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Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Games have become a central metaphor in representations of society, and most people are familiar enough with Lewis Carroll's Alice to know that when she passes through the looking glass she finds herself embroiled in a game a Chess which is also much more (Carroll 1992 [1897]). This strange game of Chess is simultaneously a simulation and an enactment of social life in Wonderland, and Carroll plots out Alice 's narrative path as a series of tactical Chess moves, which can be understood as both an attempt to win the game and to navigate through Wonderland and her social obligations therein. It takes very little imagination or inquiry on the part of the reader to realize that Carroll was also writing about the game of contemporary British life, with all its attendant insanities and inanities, and the way in which tactics had become a central concern of daily social interaction, as if life could be construed as a series of "if...then" statements and be rendered as logical as a game of Chess. The attempt to metaphorically render life as a game [1], and reflexively to render a game as life, is a vital aspect of the sociality of games, of what they allow players to do with them, but this is to issue separate realities -- that of the game and that of life -- which are too intimate to be divorced from one another. Games are much more than games; they are ways of seeing, of socializing, of subjectivizing: They are life itself. Moving beyond Alice's adventures, games have appeared in a number of other literary, cinematic and musical representations of contemporary life, from Michael Douglas in The Game (1997), to Ice-T in Surviving the Game (1994), to Iain Banks' The Player of Games (1992), to Steve Martin in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), to The Who's Tommy (1969) [2]. Interestingly, these representations make Lyotard's statement all the more apparent: The games represented in film and song are all games of life and death, of terror at the fringes of the social. In games, players can restart endlessly (or at least until their attention runs dry), but in life -- and this is the critical difference -- there is no restart button, there is no reshuffling of the deck or clearing of the board (despite what self-help programs might profess to offer their adherents): Games are vital in that they provide players with a sort of immortality, a way to endlessly begin again, a way to find within life a reprieve, a restarting. Is it any wonder then that they are such powerful and persistent metaphors? This introduction is meant to address the use of games as metaphors and the ways in which life has become understood as a kind of game, as well as how life and games -- and games of life -- are intrinsically irreducible. In so doing, we also address the material collected herein, providing ways into the articles, and also a (by no means definitive) way of understanding these articles. Allow us our diversions, knowing that we will reach an amenable end; and, by way of conclusion, we will offer yet further reading strategies, of ways the articles in this issue may be reorganized to produce alternate effects. This issue, like all writing, is a game itself: The reader is encouraged to reorder the articles, to read them differently, to tactically engage not in the strategy presupposed by the editors (as we surely have designs of our own), but in a libratory strategy of their own. Life is ordered enough already.

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