Game of the Worlds

I.

At some time in the far distant future there was a very popular game—a total waste of time—that young people loved to play, much to the chagrin and occasional outrage of their parents. It was called Game of the Worlds and was played on a TR (Total Reality) System. The game, the kids said, ought to allay the adults’ most common concern—that their children were in the grips of a world of endless fantasy—since it offered the thrills of a real experience. In this case, TR didn’t remove them from the real world (worlds, plural, in this case). All my kids were quite keen, which didn’t surprise me because they always acted as a group with fraternal unanimity. I used to complain that—thanks to the time and attention they spent gaming—they abandoned me, leaving me alone in the house for whole days at a time at the mercy of the Intelligent Home System: it caused me no end of problems and they were supposed to be my shield. But I let them play; they knew that I was permissive because I understood—and more than understood: I appreciated—generational differences, which have always existed and always should exist, to guarantee at least some evolution and to spare the species from total stagnation, even if that evolution doesn’t go in the direction we might prefer. Who are we to judge?

Parents are never able to understand their children’s interests or passions. At best we see banalities; at worst, barbarity. We’re too readily reassured by the tangible fact that our children, rather than being exceptions, are enthusiastic representatives of all young people for whom banality and barbarity (or what adults perceive as such) are shared cultural attributes, and that violence is necessary: the old norms must be challenged in order to renew civilization. At any rate, my critical stance was purely theoretical; I would never have dreamed of forbidding them from playing their favorite game. And I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, so of course my reservations ended up being little more than a topic of conversation between us, and my reiterations, even my search for new arguments, had become part of our family folklore.

Moreover, to forbid them something that made them so happy would have been heartless. When I saw them come in, their little eyes sparkling, their hair slightly mussed, all of them babbling excitedly in unison about the events of the day’s game, my paternal concerns abated. If they were happy, so was I. By leveraging their numbers, their momentary groupings and regroupings, that jubilant gang had the ability to come and go at the exact same moment. I made a concerted effort to control my progeny, as if they were an atomic configuration and the only one that gave meaning to my life. The sweep of the dispersion-collection pendulum never ceased, ticking off the hours of my days like a clock. I’d taken on the responsibility of raising and educating them but had not adopted the harsh measures popular imagination associated with the task. My mild-mannered—and eminently docile—disposition, which prevented me from doing so, also guaranteed them a stable home and allowed me to accept the hocus-pocus changes that the future had ushered in.

In the end, I let them think of me as an old dinosaur incapable of understanding the present day, fossilized in the outdated values of the past, and devoid of the mental agility needed to perceive where fun and the pleasures of life had alighted.

II.

The game in question, played on a TR (Total Reality) system, involved traveling to a world populated by an intelligent species, declaring war, and winning. The objective was to annihilate the species that enjoyed dominance over that planet. This was always achieved because of the ultra-adaptable methods of warfare improved and perfected by the game’s developers. My children, like countless other adolescents, were inveterate gamers, and not a day went by when they didn’t win the match, that is, destroy a world. If they didn’t destroy more than one (and sometimes they did), it was only due to lack of time, because each of these games took between two and five hours. They could have played Game of the Worlds individually, but they played it as a bloc, like they did everything else.

I could imagine them forging their way in TR through the blackness of the exterior galaxies—I saw them, frenzied and jubilant recreational predators without a care in the world. The streets and alleyways of the great City of the Universe led them directly to their objective, and they were so eager to get there that they never stopped to admire beautiful novas or iridescent clouds of atoms. This deficiency was not unique to them: the contemplative spirit was extinct. How different from my era, when we learned cosmology via origami, our small hands folding pieces of paper until we’d constructed an exhedron, which we then proudly showed our parents when we got home from school. And what a triumph for our bedroom decor! We gazed in wonder at its surfaces, all exterior, where we’d painted dancing mice and frog violinists in bright colors. Astral mysteries smiled upon us . . . mysteriously.

And before all that, a long time before, in a past so remote that it had become legendary, at the beginning of the conquest of exterior space-time, yes, even before the exhedron had been assembled, humanity, eager for mystery, went in search of the Great Rose at the bottom of the inverted cone of the dimensions. Those were the centuries of poetry . . . Ah, to think that the dew of the Great Rose is now used as brake fluid. Nobody’s interested in dawns anymore. Perhaps I’m wrong to lament the prosaic tenor of my children’s tonic. After all, they are a product of poetry, so to then demand poetry from them could lead to overload.

Years ago, when the game was first invented, only millionaires played it, not only because of the sophisticated equipment required, but also because of the fees for “hunting licenses.” But things evolved very quickly. For one, the devices could be produced so cheaply that the cost became insignificant; for another, before they’d even levied the fees, it had become clear that the number of inhabited and civilized worlds was so enormous that opening them up to the hedonic “exploitation” of the general public wouldn’t even make a dent in the supply.

Since all of this happened in the very distant future, I would like to offer certain explanations for a possible reader from the past. First of all, these worlds were real, as real as ours. They all existed in more or less remote sections of the Universe, and they all had as long and rich a history as our own. They’d all gone through different stages—first biological, then scientific and technological—before arriving at the present, when they had to confront those hooligans who were, if truth be told, a gaggle of brats—whose prey surely didn’t suspect as much—with nothing better or more constructive to do with their afternoons.

As for us, our civilization had come to consider the countless populations of countless worlds dispensable, and we’d placed them at the mercy of the entertainment industry. Although it might seem objectionable to offer up for destruction X-number million years of evolution and accumulated knowledge just so some kid could have some dubious fun for a few hours, there’s one argument in its favor that even I find convincing: whenever my kids sat down to dinner after one of their sessions, they were usually elated by their exploits, and they’d go about describing to me the military configuration they’d faced, about that world’s exotic means of transportation and communication as well as its multidimensional topographies (how strange to hear them say: “Today’s world wasn’t as interesting as yesterday’s!”), its landscapes and constructions . . . invariably, their descriptions bored me; they began to sound like idle chatter, without any real interest. Despite my best efforts to pretend I was giving them my full attention, as every parent must do when hearing about their children’s activities, they perceived my ennui. And now we get to the argument in favor: at the end of the day, it was the gamers who took the worlds seriously, who learned about their characteristics, who studied them . . .

“Yeah, but only to destroy them!”

“At least that’s something! Your indifference is worse!”

Indeed. We couldn’t care less. We’re not interested. And we should be; of course we should be! In the past, all this would have been high-quality nourishment, it would have fed our curiosity and intelligence. That’s the point: cultures are organized atop different foundations, with objective elements that create a different science, a different philosophy, different perceptions. What more can an intellectual ask for? The galactic conglomerate of inhabited worlds was like an infinite library, where each book contains all the literatures any given mind could imagine.

That abundance, however, means nothing to us. Why? Trying to explain that would take me too far afield. Maybe because of the sheer quantity. What good would come of devoting ourselves to the individual study of each of these worlds? We’d be within our rights to deem such an effort futile, aimless. In the old days, there were people who dedicated themselves seriously to such research, with the very sensible idea that there’s always something to be learned and applied to solving our own problems. But it became an effort without a future (how strange, now that the future is what we most have to spare) once it became obvious that, in reality, we no longer had any problems.