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遊戯の創造神 G.O.Y.G.O.

The games discussed in this book are properties of the holders of their respective intellectual properties. They have been discussed here under the Fair Use Act. This work should not be purchased as an alternative to any products sold by the holders of the rights to the intellectual properties referred to herein. All quotes and citations are printed and discussed for purposes of criticism and comment under the Fair Use Act and the right to quote per article 10 of the Berne Convention. Cover art: Magdalena van de Passe, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, from the series “Seven Wonders of the World,” 1614. Engraving on paper, 21x25.6cm. Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. 1st edition published 18 August 2016 Kindle edition ASIN B01KPEB35 a ̎ ̨̛͇̎͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎͘͢͡ ͂̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊ ͬ͒͂̎ L͍̰̥̰̞͂́̔̀͜͝͠X̔ ̎̃̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊ ̨̧̛̛͇̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊͘̚͢͡͝͡ ̨̛͇̣͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎͘͢͡I̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̚͝͡Į̛͇͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎ͬ͒͂͘͢͡ ̦̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊ ̨̛͇͍̰̥̰̞͂͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎́ͬ͒͂͘͢͜͡͝͠ ̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̚͝͡ ̎͂ ̨̧̛̛͇̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰͒̅̈́ͧͯ͗ͥ͒̏̂̎ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊͘̚͢͡͝͡ ̣̎3̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊͌ͬ͒͂ ̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱̣ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̒ͬ͒͂̚͝͡ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ͌̀́3-̛̭̜̻̝̼͎͌̐̌̑ͦ͂͢ ̣̃1̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱̦̣0̣́1͂̔ ̛̭̜̻̝̼͎̐̌̑ͦ͢ ́ ̀ ̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̚͝͡ 7 ̣ ̒ ̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̚͝͡ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̦̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊̒7̣-̣8̃̒̉ ̉1̣̦9̛̭̜̻̝̼͎̐̌̑ͦ͢6̦̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̒8̀́ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̒̀҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̦ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ JBB.ALM.GAW.SHS.LMM.SFU

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THE GOD OF YU-GI-OH THE NAME OF THE PHARAOH AND THE KING OF GAMES D.D.D.: Dios de los Duelos / Dieu du Duel / Dio del Duello der Name des Pharao und der Spielenkönig Namnet på Farao samt Kungen av spel

Dennis Frogman Edited by M. M. F. Cashiola Cover art by M. V. D. Passe 2

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For Sierra

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Contents Foreword ........................................................................................ 7 Preface .......................................................................................... 10 Introduction.................................................................................. 90 Dawn of the Duel........................................................................ 135 The Shadow of the Pharaoh ........................................................ 143 The Ballad of the Mind Sculptor ................................................. 161 Ghost Flood and the Proof of Evolution ...................................... 177 Clear and Distinct Mind ............................................................. 190 Frame Zero ................................................................................. 202 Gender and the Problem of Playstyles ........................................ 211 The Death of Dennis Frogman .................................................... 226 The Name of the Pharaoh ........................................................... 234 Appendix ................................................................................... 236

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Foreword It would be a mistake to assume that the version of this book contained herein is or could ever be complete. This work began as an attempt to solve all philosophical problems of the Yu-Gi-Oh Trading Card Game. The initial outline of the project was written in 2013, then revamped and rewritten into a second outline. The main theme of these initial drafts was a totalizing account of dueling knowledge that professed to be “metaphysical,” in the sense that it posited universal structures within the game that had always been and would always be present in some form, and that a player would be playing “theoretically optimally” when properly attuned to these structures. More importantly, it was thought that once these structures were established and defined in written form, the community would be in a perfectly communicative state in which no distortions of meaning occur from one speaker to another within discussions. We abandoned that version of the project when it became clear that the world of dueling was not properly ready for the materials contained within it. In 2013, Dennis Frogman declared that the G.O.Y.G.O. would be released sometime after Hoban’s book was written and released, so as to ensure that the community’s experience throughout the content of the G.O.Y.G.O. would be properly conditioned, so that they would be ready for the journey it would take them on. If there were any theoretical issues in 2013 that needed to be solved for duelists, Hoban’s Road of the King has done so. The goal of this book is no longer to solve philosophical problems, but to move the community towards new ones. The first two sections of this book will not be pleasurable for the average duelist to read. This is an intentional punishment of the dueling community at large for aping game-theoretic concepts

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without properly understanding the historical conditions in which those concepts were created. The genealogy of game theory contained herein is by no means complete, and may be updated or extended in future editions. For now, it is sufficient to establish the premises necessary for the conclusions drawn later in the book; upon reaching page 117, the average duelist should have the mental framework necessary to grasp these conclusions. Given Dennis Frogman’s new focus on adjusting the community’s focus towards new philosophical problems rather than erasing them entirely, the aforementioned conclusions need not contain themselves solely to the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG. Rather, upon finishing this book, the reader will have hopefully acquired new concepts and ideas which are not necessarily universal or totalizing, but that nonetheless offer new ways of thinking about and playing games. The overall goal is to motivate an entirely new philosophy of games, a philosophy which mobilizes the existing theories of games towards entirely new purposes and new kinds of conclusions. Dennis Frogman is forever indebted to Pharaoh Atem, the first philosopher-king of the duel, for the theories advanced in this book. In addition, we could never have formalized these theories without the direct help of Dan Parker and Johnny Li as well as the influence of Allen Pennington, Patrick Hoban, Anuraag Das, Nicholas Wei, Evan Vargas, and many, many more. A proper section devoted to acknowledgements would likely extend across multiple pages. We can only hope to flesh this list out in future editions as more names come to mind. For now, if you have had any conversation with Dennis Frogman about any theory, game, or theory of games, consider yourself named amongst these acknowledgements, as this project would have never come to fruition in your absence.

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Preface 1. “I can give the concept 'number' rigid limits ... that is, use the word ‘number’ for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we do use the word ‘game.’ For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn.”1

Wittgenstein’s use of the game to illustrate the structure of family resemblances in the meanings of words has become paradigmatic in contemporary philosophy of language. It seems strange, then, to begin a history of something that we cannot fully define. In principle, we can set no boundaries on the hithertounconceived human activities that are fated to become known and identified as games by future generations, nor could we ever know for sure if one particular game was the first, as there could be any number of games played by our predecessors that we have yet to find evidence of. Indeed, the question is entirely moot if we take Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games absolutely literally, in which case our starting point must be the descent of the larynx during our species’ evolution. While Wittgenstein was writing the Investigations during the 1940s, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens was the preceding account of the relationship between culture and play. Huizinga’s core thesis was that “play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) 32-33. 1

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waited for man to teach them their playing.” 2 Puppies and kittens have always played with each other by biting the other’s neck, and dolphins as well as other mammals have played language-games of their own, language-games that have always been entirely distinct from ours, for a very long time. For Huizinga, play both precedes human culture and serves an essential function in many forms of life throughout the animal kingdom, and ours in particular. In 1958, after Wittgenstein’s death and the posthumous publication of the Investigations, Caillois would take Huizinga’s model even further, mobilizing the concept of play as a sort of middle term to Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane. Huizinga figured that all play is rooted at least in part in the religious sector of culture, a phenomenon he termed the “play-festival-rite complex,” but Caillois notes that while the sacred is the concept of pure content, an “indivisible, equivocal, fugitive, and efficacious force,” play is purely formal in that it is activity for its own sake, an “end in itself.”3 The relationship of play to humans is thus the inverse of that of humans to the sacred. Play is a domain created by humans to escape the tensions that come with being creations of the sacred. As a result, recreation and religion appear very similar on the surface, but at heart, they are distinct and separate solutions to the same problem. Humans go to church to find meaning in the divine and play games to find meaning in creations of their own. 2. The current historical literature on games relies primarily on texts and pieces from board games recovered from archaeological dig sites; since we don’t have any players of those games with us to teach us how to play them, the existence and rules of the game are Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1972) 1. Thomas Henricks, "Caillois's Man, Play, and Games: An Appreciation and Evaluation," American Journal of Play Fall (2010): 157-185. 2 3

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postulated entirely from the physical game piece or a passing mention thereof in an ancient text. Our ancestors made and used stone tools at least two million years ago, but the earliest records of tools specifically created for the play-function date back to the Bronze Age. Senet was played by the Egyptians as early as 3500 BCE and the Royal Game of Ur by the Mesopotamians circa 3000 BCE. Sports followed closely thereafter with the Greeks between 1600 BCE and 1100 BCE and the Mesoamericans by 1400 BCE. There is currently no scholarly consensus on the date of the first Olympics, but it is generally agreed upon that the first “official” Olympics were held in 776 BCE at the beginning of the first Olympiad, about a century before the writings of the first pre-Socratic philosophers. There is anything but a shortage of contemporary literature on ancient Greek culture, but a few specific points are worth touching upon for our purposes. First, the inhabitable regions of ancient Greece were separated from one another by mountains and sea alike, leading the Greek people to build many distinct city-states that feuded amongst one another as early as 710 BCE. The Olympics were a means of resolving the inevitable tensions between city-states that resulted from this consistent internal strife over resources. Furthermore, starting with the rise of the merchant class around 680 BCE, the aristocratic governments of the city-states became increasingly pressured by populist revolts spurned by wealthy prospective τύραννος (tyrannos). These were not tyrants in the modern sense of the word, which is inherently pejorative -- a populist tyrant could be a good or a bad leader -- but Plato and Aristotle would both nonetheless react heavily against the threat of this flavor of tyranny. Second, by 478-477 BCE, Greek culture had been warped to a certain extent around the tension between two of these city-states in particular in Sparta and Athens. Athens was the liberal, democratic think tank known for its rich tradition of philosophical literature,

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while Sparta was a fascist military dictatorship that largely ignored individual freedoms in favor of the greater good of the state. This tension culminated in the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars throughout the bulk of the fifth century BCE. Athens and Sparta led an uneasy alliance amongst city-states against invading Achaemenid forces under Darius the Great and his son Xerxes during the GrecoPersian Wars from 499 to 449 BCE, then fought a brutal civil war against each other in the Peloponnesian Wars from 431 to 404 BCE. It is this period in Antiquity to which Huizinga traces the Greek ideal of ἀγών (agon), the human tendency towards contest and struggle celebrated by the ancient Olympics. The concept of game, and consequently, play, that Wittgenstein dealt with was essentially diffuse in meaning, as we can’t make a list of all formal properties of games, but nonetheless use the concept unproblematically through family resemblances. This was not always the case. Contest was so vital an element to Greek life that it had its own spot in the Greek language in agon, while play in a more general sense was relegated to at least three separate words with different connotations. For the Greeks, agon was what was celebrated in the sacred rites and traditions of the Olympics. For Huizinga, agon is a sort of unifying principle of the play-concept; it “bears all the formal characteristics of play, and as to its function belongs almost wholly to the sphere of the festival, which is the playsphere.”4 Agon gave rise to vast genres of sports and games alike designed to be “like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph.”5

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Huizinga 31. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (New York: Free of Glencoe) 14.

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3. Contemporary histories of economics typically begin somewhere in the transition between the pre-Socratic and Socratic periods of the Greco-Roman world. Hesiod mused on the scarcity of resources in his Works and Days around 700 BCE; as was typical for pre-Socratics to do, he concluded that our plight must be a just decree handed down by the gods to punish us for something. Thales (624546 BCE) is credited by Aristotle as having created the first monopoly in perhaps one of the earliest recorded “revenge of the nerds” stories: “Thales, so the story goes, because of his poverty was taunted with the uselessness of philosophy; but from his knowledge of astronomy he had observed while it was still winter that there was going to be a large crop of olives, so he raised a small sum of money and paid round deposits for the whole of the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios, which he hired at a low rent as nobody was running him up; and when the season arrived, there was a sudden demand for a number of presses at the same time, and by letting them out on what terms he liked he realized a large sum of money, so proving that it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about.” 6

The work of Xenophon deals heavily with the metaphysics of value and its implications for trade and the regulation thereof. The Oeconomicus (c.360 BCE) is a primitive sort of personal finance manual for the ancient Greek landowning class, with a focus on estate management and rigid gender roles in household activities. Xenophon’s Socrates condemns the lower class of craftsmen for indulging in “base mechanic arts” that contribute nothing to the struggle of society proper. “We shall not be ashamed,” he says, “to imitate the kings of Persia? That monarch, it is said, regards amongst

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Aristotle, Politics 1.11.

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the noblest and most necessary pursuits two in particular, which are the arts of husbandry and war, and in these two he takes the strongest interest.”7 The former art is the early sort of masculine economics that Xenophon concerns himself with; as noted by Foucault, this is the “economic art” which “teaches the practice of commanding and is indissociable from the latter.” The Greek οἶκος (oikos) refers more generally to the family unit, but in this context Xenophon’s focus is on the family estate; maintenance of this estate was the most important goal an individual could pursue in the name of their country. Foucault continues, “to manage the oikos is to command, and being in charge of the household is not different from the power that is to be exercised in the city.”8 Plato and Aristotle sought the essence of the money in which the estate consisted and reached opposing conclusions. Plato’s ideal city-state as sketched out in the Republic (c.380 BCE) has each citizen specialize in the task they are by nature most suited for; for him, this is the most efficient division of labor for a society. He takes a similarly pragmatic approach to the subject of money, which for him is a tool to facilitate trade with no essence in itself outside of being traded. In fact, the only reason he brings money up in the first place is to make a point about necessary functions of a city-state: “Within the city, how will they exchange their productions? To secure such an exchange was, as you will remember, one of our principal objects when we formed them into a society and constituted a State… [to buy and sell,] they will need a marketplace, and a money-token for purposes of exchange.”9

Xenophon, Oeconomicus 4.2. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon) 153. 9 Plato, Republic 2. 7 8

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Plato’s well-documented disdain for the inequality of wealth that dominated Greece during his time is evident in his views. Schumpeter’s analysis is sufficient: “He hated the Sicilian tyrannos... He almost certainly despised the Athenian democracy. Yet he realized that tyranny grew out of democracy and was, in any case, the practical alternative to it. Democracy, in turn, he interpreted as the inevitable reaction to oligarchy, and this again he traced to inequality of wealth, the consequence, as he thought, of commercial enterprise.”10

Introducing a distinction between use-value and exchangevalue that remains relevant today, Aristotle took the opposite stance, maintaining in the Politics (c.350 BCE) that “property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business.” 11 The shift from public to private property necessitates, among other things, a medium of exchange with value that is intrinsic, and therefore worth pursuit in itself as something other than a medium of exchange. Both Plato and Aristotle recognized that the “fundamental function” of money that “defines” and “accounts for its existence” is to serve as a “medium of exchange in the markets of commodities.” For Aristotle, however, it is furthermore necessary that the money itself is one of these commodities: “it must be a thing that is useful and has exchange value independently of its monetary function… a value that can be compared with other values. Thus the money commodity goes by weight and quality as do other commodities; for convenience people Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford UP) 53. 11 Aristotle, Politics 2.5. 10

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may decide to put a stamp on it in order to save the trouble of having to weigh it every time, but this stamp only declares and guarantees the quantity and quality of the commodity contained in a coin and is not the cause of its value.” Schumpeter calls this the Metallist theory of money as opposed to Plato’s Cartal theory of money.12 4. Board game variants in the style of chess and checkers made their way into ancient Greek culture from Egypt by 850 BCE. Πεττεια (petteia) is thought to refer to a genre of board games played with πεσσοι (pessoi, “pieces” or “men”). A clear and distinct ruleset for at least one of these, πολεις, (poleis, “cities”) is given by Julius Pollux in the Onomasticon (c.200): “the game played with many pieces is a board (πλινθιον) with spaces disposed among lines; the board is called ‘city’ and each pie a ‘dog’ (κυων); the pieces are of two colours, and the art of the game consists in taking a piece of one colour by enclosing it between two of the other colour.”13

