Multicoloured dice, spelling out the word 'game' on a blue tabletop. Photo: By Andrey Metelev on Unsplash.
Thought for the Week: Chris Lord wonders what we’re playing at
‘I think we’re playing a kind of Pictionary.’
When our yoga teacher tells us to put our left feet over here, I’m suddenly back to being a kid, playing Twister. And I’ve started to see some other connections between various games I have played and other things I do.
At my job, I know that the emails I send will generate more for me to deal with in return; I sometimes add more to those to-do lists than I can remove. It’s a kind of Whack-a-Mole, but, when the stuff is coming in too quickly, it’s Tetris at a very high level, with me failing to rotate shapes into the right position.
Could Quaker worship be like a game, too? I suppose it might look as if we’re waiting for someone to stand up and say ‘I-Spy with my little eye, something beginning with…’ But that’s not right. We have to concentrate to understand what a speaker is getting at, yes, but we’re not actually competing. They’re not setting us a puzzle.
Perhaps we’re playing a collaborative board game like The Quiet Year, having to make collective responses to threats and opportunities. What do we do if the harvest fails, or a group of hungry people turns up? Or perhaps it’s a kind of reverse Jenga, where we are trying to construct the biggest tower we can by each gingerly slotting in our own piece, careful not to bring the whole thing down. But really I think we’re playing a kind of Pictionary, in which the Spirit picks someone and gives them something illustrative – something beyond words that they nevertheless have to find words for to share.
‘They’re not setting us a puzzle.’
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (an admirer of George Fox) used the notion of ‘games’ to describe the overlapping social interactions that humans perform in their everyday lives. Each interaction is like a game insofar as it is a self-contained system with its own rules. Wittgenstein called these ‘language-games’, because so much of their content is based on speech. But he explicitly included non-linguistic elements like gestures, and what we tellingly call ‘body-language’. We can recognise language games everywhere: how we say good morning to a neighbour; how we play with our children; how we talk with our boss; and, yes, how we behave when with other Quakers, and how we minister.
In our version of Pictionary, our words have their meanings established in various ways (by speakers of that particular language; by Quakers more widely; and by the actual Friends there in the Meeting). But, crucially, we’re all on the same team, rooting for the speaker, upholding them, listening intently and with love. Meanings can be confusing, but, when we come at them together, they will emerge.
