No, you didn't. I don't remember who it was, but someone Important declared it over and done with, a couple of months ago. :)
Which is good. It's one of the few things I consider actively Evil, albeit in a tiny minor insignificant way. (I'm not sure why, but it resonates that way for me.)
(Er, it occurs to me that I'm not sure my tone came across like I meant it to, and while I think I'm reading the tone of your reply correctly to imply that the rest of this parenthetical is unnecessary, I am not entirely certain and thus shall include it anyway: I wasn't seriously annoyed at your post more than a homeopathic amount, and was mostly just amused at it. Even if I do have some issues with The Game itself.)
Actually, I'm glad you included the parenthetical. Me, I've always been vaguely irritated by The Game, although I'm not sure I would have gone so far as to call it evil, yet suddenly, this time, I thought of The Game out of the blue. That seemed to me to be a perfectly genuine example of "losing the game", whether or not I seriously considered myself to have been playing, and that made a significant difference in how I felt about it. This time, I was nothing more nor less than amused. I find my reaction very odd.
A lot of my vague irritation at it sort of coalesced when I realized that it felt like it was actually an evil thing, albeit such a microscopically tiny bit of evil as to not even signify as actually important.
But maybe that's just me blaming it for the fact that it happens to usually push my mental buttons in ways that I don't like. :)
Something about the first step -- "You are playing The Game", except um, excuse me, I didn't consent -- is what gets to me. There are enough real situations in life where I don't get to agree to the game being played and where the rules are set up to hose me; we don't need to invent more!
Yes. That, and the fact that it is set up so that one cannot even talk about it without deeply annoying people who take it seriously, and one can't even think about it without talking about it unless one consciously chooses to reject it.
And that's an obnoxious thing; to me, every time I think about it, there's this thought pattern I go through of having to choose to reject the rules and not "play". (And it's structured so that, according to the rules, I am still playing no matter what I do, but I can cheat.) I can't really opt out of thinking about that, any more than I can opt out of remembering having seen certain online pictures. I don't like that.
I think I also had the misfortune to learn about it from people who took it at least somewhat seriously, insofar as being genuinely annoyed at "losing". And angry at someone who put up a sign saying, "You've just lost the Game" somewhere. (Or possibly I rolled a critical failure on my "detect ironic humor" roll when I was around them; I didn't have the best nonverbal-communication stats back then!)
In my conception, evil is kind of like, say, chlorine -- it's an ingredient in things, and typically mixed with lots of other stuff, though occasionally (very rarely) one gets a big cloud of it that's noxious and deadly. But it's a thing which one can say exists regardless of quantity or proportion. (Usually, when it exists, it exists in quantities or proportions that are not very relevant, though.)
To me, the Game is kind of like a few dozen atoms of chlorine mixed with a two or three atoms of a joke that was trying to be funny and missed. There's a modicum of it there, almost certainly quite a lot less than in lots of other things I've interacted with just today that I don't think of as being at all evil, but what makes it remarkable is that there's virtually nothing else there. It's a very simple little thing, without much inherent self-contradiction.
(I'm not sure that I really think about the world using this perspective much when I'm not thinking about the Game, though. I wouldn't want to defend it as a generally valuable perspective, and it's not very useful for understanding how I interact with the world nearly all of the time. But it's how I see this.)
(There's also the point that I recognize the fact that for some people it's a funny joke that doesn't have the baggage that causes it to push my buttons like that. So the evilness of it is pretty relative, rather than being absolute. The world's weird that way.)
I must be one of those people...I honestly cannot tell why you (or anyone) would call it evil. It's not that I have a problem with the concept of evil as chlorine, except that I immediately start musing about salt. :) But...what's evil about it?
Postulate the Egyptian-based belief that putting things into words calls them into existence. (This is, in a practical sense, trivially true insofar as writing a story creates something; a fair bit of things like persuasive writing can also be usefully viewed through this paradigm as being magical acts of creation. It is also useful for looking at how labels can be damaging or empowering.) It's a perspective that I find useful sometimes, and makes explaining this one easier.
So. The Game is an entity built of pure concept. If I explain it to you, that creates it in all of its full existence. It does not need a hook to reality, or even someone who accepts it as such, in order to exist.
And what it is, in part, is a paradigm.
It actively works to annihilate the player's free will within that paradigm. It is explicitly part of the Game that you cannot escape; the first axiom is that you are playing, regardless of whether you choose to or not. You cannot escape.
Furthermore, as a concept it propagates itself. If you so much as think about it, you're supposed to tell other people about it. It seems to be psychologically appealing enough to enough people that they will in fact tell others, and so it recreates itself in new people's minds.
That's pretty much the nutshell of it. It exists, as an entity unto itself (an algorithm that propagates), and it acts in a very small way to nonconsentually remove people's free will. By removing their free will, it thereby uncreates a very tiny part of them -- and, even though that removal of free will happens only within the paradigm of the game, rejecting that paradigm doesn't allow one to unthink it or make it actually go away.
And, insofar as I believe in evil as a useful concept, willfully uncreating a sentient being is one of the better definitions of it that I have.
