The Seattle Mariners lost Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. One game away from a summit the team (and the city of Seattle) have been trying to reach since 1977, long before I was born.
Back on one of my many jaunts into the realm of Baseball (the sport that seems designed to cause suffering) has me reflecting on the funny and oppositional relationship that play, joy, and pain seem to have with one another. Why should we do things that cause us so much angst?
Playfulness and Painfulness seem like the should be completely oppositional concepts. Play conjures images of childhood, being carefree, existing in a world without constraint or restriction. Painfulness the near opposite: it speaks to the challenges of the human condition.
And yet, on a night when the Mariners ended the most inspiring (and painful) run of baseball in nearly 30 years, it is these two thoughts that sit in my head. Play and pain are never far apart. When we play we invite pain.
It doesn’t matter which medium of game you pick. Video games like Elden Ring or roguelikes like Hades are about the mastery of learning a system and facing the challenge of defeat over and over again in order to overcome it. Even on the a run you might succeed on you will face challenge and possible failure. And board games, even cooperative ones like Pandemic, or party games like Monikers are about facing the possibility of a suboptimal outcome and succeeding at it (together or alone). Athletes push their bodies to the limits not for the goal of health but to push the boundaries of what a health body is capable of.
In that sense games are artifices that let us hold pain and playfulness simultaneously. And when we are playing truly at the heights of our capability, riding the limit, so you say, it is almost to invite pain and to laugh it away.
As a Mariners fan I can attest to this fact. We got to a Game 7 (the first in our history). I went to my first playoff game earlier this year! We spent 7 innings of a 9 inning game ahead, on the cusp of doing a thing the team had never accomplished. Each out dragging us closer to a victory as a team and a fan base we had long wanted.
Only for it to be reset all over again. Yet another year away, maybe.
It’s not a large pain, but it certainly is pain. But true sorrow is only getting enjoyment from the events that went the way we hoped they did. What fun would it be to play games if we only got every outcome we ever dreamed of?
What is play but to stare at the possibility of suffering and feel joy in the face of it? Maybe that’s why play feels so youthful. It’s not because it exists in a world without pain or endings, it’s because to play means to accept that world and to persevere, and above all else, to enjoy it.
It is the thread that ties all games together.
Great perspective on life, Stu.