Greek writers as early as Plato mused on the distinction between petteia and κυβεια (kubeia), a genre of board games in the vein of backgammon where κυβων (kuboi, “six-sided dice”) are rolled to determine the movement of pieces across a board. Petteia were traditionally styled as “battle-games,” involving pieces capturing other pieces and such, while the original kubeia were “race-games” with pieces “racing” each other across a board in some way or another. The evidence on these is admittedly nebulous; it is difficult to distinguish in translation between general references to categories

Schumpeter 60. Roland G. Austin, “Greek Board Games,” Antiquity 14 (September 1940): 257-271. 12 13

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of games and specific games with defined rulesets, and as a result, it is unclear whether or not διαγραμμσμος (diagrammismos) or the enigmatic game of “five lines” (πεντε γραμμαι) were kubeia, petteia, neither, or both. What is clear is that kubeia became significantly more popular than petteia over time, to the point that by the second century people were referring to both genres of games as kubeia indiscriminately while the “true sense of 'petteia'” had been lost.14 5. Military strategists in Antiquity wrestled with Homer’s classical dichotomy of bie (bία, “violence”) and metis (μῆτις, “cunning,” “skill,” or “craft”). One could wage war like Achilles, relying on brute force and overwhelming the opponent’s physical resources, or they could make like Odysseus and outwit the opponent with some sort of ruse or scheme. A core principle of Sun Tzu’s Art of War (c.500 BCE) is the uncertainty of physical combat, which favors the Odyssean side of the Greek dichotomy. Because anything can happen, engaging physically carries with it a fundamental risk; it is thus favorable to minimize this risk by avoiding confrontation whenever possible: “Sun Tzu gave birth to a long tradition that believed strategic goals could often best be achieved by avoiding the destructive uncertainty of pitched battle. It was preferable to use ‘stratagem and finesse’ to defeat an enemy—famine was a favourite tactic of Sun Tzu’s—than to expose yourself to ‘the chance of arms.’”15

Writers in Antiquity did not explicitly treat the skillful play of games, but Plato and Aristotle both used the skillful petteia player in

Ibid. Fiammetta Rocco, ed. “Why Strategy is Not a Plan,” Economist (2 November 2013). 14 15

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metaphors, showing that skill was at least perceived, if not explicitly written about in documents that have yet to be recovered. For the Greeks, a good petteia player was simply one who played petteia well the same way one could govern a city well or manage their household well. The title is purely descriptive; it is a statement that the petteia player has done that which makes one win at petteia; it is a declaration that the player has acted upon some principle, even if the principle is neither thoroughly nor explicitly defined. Also of note in Plato is his crusade against the sophists, whom he associated with the legacy of Athens. In Plato’s view, the sophists had “given up on the search for truth” and resigned themselves to play “rhetorical games” which “allowed

the

foolish

and

ignorant

to

appear

wise

and

knowledgeable.” Plato preferred an agonistic, Spartan approach to 16

truth, one that constituted its own distinct discipline of knowledge and corresponding profession. In the East, the roots of chess in the Achillean view of war were well-documented; Murray counts no less than four distinct ancient Indian accounts of the invention of chess as a tool for the practice and rehearsal of military tactics.17 The resemblances carried over to the ancients’ initial evaluation of skill in games. Freedman, citing Jullien, writes on the contrasting ancient cultures of strategy and conflict in the West and East and the corresponding differences in the Greek and Chinese linguistic structures of the period: “... The disinclination to engage in high-risk, potentially destructive direct confrontations in war [advocated by Sun Tzu] was also followed in rhetorical conflicts, which were similarly indirect and implicit… Following an indirect approach to discourse would raise the same problems as with battle: when

16 17

Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford UP) 39. H.J.R. Murray, History of Chess (New York: Skyhorse) 199.

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both sides were using identical ploys the contest could be indefinite and it would be hard to reach any sort of closure… [in contrast, the Athenians] saw the advantages in decisive action that brought both war and argument to a quick close, thereby avoiding the expense and frustrations of prolonged confrontation… In the same way, the Athenians were straightforward in argument. Whether in the theater, the tribunal, or the assembly, orators would make their cases directly and transparently, with points open to refutation, within a limited time period. There could therefore be decisive arguments as there were decisive battles.” 18

This corroborates Caillois’ proposition that all games require the “temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion, then at least of a closed, conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe.” When one plays, they do so in an imaginary space of “mimicry” designed to resemble the “real world” in certain respects and to deviate from it in others.19 6. The ancient Olympic games represented the socialization and institutionalization of sports, as they became more important to Greek public life than any sport or game had ever been to any society prior. In 81, the gladiatorial games of the Amphitheatrum Flavium supplanted the Olympics as the premier athletic bonanza of the West, and Olympic culture eventually dwindled with the Roman conquest following the Battle of Corinth in 146. Nero competed in the games in 167 with his own cheering section and rigged the results when he fell off his chariot during a race. In 394, Theodosius I discontinued the Olympics altogether, along with the gladiatorial games of the Colosseum, when he outlawed all pagan activities throughout the Roman empire. With the switch from the Olympics over to the 18 19

Freedman 46. Caillois 19.

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Colosseum came a parallel transition from Odysseus to Ulysses, firmly within the shadow of Plato: “Under the Romans the pendulum swung away from metis and towards bie. Homer’s Odysseus morphed into Virgil’s Ulysses and became part of a story of deceitful and treacherous Greeks. Even the Athenians, as they found themselves on the losing side in their war with Sparta, began to have some sympathy for the Trojans and saw Odysseus’s cruel trick in a new light. Heroes were sought who were more plain-speaking, honorable as well as brave in battle, less reliant on cunning and cleverness.”20

For both the Romans and Greeks, sports and games were among the leisure activities afforded by citizens who tended well to their work and business. However, while the Olympics had been a public endeavor that brought the governments and populations of many distinct city-states together, the exhibitions held in the Colosseum were funded and organized not only by the state, but by wealthy private individuals typically looking to bolster their family name. Picking up where the Greeks left off, the Roman gaming culture revolved around the random element introduced by the dice of the ever-popular Greek kubeia. While the earliest variants of chaturanga were spreading across the East in the first five centuries, the Romans used dice as well as sticks, coins, and other trinkets to gamble in various games of alea (“chance”). Caillois finds in this alea an inversion of the values of agonistic culture: “In contrast to agon, alea negates work, patience experience and qualifications. Professionalization, application, and training are

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Freedman 42.

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eliminated. In one instant, winnings may be wiped out. Alea is total disgrace or absolute favor. It grants the lucky player infinitely more than he could procure by a lifetime of labor, discipline, and fatigue. It seems an insolent and sovereign insult to merit. It supposes on the player’s part an attitude exactly opposite to that reflected in agon. In the latter, his only reliance is upon himself; in the former, he counts on everything, even the vaguest sign, the slightest outside occurrence, which he immediately takes to be an omen or token -- in short, he depends on everything but himself.”21

Some aleatores (“gamblers”) became so entrenched in their lifestyle that they preferred the title tesserarii to distinguish their “skill” from the actions of “mere dice-players, who depend on luck alone.” When the fetishization of alea became a widespread problem that the Roman government could no longer ignore, fines and restrictions were put in place on chance-based activities played for money. This was, of course, a fool’s endeavour. Etched bone gambling chips used as IOUs followed soon after, and as noted by Caillois, neither the Romans nor anyone else would have ever been in any shortage of things to make the subject of betting: “Since the result of agon is necessarily uncertain and paradoxically must approximate the effect of pure chance, assuming that the chances of the competitors are as equal as possible, it follows that every encounter with competitive characteristics and ideal rules can become the object of betting, or alea, e.g. horse or greyhound races, football, basketball, and cock fights. It even happens that table stakes vary unceasingly during the game, according to the vicissitudes of agon.”22

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Caillois 17. Ibid., 18.

22

The megalomaniacal emperor Commodus (177-192) was fond of both gladiators and gambling. He fought animals and other gladiators in the Colosseum and had a few parts of his house built to resemble parts of an arena. He also bankrupt the imperial treasury and replenished the money he had lost by seizing assets from senators and renting out parts of the imperial palace for gambling events. He was strangled in bed by his wrestling partner in 192; this assassination is widely regarded as the start of the decline of the Roman Empire over the next three hundred or so years. 7. The precedent set by the Olympics nevertheless remained, and the presence of sporting culture could be felt throughout the Middle Ages. Feudal sports in Europe developed along aristocratic and religious dimensions. Knights and nobles enjoyed sporting events during times of peace, celebrating many of the same values as did the Greeks during their Olympics. The sporting culture of the feudal period made two major exclusions. First, most of the events were barred from the common people; sports were now for the noble and affluent, while mere games were for the peasants. Second, elements of variance along the lines of dice and cards had been excluded from sports proper since the ancient Olympic games. Just as explicit variance is found nowhere on the battlefield, where physical execution and planning reign supreme, agon does not concern itself with the flip of a coin or the spin of a roulette wheel; these would only take away from the quality of the competition in javelin throwing, jousting, and so on. This trend continued when the medieval European nobility inherited the sporting culture of their Greek ancestors. While the sports of the nobility were inherited strictly from Western ancestors, the games played by nobles and peasants alike 23

during the cold European winters came from all across the eastern hemisphere. The Islamic Arabian empire expanded rapidly under the Prophet Muhammad (570-632), eventually into Sassanid Persian territory. The Arabs learned shatranj from the Persians in the sixth century and brought it with them first to northern Africa, then the Iberian Peninsula. Anand summarizes: “Chess traveled westward out of India, through what is now Afghanistan into Persia, where it arrived during the Sassanid Empire — an Indian king is believed to have sent a chessboard as a gift to his Persian counterpart. At the royal court in Ctesiphon, the game was known as chatrang. The Arabs learned it (they called it shatranj) when they conquered Persia in the 6th century A.D. and carried it across northern Africa. They introduced the game to Europe when the Moors crossed the Mediterranean into the Iberian peninsula. It grew immensely popular in Moorish Spain, where it was played in the street — a practice still seen in parks and other squares in cities around the world.”23

In a world where dice and other elements of luck were being used to create wide varieties of games in the vein of kubeia, chess remained more or less the sole representative of petteia. Within religious circles in particular, chess came to be regarded as a paradigmatic game of pure skill and intellect, as opposed to the luckbased affairs of the ever-popular dice games which were condemned within the clergy. Influenced in part by the Arab scholars with which he kept contact, Alfonso X of Castile commissioned the Libro de los juegos, an early primer on chess, dice games, and backgammon, in 1283. In it, he assigns a privileged position to chess, for “although

23

Viswanathan Anand, "The Indian Defense," TIME (19 June 2008). Web.

24

these games may be divided in many ways,” chess was, by all standards, “more noble and of greater mastery than the others.”24 Even more significant to Alfonso, however, is the game of tabula, or todas tablas (“all tables”), a predecessor of backgammon. “Although [tables] might need dice that show luck with which to be played,” he writes, “still they are to be played intelligently taking therefore from where it should be required, the brain… and also from luck.”25 To Alfonso, tables were a synthesis of the intellect and skill of battle games and the variance of race games, combining elements of both genres to create a challenge for players that was unprecedented at the time. The illusory “skill of the dice” that the Roman tesserarii had deluded themselves with now suddenly gained legitimacy in tables, for “he that knows how to play [tables] well, even though the luck of the dice be against him, that because of his prudence he will be able to play his pieces in such a manner as to avoid the harm that may come to him through the rolls of the dice.”26 8. The works of al-Farabi in the ninth and tenth centuries triggered a sort of “renaissance of Plato’s philosophy in Islam,” and the new Muslim rationalism continued with many of the philosophical traditions of the ancient Greeks. Al-Farabi (872-951) extended the Platonic and Aristotelian frameworks for ideal states in anticipation of Hobbes’ social contract theory and ported Aristotle’s four causes over to the Muslim world. Ibn Sina (980-1037) united the rich Islamic tradition of theology with Al-Farabi’s Aristotelianism in his systematic treatment of metaphysics. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) struck out against his predecessors’ treatment of the division of sciences. The medieval Muslim

Alfonso, Book of Games 4. Ibid., 5. 26 Ibid. 24 25

25

philosophers, like their Christian contemporaries, had become enthralled with the capacity of the human mind for “knowledge of both the ‘world of spirits’ and the world of human beings.” One of their main intellectual struggles was that of finding philosophical foundations for theology together with theological justifications for philosophy, resulting in a branch of “philosophical” sciences rich with

“systematic

treatments”

of

anything

and

everything

conceivable, including conception itself.27 Ibn Khaldun saw these as an impending threat to order and progress as they became increasingly at odds with the traditional sciences. He believed the Greek political theories had abstracted too far from reality and fallen out of touch with the real needs of real civilizations, and struck out on an alternative approach focused on history and raw empirical data. Spengler’s 1964 analysis remains the prevailing Western reading of the theory Ibn Khaldun arrived at in the Muqaddimah: “A new dynasty comes into being and as it acquires strength, it extends the area within which order prevails and urban settlement and civilization can flourish. Crafts increase in number and there is greater division of labor, in part because aggregate income rises, swelled by increase in population and in output per worker, and provides an expanding market, a very important segment of which is that supported by governmental expenditure. Growth is not halted either by a dearth of effort or by a shortage of demand; for tastes change and demand rises as income grows, with the result that demand keeps pace with supply. Luxurious consumption and easy living serve, however, to soften both dynasty and population and to dissipate hardier qualities and virtues. Growth is halted by the inevitable weakening and collapse of the ruling dynasty, usually after three or four generations, a process that is

27

Joseph J. Spengler, “Economic Thought of Islam: Ibn Khaldun,” Comparative

Studies in Society and History 6.3 (April 1964): 284.

26

accompanied by deterioration of economic conditions, decline of the economy in complexity, and the return of more primitive conditions.”28

Like the cultures of sporting and gaming that had spread throughout most of Europe by the Middle Ages, Ibn Khaldun’s primitive economics are derivative of the conflicts between nations that had shaped human history up to that point. In the former case, sports and games were both initially created in the image of war. In the latter case, Ibn Khaldun and his contemporaries stumbled across economic theories in the simple act of accumulating records of the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. It is likely that this body of empirical economic knowledge was shared across the world, but never explicitly labelled or written in any structured form: “One is compelled to infer from a comparison of Ibn Khaldun's economic ideas with those set down in Muslim moralphilosophical literature that the knowledge of economic behavior in some circles was very great indeed, having been acquired through contact with cumulating experience, and that one must turn to the writings of those with access to this knowledge and experience if one would know the actual state of Muslim economic knowledge… A comparison of his ideas with those of similarly situated writers in early Indian, Chinese, and European societies suggests that there did exist a very considerable pool of economic knowledge or wisdom, even though, for a variety of reasons, this did not get set down in an orderly fashion in manuals or treatises.”29

28 29

Ibid., 290. Ibid., 304.

