Category:Meaning

"I still don't know what love means."

We can talk of meaning as a philosophical concept.

(VIDEO)GAMES - A CONVENIENT THEATER OF MEANING
This short story (of a tabletop RPG game, over many months of individual game sessions) beautifully describes the rise and fall of Meaning as the game progresses. This exploration of a quantity of perceived Meaning, it can easily be said, is what our individual lives seem to revolve around in real life (games are simply a further detailed area of life, with no substantial differences to individual Meaning or self-preservation).

Particularly strong (fundamental) points of consideration:
 * The familiarity* of one non-player character in which to immerse themselves more than predictable, easy acts of violence provided by the typical (now bland; worn-out; boring) power fantasy that such a game structure regularly involves.
 * "Depravity" part - the young girl NPC's existence functioned as a relativistic measure of the game world's cruelty. (Without the happy people, there can be no Meaning in sadness. Without the good, prosperous, safe and comfortable states, there can be no inverse because to invert is to have/use a negative point of reference.) The girl acted as the check and balance for the existence of relative goodness, positive Meaning, in the game world and to destroy her in any sense destroys the Meaning in the game.*

In EVERY instance, the last speck of what we are destroying or dominating becomes infinitely more valuable and Meaningful to the act. What comes to be the "only thing standing in the way" of total destruction of Meaning is made suddenly hugely more important: the last victim the main character leans over to shoot in the head in the action film; the last £10 note you break into as you're running out; the last patch of trees, the last product on the shelf  - these conjure a distinct behavioural pattern in us, and this is an area where human behaviour can be deconstructed scientifically, predictably, at least partially. This conforms to the notion of Meaning, which is inherently mathematical.

When we agree to play games we are knowingly entering the scientific reality and that we all, roughly, are held by the same rules internally in our minds - Meaning.

In any other scenario (not social contract between allies) it could have been different. But in the last part in particular we see the increasing social dynamics of the allies' inner Meaning-connections taking hold. Friendship and other arrangements of acquaintance or familiarity ("relationships") are held incredibly strongly additionally by particular forms of Meaning, and Meaning becomes more complex in this way (has to be 'calculated')

CC stuff / multiplication

expansion

 * as opposed to anonymity


 * (destroying the interesting relative mechanisms; cheating; cheapening or devolving the game into something simpler)

see also: amassing wealth in the real-world financial economy[endgame]; power fantasy in video games[endgame]; grinding in MMOs and modern employment[endgame]

Endgame - the end of the relativity of values. When we (mathematically!) reach the true final end of any scale, there is no more progress to be made at all. This is the complete destruction of even any perceivable, imaginary, progress that we might make.

Doubling up to extend our theory of the absurd, we can say that the level of planetary human civilization is just another game in a set of games (of Meaning) where we just happen to have failed. Every other time it's a victory - absurd, huh?