I must admit, I do not understand Wittgenstein. And by this I don't mean to say I don't get why he did things or what his motivations were. His incomprehensibility reveals such things unclearly: that he wanted us to not know; that he wanted us to see how impossible it was to explain and that the explanation was not the thing. For Wittgenstein the use of language was a game and the game was always afoot, inseparable from it's use. You can not use language to talk about language because that was not its purpose. If you tried to play the game outside of itself, the game ceased to be. And thus by trying to explain himself, by posturing meta-linguistically, Wittgenstein became unintelligible.
However, game is not an explanatory meta language, something that exists as an alternate, elevated, explanatory reality that might somehow shed light on -isness. Nothing, if I'm more or less getting Wittgenstein, is an explanation. Nothing is an alternative to reality. Everything is what it is and there are no meta-languages that explain some other is-what-it-isness. Virtual reality is not almost reality. It is essentially reality. Game is not something we do outside of reality. It is its own experience inexplicable in other terms.
Marshall McLuhan offered a similar explanation of where we might be when we are engaged in such worlds. "The medium is the message" might be seen to imply that being in the act is its own reality, rather than any goal or purpose we might try to invest it with. The medium we find ourselves in is more essential than what we might try to get out of it.
Our culture tends to conceptualize human activity not concerned with industriousness, work or what was back in my youth so popularly termed economic reality, as distraction, diversion, pastime, entertainment, dream, hobby, amusement, party or game. That which can not be seen as a brick in the ongoing construction of infrastructure is the ethereal, pointless dust of fantasy. And yet a fascination with the fantastic, with the chimeras of the human imagination, has always existed, right along side the pyramids, the aqua-ducts and the armies. We have proposed gods, we have told stories and written songs and poems of inspiration, love, honor and invented a thousand adjectives for the intangible, we have dreamed and believed and imagined and created, ingested entheogens to have vision, to stare past the banal and be in some other medium, speak in another tongue, experience another essence, not alternate, not altered, but original. We live in symbol. Why trust one and not the other.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." William Blake
It has been argued that there is an innate impetus in the human consciousness to periodically alter its state. It is the contention of Andrew T. Wiel, "that the desire to alter consciousness is an innate psychological drive arising out of the neurological structure of the human brain. Strong evidence for this idea comes from observations of very young children, who regularly use techniques of consciousness alteration on themselves and one another when they think no adults are watching them. These methods include whirling until vertigo and collapse ensue, hyperventilating and then having another child squeeze one's chest to produce unconsciousness, and being choked around the neck to cause fainting. Such practices appear to be universal, irrespective of culture, and present at ages when social conditioning is unlikely to be an important influence." Being told by someone what the experience is like would be about as useful as hearing about sex or food. The experience of the flower or the view of the beach can not be given by word or picture, because the flower can not be conceived of usefully as a meta experience and translating it into a meta experience renders it meaningless babble. Perhaps what we desire is a profound reality, a change that wakes us from the sonambulism of routine to the perceptiveness of being. We don't enter other realities by altering our consciousness as much as we wake ourselves to what reality is by a change in landscape.
From a traditional and confined point of view, waking experiences are viewed as extraordinary and never viewed as useful until they are applied to the conventional experience of reality, the sleepwalk. The drug experience can't be seen as validated until one comes back to straight life with an idea of god; education can't be seen as meaningful unless it is related to the creation of good citizens with acceptable community standards; books and movies and paintings and actions must have messages; playing sports can only be interpreted through an explanation of war or competition; game must be about dexterity or problem solving or, at its worst, training people to be good, violent soldiers. We are obsessed with utility. Enjoyment and happiness are goals and unhappiness and cruelty must be enlightening, positive thinking must bring us material gain and negative thinking must be punished.
Game is not simulation. It is stimulation. Game can not be defined by an external game. Game exists as an engaged reality, meaningful in the way that it is and not as a referent to alternate ways of being. In game we are awake in ways we just don't seem to be while we work, eat, crap, sit. It is a meditation on -isness.
But then again, I simply don't understand Wittgenstein.
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