27

10. The Renaissance began roughly at the start of the fifteenth century with the recovery of Greek literature that had been censored from the European public sphere since Roman rule. The resulting return to Greek values brought with it a number of innovations in sports and games. First and foremost is the advent of chess as it is known today. The old medieval chess ruleset had become somewhat stagnant: at the time, the queen could only move diagonally and the bishop could only “jump” three squares in any diagonal direction, akin to the knight. So, the games were boring and stodgy, and the high-level players spent their time betting on and solving chess problems rather than playing actual games. Alternate rulesets had arisen locally over the years as the result of various attempts to remedy the problems with the “standard” ruleset in the absence of a governing body with a final say in rules disputes. “Queen’s chess,” the current standard ruleset with pawn promotion and improved queen and bishop, began in a literary circle in Valencia, Spain sometime around 1470-1490 and made waves immediately. By the end of the fifteenth century, the game’s intellectual landscape had changed completely: “The new form of playing chess adopted in the chess circle of Valencia completely changes the picture. With the rapid movements of queen and bishop, the theory of opening play becomes very important because it is possible to checkmate the opponent in a few moves. Arab players, with the old rules, didn't bother too much about the opening because the chess armies deployed slowly. So, each player, when beginning the game, had in mind a distinct order of battle or tabiya (classified with fancy names) which he intended to obtain, without caring about the opponent's moves. The real chess battle started in the middle game. Modern chess changes also all principles of attack and defense, because the new moves of queen and bishop increase

28

tremendously the possibilities. Likewise, previous endgame theory is quite thoroughly shaken since a pawn can promote to a powerful queen. A completely new game has emerged.” 30

Furthermore, advances in woodcutting technology allowed for the mass production of decks of Egyptian playing cards across Europe starting in 1418. Around 1480, the French suits (diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades) replaced the eminent Latin paradigm of swords, clubs, cups, and coins as the standard for production; the new decks were much easier to produce, as they only required a single color on all but face cards. By the sixteenth century, France had become the primary supplier of playing cards to England; decks in the French style spread to North America soon after. The universalization of queen’s chess and the mass production of playing cards were made possible in part by a revolution in communication technology in the form of the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1436. No aspect of European daily life went unchanged by print: “We take print for granted today. It’s so much a part of our daily existence that we rarely stop to consider how growing up on the printed word affects the very way our minds are organized. While medieval script was idiosyncratic and varied with the subjective contribution of each scribe’s input, print removed the subjective element, replacing it with a more rational, calculating, and analytical approach to knowledge. And unlike oral communication, which depended on memory and therefore formulaic responses, print stored memory and systematized the retrieval of information -- in the form of tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, and bibliographies -- allowing the mind to deepen and

Ricardo Calvo, “Valencia Spain: The Cradle of European Chess,” Presentation to the CCI, May 1998. 30

29

expand vocabulary and develop a far more nuanced language that could be tailored to the specific moment or experience.” 31

One of the first books printed in English was Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse (1470), which translated and spread some core principles from the sermons of the thirteenth-century Dominican monk Jacobus de Cessolis. The Spanish and Portuguese masters followed soon after with the earliest theoretical chess treatises as the printing press spread across mainland Europe. The earliest modern chess book, Vicent’s Llibre dels jochs partitis del schachs en nombre de 100, was published in Valencia in 1495, containing a definitive set of chess rules and a hundred chess problems, supposedly complete with solutions. Many of these problems were slightly altered and republished by Lucena in the 1497 Repetición de amores y arte de ajedrez. Francesch Vicent left Spain for Rome around the turn of the sixteenth century and is thought to have translated much of his earlier work and theories into Italian in the 1512 Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de le partite under the pseudonym Pedro Damiano. 10i. With a vast base of literature came rapid improvement in the science of chess, so much that the contents of the Lucena and Vicent manuscripts were considered obsolete at the highest levels of play by the later half of the sixteenth century. They were succeeded by the personal notebooks of many prominent European masters, which were viciously guarded from rivals and made largely unavailable from the public: “Many of the players of this period kept note-books in which they recorded the openings of games for reference or later use. The keen chess-life of the time led to so rapid a development of the 31

Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society (New York: St. Martin's) 43.

30

science of the Openings, that the existing textbooks soon became obsolete, and it was imperative that the player who desired to excel should have more up-to-date information... None of these players felt disposed to print his collection of Openings; the high stakes for which players played made it desirable to keep information as to new Openings private, but a wealthy patron could always obtain a copy from the players whom he included in his retinue. In this way the surviving [manuscripts] of this class have for the most part escaped destruction.”32

The network of knowledge that took over the chess world mirrored the Renaissance politics at large that motivated Machiavelli’s Il Principe in 1513. Since the thirteenth century, Italy had been split into feuding city-states whose princes played veritable games of power with one another. These often resulted in tangible, physical wars, which were often fought by mercenaries: “The game of power politics in Italy was unbelievably complex. The minor princes, mostly self-made tyrants, allied themselves now with one of the larger States, now with another; if they played the game unwisely, they were exterminated. There were constant wars, but until the coming of the French in 1494 they were almost bloodless: the soldiers were mercenaries, who were anxious to minimize their vocational risks. These purely Italian wars did not interfere much with trade, or prevent the country from increasing in wealth. There was much statecraft, but no wise statesmanship; when the French came, the country found itself practically defenceless. French troops shocked the Italians by actually killing people in battle. The wars between French and Spaniards which ensued were serious wars, bringing suffering and impoverishment. But the Italian States went on intriguing against each other, invoking the aid of France or Spain in their internal 32

Murray 820.

31

quarrels, without any feeling for national unity… The desirability of Italian unity was evident, but the rulers were incapable of combination. The danger of foreign domination was imminent, yet every Italian ruler was prepared to invoke the aid of any foreign power, even the Turk, in any dispute with any other Italian ruler.”33

Usurers were declared excommunicated by the Vatican in 1179, and Aquinas joined Aristotle and Plato in their condemnation of usury in the Summa Theologica. However, after Fibonacci’s 1202 Liber Abaci, which imported from the East concepts like the decimal system, fractions, and present value, the prospective financiers in Italy could no longer be repressed by taboo. The Florentine houses Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli rose to power in the early fourteenth century by facilitating massive underground loans to wealthy foreign clients. All three learned first-hand of the “inherent weakness” of the foreign creditor in the 1340s when they fell in the midst of defaults by the kings of England and Naples.34 In their wake, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici rose to dominance first in Rome, then his hometown Florence, and finally all of Italy with key innovations in the medieval system of cambium per literas (“bills of exchange”). Giovanni made his initial fortune managing his cousin’s bank in Rome, but saw even greater financial opportunities in his hometown, beginning a Medici tradition of “diversification” and “decentralization” that set them apart from their predecessors: “Whereas earlier Italian banks had been monolithic structures, easily brought down by one defaulting debtor, the Medici bank was in fact multiple related partnerships, each based on a special, Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Unwin Bros) 520-523. 34 Niall Ferguson, Ascent of Money (New York: Penguin) 42. 33

32

regularly renegotiated contract. Branch managers were not employees but junior partners who were remunerated with a share of the profits. It was this decentralization that helped make the Medici bank so profitable.”35

11. Prior to the sixteenth century, the medieval economic writing in the West inherited Aristotle’s Metallist theory of the nature of money from the Politics and Nichomachean Ethics. Aquinas (1225– 1274) added a distinctly Christian teleology to Aristotelian economic thought, focusing on “what was held to be the true end or purpose of money and on its three principle functions as laid down by Aristotle, more particularly its use as a medium of exchange.”36 He reiterated Aristotle’s condemnation of usury and declared that swapping foreign currencies for the purpose of foreign exchange was similarly contrary to the nature of money. The tradition of Western literature that followed Aquinas wrestled mainly with Plato’s problem of the just price: “To sum up, it would seem that supply-and-demand, utility, cost of production (including the remuneration of labour), and other factors such as the cost of transport and risk, were all to be taken into account in determining value. These apparent contradictions cannot be attributed to mere carelessness on the part of such skilled reasoners as the schoolmen. They rather imply a realistic acknowledgement of the dual aspect of price, and an anticipation of the intertwining of subjective and objective factors in modern theory.”37

Ibid., 45-46. Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, School of Salamanca (Oxford: Clarendon) 2627. 37 Ibid., 27-28. 35 36

33

It became increasingly clear to medieval writers that suppliers could overcharge the common man at will if the objective, cost-ofproduction theory of value is read absolutely maximally. A “common estimation” by the community at large was seen as more fair. The gradual trend towards subjective theories of value culminated in the Salamancan school of economic thought in the sixteenth century: “Those who measure the just price by the labour, costs, and risk incurred by the person who deals in the merchandise or produces it, or by the cost of transport or the expense of traveling...or by what he has to pay the factors for their industry, risk, and labour, are greatly in error.... For the just price arises from the abundance or scarcity of goods, merchants, and money...and not from costs, labour, and risk.... Why should a bale of linen brought overland from Brittany at great expense be worth more than one which is transported cheaply by sea?... Why should a book written out by hand be worth more than one which is printed, when the latter is better though it costs less to produce?... The just price is found not by counting the cost but by the common estimation.” 38

The Salamancan school’s main focus with regards to monetary theory was to explain the problem of inflation. Jean Bodin is often credited with the discovery that prices rise with an increase in the monetary base in 1568, but the Spanish, having been the first to plunder the Americas, were about a decade faster, with Navarro in 1556: “The basic principles of the quantity theory had certainly been glimpsed by medieval writers, while the effect of American treasure on the European price-level was first noted, as we might

Luis Saravia de la Calle, Instrucción de mercaderes (1544) in GriceHutchinson, School of Salamanca 79-82. 38

34

naturally expect, in Spain, the country where it was first felt. We have seen that both prices and the imports of bullion reached a new high level in the sixth decade of the century. In 1556 Azpilcueta Navarro produced the first clear statement that the high cost of living was a result of the import of treasure… He thus preceded Bodin by twelve years. In England it was not until 1581 that the same observation was made, and it is interesting to see how American treasure in its passage across Europe called up the quantity theory in Spain, France, and England successively.” 39

One consequence of this view is the purchasing-power parity theory of exchange; as prices in one country rise due to inflation, the currency of that country becomes weaker relative to currencies of other countries. These effects were felt most harshly by Spain in the sixteenth century: “...When money was sent from foreign countries to Spain a considerably larger sum was usually repaid in Spain than had been delivered abroad, but when money was sent in the opposite direction, from Spain to places abroad, only a slightly larger sum, and sometimes even a smaller one, was repaid abroad than had been delivered in Spain. This discrepancy had nothing to do with the quality of the actual coins delivered and repaid. It existed even when the transaction was confined to one particular kind of money, such as the Spanish escudo, and therefore the question of weight, fineness, tale, etc. could not enter into the matter. Moreover, the same amount of labour and risk were involved in sending money from Spain to places abroad as in the other direction.”40

39 40

Grice-Hutchinson 52. Ibid., 54.

35

These conditions led de Soto to the following conclusions in 1553: “The more plentiful money is in Medina the more unfavourable are the terms of exchange, and the higher the price that must be paid by whoever wishes to send money from Spain to Flanders, since the demand for money is smaller in Spain than in Flanders. And the scarcer money is in Medina the less he need pay there, because more people want money in Medina than are sending it to Flanders.”41

12. In 1560, the Spanish bishop Ruy López de Segura sought out the Italian chess clubs during his travels to Rome, defeating famed Italian masters Leonardo “il Puttino” di Bona and Paolo “il Siracusiano” Boi. Within a year, he had written his response to the Damiano manuscript, the Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez, in which he criticized Damiano’s approach to openings, in particular his line for Black in 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6. López declared this suboptimal because White can set the pace of play with 3. Bb6, the opening that would eventually be named after him. Spain was ostensibly on top of the world of chess in 1561 between the rich Spanish tradition of chess literature and López having defeated Italy’s strongest on their home turf. However, after over a decade of preparation and study, di Bona exacted revenge upon López in 1575 at the first international chess tournament, hosted by King Philip II in Madrid. As the story goes, the King almost left in disgust when di Bona purposely lost the first two games of his best-of-five set. When il Puttino won the next three in a row, the King was so impressed he granted him a host of riches and jewels along with a single wish, genie-in-a-bottle-style; di 41

Domingo de Soto, De Justitia et Jure (1553) in Grice-Hutchinson 79-82.

36

Bona had his country absolved of fiscal dues to Spain for some number of years. Paolo Boi placed ahead of López and the other Spaniards at the tournament, but ultimately lost out to di Bona’s consistent, sound fundamentals; regardless, the “open and attacking” Italian play had proven itself over the underdeveloped, space-based Spanish style.42 Gioachino Greco (c.1600-1634) bookended the Renaissance era of Italian dominance in chess, and the manuscripts of games he kept from his travels throughout France and Britain set a new standard for chess literature when they were finally published in 1656. Murray notes that he surpassed his predecessors by going beyond the opening and showing the public the full stories produced by every game of chess: “The Greco [manuscripts] of the English and the second French visits are no longer collections of Openings only, but are collections of games in which the play is continued until the mate is reached or in sight. The concluding combinations are often extraordinarily brilliant and suggestive, although it must be admitted that they are often only possible as the result of weak moves on the opponent's part. A complete game appeals to a larger public than does analysis, however accurate, and it is to this novel feature of Greco's work that its instant and lasting popularity was due.”43

13. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the Aristotelian philosophical tradition combined with the rapidly expanding scientific literature motivated the dueling traditions of empiricist and rationalist philosophy that would become iconic of the Enlightenment. Aristotle’s model of knowledge had been made 42 43

Murray 824. Ibid., 830.

37

obsolete by scientific advances which Bacon (1561-1626) sought explanation for in a unifying philosophical principle that would serve as the foundation for all of science: “When Bacon introduces his new systematic structure of the disciplines in The Advancement of Learning (1605), he continues his struggle with tradition, primarily with classical antiquity, rejecting the book learning of the humanists, on the grounds that they ‘hunt more after words than matter.’ Accordingly, he criticizes the Cambridge University curriculum for placing too much emphasis on dialectical and sophistical training asked of ‘minds empty and unfraught with matter.’ He reformulates and functionally transforms Aristotle's conception of science as knowledge of necessary causes. He rejects Aristotle's logic, which is based on his metaphysical theory, whereby the false doctrine is implied that the experience which comes to us by means of our senses (things as they appear) automatically presents to our understanding things as they are. Simultaneously Aristotle favors the application of general and abstract conceptual distinctions, which do not conform to things as they exist. Bacon, however, introduces his new conception of philosophia prima as a meta-level for all scientific disciplines.”44

Alongside this new model of knowledge came a new conception of metaphysics in Descartes’ Meditationes (1641). The cogito ergo sum committed Descartes and the philosophers that followed him to a new philosophy of the mind as the self-awareness that Descartes could not doubt. “Mind” had become something entirely different from the antiquarian νους (nous) or the scholastic anima. Prior to this “invention of the mind,” as termed by Rorty, the

Jürgen Klein, "Francis Bacon" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015). Web. 44

38

duality between the worlds of sensation and reflection was not something philosophers concerned themselves with, and “mind” referred to something different entirely: “To show that mind was imaginable apart from body was thus an entirely different project from that found in the tradition which stemmed from Aristotle. In Aristotle, the faculty which received universals without embodying them in matter was ‘separable’ and it was hard... to say whether one should view it as a special power which the body had, a separate substance attached to each mature human body, or perhaps a single substance which was somehow shared among as many men and angels as there happened to be. Aristotle vacillated between the first and second options, with the second having the usual attractions offered by the possibility of surviving death. Medieval philosophy vacillated between the second and third. But in all these disputes the controversy was not about the survival of ‘consciousness’ but about the indestructibility of reason. Once mind is no longer synonymous with reason then something other than our grasp of universal truths must serve as the mark of mind.”45

15i. Starting in the sixteenth century, the feudal social structure gave way to new economies of trade between Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Colonial economics largely picked up where Aquinas and his contemporaries had left off with regards to the project of fully “naturalizing” the metaphysical concept of the just price that had originated with Aristotle. Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologica (1274) that property was a product of human reason that ought to be nourished and harnessed for the common good rather than condemned on metaphysical premises. On this

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UP) 52-54. 45

39

view, there are many different prices paid by different individuals for a specific good in practice, which tend towards a “just price” that in theory “consists in the public’s evaluation of the commodity.”46 Schumpeter credits Duns Scotus (1266-1308) with having linked this just price to cost of production, predicting what would become known in the nineteenth century as the Law of Cost. With these authors, the early framework was complete for what Schumpeter terms an “economic rationalism” that developed in parallel to the new scientific attitudes of the times: “Scientific activity is often looked upon as the standard instance of rational activity in the sense that the worker, whatever his ultimate aim, allows himself to be guided by the rules of logical inference. This is indeed not quite accurate: precisely the strongest achievements in science proceed not from observation or experimentation and orderly logic-chopping but from something that is best called vision and is akin to artistic creation. Still, results have to be ‘proved’ by the logical or rational procedure dictated by professional standards and this suffices to impress rationality in this sense—which has nothing to do with the sense discussed above—upon the stock of scientific knowledge that we possess at any time… Just as we may look upon the physical universe—in the way first made fashionable by the Stoics—as a logically consistent whole that is modeled upon an orderly plan—so we may look upon society as a cosmos that is possessed of inherent logical consistency. For us, it matters little whether this order is imposed upon it by divine will—directed to some definite ends by an invisible hand—or is inherent merely in the sense that the observer discovers in it plan and purpose that are independent of his analytic rationality, because in either case nothing is allowed to

46

Schumpeter 89-90.

