrived here long before the self-help shelf did. Johan Huizinga, the Dutch historian, published Homo Ludens in 1938 and argued that play predates culture itself, that law and ritual and poetry grew up inside the roped-off spaces he catalogued, the arena, the card table, the temple, the stage, where ordinary life suspends and agreed rules take over. I have spent my working life inside the last of those. On a stage the script never changes and the curtain never waits, and actors find their whole freedom inside that binding; four decades in the Dramatists Guild taught me the paradox every playwright carries in the wrist, which is that constraint is where the art lives. The sonnet holds fourteen lines. A clock face holds sixty minutes. Form 1040 arrives with its schedules. Only one of those three makes your neck sweat, and what separates it from the other two is consent. Nobody asked whether you wanted to play.

Bernard Suits, the philosopher, wrote the cleanest definition on record in The Grasshopper in 1978: playing a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” Read that against the licensing counter and the flaw jumps out. The obstacles are present, and most qualify as unnecessary, and yet nothing about the morning feels voluntary, since the state compelled your attendance, and compulsion is the acid that curdles a game into a sentence. The repair fits in one move: volunteer an hour before anyone can compel you. Choose the chore on purpose, early, on your own schedule and by your own design, and the compulsion evaporates because you got there first. Mark Twain staged the discovery on a fence in 1876. Tom Sawyer, condemned to whitewash thirty yards of board on a Saturday, sold the sentence to the neighborhood as a privilege, and boys paid him an apple and a dead rat on a string for the honor of the brush. Twain spelled the moral out in the same chapter: obligation turns a thing into work, and choice turns it into play. The fence never changed. The boy holding the brush did.

The volunteer’s move comes with a second half, which is naming the win before you start. A game without a victory condition is a hallway, and most chores get handed to us as hallways. So declare the condition yourself, out loud if you have to, before the first form gets touched: today the win is the postmark, or the win is one clean folder, or the win is leaving the building knowing what to bring back. A declared win turns effort into score, and score is the difference between an afternoon that drains you and an afternoon you played.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent a research career asking why a chess match swallows a mind whole while an hour of form-filling embalms it, and the recipe he published in Flow in 1990 runs three ingredients long: a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge matched to the player’s skill. Games ship with all three installed; a chore arrives stripped, and the stripped condition is the boredom you feel. His most famous case worked an assembly line. Rico Medellin performed one operation on one unit about six hundred times a shift, forty-three seconds allotted per unit, a job engineered to grind a soul into paste, and Rico refused the grinding by turning his station into a stopwatch sport. He studied his own motions the way a sprinter studies film, tuned his tools, tightened his sequence, and pushed his average down toward twenty-eight seconds, and after five years he told the researchers his shift beat watching television. Rico had redesigned his relation to the job, installing a goal, a score, and a rising difficulty where the company had installed none, and he walked out of the factory every evening having played all day on his own terms.

Carry the frame into the most dreaded rulebook in American life. The federal tax code is a game manual, thousands of pages long, published in the open, free to read, and studied hardest by the players who keep winning. Judge Learned Hand settled the ethics of that game from the federal bench twice, in 1934 and again in 1947: a citizen owes no public duty to pay more than the law demands, may arrange affairs so the tax comes out as low as the rules allow, and carries, in Hand’s words, “nothing sinister” in doing so, since everybody does it, rich and poor alike, and all of them do right. Congress writes deductions the way a designer writes power-ups, to steer players toward moves the state prefers, toward the retirement account, the mortgage, the charitable gift, and a deduction left unclaimed is a power-up left glowing on the floor of a level you already cleared. Fear of the code is expensive every spring, and the cure for the fear sits free on a government website, which makes the tax manual a rare horror whose antidote ships in the same box.

The sharper players read further. A refund check in April feels like a jackpot and works like a confession, since the money was yours all along and you loaned it to the Treasury for a year at zero interest; the studied player tunes the withholding until April arrives owing a little or receiving a little, and keeps the float working all year. Even the calendar bends for a reader. Printed in the rules sits a legal timeout, the automatic six-month extension to file, available to anyone who asks, though the payment clock keeps running underneath it, a distinction the manual states plainly and the panicked never reach. Cheating sits outside all of this. Evasion means flipping the table, and a flipped table lands back on the flipper with interest, penalties, and, at the far end, a prosecutor, which is why the crafty player treats the printed lines as load-bearing walls.

Now walk the frame back into the room where I started. Watch two players take on one licensing-counter morning. Call the first one Harmon Teague. Harmon arrives at eleven, peak of the surge, no appointment, holding the wrong utility bill and a passport that expired during the second Obama administration. He treats the posted checklist as bureaucratic hazing, the clerk as the author of his suffering, and the wait as a referendum on his worth. By the time his number blinks he has rehearsed a speech, and he delivers it, and the clerk, who wrote none of the six-point identification rules and can suspend none of them, sends him home with nothing except a story about the system, a story he will tell for years, always as the hero, never as the man who showed up to a chess match without the pieces.

