1
A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.
2
No gamer tolerates reality.
3
Any game, like any medium of information, is an extension of the individual or the group. In games we recover the integral person, who in the workaday world or in professional life can use only a small sector of his being.
4
Immersion is complete when the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world. It is only when we immerse ourselves in an illusion that we find who we truly are. Contrary to what we may believe, we must embrace what is beyond ourselves in order to become ourselves.
5
Processes of value creation have advanced so far that almost everything known as a ‘virtual’ commodity is now certifiably real. Indeed, the very idea of “reality” relies upon the simulation of itself in order to retain its meaning. (Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real. Though Not-real was once Real, the Real is never unreal.)
6
7
The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.
8
Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. To take mere worldly things in dead earnest betokens a deficit of awareness that is pitiable. The difference between enlightenment and earthly desire is of about the same order of difference between the good and the bad in a romance.
9
Do gamers believe that the protagonists of their games do good?
10
She quite lost herself in games and would spend whole days with them. She could not be sure whether they were true or not.
11
All my story narrates, the meetings and partings, the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs of fortune, are recorded exactly as they happened. (All the best stories are true.)
12
Life is never false; reflect that life itself’s a dream.
13
Like our vernacular tongues, all games are media of interpersonal communication, and they could have neither existence nor meaning except as extensions of our immediate inner lives. For games to be welcome, they must convey an echo of reality.
14
Sometimes I stand and watch the games they play with my daughter, and I think to myself that there certainly are good fabricators in the world. I think that these yarns must come from people much practiced in lying. but perhaps that is not the whole of the story?
15
To dismiss them as lies itself is to depart from the truth. Something can be true and untrue at the same time.
16
False words do exist!
17
What is a fact? What’s a lie, for that matter? What, exactly, constitutes an essay or a story or a poem or even an experience? What happens when we can no longer freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience?
18
If, finally, we ask ‘Are games mass media?’ the answer has to be ‘Yes.’ Games are situations construed to permit simultanoues participation of many people in some significant pattern of their own corporate lives.
19
I can see that that would be the view of someone much given to lying himself. For my part, I am convinced of their truthfulness. (Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true.)
20
So it really was all utter nonsense! Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark! Just so much ink splashed for fun, a game, a diversion!
21
Only the truth is funny.