40

enter that ‘rational’ cosmos but what comes within the grasp of the light of reason.”47

By the seventeenth century, the feudal markets dominated by local guilds of craftsmen were beginning to cave under the pressure of the combined efforts of small-manufacturing entrepreneurs of the new wind and water energy industries and the new class of merchants which outsourced labor in the putting-out system. The latter class went on to influence the first waves of mercantilist trade policies throughout Europe at the expense of the former: “[The new manufacturers and merchants] parted company… on the question of exports for foreign trade. The merchants aligned with the monarchies in pursuit of colonial policies that favored foreign over domestic trade. The mercantilist’s rationale was to heavily regulate domestic production to secure high-quality goods at cheap prices for sale abroad at inflated prices, to be paid in precious metals. The overseas colonies, in turn, were prevented from producing finished goods and restricted to producing cheap raw materials for export back to the host countries, and then forced to buy the finished manufactured goods from the home country at a higher price.”48

At this point, economics proper was still excluded from philosophia prima, and so economic writing was found in jurisprudence and government policy rather than comprehensive treatises on philosophy and science. Oeconomia was still a fancy way of saying “household management,” or the “prudence” necessary to “govern a family.” 49 Contemporary historians unanimously confer Ibid., 109-110. Rifkin 45. 49 Schumpeter 151. 47 48

41

the lofty title of paradigmatic mercantilist of the seventeenth century to Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), minister of finance under Louis XIV and pioneer of many mercantilist doctrines motivated by French colonialism in the St. Lawrence River Valley. The underlying theories behind policies like these festered and eventually blossomed in Mun’s England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade in 1664. The infamous decree in which Colbert set strict import and export quotas in order to achieve a “favorable balance of trade” followed four years after. In short, the ideal mercantilist balance of trade involved importation of raw materials and exportation of manufactured products, as a nation drew its economic and militaristic power from its stock of precious metals. 16. For any given question raised by Descartes in the Meditationes along dimensions of metaphysics or epistemology, two predominant lines of interpretation appear to have followed throughout the rest of the seventeenth century. The rationalists proceeded by dropping Descartes’ “ridicu-lous ref-er-ence to the pineal gland in order to explain the coordin-a-tion between the mater-ial and the spir-itual sub-stance” while joining Descartes in maintaining via the cogito that thought, rather than sensation, was the primary foundation for knowledge. 50 Malebranche (1638-1713) cut material substance from the equation entirely, resulting in a primitive idealism, and Spinoza (1632-1677) dissolved both mind and matter under deus sive natura (“both God and nature”). The first generation of British empiricists took an entirely different approach, rejecting both Descartes’ dualism and his rationalism. This line of responses to Descartes starts with the notorious exchange between Descartes and Hobbes following the Slavoj Žižek, "Cogito, Madness, and Religion" in Theology After Lacan (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2015). 50

42

1641 printing of the Meditationes and culminates in the publication of Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651. For Hobbes, all mental processes follow from sensation, and understanding is explained by a materialistic account of the mind which he “had no wish to distinguish from something else called ‘science.’”51 Upon his return to London from exile as the seventeenth century drew to a close, Locke (1632-1704) made this Cartesian-Hobbesian concept of mind the subject matter of its own distinct “science of man” by “confusedly thinking that an analogue of Newton’s particle mechanics for ‘inner space’ would somehow be ‘of great advantage in directing our thoughts in the search of other things’ and would somehow let us ‘see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.’” 52 Not only did Locke believe that this account would dissolve the mindbody problem that Descartes had raised, but he intended for it to serve the role of philosophia prima, a new epistemology which serves as a foundation for all other claims to knowledge. Rorty summarizes this wave of developments as follows: “The idea of a discipline devoted to ‘the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge’ -- the textbook definition of ‘epistemology’ - required a field of study called ‘the human mind,’ and that field of study was what Descartes had created. The Cartesian mind simultaneously made possible veil-of-ideas skepticism and a discipline devoted to circumventing such skepticism... This is not to say, however, that the invention of the Cartesian mind is a sufficient condition for the development of epistemology. That invention gave us the notion of inner representations, but this notion would not have given rise to epistemology without the confusion I attributed to Locke -- the confusion, of which Descartes was largely innocent, between a mechanistic account of the

51 52

Rorty 131. Ibid., 137.

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operations of our mind and the ‘grounding’ of our claims to knowledge.”53

17. The first half of the eighteenth century brought minor tweaks to the preceding early modern traditions. Idealism started with Berkeley and Leibniz in the second decade as a reaction to the hard materialism that Locke had arrived at. Berkeley’s 1710 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge rejected any and all knowledge of external material objects and held that “esse est percipi:” to be is to be perceived. In Berkeley’s view, we cannot infer the existence of external objects from perceptions alone; there are no material objects for our ideas to resemble or refer to, only other ideas. Leibniz preferred to “reduce” material bodies to their simplest components, but where Democritus found the atom, Leibniz finds the monad, a simple mind-like substance consisting in the unity of perception and appetition. Empiricism survived across the channel in Hume in the wake of the Irish movement for economic independence from Britain. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume rails against the “popular superstitions” of the philosophers that preceded him for attempting to “penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding.”54 Hume’s great contribution was his rejection of all claims to knowledge of causation, unprecedented in the Scholastics and Cartesians alike. This left philosophy with an uncomfortable skepticism in the connection between cause and effect that had hitherto been taken for granted, a skepticism that “none could refute and none could accept.” 55 The ripples of Hume’s skepticism could be felt in the budding sphere of economic analysis; Ibid., 140. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon) 11. 55 Russell 514. 53 54

44

in Schumpeter’s account, Hume is the first to have shown “clearly and explicitly” and “on the level of pure logic” that the question of “what quantity of money a given country needs” has no answer: “...On the one hand, any quantity of money, however small, will do in an isolated country; on the other hand, with perfect gold currency all round, every country will always tend to have the amount appropriate to its relative position in international trade. But in the sixteenth century people thought differently, and practical sense may in fact be imparted to that question by adding: at the prevailing level of prices. Thus amended, the problem was to determine the requirements of internal circulation under given conditions of time and place with a view either to support up to a point or to combat beyond that point the ‘mercantilist’ policy of enforcing gold and silver imports.”56

17i. The latter half of the seventeenth century saw Kant (17241801) attempt a synthesis of all of the preceding early modern schools of thought. First and foremost, Kant’s critical project begins with Hume, whose sweeping critique of causal philosophy had just made waves in the world of academia a few decades prior. As recounted by Hegel in one of his lectures (c.1825): “The significance of the Kantian philosophy, generally expressed, is from the very beginning to allow that determinations such as those of universality and necessity are not to be met with in perception, and this Hume has already shown in relation to Locke. But while Hume attacks the universality and necessity of the categories generally... Kant merely argues against their objectivity in so far as they are present in external things themselves, while

Schumpeter 301. EDT \\ Kumamoto City, Kumamoto Prefecture, January 1975.

56 d

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maintaining them to be objective in the sense of holding good as universal and necessary, as they do, for instance, in mathematics and natural science. The fact that we crave for universality and necessity as that which first constitutes the objective, Kant thus undoubtedly allows. But if universality and necessity do not exist in external things, the question arises ‘Where are they to be found?’ To this Kant, as against Hume, maintains that they must be a priori, i.e. that they must rest on reason itself, and on thought as self-conscious reason; their source is the subject, ‘I’ in my selfconsciousness. This, simply expressed, is the main point in the Kantian philosophy.”57

Kant brazenly declared the system outlined in his first Kritik (1781) the first of a new breed, the genesis of a new “transcendental” line of idealism: transcendental, because it transcended the preceding questions

of

universality

and

necessity

while

nonetheless

demonstrating the “universal and necessary elements in the selfconscious understanding,”58 and idealist, because it advanced claims of knowledge which were a priori and not necessarily “inferred inductively from experience.”59 In his own words, Kant had “effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy,” in which he had solved all metaphysical problems and left the tools necessary to solve any further philosophical problems that could arise in the future. 60 Consequently, ethical and moral problems were to be solved a priori through reason alone, for moral worth is only conceivable in a free will, i.e. a mind that can act rationally according to its concept of a law. The closest thing to such a solution provided by Kant is the categorical imperative. Essentially a logical reformation of the 57

G. W. F. Hegel, “Recent German Philosophers: Kant,” sec 3b in Lectures on

the History of Philosophy (Hegel by HyperText). Web. Ibid. Russell 732. 60 Ibid., 733. 58 59

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Golden Rule, Kant formulates the categorical imperative in the second Kritik (1788) as follows: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.”61 Finally, in the third Kritik (1790), Kant arrived at a new aesthetic theory in which he sought to “combine the two parts of philosophy into a whole.” By “two parts,” Kant invokes the division of theoretical philosophy, covered in the first Kritik, and practical philosophy, or ethics, in the second Kritik. Kant believed he had located the “middle term” or “in-between” of this dichotomy in aesthetic judgment. Hegel continues: “The highest form in which the conception of the concrete comes into Kant’s philosophy is this, that the end is grasped in its entire universality; and thus it is the Good. This Good is an Idea; it is my thought; but there exists the absolute demand. that it should be realized also in the world, that the necessity of Nature should correspond with the laws of freedom, not as the necessity of an external Nature, but through what is right and moral in human life, through life in the State, — or in other words that the world in general should be good. This identity of the Good and reality is the demand of practical Reason; but subjective Reason cannot realize this. In every good action a man no doubt accomplishes something good, but this is only limited; universal Good, as the final object of the world, can be attained to only through a third. And this power over the world, which has as its final object the Good in the world, is God. Thus the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment also ends with the postulate of God. Now, although the particular laws of Nature, as independent individual relations, have no relation to the Good, Reason consists in having and desiring unity as the essential or substantial in itself. The opposition of these two, the Good and the world, is contrary to that identity; Reason must therefore demand that this contradiction should be abrogated, that there should be a 61

Ibid., 737.

47

power which is good on its own account, and is a Power over Nature. This is the position which God assumes in Kant’s philosophy: no proof is possible, he says, of God’s existence, but the demand is there. The deficiency here is the impossibility of proving God’s existence, and it consists in this, that if we admit Kant’s dualism, it cannot be shown how the Good as abstract Idea in itself is the abrogating of its Idea as abstract; and how the world in itself is the abrogating of itself in its externality, and in its diversity from the Good — this being done in order that both may reveal themselves to be their truth, which in respect to them appears as the Third, but is at the same time determined as the First. Thus, therefore, according to Kant, God can only be believed in.” 62

I saw the figure in white again as I got off my flight to Long Beach. I got a better view this time and it’s definitely a woman’s body under the robes. They watched me get into the cab to the Queen Mary, but I didn’t see them after I got into the cab. I have solved all philosophical problems in the duel. I didn’t lose a single game this past night. Steven Klaus got really mad. I we will be the king of games. 18. After Greco passed in 1634, European chess proceeded for about a century without any individual player making a definitive claim to best in the world. While the literature on openings had become rich and vast, the very idea that the endgame was something that could be theorized about was not widely grasped throughout the West until the Syrian Philipp Stamma (1705-1755) published his Essai sur le jeu des echecs while living in France. At the time, the Middle East’s tradition of endgame literature was comparable in size and depth to Europe’s literature on the opening; Stamma brought these traditions together and remained dominant in his travels across 62

Hegel, “Kant,” in Lectures.

48

France and England from one coffee house to the next. Philidor (17261795), a young French musician, scored a convincing 8-1-1 win over Stamma during a visit to London’s Slaughter Coffee House in 1747. His Analyse du jeu des Échecs, which covered openings as well as endgame theory, followed two years after. In the latter analysis, he identifies ranges of common endgame situations and explores proper play on both sides for each. Philidor solidified himself as the new king of European coffeehouse chess when he finally defeated his former master de Legalle upon his return to France from England in 1754. 19. As the last century of the Enlightenment drew to a close, the Western world became engulfed in revolutionary conflicts beginning in the New World in 1776. First to note is the growing resentment towards mercantilist policies and theories by the European and American public. In England a “general tendency towards freer trade” had already begun to take shape as early as 1713 with the treaty of Utrecht, with the Dutch, the Germans, and the Italians following suit: “In England this tendency had already asserted itself in the growing opposition to the Navigation Acts and other ‘mercantilist’ measures, for example, in the Committee on Trade of 1668. Much more significant was the assault on the system that the Tories, under Harley and St. John, made in 1713: the eighth and ninth clauses of the peace treaty of Utrecht went a long way toward free trade with France… The governments from Bute’s to North’s had other worries, but Shelburne and especially the younger Pitt led the way toward fewer and lower duties— the latter’s crowning achievement being the commercial treaty with France, 1786… In the German and Italian states we see at first glance nothing except further development of the ‘mercantilist’ system. But its

49

rationalization led in many instances to a reduction of the burdens on inter-territorial trade, especially in raw materials and semifinished products. In the Netherlands, as we should expect, a much more definite tendency toward freer trade already had asserted itself in the seventeenth century… Free-trade conviction began to spread as part of a general laissez-faire code. With the bourgeois public, the operative impulse was simply surfeit with bureaucratic overadministration, which became so strong that even direct self-interest failed occasionally to counteract it. With the writers, or some of them, a similar impulse took on a philosophic flavor: free trade was increasingly considered as a part of the autonomy of the individual, which was held to imply a ‘natural right’ to trade as he pleased.”63

These tensions rose to crescendo with the outbreak of the American revolutionary war. Britain had built a massive empire upon the colonial network of trade at the expense of colonial importers. Points of interest include the Navigation Acts (1651-1663), the Currency Act (1764) and the Tea Act (1773), which motivated the Boston Tea Party and subsequently the Coercive Acts (1774); in every case, the British firms prospered while the colonial domestic markets suffered. As a “dark pall of depression” hung over the colonies, the American merchants and “whig elite” spoke more and more of “reasserting control over their commercial dealings and over the local economy in general,” especially in Philadelphia, New York, Charlestown, Boston, and Baltimore.64 Egnal and Ernst continue: “The upper-class whigs who stood in the forefront of the revolutionary movement retained their coherence and their momentum after 1776. Independence was no more their ultimate Schumpeter 350-351. Marc Egnal and Joseph Ernst, “Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 29.1 (Jan. 1972): 18-19. 63 64

50

goal than was the repeal of any specific piece of British legislation. The control over the American economy that they sought required a restructuring of government and a comprehensive program of legislation: for those in urban centers, a national banking system and American navigation acts, and for the tobacco planters of the South, the encouragement of national cities. In addition, upperclass whigs showed a continued concern for challenges from the ‘lower orders.’ The Constitution of 1789, from the whig elite’s viewpoint, was the culmination of the movement for Independence…”65

Smith’s Wealth of Nations took the economic world by storm in the same year as the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Inspired in part by conversations with Ben Franklin, Smith famously railed against Mun’s Treasure from the preceding century and put forth a new theory of market mechanics that would serve as a springboard for centuries of literature to come. On Smith’s view, the protectionist tariffs of the mercantilist system were fundamentally misguided, as was the mercantilist conception of a nation’s wealth as being necessarily tied to its stock in precious metals. Heilbroner remarks: “In a sense the vision of Adam Smith is a testimony to the eighteenth-century belief in the inevitable triumph of rationality and order over arbitrariness and chaos. Don’t try to do good, says Smith. Let good emerge as the by-product of selfishness… He urges that judges should be paid by the litigants rather than by the state, since in that way their self-interest will lead them to expedite the cases brought before them. He sees little future for the newly emerging business organizations called joint-stock companies (corporations), since it seems highly improbable that such

65

Ibid.