A completely different answer is that it was once a reason why people mocked me and considered me a "loser". And that it was a thought-pattern that led to some people around me being obnoxious.
It is probably arguable which of these answers is a more relevant and accurate answer. :)
Actually, on reflection, the more useful truth of the matter is probably a synthesis of the above two comments. It was a thought pattern that led to people I considered my friends telling me that I had no choice but to play, no matter what I wanted or decided to do. And which presented this in a paradigm in which I didn't have an effective way to argue with them.
And it's a thought pattern which reminds me of that feeling, and brings it up again in that choice of "do I have to reject this stupid paradigm and its insistence that I'm cheating, again?" every time I'm remember it. And I have a visceral annoyance at that feeling, and that reminder of having my friends do that to me.
(I should note that cjsmith's post didn't feel like she was doing the same thing, because her amusement at it carried through and more importantly she wasn't actually telling me personally that I was playing, unlike my abovementioned friends where it was personally directed. And the bit of unpleasantness to the reminder is something I attribute to the thing itself, not to a person who mentions it.)
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Which is good. It's one of the few things I consider actively Evil, albeit in a tiny minor insignificant way. (I'm not sure why, but it resonates that way for me.)
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(Er, it occurs to me that I'm not sure my tone came across like I meant it to, and while I think I'm reading the tone of your reply correctly to imply that the rest of this parenthetical is unnecessary, I am not entirely certain and thus shall include it anyway: I wasn't seriously annoyed at your post more than a homeopathic amount, and was mostly just amused at it. Even if I do have some issues with The Game itself.)
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A lot of my vague irritation at it sort of coalesced when I realized that it felt like it was actually an evil thing, albeit such a microscopically tiny bit of evil as to not even signify as actually important.
But maybe that's just me blaming it for the fact that it happens to usually push my mental buttons in ways that I don't like. :)
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And that's an obnoxious thing; to me, every time I think about it, there's this thought pattern I go through of having to choose to reject the rules and not "play". (And it's structured so that, according to the rules, I am still playing no matter what I do, but I can cheat.) I can't really opt out of thinking about that, any more than I can opt out of remembering having seen certain online pictures. I don't like that.
I think I also had the misfortune to learn about it from people who took it at least somewhat seriously, insofar as being genuinely annoyed at "losing". And angry at someone who put up a sign saying, "You've just lost the Game" somewhere. (Or possibly I rolled a critical failure on my "detect ironic humor" roll when I was around them; I didn't have the best nonverbal-communication stats back then!)
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In my conception, evil is kind of like, say, chlorine -- it's an ingredient in things, and typically mixed with lots of other stuff, though occasionally (very rarely) one gets a big cloud of it that's noxious and deadly. But it's a thing which one can say exists regardless of quantity or proportion. (Usually, when it exists, it exists in quantities or proportions that are not very relevant, though.)
To me, the Game is kind of like a few dozen atoms of chlorine mixed with a two or three atoms of a joke that was trying to be funny and missed. There's a modicum of it there, almost certainly quite a lot less than in lots of other things I've interacted with just today that I don't think of as being at all evil, but what makes it remarkable is that there's virtually nothing else there. It's a very simple little thing, without much inherent self-contradiction.
(I'm not sure that I really think about the world using this perspective much when I'm not thinking about the Game, though. I wouldn't want to defend it as a generally valuable perspective, and it's not very useful for understanding how I interact with the world nearly all of the time. But it's how I see this.)
(There's also the point that I recognize the fact that for some people it's a funny joke that doesn't have the baggage that causes it to push my buttons like that. So the evilness of it is pretty relative, rather than being absolute. The world's weird that way.)
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So. The Game is an entity built of pure concept. If I explain it to you, that creates it in all of its full existence. It does not need a hook to reality, or even someone who accepts it as such, in order to exist.
And what it is, in part, is a paradigm.
It actively works to annihilate the player's free will within that paradigm. It is explicitly part of the Game that you cannot escape; the first axiom is that you are playing, regardless of whether you choose to or not. You cannot escape.
Furthermore, as a concept it propagates itself. If you so much as think about it, you're supposed to tell other people about it. It seems to be psychologically appealing enough to enough people that they will in fact tell others, and so it recreates itself in new people's minds.
That's pretty much the nutshell of it. It exists, as an entity unto itself (an algorithm that propagates), and it acts in a very small way to nonconsentually remove people's free will. By removing their free will, it thereby uncreates a very tiny part of them -- and, even though that removal of free will happens only within the paradigm of the game, rejecting that paradigm doesn't allow one to unthink it or make it actually go away.
And, insofar as I believe in evil as a useful concept, willfully uncreating a sentient being is one of the better definitions of it that I have.
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It is probably arguable which of these answers is a more relevant and accurate answer. :)
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And it's a thought pattern which reminds me of that feeling, and brings it up again in that choice of "do I have to reject this stupid paradigm and its insistence that I'm cheating, again?" every time I'm remember it. And I have a visceral annoyance at that feeling, and that reminder of having my friends do that to me.
(I should note that
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well.
OK, then.
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