"You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game... in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty. He stopped and twisted to face me. "Know what I'm sayin'?"
But the promise of Playground tickled a few synapses I couldn't resist. The game of Go, a sculptor, generative AI, a Montrealer, a stolen library book.
Three main threads. Todd, recently diagnosed with Lewy bodies dementia, reminiscing about his early life. The tale of Rafi and Ina living idyllically in Polynesia, until political environmental concerns threaten their way of life. And an old oceanographer who broke all sorts of barriers for women.
I loved reading this book because it reminded me of how I used to read books. It reminds me that I used to read old white men, and that that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It took me out of my present when I needed to step out of it. Less interiority, more in the world. Despite being set in a near future with extrapolated technological advancements, the novel revels in good old-fashioned storytelling.
I love that Todd does jigsaw puzzles with his mother.
My mother and I were building a time tunnel, not just back to the childhood I never had, not just to Constable's 1821, but back several millennia, to the first magic picture puzzles from history's beginning. That's how my brain works.
[A jigsaw puzzle figures in The Gold Bug Variations as well, defining two types of puzzlers: one who looks for the spot that fits a piece, and one who seeks the piece that fits a spot. I think of this every time I puzzle.]
In high school, Todd discovers Godel, Escher Bach. His best friend Rafi steals a library book (The Philosophy of the Common Task, by Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov), obsessed with its premise that evolution intends to defeat the design flaw of death, that humanity would someday learn to resurrect every person who ever lived. Rafi introduces Todd to Go. College begins with underground movies and poetry slams and being "schooled in the size of our capacious ignorance."
In the fall of our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and orange, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation, Rafi came back to our dorm room late one afternoon with an announcement. He smiled his most serene and philosophical smile, with his tongue in the slight gap between his two front teeth. "I've just met the woman I am going to marry."
Enter Ina, the artist, who keeps them together and tears them apart. Todd is on the path to super-rich tech bro-dom, while Rafi struggles to complete his thesis.
He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga's classic, Homo Ludens: "At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play...." Judging from the lines he's sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.
When Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, humanists took heart that a computer could never master Go. But in 2015, AlphaGo beat a human professional player.
If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.
Children. Mammals, pets, dolphins. Machines. The machines are undeniably getting smarter.
The games industry surpassed the movie industry in terms of revenue decades ago. In terms of cultural reach and influence, it grows stronger every day. By Todd's account, "Games now ruled humanity."
AI's next turn would be the greatest game of all: Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel. Powers is definitely onto something here. (And Wittgenstein just won't shut up this year.)
The novel is ultimately about the power of play, the power of storytelling, and how similar these two are. Playground filled me with joy and wonder, and reminded me of my past and future selves.
Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.
Excerpts
Chapters 1 & 2
Chapter 4