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impersonal bodies could muster the necessary self-interest to pursue complex and arduous undertakings. Even the greatest humanitarian movements, such as the abolition of slavery, are defended in his own terms; best abolish slavery, says Adam Smith, since to do so will probably be cheaper in the end... The complex irrational world is thus reduced to a kind of rational scheme where human particles are magnetized in a simple polarity toward profit and away from loss. The great system works, not because man directs it, but because self-interest and competition line up the filings in the proper way; the most that man can do is to help this natural social magnetism along, to remove whatever barriers stand before the free working-out of this social physics, and to cease his misguided efforts to escape from its thralldom.”66

The impact of the Wealth of Nations was felt immediately as an entirely new discipline of knowledge, along with an entirely new genre of marketable literature, began to take shape. Smith was made Edinburgh’s Commissioner of Customs two years after its publication, and the University of Glasgow, his alma mater, appointed him rector a decade after that. He spent the remainder of his years in relative peace and security, probably because he was very far away from the bloody revolutions across the channel. Schumpeter notes the fervor with which the book circulated: “Before the century was out the Wealth of Nations had run to nine English editions, not counting the ones that appeared in Ireland and the United States, and had been translated (so far as I know) into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish... This may be taken to measure the extent of its success in the first stage of its career. For a work of its type and calibre—which entirely lacked the graces of the esprit des lois—it can, I think, be called Robert Heilbroner, Worldly Philosophers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999) 42. 66

52

spectacular. But this was as nothing compared with the really significant success that is not so easy to measure: from about 1790 on, Smith became the teacher not of the beginner or the public but of the professionals, especially the professors. The thought of most of the [following generation of economists] started from him and most of them again never got beyond him. For half a century or more... Adam Smith supplied the bulk of the ideas of the average economist.”67

20. Meanwhile, the victory of the whig elite overseas motivated a similar stirring within the French class of literate homeowners and workers. The French revolution is widely regarded as having set the final nail in the coffin of absolutism and the feudal system. The preface of the first volume of Aulard’s landmark historical account captures adequately the perceived plight of the communes under the Sun King: “The condition of France was briefly this: that she was insolvent, enormously in debt, and hopelessly unproductive… Ignorant, hopeless, overburdened, with the weight of the whole nation on his shoulders; clad often in only a rough woollen kilt with a leather girdle; a mere slave, put into the world to fatten his masters; his nerves harassed continually by every kind of tyranny; forced to work, under the whip, on the public roads or in his seigneur’s fields; exasperated by the failure or destruction of his crops, by the perpetual disappointment of such miserable hopes as he might foolishly conceive; subject to famine; dying of starvation or lingering on a diet of mildewed grain or leaves or nettles: it is no wonder that the peasant… finally lost all patience; and fell, with

Schumpeter 187. Schumpeter’s ‘Reader’s Guide’ to the Wealth of Nations is unfinished and pieced together by the editor. The intended position or page number by Schumpeter of the quoted excerpt is unknown. The figure in white asked me why I lost two in a row again. 67

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his fellows, upon his tyrant’s château with pike and torch, destroying, with his hated enemy’s home, the feudal system itself.”68

The shrewd historian of today knows that this is, at best, only half of the story. While the Parisian masses that descended upon the Bastille in July of 1789 did so “on their own initiative, prompted by the food shortages hitting poor areas as well as by hatred of the king’s aristocratic friends,” it was the delegates of the Third Estate, mostly upper-middle class landowners, who convened under Lafayette to frame a new French constitution in the months that followed.69 To be clear, this revolution had bourgeois roots just as deep as those of the American revolution just decades prior: “As a privatized individual, the bourgeois was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others, i.e., bourgeois and homme. This ambivalence of the private sphere was also a feature of the public sphere, depending on whether privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings communicated through critical debate in the world of letters, about experiences of their subjectivity or whether private people in their capacity as owners of commodities communicated through rational-critical debate in the political realm, concerning the regulation of their private sphere. The circles of persons who made up the two forms of public were not even completely congruent. Women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere, whereas female readers as well as apprentices and servants often took a more active part in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and François Alphonse Aulard, The French Revolution: A Political History (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1910) 1.31. 69 Chris Harman, People’s History of the World (London: Bookmarks, 2002) 280. 68

54

family heads themselves. Yet in the educated classes the one form of public sphere was considered to be identical with the other; in the self-understanding of public opinion the public sphere appeared as one and indivisible. As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as propertyowners desired to influence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm. The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple.” 70

The threat of counter-revolutionary invasion by neighboring European nations opened a window for Robespierre, Danton, and Marat to undermine the fragile constitutional monarchy under Lafayette in 1792. In the next key “turning point” of the revolution in Harman’s account, the poor and the bourgeois marched together upon the royal palace to overthrow the monarchy: “It was not only the poor who were frightened by the spectre of counter-revolution, so were the radical sections of the middle class led by Robespierre, Danton and Marat. They saw that defeat stared them all in the face unless they made a further revolution. They did so on 10 August 1792, the second great turning point of the revolution. Tens of thousands of sans-culottes from the sections joined the fédérés to march on the Tuileries palace. National Guards who were meant to be defending the king joined the insurrection and it defeated the royal troops after a battle in which 600 royalists and 370 insurgents died... The Parisian masses were once again in Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT, 1989) 55-56. 70

55

control of the city. The Assembly, made up of ‘moderate’ representatives elected under the property qualification less than a year before, bowed to the new power. It voted to suspend the king, recognise the new revolutionary commune based on the Parisian sections, and organise new elections based on universal male suffrage.”71

The Parisian masses rallied and struck a decisive blow to the invading Prussian army at Valmy, and by 1794 the French army was making an argument for itself as “the best fighting force Europe had ever seen.”72 As the perceived need for martial law dwindled, so did support for the Jacobins, until in July, then Thermidor, the National Convention conspired to arrest and ultimately execute Robespierre and 92 of his allies. By the turn of the century, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) had emerged on top of all this revolutionary strife and chaos plaguing France, and the title he claimed was not king, but emperor. Tolstoy muses on this movement by which the old feudal regime had been supplanted: “And beginning with the French Revolution the old inadequately large group was destroyed, as well as the old habits and traditions, and step by step a group was formed of larger dimensions with new customs and traditions, and a man was produced who would stand at the head of the coming movement and bear the responsibility for all that had to be done. A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, without a name, and not even a Frenchman, emerges- by what seem the strangest chances- from among all the seething French parties, and without joining any one of them is borne forward to a prominent position.”73 Harman 283. Ibid., 298. 73 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Moscow: Russian Herald, 1869) 16.3, 1747. 71 72

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With the completion of this movement, Napoleon had fulfilled the French Nerevarine prophecy of Goethe himself, coming from an unknown background and garnering the assent and support of the tribes and houses which trifled amongst one another as the true enemy, Dagoth Ur, grew stronger in Red Mountain. And just as the Nerevarine severed the divinity of the Tribunal at the end of the ̛̭̜̻̝̼͎̐̌̑ͦ͢ ͌ Third Era, so too did Napoleon sever the divinity of the Sun King’s ͌ ̧̛̘̫̰̟̘̺͍̗̫͎̱̜̠̜͉̰ͩ̌̈́ͪ̑͆̂ͫ̏͊̚͝͡ ̅̍͋̾̓͂ͯ̑̅͊ ͂ ̎ ͂ legacy, and so g̉o ̉͂ ̀d b͂ ̃ ͍̰̥̰̞̦̉͜͝͠l̃e̦ḍ̀́̎.̦̣̀ After the revolution in France, war was no longer something to be avoided by the prudent general in fear of the uncertainty of combat. For Napoleon, war was not a bargaining piece in a diplomatic game, but a veritable extension of his will as a ruler. Freedman notes: “The French Revolution of 1789 was a source of great energy, innovation, and destruction. It unleashed political and social forces that could not be contained in their time and whose repercussions continued to be felt in the succeeding centuries. In military affairs, the Revolution led to large, popular armies whose impact was enhanced by the developing means of transporting them over long distances. There was a move away from limited wars of position, bound up with quarrels between individual rulers and shaped by logistical constraints and unreliable armies, to total wars engaging whole nations. With Napoleon, wars became means by which one state could challenge the very existence of another. No longer were they an elaborate form of bargaining. The high stakes removed incentives to compromise and encouraged a fight to a bloody conclusion. Military maneuvers were no longer ritualistic -- their impact reinforced by the occasional battle -- but preludes to great confrontations that could see whole armies effectively eliminated and states subjugated.”74

74

Freedman 70.

57

Thirty years before Napoleon seized power, Guibert’s Essai général de tactique had made standard the distinction between run-ofthe-mill “elementary” tactics, la tactique, and “grand tactics,” which became la stratégique. The focus of tactics was the direct handling of troops in battle, while strategy referred to the larger, broader decisions made by the commander-in-chief. For Napoleon, all was reduced to the former, which was in turn entirely a matter of practice rather than theory: “Napoleon preferred to keep the critical ingredients behind his approach beyond explanation. The art of war, he insisted, was simple and commonsensical. It was ‘all in execution… nothing about it is theoretical.’ The essence of the art was simple: ‘With a numerically inferior army’ it was necessary to have ‘larger forces than the enemy at the point which is to be attacked or defended.’ How best to achieve that was an art that could ‘be learned neither from books nor from practice.’ This was matter for the military genius and therefore for intuition.”75

With Napoleon, Freedman notes the birth of the “cult of the offensive,” a long tradition in military theory of focus on the “decisive battle.” The decisive battle was an early feature of ancient Western wars and rhetoric, as opposed to the indirect rhetorical and militaristic traditions in the East stemming from Sun Tzu. Napoleon possessed enough manpower and military genius to focus entirely on the decisive battle, and therefore had no need for indirect engagements; he would simply hold out for increasingly optimal positions until he finally decided to strike. As Napoleon’s was one of the most powerful armies the world had seen at the time, this

75

Ibid., 75.

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strike was almost always, by definition, a decisive victory in his favor. 21. In 1792, a book appeared which was initially thought to be a fourth Kritik by Kant, but turned out to be a commentary on Kant’s work by a young upstart Fichte (1762-1814). The Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung had been printed without its author’s name, signature or knowledge, and early reviews assumed that only Kant could have written something of such intellectual caliber. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre

(1794),

an

expansion

of

the

system

of

transcendental idealism which Fichte ascribed to Kant and which discarded entirely the “traditional ontology of substances and their accidents within which Berkeley still worked, which Hume questioned but for which he supplied no alternative, and which Kant again defended by conceiving of substance and accident as relational categories,”76 was considered one of the most important works of its age. Fichte placed divine revelation firmly in line with Kant’s ethics and metaphysics, but he was charged with atheism in an anonymous essay published in 1798 and was ultimately forced out of his position at the University of Jena and into refuge in Berlin. In his absence, his former pupil Schelling (1775-1854) rose to prominence as the new genius of the Romantic school. Lindsay summarizes this movement as follows: “The world was to Fichte as self-consciousness erects it; but the self which builds it was to the Romanticists the self of genius - of the constructive artist - and the real world is the world that satisfies such geniuses... [Schelling’s] ideal of man is just this genial and creative individuality - not, as with Fichte, moral will or

76

Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, "Idealism" in Stanford Encyclopedia

of Philosophy (Fall 2015). Web.

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character. The Romanticists preferred, to the ethical idealism of Fichte, [this] less severe mode of interpreting nature, idealistically, in terms of bold statement and striking divination.” 77

For Schelling as for Napoleon, the most important determinations required the intuition of an equally important genius; in Schelling’s case, this was an intellectual intuition which “discerns the identity of the One with the All” and “transform[s] into its own object what is otherwise no object, so that, in the result, the producing of the object and the perceiving are absolutely one."78 In 1801, Schelling

brought his good friend Hegel (1770-1831) to teach with him at Jena, where they managed the publication of an Idealist philosophy journal together until Schelling’s departure in 1803. Meanwhile, Napoleon had conquered Austria and set his sights on Germany. He located two key bastions of German military power in Jena and Auerstädt, and engaged both cities on the same day in October 1806. The King of Prussia faced the maréchal de fer, Davout, at Auerstädt, while Napoleon led the charge at Jena. Hegel watched as he added the finishing touches to his Phänomenologie, recalling in a later letter to a friend: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. As for the fate of the Prussians, in truth no better prognosis could be given. Yesterday it was said that the Prussian King had his headquarters in Kapellendorf, a few hours from here. Where he is today we do not know, but surely further away than yesterday. The Duchess

James Lindsay, "Philosophy of Schelling," Philosophical Review 16.3 (May 1910): 259. 78 Ibid., 263. 77

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and her Princess had decided to remain in Weimar. Yet such advances as occurred from Thursday to Monday are only possible for this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.”79

The Phänomenologie provided historicist critiques of each early modern philosophical movement beginning with Descartes and promoted a “ladder” model of truth. On this view, absolute truth is that tension between that which is known and that which cannot be known, and this tension is fundamental to the human condition. Since truth is necessarily a historically conditioned concept dependent upon other historically conditioned concepts, Hegel finds narrow-mindedness across all of the sub-genres of philosophy that grew out of Descartes and applies his reductive process of “mediation,” the entwicklung, to all of them: “At the metaphysical level, we oppose the universality of the ideal to the individuality of the real, and so generate the debate between Platonists on the one hand and nominalists on the other; we oppose the universality of essence to the individuality of existents, and so generate the debate between essentialists and existentialists; we oppose universal properties to individual entities, and so generate the debate between predicate realists and predicate nominalists; we oppose the universality of form to the individuality of matter, and so generate the debate between conceptual realists and conceptual idealists; and we oppose the universality of God to the individuality of man, and so generate the debate between theists and humanists. At the epistemological level, we contrast the universality of thought with the individuality of intuition, and so generate the debate between rationalists and empiricists. And at the moral and political level, we distinguish the community as universal from the citizen as Hegel, letter to Niethammer (Oct 1806), in Hegel: The Letters (Bloomington: Indiana, 1984). Web. 79

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individual, and so generate the debate between communitarianism and liberalism; we distinguish the universal interest from the individual interest, and so generate the debate between the egoist and the altruist; we distinguish the universality of the general good from the particularity of the individual agent, and so generate the debate between the utilitarian and the Kantian; we distinguish the universality of law from the freedom of the individual, and so generate the debate between the defender of the state and the anarchist; and we distinguish the universality of rights and natural law from the particularity of local traditions and customs, and so generate the debate between the cosmopolitan who thinks that all societies should be ruled in the same way, and the communitarian who thinks divergent cultural histories should be respected. Hegel therefore claims that crucial issues of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political and religious thought are all associated with the ways in which the categories of universal, particular, and individual are conceived, such that apparently insuperable philosophical difficulties will be generated unless these categories are brought together or ‘mediated’ in the right way. Hegel therefore claims that crucial issues of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political and religious thought are all associated with the ways in which the categories of universal, particular, and individual are conceived, such that apparently insuperable philosophical difficulties will be generated unless these categories are brought together or ‘mediated’ in the right way. Thus, when Hegel talks of the failure of ‘the understanding’ to overcome the opposition between these categories, he can point to a whole series of divisions in our view of the world, between abstract and concrete, ideal and real, one and many, necessity and freedom, state and citizen, moral law and self-interest, general will and particular will, reason and tradition, God and man.”80 Robert Stern, Routledge Guidebook to Hegel (London: Routledge, 2002) 1920. 80

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Roderick recognizes Hegel as the endpoint of any proper introductory history of ethics, as Hegel’s conception of freedom is a sort of “last trump” the shadow of which no future ethical views can claim to be outside. For Hegel, freedom is a descriptive term for “the best moral views that go out of your community, the limitations they face, wherever you happen to be and whenever they are, and the struggle to overcome those things… with those goals.”81 While the impending meeting of Napoleon and Goethe certainly interested Hegel, he did not believe that a grand Prussian state was the ultimate realization of his ethics. Instead, he predicted that America would be the “land of the future” where “the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.”82 22. At the Congress of Erfurt in 1808, Napoleon met with Tsar Alexander and a host of other powerful European figureheads, not the least of which was Goethe; in this latter meeting, Hegel believed the proper historical synthesis of French power and German theory had been completed. The Fourth Coalition’s anti-Napoleonic efforts under Britain were put to an end during the Erfurt proceedings, and Napoleon added a curious clause to the agreements by which Alexander would be obliged to assist France in the case that France went to war with Austria. Alexander assisted only minimally when such a war came to pass, and by 1810 the Tsar knew that a war with France was imminent. In the summer of 1812, Napoleon finally set his sights eastward on Moscow. At Borodino, the Russian general Kutuzov was forced to withdraw back to Moscow, and succeeded in baiting Rick Roderick, Mill on Liberty in “Philosophy and Human Values,” Teaching Company, 1990. Lecture. 82 Russell 765. 81

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Napoleon into following him in search of a decisive victory. Following the Tsar’s directive to “avoid big battles until we have fallen right back to [Russian] supply lines,” Kutuzov reasoned that Moscow would be the “sponge” that turned the tide of the Napoleonic “torrent which [the Russians were] still too weak to stem.”83 The resulting occupation of Moscow and subsequent retreat by the French in the face of a harsh Russian winter called into question the very notion of the decisive victory upon which Napoleon had built an empire: “The emperor took comfort in the fact that at the end of the day he occupied the battlefield and had inflicted greater harm on the enemy than his own forces had suffered. But the Russian army was not annihilated, and those that were not killed or wounded largely escaped. Napoleon had expected to take many prisoners, but the actual haul was small. He now lacked the capacity to finish the Russians off in another battle. A large country with large population could absorb the losses… As the city was being occupied, fires began and ultimately destroyed two-thirds of it. Napoleon expected the Tsar to sue for peace. Soon he realized that with the Russians unwilling to either fight another battle or negotiate a settlement, he was stranded, unable to sustain his forces through hunger and cold. He had no choice but to return to France.”84

Jomini (1779-1869) served as chief of staff to Marshal Ney during the Moscow campaign, and for a century was considered the “foremost interpreter of the Napoleonic method” who was said to have “betrayed the innermost secrets of [Napoleon’s] strategy”

83 84

Freedman 79-83. Ibid.

