How do you play the Game of Life?
What Rules have you adopted?
What Rewards do you expect?
In the last post in this series I explored ideas about how the rules adopted for a game define the way it’s played and the rewards it can offer.
This post is about how we play the Game of Life.
In preparation for writing this series of posts I resurrected a game I’d played about a year ago; a simulation game that lets you learn the basics of how to build a civilization. I highly recommend this game, as a fun pastime and as a tool to sharpen your awareness of what actually goes into the long and arduous process of civilization-building. Check it out: Civilization IV.
As far as the effect the rules of a game have on how it’s played, I’ll offer this experience:
A year ago, I played Civilization IV for a number of months. Since it models the actual circumstances of many cultures and nations, over most of recorded history, as they attempt to establish their conception of “civilization”, it’s real heavy on the implementation of war and all of its necessities.
I “gamely” persisted in being a peaceful participant in these attempts at building “civilization”. I became, in spite of the game’s superb design and its fidelity to historical circumstance, extremely frustrated. All my attempts to introduce peaceful principles were engulfed by the war-centered Rules of the game…
When I resurrected the game, to research the principles underlying these posts on the Game of Life, I fortuitously discovered an option called “Always Peace”.
Eureka!!!
Now, I could play the game and avoid the grit and grime and death and destruction of war.
Some of the people on the forum that supports the game were puzzled by my desire to play with all the options of war eliminated. Someone even declared that it must be real boring.
Nope, not boring at all. In fact, with war eliminated, I could actually concentrate on what builds a real Civilization. I could pay attention to the people in my cities—their wants and needs—, I could make profitable decisions about how much industry we needed, how much culture we needed, how to balance material and spiritual aspirations (Yes! This game includes spirituality and it has profound effects on the material success of civilization-building.)
And, to broaden the whole concept of playing the Game of Life, please realize that people don’t have to actively embrace war to have inclinations of behavior that can and have led to war: selfishness, prejudice, intolerance, religious extremism, egregious nationalism, racism, and materialism, to name just a few.
So, let’s entertain those opening questions again:
How do you play the Game of Life?
What Rules have you adopted?
What Rewards do you expect?
Spiritual Quotes:
“Their own instincts, no less than the fury of conservative forces, the opposition of vested interests, and the objections of a corrupt and pleasure-seeking generation, must be reckoned with, resolutely resisted, and completely overcome. As their defensive measures for the impending struggle are organized and extended, storms of abuse and ridicule, and campaigns of condemnation and misrepresentation, may be unloosed against them. Their Faith, they may soon find, has been assaulted, their motives misconstrued, their aims defamed, their aspirations derided, their institutions scorned, their influence belittled, their authority undermined, and their Cause, at times, deserted by a few who will either be incapable of appreciating the nature of their ideals, or unwilling to bear the brunt of the mounting criticisms which such a contest is sure to involve.”
Messages to America: Selected Letters and Cablegrams Addressed to the Bahá’ís of North America, 1932-1946, The Compilation of Compilations vol. I, p. 144
“The fate-laden world ordeal is moving in steady, pre-ordained crescendo. The blaze of a seemingly uncontrollable fire is leaping, ravaging the last remaining great Power on the European continent. Shadows of God’s retributive act are fast gathering. As the arena of world convulsing contest broadens; as wounds it inflicts deepen; as issues it raises aggravate and multiply, so will the operation of the spiritual forces, destined to cast the burden of a travailing age, be accelerated.”
Shoghí Effendí Rabbání, Messages to America, p. 48
Major Statement of how People’s Rights have been Subjugated with the prevailing Rules of the Game:
“By far the greatest tragedy resulting from this latest contest for world domination was the blight that it cast over the hopes with which formerly subject peoples had welcomed the opportunity they believed they had been given to build a new life of their own devising. The obstinate determination of some of the surviving colonial powers to suppress such hopes, though doomed to failure in the eyes of any objective observer, had left the urge for liberation in many countries with no recourse but to assume the character of revolutionary struggle. By 1960, such movements, which had already been a feature of the political landscape during the earlier decades of the century, were coming to represent the principal form of indigenous political activity in most subject nations.
“Since the driving force of colonialism itself was economic exploitation, it was perhaps inevitable that most movements of liberation assumed a broadly socialistic ideological cast. Within only a few short years, these circumstances had created a fertile ground for exploitation by the world’s superpowers. For the Soviet Union, the situation seemed to offer an opportunity to induce a shift in the existing alignment of nations by gaining a preponderating influence in what was by now beginning to be called the ‘Third World’. The response of the West—wherever development aid failed to retain the loyalties of recipient populations—was to resort to the encouragement and arming of a wide variety of authoritarian regimes.
“As outside forces manipulated new governments, attention was increasingly diverted from an objective consideration of developmental needs to ideological and political struggles that bore little or no relation to social or economic reality. The results were uniformly devastating. Economic bankruptcy, gross violations of human rights, the breakdown of civil administration and the rise of opportunistic elites who saw in the suffering of their countries only openings for self-enrichment—such was the heartbreaking fate that engulfed one after another of the new nations who, only short years before, had begun life with such great promise.”
Commissioned by The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, p. 88
The next post looks at the Rewards of the Game of Life.
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