For Realing

Let's not call it "playing" for a while. Let's call it "realing" instead.

Really. Games aren't just pretend. They are also quite real events, shared realities. In fact, they are realities that we have created together, alternate realities, absolutely as real as we can make them be.

My best playmates have been those who made the game more real for me.

All right, now let's call them games again, knowing that what we really mean are "reallies."

As long as we are using games to mean "reallies" we could actually think of every reality as yet another game.

This is very handy.

As intimate as we may be with our personal realities, we do tend to get lost in them. But, if we think of our many reallies as games, well, we can at least assume it's all right to try to have a little more fun.

We can make even more useful assumptions about the real existence of things like rules and roles, losing and winning, cheating and quitting.

We can also ask some very liberating questions. Such as, if "life" for example, is (or might as well be) a game, why, actually, isn't it more fun? After all, what's a game for?

So, all right, every "really" is a game, and vice versa, and when I say one I mean the other.

Which means that every Really we can name should and can be more fun.

This is Major Fun's Corollary

Let's test this idea out on some "reallies" that are really Big, but at least a little smaller than Life:

Death, for example, is one of your Bigger Reallies.

Everybody knows that death is really a Really.

According to Major Fun's Corollary, therefore, even death should and can be more fun.

We are fortunate in having many authorities on the play value of death: the sky-diving, hang-gliding, bunjee-jumping, rock-climbing death-defying people who actually risk their lives to play with death (but are still winning).

For these people it's so much fun to 1) think you might really die and 2) not die, that they spend enormous efforts and fortunes to experience item 1, only to eventually be proven wrong about 2.

Life, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have produced very many people who can attest to its ultimate play value. It might be because it's just too big of a Really to describe. But, enjoy life? Have fun? What else is there?

And yet, despite our wanting to have fun in life, for many, for most of our lives, well, the fact is, there's a lot about life we just don't like.

Which makes us very unwilling, as mature adults, to play life, or to pay much attention to those who try to tell us that we can make the Big Really more fun.

And so, our most popular games, and, oddly, our most popular religions all seem to defy (deny) 1) death, and 2) fun.

And if that's not silly, what is?

Really.