64

according to Napoleon himself.85 Jomini sought to unearth rational principles to the art of war which were timeless and infallible, placing strategy as the middle term between politics, which decided the initial broad terms of war (i.e. France declares war on Russia), and grand tactics, which decided the technical and executional factors which Napoleon had made his main focus. 23. In the midst of the Napoleonic wars, England had fallen into an economic crisis. The demand for grain had risen to unprecedented levels due to the issue of population growth on which Malthus had mused in the 1799 Essay on the Principle of Population. Parliament had seen fit to impose even more unprecedented taxes on foreign grain in order to stimulate domestic wheat in the long run, further compounding the issue. The new English class of industrialists found themselves at the mercy of the landowning aristocracy: “It is not difficult to understand why David Ricardo, writing in the midst of such a period of crisis, saw economics in a different and far more pessimistic light than Adam Smith. Smith had looked at the world and had seen in it a great concert; Ricardo saw a bitter conflict. To the author of The Wealth of Nations there was good reason to believe that everyone could share in the benefits of a benign providence; to the inquiring stockbroker writing about a half-century later, not only was society rent into warring groups, but it seemed inescapable that the rightful winner of the conflict— the hardworking industrialist—was bound to lose. For Ricardo believed that the only class that could possibly benefit from the progress of society was the landlord—unless his hold on the price of grain was broken.”86 85 86

Ibid. Heilbroner 47-48.

65

Ricardo agreed with Malthus that the exponential growth of the human species cast a “melancholy hue” over Smith’s findings in the Wealth of Nations. These issues were compounded by the old mercantilist tradition in the government; the conventional wisdom was to tax foreign trade so as to achieve a “positive balance of trade” in which the nation was importing more precious metals than product and vice versa for exporting. The end result was that the landowners got richer while things got progressively shittier for the workers and aspiring capitalists. Marx summarizes: “Ricardo explains the decline in profit on capital or interest thus: the more capitals grow, even though the kinds of application proliferate as capital does, in terms of the greater difficulty of procuring the first and most necessary means of life. He leaves competition entirely out of play. If capitals — understood on the assumption of private ownership — were not too numerous in relation to the application of capital then competition would be entirely inexplicable, as competition is not possible unless there are 20 instead of 3, thus there is a superfluity of capitals in relation to their application… If accumulated capitals are concentrated in a few hands, competition ceases and, despite accumulation, profits — as monopoly profits — rocket. Economics not only has the miracle of overproduction and extreme poverty but also of growth of capitals, in the forms of their application, on the one hand, and lack of productive opportunities due to this growth, on the other hand.”87

Elevating economics to the lofty position of a properly abstract science, Ricardo showed how free trade could alleviate England’s wheat issues against the traditional mercantilist logic. 87

Karl Marx, Notes on Ricardo (1845) in MEGA (Berlin: Dietz, 1975) 415-416.

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Advances in technology had rendered this old logic obsolete. Heilbroner continues: “We remember Smith’s enthusiastic appraisal—mixed with some social misgivings—as to what that change could do for the production of a given product, such as pins. But we also recall that there is nothing in Smith’s appraisal to suggest that once the division of labor had worked its wonders in the making of a given product, it would spread to new products—textiles, iron-making, who knows what next? Here is a technological reason why a country that had acquired its “full complement of riches,” would thereafter stagnate or even decline... No such limited prospects accompany the emerging industrial technology known to Malthus and Ricardo half a century later. The spinning jenny, the steam engine, the puddling of iron were immediately perceived as opening new avenues for economic growth. With this came an end to the Smithian view of finite expansion possibilities—and with it came as well a premonition of new problems arising from that very prospect. For one thing, population growth now took on a far more threatening aspect as economic expansion no longer enjoyed the brake of constrained capabilities. In the same way, more expansive prospects for industrial economic growth also implied the further enrichment of the landlord.”88

24. While Jomini wrote with a “confidence in his principles” that could only be possible during Napoleon’s historical “peak,” Clausewitz (1780-1831), advisor to the Tsar in 1812, wrote in the wake of Napoleon’s great failure at Borodino, and his project was far different from that of Jomini. While Jomini followed the Napoleonic tradition of instruction over description, Clausewitz sought a complete theory of war, a total critique of the “limits of strategy, the

88

Heilbroner 59.

67

constraints that make it unwise to try to be too clever.” His most influential conclusion in this endeavour was that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” With Clausewitz, there is a marked shift in strategic focus away from merely directed “mindless violence” and towards “political purpose.”89 More specifically, war was the interplay of reason as an “instrument of policy” with the Achillean “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity which are to be regarded as a blind natural force” and the Odyssean “chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam.”90 Of key importance in Clausewitz’s model is the concept of friktion (“friction”), the “fog of war” consisting in “countless minor incidents… the kind you can never really foresee” that “combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal” and resulting in “effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.”91 The duty of the commander was to navigate this fog and mitigate its effects as best as possible according to Laplace’s laws of probability, as this friktion represented in itself the limits of strategy and tactics. One consequence of this view was an inherent advantage to the defense. In Clausewitz’s reading of Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812, the Tsar was able to triumph largely because of the excessive risks and uncertainty forced upon the offensive position which Napoleon was forced to maintain: “The Russian campaign and lack of confidence in strategies based on surprise and complex maneuvers led Clausewitz to the view that the advantage lay with the defense. The forward movement necessary to occupy enemy territory taxed the attacker’s energies Freedman 86. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: Dryden House, 1908) 89, in Freedman 87. 91 Clausewitz 119-120, in Freedman. 89 90

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and resources, while the defender was able to use this time to prepare to receive the attacker… But while Clausewitz described defense as the stronger form of fighting, he also noted that its purpose was negative. It was limited, passive, concerned only with preservation. Only attack could secure the objectives of war. Defense was unavoidably preferred by the weak, but once there was a favorable balance of strength, the incentives were to move to the attack.”92

For the first half of the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic wars left military theorists wrestling with two fundamental issues. The first was the relation of the military to the political. European networks of alliances had reached unprecedented levels of depth and complexity, and with Clausewitz began a long tradition of attempts to resolve these complexities into the art of war. Key in this model is the quadripartite distinction between tactics, or the ground level, grand tactics, or the operational level, strategy, or the set of interactions that occur between two grand tactical operational spheres, and grand strategy, or policy, the latter link being Clausewitz’s famous conclusion. The military sphere was left uncertain as to its relation to the new science of the Enlightenment; while strategy was thought to be a “science whose principles could be learnt,” this raised the question of to what extent this would enable opponents to “see the pattern and work out the counters,” which would ultimately result in “stalemate or attrition.”93 25. Philidor stood at the head of a dynasty of French coffeehouse chess masters. Following his death in 1795, le Breton Deschapelles (1780-1847) ascended to the throne and maintained

92 93

Freedman 89-95. Ibid.

69

French dominance in European chess for the first few decades of the nineteenth century. His pupil la Bourdonnais (1795-1840) officially surpassed him in 1821. When la Bourdonnais returned victorious from a tour of England, whose best players had all passed or moved abroad, Deschapelles was content with retiring from chess and moving onto English card games. This left la Bourdonnais alone to face the new rising English threat in the Irishman McDonnell (17981835) a decade later. The la Bourdonnais-McDonnell matches commenced in June of 1834 in a club in London. McDonnell drew ahead around the end of the second match, at which point la Bourdonnais exclaimed to an English confidant that McDonnell was “the greatest player [he] ever encountered,” but McDonnell eventually caved to the relentless pressure of la Bourdonnais, who won the third, fourth, and fifth match after that: “A great number of the games in this match consisted of Queen's Gambits, played by De la Bourdonnais; in which M’Donnell persisted, most erroneously, in taking the offered Gambit Pawn, and thus exposing himself needlessly to a murderous attack. With the powers of genius, he possessed also its firmness, amounting too often to mere obstinacy. Nothing could induce him to evade the Queen's Gambit. It is worthy of remark, that M'Donnell introduced his Bishop's Gambit three times during the match, and always lost it. De la Bourdonnais was the first to shew us that the real defence of this game turns on second player's not regarding the being compelled to move his King to the Queen's square, at a certain point of the opening.”

While McDonnell was ahead once again in the sixth match five games to four, the set was suspended in October when la Bourdonnais had to return to France on business. McDonnell

70

succumbed to kidney disease the following year, to the “irreparable loss of the Chess-world.”94 Alexandre’s Encyclopédie des échecs (1837) bookended what Metzner calls the dynasty of the Café de la Régence: “The careers of these relatively unsuccessful successors to the Café de la Régence dynasty signaled the end of an era. It had lasted roughly a century, from about 1740 to about 1840. What the Age of Revolution was to European society at large, the Café de la Régence era was to chess: the childhood of many of its most characteristic present-day institutions. The chess club; the chess journal; the international championship match; subspecialties such as imaginative writing on chess subjects, problem composition, and simultaneous blindfold exhibitions; the study and publication of systematic analyses as an essential part of mastering the game; and, in general, a commitment to chess commensurate with that to any art or science: These are some of the distinctive institutions of modern chess that took form during the Café de la Régence era. The glory years of the Café de la Régence, whose traditions prevailed until the new institutions established themselves, were indeed those of a regency.”95

As the era of the Café de la Régence drew to a close, Staunton finished the job that McDonnell had started with his victory over France’s Saint-Amant in 1843, at which point it was widely believed that England had fully supplanted France’s dominance in the chess world: “In England there was an interregnum until Howard Staunton, a player who learnt his chess at the Divan and other London chess resorts, came to the front in 1840-1. By his memorable victory over Walker 374-378. Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso (Berkeley: UC Press, 1998), 1.1, sec. 2. Web. 94 95

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Saint-Amant by 11 games to 6 (with four draws) in a match of 21 games for £100 a side, which was played in Paris in the late autumn of 1843, he made good his claim to be the first player in England and France. The games of this match are a great contrast to those of the De la Bourdonnais-MacDonnell matches, in that both players avoided the open game and played close Openings -the Sicilian, the Queen’s Gambit Declined, and 1 Pc4… [the opening that would be called the English Game after] Staunton’s success with it… in [all of these,] the early play is directed towards securing a favourable position for the End-game. In this they showed a tendency towards a new system of play more like that of Philidor than that of Ponziani, but taking a broader view of positional advantage than Philidor ever adopted… The international significance of the match had been seized by the public at once, and with the victory of Staunton England was regarded as having gained the position which France had held since the time of Philidor.”96

26. Schopenhauer’s rejection of Kant’s noumenon in the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818) began a tradition of materialism which maintained

Hegel’s

historicism

while

eschewing

Kant’s

transcendental idealism. This culminated in Marx’s critique of Hegel in 1844: “There is a double error in Hegel. The first emerges most clearly in the Phänomenologie, the birth-place of the Hegelian philosophy. When, for instance, wealth, state-power, etc., are understood by Hegel as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts ... They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, i.e., abstract, philosophical thinking. The whole process therefore ends with absolute knowledge. It is precisely abstract thought from which 96

Murray 885.

72

these objects are estranged and which they confront with their presumption of reality. The philosopher – who is himself an abstract form of estranged man – takes himself as the criterion of the estranged world. The whole history of the alienation process [Entäußerungsgeschichte] and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought – of logical, speculative thought... there is already latent in the Phänomenologie as a germ, a potentiality, a secret, the uncritical positivism and the equally uncritical idealism of Hegel’s later works – that philosophic dissolution and restoration of the existing empirical world… In the second place: the vindication of the objective world for man – for example, the realisation that sensuous consciousness is not an abstractly sensuous consciousness but a humanly sensuous consciousness, that religion, wealth, etc., are but the estranged world of human objectification, of man’s essential powers put to work and that they are therefore but the path to the true human world – this appropriation or the insight into this process appears in Hegel therefore in this form, that sense, religion, state power, etc., are spiritual entities; for only mind is the true essence of man, and the true form of mind is thinking mind, theological, speculative mind. The human character of nature and of the nature created by history – man’s products – appears in the form that they are products of abstract mind and as such, therefore, phases of mind – thought-entities. The Phänomenologie is, therefore, a hidden, mystifying and still uncertain criticism; but inasmuch as it depicts man’s estrangement, even though man appears only as mind, there lie concealed in it all the elements of criticism, already prepared and elaborated in a manner often rising far above the Hegelian standpoint...”97

Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts (Moscow: Progress, 1959) 65-66. 97

73

One consequence of this dialectical materialism was the inevitability of conflict between socioeconomic classes. Marx agreed with Ricardo on at least one key point: throughout the capitalist process, the landowners are favored at the expense of the working class. Marx identifies the key commodity in this relation as the commodity of labor. The commoditization of labor is necessary for the capitalist society to function; the basic unit in which this laborcommodity is measured in is the “labor hour.” On Marx’s view, the capitalist who employs a worker will always receive surplus value s at the expense of the worker proportional to the total capital; that is to say, “labor receives not less than its full value and consumers do not pay more for the products than their full value.”98 This “special kind” of “abstract labor, labor that is detached from the special personal attributes of a precapitalist world, labor that can be bought or sold like so much wheat or coal,” resulted in a system, inherited from Smith by Ricardo, in which “historical forces (such as the enclosure movement) have created a propertyless class of workers who have no alternative but to sell their labor-power—their sheer ability to work—as a commodity.” Heilbroner expands: “Hence conflict develops. The classes whose positions are jeopardized fight the classes whose positions are enhanced: the feudal lord fights the rising merchant, and the guild master opposes the young capitalist. But the process of history pays no attention to likes and dislikes. Gradually conditions change, and gradually, but surely, the classes of society are rearranged. Amid turmoil and anguish the division of wealth is altered. And thus history is a pageant of ceaseless struggle between classes to partition social wealth. For as long as the technics of society change, no existing division of wealth is immune from attack… The result was twofold. First, capitalism would sooner or later 98

Schumpeter 619.

