Battlegrounds

THE ULTIMATE ROLEPLAYING UNIVERSE   §1464. Playacting myself—Isn’t it miraculously coincidental that our best games would end up mirroring the universe? But since there’s no such thing as “the” universe but infinite “windowless monads”—one for each of us—wherein we can’t even agree on what “best” means, and instead observe that every type of life without fail prefers precisely the games for whose real-life equivalents it is best equipped to handle, with cats playacting catfights, autists autism and average people decent average experiences. So the megalomaniac brainiacs among us were BOUND to end up with universe-spanning games of as much complexity as our DNA could handle, before long. And hey, we got them, and there’s nothing coincidental about it because everyone gets them—even cats. It’s just that a cat’s universe is of a whole other order than ours, and that’s all. Maybe it doesn’t look infinite through our eyes, but for the cat it is. Who knows what our universes look like through cats’ eyes? (As it happens, we some day will, and I am guessing it will be a blurry, abstract mess, and more boring than sleep.)   And so it is that even I have finally attained my ideal game, after decades of searching for and developing it (because, believe it or not, I had to actually develop mine because no one would make it), and since my preferred role to play is that of Game Master, I quite naturally playact... God, in the most sprawling and most complex game ever.   -Alex Kierkegaard, Orgy of the Will