Call the second one Odessa Vail. Odessa opened the agency website three weeks ago the way a coach opens a scouting report, booked the quiet slot, a Tuesday at 9:40 in the morning, mid-month, printed the checklist, and crossed off the six points of identification one by one at her kitchen table before packing the folder in the order the window would request them. She arrives early and greets the clerk by the name on the badge, lays her documents down like a dealer laying a clean hand, and when one paper fails anyway, a bank statement aged out by a week, she writes down the full name of the acceptable substitute, thanks the window, and books the return slot from the parking lot before the disappointment can land. Odessa lost the round on points. She banked the map, and the map wins the rematch. The clerk will remember her the way a referee remembers the player who declined to argue a call, and referees, whatever the league pretends, hold discretion at the margins.

Courtesy in these rooms gets mistaken for weakness, and the mistake is expensive. The clerk stands bound by the rulebook more tightly than you do, faces it eight hours a day under supervisors and audits, and has watched a thousand Harmons deliver the speech. Become the easiest three minutes of her shift and you have made an ally inside the machine, and allies inside machines know where the levers sit. This costs nothing. It requires no charm, no bribe, and no surrender of your spine, only the recognition that the person behind the glass is another player in a uniform, dealt worse cards than yours, playing out a shift while you play out a morning.

Work runs the deepest version of the game, because the rulebook there comes doubled: the official rules printed in the handbook, and the live rules that decide who rises. Every workplace keeps two scoreboards, one on the wall and one in the room, and the employees who burn out are usually grinding points onto the board nobody reads. Finding the live scoreboard is the opening move of the working game: watch what gets rewarded, set it beside what merely gets requested, and spend your craft on the gap between them. The meeting is a turn-based contest with a shot clock, so speak once, early, land one point, and hold. The inbox is a queue with physics, so touch a message once, route it, and the pile obeys. Even the calendar of work is a season: the review cycle has a schedule, the budget has a window, the promotion list closes on a date, and the player who learns the fixture list stops being surprised by games everyone else forgot were scheduled. And the dull stretch, the spreadsheet hour, the filing, the freight of every honest job, surrenders to the Medellin treatment: a timer, a personal best, a private league of one. Call it survival technology, the boy’s technology from the town with one channel, scaled up and wearing a lanyard.

The telephone maze deserves its own page in the manual, since the insurance company, the cable provider, and the airline all run the same labyrinth. That maze has rules, and the rules favor the prepared: the account number ready before dialing, the policy language read in advance so the representative hears a player quoting the manual, the polite request for a supervisor delivered as routine procedure, and the notes field, which follows your account from call to call, slowly filling with the record of your calm. Companies staff a retention department whose whole job is keeping the customer who asks to leave, and the caller who knows that department exists has already found the warp zone hidden in the hold music. None of it requires raising a voice.

Playing against the lines means the lines stay up and the temper stays holstered. The moment you rage, you forfeit, since every referee in every room has been trained to stop the clock on whoever swings, and the record will show the swing and none of the provocation. Anger is a technical foul you call on yourself, and force is an ejection with a court date attached. Craft outperforms fury on every board human beings have ever ruled off, from the sandlot to the tax court, and craft is the only one of the two that leaves you standing in a room where winning stays possible.

One objection deserves its floor, because it lands hard and lands often: calling life a game can sound like a luxury sold by the comfortable, since some players start with fewer chips, some tables tilt, and some rulebooks were written to keep whole populations away from the seats. Every word of that objection is true. The frame concedes all of it and still holds, because a lens gets judged by what it lets the player do next, and this lens works hardest for the player holding the least margin. A rulebook you can read beats a mystery you must guess, and the reading costs nothing: the tax instructions, the agency checklists, the employee handbook, the appeal form, all of it published, all of it studied hardest by the people the tables already favor. Learning the rules is how the unfavored close the gap. And the rules themselves sit inside a larger game with its own published moves, the appeal, the hearing, the public comment, the council vote, the ballot, and changing a bad rule through those channels is the most advanced play the game contains. My childhood neighbors in Ord, Nebraska, eleven miles up the road from my grandfather’s North Loup, ran that play earlier this month, when a town of two thousand read the fine print on surveillance cameras nobody local had requested and voted them off the poles, five to nothing. Rage would have earned a lecture. The rulebook earned results.

One book remains on the shelf, and it holds the gentlest move of all. James P. Carse, a professor of religion at New York University, sorted every game humanity plays into two kinds in 1986. Finite games run toward a winner and an ending, the way an audit ends, a title clears, a season closes. Infinite games run toward the continuing of play itself, the way a marriage continues, a life continues. His sorting matters most on the bad days. Some mornings hold no winnable finite game at all: the document will fail, the meeting will wound, the number will get called after the window closes. On those mornings the infinite game stays in session, its sole rule is to keep playing, and by that rule a day survived is a day won. The extension filed on time is a win. Walking out of the agency holding the full list of what to bring back is a win. Sitting through a brutal shift without absorbing the insult into your own opinion of yourself is a win, and on certain days it is the whole tournament. The rules fix the board, the pieces, and the clock, and they always did, and they always will, and inside all that fixing one sovereign move stays permanently yours, which is deciding what counts as winning today.

The screen in North Loup went to snow by ten, and the dark that followed carried no menace, because the games kept going without it, on the porch, under the yard light, by rules we carried in our pockets and amended by shouting. My grandfather sat in the doorway on those nights and let the town grow quiet around us. I think of him in the folding chairs of New Jersey now, whenever the number board blinks and the whole room sighs, and when my number comes I stand, folder under my arm, papers in their order, and cross that government floor the way a boy crosses a summer yard when his side is finally up. The window opens. The game is on. Deal me in.