74

destroy itself. The planless nature of production would lead to a constant disorganization of economic activity—to crises and slumps and the social chaos of depression. The system was simply too complex; it was constantly getting out of joint, losing step, and over-producing one good while under-producing another. Secondly, capitalism must unknowingly breed its own successor. Within its great factories it would not only create the technical base for socialism—rationally planned production—but it would create as well a trained and disciplined class which would be the agent of socialism—the embittered proletariat. By its own inner dynamic, capitalism would produce its own downfall, and in the process, nourish its own enemy.”99

This put Marx in a unique position with regards to the Clausewitzian tradition of strategy. While Clausewitz attempted a universal theory of conventional war as conflict between nationstates, Marx’s project necessitated a theory of revolution, i.e. war fought via unconventional means by the working class against the established social structure. It also put him at odds with many fundamental assumptions of classical economics, which he viewed as products of bourgeois ideology: “Marx realized further that the ideas or systems of ideas that prevail at any given time in any given social group are, so far as they contain propositions about facts and inferences from facts, likely to be vitiated for exactly the same reasons that also vitiate a man’s theories about his own individual behavior. That is to say, people’s ideas are likely to glorify the interests and actions of the classes that are in a position to assert themselves and therefore are likely to draw or to imply pictures of them that may be seriously at variance with the truth. Thus, the medieval knights fancied

99

Heilbroner 83-92.

75

themselves as protectors of the weak and defenders of the Christian faith, whereas their actual behavior and, still more, other factors that had produced and kept in existence the social structure of their world are bound to look very different to an observer of a different time and class. Such systems of ideas Marx called ideologies. And his contention was that a large part of the economics of his time was nothing but the ideology of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie.”100

27. While France and England were vying for continental superiority in the world of chess in the 1830s, Germany was slowly building up a presence of its own. Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, Deschapelles had made short work of the top chess club in Berlin while giving each of their players rook odds. The work of the Seven Stars of Berlin began around 1837, and out of their efforts were born such vital resources for German chess as a chess periodical in Bledow’s Schachzeitung, a contemporary chess textbook in von der Lasa and Bilguer’s Handbuch des Schachspiels (1843), and a club of up-and-coming youngsters in the Berliner Schachgesellschaft. The Handbuch systematized the nomenclature of openings that had developed throughout centuries prior; while the theory of chess had revolved heavily around the opening for most of that time, referring to these openings by “special names” had not been standard practice. When Staunton hosted the first international chess tournament in London in 1851, Anderssen (1818-1879) of the Berlin club emerged victorious. While Germany may have had a claim to the best European nation in chess at this point, Murray notes that “circumstances had changed since the time of Philidor, and a claim of this kind, probably never really tenable at any time, had become an absurdity with the

100

Schumpeter 33.

76

general rise in the standard of chess in all countries.”101 Chess was now an individual rather than a national affair, and so the focus of this new generation of chess masters was not so much on victory over opposing communities of players as on the perfection of the art of chess as a means of individual aesthetic expression. With regards to this aesthetic expression, no player’s legacy extends farther than Anderssen’s. Ruminating on Anderssen’s combinational style of play, Rèti writes: “If we ask ourselves what there is in… any [particular] combination... that compels our admiration, the reply will be that in the game just quoted it is the quiet inconspicuous introductory move which just by reason for its inconspicuousness operates with such great charm. A strong and more strikingly attacking move could have been made without any regard as to what was to follow. But it is the choice by Anderssen of the less obvious move, whose meaning only becomes clear later on, that focus us to the appreciation of the deep working of his brain… It is the same with a sacrifice. A combination composed of a sacrifice has a more immediate effect upon the person playing over the game in which it occurs than another combination, because the apparent senselessness of the sacrifice is a convincing proof of the design of the player offering it. Hence it comes that the risk of material, and the victory of the weaker material over the stronger material, gives the impression of a symbol of the mastery of mind over matter... Now we see wherein lies the pleasure to be derived from a chess combination. It lies in the feeling that a human mind is behind the game dominating the inanimate pieces with which the game is carried on, and giving them the breath of life. We may regard it as an intellectual delight, equal to that afforded us by the knowledge that behind so many apparently disconnected and seemingly

101

77

Murray 888.

chance happenings in the physical world lies the one great ruling spirit - the law of Nature.”102

The American Paul Morphy struck the first blow against this essentially romantic style of play in 1857. After a stellar performance at the first American Chess Congress in New York, Morphy toured Europe and scored decisive victories over Anderssen, Staunton, and Harrwitz of the Café de la Régence. Rèti cites the fourth game in the match with Anderssen as exemplifying the stark contrast between the traditional European school and Morphy’s unprecedented positional approach. On the seventh move, Anderssen commits to a radical line of attack that Rèti notes “could have succeeded brilliantly against a weaker opponent.” When this line is hindered, Anderssen pushes on via occasional chance developments off of moves, but by the time Anderssen’s would-be game-winning combination is finally effected on turn 24, Morphy’s position is too developed, and Anderssen ultimately runs out of juice and loses the game. Rèti concludes that Anderssen, “the player who, merely through his imagination and power of combination, gave to the game its particular aspect, was bound to lose in the long run; because Morphy's Positional play and the principle of quick development proved ultimately superior to mere talent, however strong.”103 Rèti’s reading of Morphy as the earliest positional player is not a universally accepted one. Morphy’s career is made difficult to evaluate by its brevity; after his return to America in 1859, he declared that he had vanquished all of his competition, and retired in order to pursue a career in law. The principles of positional play were more clearly and distinctly established in Steinitz (1836-1900), who rose to prominence with a win over Anderssen in 1866. Consider 102 103

Richard Rèti, Modern Ideas in Chess (New York: Dover, 1913) 4. Ibid., 12-18.

78

Rèti’s comparison of the “positional style of play” unveiled by Steinitz at the 1873 Vienna tournament to his predecessor, who was still essentially within the old attacking school, and often simply better and smarter at attacking than his opponent: “In the old era positional play was almost throughout based on general principles. The perception and development of those general principles were at that time nearly identical with the development of chess playing. From the striving for, and after investigation of, such general principles it becomes clear that chess at that time was treated on scientific lines. The greatest representative of the scientific tendency in chess was Wilhelm Steinitz… Morphy tried his utmost at the commencement to press forward in the centre, so that his game became open quite early. It was due to his principles of development that he had, in most cases, at the outset a better development than his opponent. As soon, however, as these principles of Morphy’s had become the common property of all chess players it was difficult to wrest an advantage in an open game… On the contrary the old form of opening brought about the early mutual opposing of bishops and rooks and led to simple exchanges... In order to avoid such a simplifying process so early in the game, and to have an opportunity of preparing deeply laid manoeuvres for attack, without being threatened by his opponent with exchanges, Steinitz readily chose openings in which he obtained in the centre a more defensive, but strong and unassailable position. The assured centre position afforded him the possibility to prepare a wing attack slowly yet steadily… The Morphy principle, based on the quick development of pieces, is the correct one only in open positions. After that had been grasped the next problem with which players were confronted in the period of scientific chess was to discover principles upon which close positions could be dealt with. To have discovered such principles, deeper and more numerous as they were than those relating to development in open positions, is due

79

to Steinitz… Steinitz discerned that in close positions the development of pieces was not of first importance but that certain continuing positional characteristics were so.”104

Tournaments were rapidly spreading across the chess communities of the world, and critics of Steinitz’s scientific approach were quick to note that the heavy penalty associated with single losses in the tournament format incentivized a risk-averse style, “safety play,” which was said to be “dull and unenterprising in comparison with the school which it has displaced, but... is supposed to pay better in matches and tournaments.” 105 However, Steinitz’s results spoke for themselves, and he defended his unofficial title as world chess champion against names such as Blackburne and Zukertort from 1866 to 1894. 28. In Wilson’s account of the “genesis of football” in England, in the beginning, there was “chaos” and “football without form.” Football did not have a standardized set of rules until the Cambridge Rules in 1848, and the earliest primitive theories of arrangement of players had emerged by the 1870s in the triumph of the Scottish passing game over the “more established tradition and larger pool of players” of England which “confirmed the notion of passing as superior to dribbling.” Robinson explains the development of this style as follows: “The [Scottish club] never neglected practice… In these games, the dribbling and passing... which raised the Scottish game to the level of fine art, were developed. Dribbling was a characteristic of English play, and it was not until very much later that the

104 105

Ibid., 27-28. Murray 889-890.

80

Southerners came to see that the principles laid down in the Queen’s Park method of transference of the ball, accompanied by strong backing up, were those that got the most out of the team. Combination was the chief characteristic of the Queen’s Park’s play. These essentials struck Mr. C.W. Alcock and in one of his earlier Football Annuals formed the keynote for a eulogium on Scottish players, accompanied by earnest dissertations advocating the immediate adoption by English players of the methods which had brought the game to such a high state of proficiency north of the Tweed.”106

Wilson continues on the standardization of the Scottish passing game into the Pyramid, the 2-3-5 formation which supplanted the primitive 2-2-6 and by which the center-half “became the fulcrum of the team, a figure far removed from the door stopper he would become,” a “multi-skilled all-rounder, defender and attacker, leader and instigator, goal-scorer and destroyer”: “It was the success of Preston North End in the 1880s that confirmed the pre-eminence of the 2-3-5. Initially a cricket and rugby club, they played a ‘oneoff’ game under association rules against Eagley in 1878. No positions were recorded for that game, but in November the following year, they met Halliwell, with a team listed in the classic 2-2-6: that is, with two full-backs, two half-backs, two right-wingers, two left-wingers and two centreforwards. Preston joined the Lancashire Football Association for the 1880-81 season and, although they initially struggled, the arrival of a host of Scottish players professionals in all but name transformed the club. By 1883 the team-sheets were for the first time showing Preston lining up in a 2-3-5 system. Exactly whose idea that was is unclear, but it is known that James Gledhill, a teacher and doctor from Glasgow, gave a series of lectures 106

81

Jonathan Wilson, Inverting the Pyramid (London: Dover, 2009) 12-16.

‘showing by blackboard what might be done by a team of selected experts’, as David Hunt put it in his history of the club. It was with that system that Preston went on to win the first two Football League titles, the first of them, in 1887-88, without losing a game… Just as the dribbling game and all-out attack had once been the ‘right’ - the only - way to play, so 2-3-5 became the touchstone.”107

The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the pervasive spread of football from Britain to the rest of the world as a byproduct of capitalist exploitation. Wilson closes his account of football’s genesis from the 1850s to the close of the century as follows: “It wasn’t only Britain that found football irresistible; almost everywhere the British went in search of trade and commerce they left the game, and that didn’t just include parts of the Empire. There was money to be made from exporting copper from Chile, guano from Peru, meat, wool and hide from Argentina and Uruguay and coffee from Brazil and Colombia, and there was banking to be done everywhere. By the 1880s, 20 percent of Britain’s foreign investment was in South America, and by 1890 there were 45,000 Britons living in the Buenos Aires area, along with smaller, but still significant, communities in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Lima and Santiago. They ran their businesses, but they also established newspapers, hospitals, schools and sporting clubs. They exploited South America’s natural resources, and in return they gave football.”108

29. Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, cotton had become a driving force in the transatlantic economy. The Industrial Revolution had sparked exponential growth in the European textile

107 108

Ibid. Ibid., 17.

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markets, which relied on the supply of raw cotton from abroad. This resulted in surplus demand for cotton imports that the European agricultural markets could not fill. Meanwhile, the Southern cotton industry had boomed with the invention of the mechanical cotton gin in 1793, asserting a central role in the structure of the American economy. The abundance of slave labor in the South allowed plantation owners to maximize the productivity enabled by the new machine. It did not take long for European markets to adjust; as early as 1796, American cotton had surpassed its Indian competitors in Europe. American cotton was cheaper and superior to the alternative Indian cotton. The South put this competitive advantage to good use, filling the massive European surplus demand for cotton. By the late 1850s, Great Britain and France, among other European countries, appeared to have become dependent on the South for cotton imports. The South’s price-setting power in the international cotton market was affirmed in 1855 with Christy’s publication of Cotton is King, a comprehensive statistical analysis of the world economy’s dependence on Southern cotton. Christy’s data confirmed what had become a near-universal intuition throughout the South. Three years later, James Henry Hammond rallied pro-secession attitudes in the Senate with the same intuition. Famously quoting Christy’s work, he argued that “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her” to preserve its supply of Southern cotton imports in the event that the Southern states seceded. The “King Cotton” theory, as it came to be called, would be put to the test when secession became a reality for the South. In 1861, the Union’s naval embargo all but completely cut off the supply of Southern cotton to the rest of the world. Great Britain and France found themselves faced with a choice: commit to military aid for the Confederacy, or buckle down for the impending cotton famine. Both countries maintained neutrality. While European markets initially 83

suffered as a result of the embargo, they adjusted relatively quickly, thanks in part to the resurgence of Indian cotton suppliers whom had previously lay dormant in the market. The Confederacy was forced into a similarly risky position with regards to the war itself. To be clear, the Union also had clear circumstantial reasons for taking the offensive in the war, but it was largely due to McLellan’s fascination with maneuver warfare and the Napoleonic decisive battle, much to the disdain of Lincoln, that the Union was ultimately able to “whip the rebels by strategy.” In contrast, Freedman notes that the Confederacy went on the offensive, against crippling odds, because it essentially had no other choice: “Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy had made his own studies of Napoleon and was totally convinced of the need to go on the offensive to annihilate enemy forces. He knew that he could not mount a successful passive defense and so had to take the initiative, using maneuvers to get into the best position but then accepting battle. But this involved high casualties, and the Union side did at least understand defenses. Lee had set a goal for victory that he could not realize, and he suffered the consequences. The rival armies were ‘too big, too resilient, too thoroughly sustained by the will of democratic governments’ to be destroyed ‘in a single Napoleonic battle.’ Ulysses Grant saw the logic clearly and brutally. The terrible loss of life in both armies had achieved little, observed Grant, but he understood that the North could survive the losses better than the South and so he decided to embark on ‘as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed,’ locking Lee’s forces in constant combat until he barely had an army left.” 109

29i. A hundred years of idealism drew to a close at the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of the analytic movement under 109

Freedman 110-111.

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Russell and Moore along with the earlier framework of Frege (18481925). The distinguishing feature of this new line of philosophy was its focus on language. Rorty dubs this the “linguistic turn” of philosophy in the twentieth century: “There are two sources for the discipline presently called ‘philosophy of language.’ One is the cluster of problems pointed out by Frege and discussed, for example, by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and by Carnap in Meaning and Necessity. These are problems about how to systematize our notions of meaning and reference in such a way as to take advantage of quantificational logic, preserve our intuitions about modality, and generally produce a clear and intuitively satisfying picture of the way in which notions like ‘truth,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘necessity,’ and ‘name’ fit together. I shall call this set of problems the subject matter of ‘pure’ philosophy of language-a discipline which has no epistemological parti pris, nor, indeed, any relevance to most of the traditional concerns of modern philosophy. An ancestry can be traced for some of Frege's problems in Parmenides, Plato's Sophist, and some other ancient and medieval writings, but they are issues which rarely intersect with other textbook ‘problems of philosophy.’ The second source for contemporary philosophy of language is explicitly epistemological. The source of this ‘impure’ philosophy of language is the attempt to retain Kant's picture of philosophy as providing a permanent ahistorical framework for inquiry in the form of a theory of knowledge. The ‘linguistic turn’... started as the attempt to produce a nonpsychologistic empiricism by rephrasing philosophical questions as questions of ‘logic.’ Empiricist and phenomenalist doctrines could now, it was thought, be put as the results of ‘the logical analysis of language’ rather than as empirical psychological generalizations. More generally, philosophical points about the nature and extent of human knowledge (e.g., those which Kant made about knowledge-claims concerning God, freedom, and immortality)

85

could be stated as remarks about language… Treating philosophy as the analysis of language seemed to unite the merits of Hume with those of Kant. Hume's empiricism seemed substantively true, but methodologically shaky because it reposed on nothing more than an empirical theory of the acquisition of knowledge. Kant's criticisms of ‘bad’ philosophy (e.g., natural theology) seemed both more systematic and more forceful than Hume's, but seemed to presuppose the possibility of a nonempirical methodology. Language, unlike transcendental synthesis, seemed a suitably ‘natural’ field of inquiry-but, unlike introspective psychology, linguistic analysis seemed to offer the promise of a priori truth. To say that a material substance was constituted by the synthesis of a manifold of intuition under an a priori concept seemed ‘metaphysical’ whereas to say that any meaningful remark about such a substance could be put in terms of phenomenalistic hypothetical statements seemed both necessarily true and methodologically unmysterious. Kant had taught that the only way in which a priori knowledge could be possible was if it were knowledge of our contribution-the contribution of our faculty of spontaneity-to the constitution of the object of knowledge.” 110

These early analytic movements festered in Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica and Russell and Whitehead’s 1910 Principia Mathematica and eventually fully blossomed in Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, at which point Wittgenstein declared that all philosophical problems had been solved, and all further philosophical activity would be matters of practice and application rather than pure theory. Out of this marriage of philosophy to the new modern traditions of science and arithmetic came the earliest precursors to the discipline of economics now called game theory. In 1913, Zermelo

110

Rorty 257-258.

