Games Worth Playing

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem, but games worth playing. He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness.

Accidie is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment - "God, oh God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" Such a state of mind is a prelude to what is loosely called "mental illness." Which...fills half the beds in hospitals and makes multitude of people a burden to themselves, their families, and to society.

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to the modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity--play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it). Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked "NO EXIT", yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game. 

What is a game? It is essentially a trial of strength by rules. Rules are essential. If the rules were not observed, the game would cease to be a game at all. A meaningful game of chess would be impossible if one player insisted on treating all pawns as queens.

The only game worth playing is the "Master Game", the aim of which is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. 

~ The Master Game by De Ropp