Dear readers, I admit I’ve fallen short of my modest once-a-month posting target while in the midst of my work on a professional side project. I’m still deep in that project headspace, so rather than post a brand new piece, I’m returning to a piece I put on the backburner last year.
While its not in the style of my recent writing, it was a fun one to write and always felt like one worth returning to. It was also satisfying to take a hatchet to it in edits—editing an old piece can tell you a lot about how your writing has improved and evolved.
Another post will drop late next week before I (actually) return to a once-a-month schedule.
1. The Game of Death
“There is no doubt that the Game has its dangers. For that very reason we love it; only the weak are sent out on paths without perils. But never forget what I have told you so often: our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity. Such is the nature of the Glass Bead Game.”
- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
I came across this on a recent visit to Brooklyn Museum’s Egypt wing:
Surrounded by impressively ornate gold gilt sarcophagi containing the mummies of some lesser-known pharaohs and priests, this little box was tucked away in a small case and easily overlooked. Even so, I found this to be the most interesting artifact in this exhibit: a game of death, called “senet”.
At first glance, senet looks like a dominoes box with a hopscotch board on top. According to the placard description:
The game of senet reflects the belief that the deceased encountered demons on the road to the underworld who blocked gateways. The Egyptian word senet means "passing", a reference to avoiding the demons when passing through the gates. The game board represents the zones through which the deceased had to travel to reach the place of judgment. A New Kingdom text suggests the game was played between the deceased and an unnamed opponent, the stakes being the deceased's continued existence. But there is also evidence that senet was popular among the living.
I had a laugh at the placard writer’s dry wit in, “there is also evidence that senet was popular among the living,” implying its popularity among the dead. But there are indeed many Egyptian representations of solitary, supposedly dead individuals playing the game.
Rules have changed over time, and it's unclear exactly how the game was played. However, certain historians have made reconstructions of the gameplay.
According one of these interpretations from New Zealand’s Otago Museum, the game goes as follows:
The game board is a grid of 30 squares, 3 wide by 10 long. Each player has at least 5 pawns.
The pawns go in an S around the board. A square called the "square of Rebirth" or “the square of Life” is the starting point and the respawning point.
The opposing player (or the demons that would play the deceased) can knock the player’s pawns off the board by landing demon pawns on their spot. This forces their pawns back to the square of Rebirth.
Winners have to move all their pawns off of the board while following the rules and avoiding their opponent’s pawns.
Backgammon with demons, basically.
In an adjacent room at the Brooklyn Museum, there were papyrus fragments containing passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This “book” was less a book than a collection of spells and incantations that would be buried with a deceased person to assist them in their journey through the afterlife. The spells helped them to recognize (and even control) the gods they would encounter, to preserve and reunite the dead person’s being, and to protect and guide them past obstacles and hostile demons they’d encounter.
Senet is both mentioned in the Book of the Dead and is part of the demon-dodging preparation that the Book is dedicated to. As a representation of the journey that your “ka” (or “vital spark”) would take to the afterlife, senet is how you’d practice to ensure that journey will be successful.
Think of death for a moment. Entertaining the possibility of an afterlife, what do you imagine it feeling like, looking like? It’s unlikely you thought of an underworld with specific demons and gods, which, equipped with the right incantations, you can control or neutralize.
But would we consider that game-worthy? Without a doubt. Diablo II, anyone?
2. What’s in a game?
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
In the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, a 16th century crusader is confronted by death in the form of an ashen grim reaper figure. The crusader challenges Death to a game of chess in an attempt to save his life.
A game is not serious, except when it is. A game, in a way, is the reverse of Shakespeare’s “what’s in a name”: a name pretends to be more important than it actually is, “a rose by another name is still a rose”. A game pretends to be less important than it actually is, a mere game when there’s something more serious or consequential on the line. As George Orwell has observed, sport is “war minus the shooting”.
