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!)
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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!)