Money is a sign of poverty.
The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?
What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.
Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.
Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.
Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.
Myself,” said the drone sniffily, “I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.
An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power – or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness – a similar distinction?
Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.
It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.
And in all of this, to what end?” “No end save itself: I pass the time to pass the time, and stay involved to stay involved.” “Yes, but why?” “Why not?
He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change.
The only sin is selfishness.
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
Empires are synonymous with centralized – if occasionally schismatized – hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through – usually – a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser – as a rule nominally independent – power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.
All food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least.