For the chess-playing crusader in Bergman’s film, his loss is not just a loss of a game, but his death. For the child, a loss can be a real humiliation, a defeat in the heart if not in the mind. As a boy, it meant something to me that I always lost in chess to my dad—and when I finally beat him, and then beat him consistently, that also meant something to me. (I also learned the true meaning of unfairness when he’d play as the bank in Monopoly—with the made-up rule that the bank could lend money with extravagant rates of interest.)
This is why ”it’s only a game” can be such a hollow-sounding reassurance. We don’t just play games because they are fun. We can also play them because they mean something to us beyond the game. When Britain lost to Italy in last year’s Euro Cup, the Italians didn’t just call English fans “weaklings” that needed to “eat more pasta”, but also gleefully lampooned a “worthless” Britain following their Brexit exit from the European Union. “A united Europe beats the England of Brexit!” tweeted one European parliamentarian.
We also play to have a vicarious experience of something we don’t have access to. This is most obvious in contemporary video games, which offer hyperreal experiences of often unreal experiences—how many different games can you be a wizard in? But games have been about experiencing something else since the dawn of games. “Playing house” as a child is about experiencing adulthood. Playing Risk, or chess, or Call of Duty, is about experiencing war and conquest in various forms.
Yet, crucially, the game removes obligation and danger from these vicarious experiences. If war games were dangerous, we’d have no reason to play Risk or Call of Duty—we’d just go to war. “Playing house” permanently would mean fending for oneself at too young an age. But the game prevents us from being harmed, and ensures that we can stop playing as soon as we get tired of it.
This is why games make such great pretexts for horror movies and thrillers—Jumanji, the Saw franchise, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Funny Games, the list goes on. The game, which isn’t supposed to have real-world consequences, suddenly does. And that terrifying prospect is compounded by that fact that we can no longer just stop playing. The game becomes dangerous, and then becomes compulsory.
Clearly senet, too, is not actual death. Senet is a proxy to practice death, to acquaint oneself with it, and yet to remain safe from death itself.
3. Perchance to die
“To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…”
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Why did ancient Egyptians play a game like this and we don’t? I think this is straightforwardly explained by their differing conception of death.
The ancient Egyptians lived in a society that believed in an underworld with defined, concrete gods and demons, which they fleshed out to the point of having an actual game to prepare for the experience. Concrete form, concrete content.
The Judeo-Christian concept of the afterlife kept the notion of a hereafter, in the form of Heaven and Hell, but largely made their contents abstract and unspecific (try to imagine a “game of Heaven and Hell”). Concrete form, abstract content, Dante and Milton aside.
The modern agnostic-atheist conception is akin to a giant question mark (agnosticism), or certainty in a black, empty void (atheism). Abstract form, abstract content.
A game can only model an experience that has concrete rules and therefore concrete content. It makes sense, then, that only the ancient Egyptians’ conception of the afterlife could accommodate a game like senet, just as only our economic model can accommodate a game where you learn to become a rapacious capitalist landlord (or banker) intent on impoverishing all your neighbors (thanks Dad).
There is a fascinating reversal in all of this, though. Death is omnipresent in our video games, the most contemporary medium of gaming. It has been since the very earliest arcade games. You die, you get reborn, you use up a life, you lose progress. There are many ways this mechanic gets structured, but death is always at the center, always the thing you are trying to avoid.
While we don’t have any video games that model death itself (as far as I know—what could that even look like?), death is everywhere in our games. It’s as if, with the modern loss of any metaphysical certainty around what life after death looks like, we find consolation in simulating death in an endless number of forms—falling off a ledge, getting slayed by goblins, getting shot by an enemy soldier, getting attacked by colorful ghosts while you try to snack on delicious white dots.
Do you suppose this endless reconfiguration of death helps us face death? Does it maybe make death (or life) feel like more of a game to us?
Rather than helping us practice the very serious ordeal of death like with senet, maybe a sum effect of all of our most modern games is to help make death seem like less of an ordeal.
That, and they’re fun, of course.