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sought to determine whether or not an “advantageous position” in a fully determinate two-player game could be objectively and mathematically defined. Schwalbe and Walker continue: “In his paper, Zermelo concentrates on the analysis of two person games without chance moves where the players have strictly opposing interests. He also assumes that in the game only finitely many positions are possible. However, he allows infinite sequences of moves since he does not consider stopping rules. Thus, he allows for the possibility of infinite games. This is in contrast to what is normally assumed in the modern literature. He remarks that there are many games of this type but uses the game of Chess as an example since it is the best known of them. Zermelo then addresses two problems: First, what does it mean for a player to be in a ‘winning’ position and is it possible to define this in an objective mathematical manner; secondly, if he is in a winning position, can the number of moves needed to force the win be determined? To answer the first question, he states that a necessary and sufficient condition is the nonemptiness of a certain set, containing all possible sequences of moves such that a player (say White) wins independently of how the other player (Black) plays. But should this set be empty, the best a player could achieve would be a draw. So he defines another set containing all possible sequences of moves such that a player can postpone his loss for an infinite number of moves, which implies a draw. This set may also be empty, i.e., the player can avoid his loss for only finitely many moves if his opponent plays correctly. But this is equivalent to the opponent being able to force a win. This is the basis for all modern versions of Zermelo’s theorem. The possibility of both sets being empty means that White can not guarantee that he will not lose... However, the preceding was only of minor interest for Zermelo. He was much more interested in the following question: Given that a player (say White) is in ‘a winning position’, how long does it take for White to force a win? Zermelo claimed that it will never

87

take more moves than there are positions in the game. His proof is by contradiction: Assume that White can win in a number of moves larger than the number of positions. Of course, at least one winning position must have appeared twice. So White could have played at the first occurrence in the same way as he does at the second and thus could have won in less moves than there are positions.”111

Zermelo’s proof is built upon a number of assumptions. The first of these to note is that White will always be able to identify a “winning position” from which it is impossible for Black to avoid defeat. Second, Zermelo’s proof relies equally on the assumption that that Black will never recognize a “winning position” for White and therefore never adjust accordingly; the proof only applies in the case of an essentially oblivious opponent. Both of these assumptions rely furthermore on the concept of a “winning position,” to which Zermelo can only ascribe form, not content. Since Zermelo’s proof only deals in abstractions regarding these forms of winning positions and sequences of play, it never assigns to these positions or sequences any content, and nowhere in the paper does Zermelo apply his method to any specific chess problem or scenario. Setting the tone for a century of exponential growth in game theoretic literature, Zermelo’s project was to extricate this notion of pure position, derived initially from its practical application in Steinitz’s play, and to unravel the distinctions within it. In freeing philosophy from any and all remaining shackles of Hegelian idealism, the analytic endeavours of the new Cambridge school had granted the privileged status of universality and necessity to the sectors of logic and arithmetic, elevating Zermelo’s project to the

Ulrich Schwalbe and Paul Walker, Zermelo and the History of Game Theory, discussion paper no. 9703 (Christchurch: U of Canterbury, 1997): 3. 111

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realm of science proper. While Zermelo’s proof did inspire much economic thought and discussion, this was not so much a paradigm shift in economics as it was the birth of an entirely new paradigm in an entirely new field of study. Zermelo had successfully united the game, with all its philosophical and historical baggage, with the analytic tradition in philosophy and its new conceptions of science and art. At this moment, under the influence of the linguistic turn, economics has collided with the long scientific chess tradition that produced Steinitz and created a new concept of the game to be mobilized for use in a wide range of diverse fields including but not limited to economics, ethics, and the military sector, not to mention the games themselves on which Zermelo’s proof is based. The fetishization of the advantageous position will henceforth permeate a number of competitive fields producing further theoretical disagreement,

then

competition

and

conflict,

then

more

disagreement, and so on and so forth. What is known at this moment is this: the dialectic of game theory begins with Zermelo’s construction of the advantageous position. This construction was not yet fully complete, and once again, its content was yet to be filled in; these developments would follow with the Great War which began a year after the publication of Zermelo’s paper.

89

Introduction 32. The First World War began in 1914 with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his visit to Bosnia. Capitalist expansion had created vast and intricate networks of alliances that collapsed inwards upon themselves following this event, triggering a war of unprecedented proportions involving every great nation of Europe. Harman muses further on the capitalist underpinnings of the outbreak of this war: “Behind the long chain of diplomatic activity in the summer of 1914 lay a very simple fact. The rival imperialisms which had emerged as each capitalism tried to solve its own problems by expanding across state boundaries now collided right across the world. Economic competition had turned into competition for territories, and the outcome depended on armed might. No state could afford to back down once the chain of confrontations had been set off by the Sarajevo assassination, because no state could risk a weakening of its global strength. The same imperialism which had stimulated economic growth and a belief in the inevitability of progress was now to tear the heart of Europe apart.”112

Germany quickly determined that France or Britain must be eliminated early via a decisive victory in order to focus its resources on Russia as soon as possible. Once again, the unique geography of Russia left her adversaries in an uncomfortable position with regards to strategy. Before the turn of the century, German chief of staff Alfred von Schlieffen had proposed that the best way to address

112

Harman 404.

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these issues would be through swift attacks on Belgium and Luxembourg in violation of their neutrality. Schlieffen’s successor, von Moltke the Younger, expanded on this plan in 1911: “In the battle against France lies the decision in the war. The Republic is our most dangerous enemy, but we can hope to bring about a rapid decision here. If France is beaten in the first great battle, this country, which possesses no great manpower reserves, will hardly be in a position to conduct a long-lasting war. Russia, on the other hand, can shift her forces into the interior of her immeasurable land and can protract the war for an immeasurable time. Therefore, Germany’s entire effort must be focused on ending the war, at least on one front, with a single great blow as soon as possible.”113

The initial German offensive in August 1914 saw success in Belgium but failed to reach Paris; Russia’s offensive in East Prussia was similarly forced back. Any hopes of a quick decisive victory through superior maneuvers were quickly stamped out on all sides as the fighting devolved into the attrition-based trench warfare that the first Great War is now known for. With this total warfare came a total regression of states on all sides from the popular Smithian “free market economic orthodoxy.” Harman continues: “It became clear to generals and politicians alike that success in the war depended on the state taking control of much of the economy, regardless of the ‘free market’ economic orthodoxy. There was a sharp escalation in the trend towards the integration of monopolised industry and the state, which was already visible in some countries before the war. By 1917 a British war cabinet report

R. T. Foley, “The Real Schlieffen Plan,” War in History 13 (2006): 109, in Freedman 114. 113

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acknowledged that state control had extended ‘until it covered not only national activities directly affecting the war effort, but every section of industry’. By the end of the war the government purchased about 90 percent of all imports, marketed more than 80 percent of food consumed at home, and controlled most prices. In Germany generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised a virtual dictatorship over much of the economy in the later stages of the war, working through the bosses of the great monopoly trusts… Both the generals and the industrialists could see that acquiring territory would increase the economic resources at their disposal. There was a general redefinition of war aims to include not just grabbing or defending colonies in Asia or Africa, but also seizing areas, particularly industrial or semi-industrial areas, in Europe… Just as individual capitalists looked to expand their capital through economic competition, groups of capitalists tied together by national states looked to expand their capital through military competition and warfare. Imperialism was no longer just about colonies, although they remained important. It was now a total system in which no one capitalism could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others—a system whose logic was total militarisation and total war, regardless of the social dislocation this caused.”114

After the failure of the initial offensive in France, Germany stayed true to the cult of the offensive and set the industrial sectors to the task of developing new technologies to break the stalemate with the Allies. These included gas warfare to challenge the combined French and British ground forces as well as Zeppelins and advanced submarines to get around or under Britain’s long-standing naval superiority. In Freedman’s reading, the decisive victory sought on both sides was now a dualistic one, targeting the opposing minds and morale rather than solely the body: 114

Harman 408-409.

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“In the middle of this great stalemate, when there seemed to be few obvious means of breaking the deadlock other than by persevering with the costly and futile combination of artillery bombardment and infantry charges, plans began to be drawn up for more daring strategies. In each case the intention was to realize the potential of a new technology -- the tank on the ground or the airplane in the air -- to break the will of the enemy. In both cases the presumed impact of the new weaponry was assumed to be psychological as much as physical. The aim was to cause what would in effect be a collective nervous breakdown on the enemy side. This directly challenged the assumption that a decisive victory had to involve the annihilation of the enemy army.” 115

On the other side, Britain developed the tank to assist the French forces on the ground and adapted to the “humiliating” Zeppelin strikes with “strategic bombing” and defensive air power of their own. The Soviet revolutions of February and October 1917 ultimately forced the Russian government into peace terms with Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Germany had a little bit of push left after that, but not enough, and the combined Anglo-French and US forces eventually forced Germany into retreat on all sides, then finally submission in November in the midst of revolt and mutiny within the German navy. The League of Nations was thusly formed to prevent another conflict of such proportions, and also to promote the magnificent legacy of the great King Sheamus. 33. König refined Zermelo’s proof and theorem in the 1927 ÜbereineSchlußweise aus dem Endlichen ins Unendliche using a

115

93

Freedman 124.

proposition from set theory, the branch of mathematics that had grown out of Cantor’s work in the century prior: “Let E1,E2,E3,... be a countably infinite sequence of finite nonempty sets and let R be a binary relation with the property that for each element xn+1 of En+1 there exists at least one element xn in En, which stands to xn+1 in relation R which is expressed by xnRxn+1. Then we can determine in each set En an element an such that anRan+1 for the infinite sequence a1,a2,a3,...always holds(n = 1,2,3,...).”116

König defines the game of chess as a sequence of alternating moves from both players, each of which result in a new game position; a position can either be the arrangement of the board at the start of the game, or any other arrangement of pieces that result from a beginning of a game, which can be any finite sequence of alternating moves that does not result in a checkmate or an otherwise finished game. On this view, a single game of chess can be crudely represented as a linear transition through positions q1, q2, etc:

𝑞1 → 𝑊ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒 → 𝑞2 → 𝐵𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒 → 𝑞3 → ⋯ For each position q, there exists Q, a set of sets of alternating moves that will produce that position on the chessboard, or a set of “all possible beginnings” for that position. König expands on Zermelo’s definition of the winning position q’ as the position from which White can force a checkmate. Recall that Zermelo had assumed “unchanging behavior” on Black’s part; in other words, his winning position was one that could result in a win for White, not one that necessarily resulted in such: Dénes König, “On the Transition from the Finite to the Infinite,” Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum 3 (1927): 121, in Schwalbe and Walker 4. 116

94

“[König] remarks that Zermelo failed to prove that a player, say White, who is in a winning position is always able to force a win in a number of moves smaller than the number of positions in the game. Zermelo had argued that White could do so by changing his behaviour at the first occurrence of any repeated winning position and thus win without repetition... It is not sufficient to reduce the number of moves in a single game below the number of possible positions. Rather, this has to achieved for all games in such a way that the three properties required for the set R remain valid. This is non–trivial especially for condition 2. Stated otherwise, Zermelo implicitly assumes that Black would never change his behaviour at any reoccurrence of a winning position...”117

König solves this shortcoming by demonstrating a finite upper bound to the number of moves in a “correct” game, that is to say, a sequence of moves starting from a winning position and ending in checkmate for White: “If q is a winning position, a game starting with q that satisfies condition 3 is called a correct game. A correct game is finite and ends with a win by White. As White can force a win by playing correctly, König can now prove the proposition that if one of the players can win at all, there is only a finite number of moves necessary to do so. He does so by showing that the number of moves in a correct game has a finite upper bound. Let En be the set of all elements of R consisting of 2n − 1 moves (n = 1,2,3,...). As from any position only finitely many other positions can be reached, the sets E1,E2,E3,... are all finite. Let an (an+1) denote the beginning of a game including move n (n + 1), he states a binary relation R between an and an+1. Assume the proposition is wrong. This implies that there are correct games of arbitrary length, i.e. 117

95

Schwalbe and Walker 5-6.

none of the sets E1,E2,E3,... is empty. The definitions of the sets En and the relation R imply that the conditions of the lemma are satisfied. Thus, there is an infinite sequence a1,a2,a3 ... of beginnings (where an consists of 2n−1 moves) which constitute a correct game. But this is impossible, as a correct game is finite.”118

A year later, Kalmár codified Zermelo’s theorem free of the imperfections that König had identified. The result was a tripartite theory of game positions: a position belongs either to the set of winning positions for White, the set of winning positions for Black, or the set of “draw positions” in which “both A and B can avoid a loss by using an appropriate non-losing tactic,” i.e. the sort that Zermelo failed to consider in which the number of moves until checkmate is infinite on both sides. Kalmár continues: “For each position which belongs to GA (GB), there is a winning tactic (also in the strict sense) GA (GB) which depends only on the game S by which players A (B) can force a win. For each position which belongs to R, there is a non-losing tactic (also in the strict sense) RA (RB) which depends only on the game S by which A (B) can avoid a loss.”119

A consistent focus on repetition is found throughout Zermelo, König, and Kalmár; Zermelo used the idea of non-repetition to prove that White can win in a finite number of moves from a winning position, and König and Kalmár remained firmly within this method while ironing out kinks in Zermelo’s work. The theories prescribe rules which are said to be in principle the “correct” ways to play if one wants to win as much as possible; this concept of a rule is ported Ibid. László Kalmár, “Zur Theorie der abstrakten Spiele” in Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum 4 (1928): 84, in Schwalbe and Walker 9. 118 119

96

over from the ethics of Kant, who standardized the idea of reducing morality to ethical principles, or rules, which guided ones actions, and so too do these rules purport to guide one’s actions towards the surest victory possible. There is no consideration of uncertainty in these models: since chess is determinate, such rules could guide a player’s actions from start to finish, i.e. at any logically conceivable position within the game. 33i. The games explored by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior took a form quite different from that of the chess games of Zermelo, König, and Kalmár. Von Neumann chose poker rather than chess as his go-to setting for thought experiments in order to better explore the effects of asymmetric information and uncertainty on strategic interaction between two competing players in a zero-sum game. In his view, games as well as real life consisted “of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do.” Zermelo had focused disproportionately on one extreme side of a large spectrum of games, and von Neumann saw fit to move farther down this spectrum of chance towards the range of games that involve both chance and player interaction to varying degrees: “In chess both sides are working with exactly the same, perfect information, besides what is going on in the head of the opponent. Chance is a factor in poker, but the game is not pure chance. It is possible to apply probabilities to assess the likely hands of other players. As there will always be a degree of uncertainty, the same hand can be played in different ways according to judgments about whether other players are bidding out of strength or weakness. It is possible to outthink the competition. [Von

97

Neumann’s] game theory was therefore about intelligent strategies in inherently uncertain situations.”120

During the war, von Neumann had studied poker players extensively in order to develop the theorem of the “minimax solution” by which it was optimal for a rational poker player to play to the “best of the worst” outcomes, recognizing that the rational strategy in situations of uncertainty was “not to attempt to maximize gain but instead to accept an optimal outcome.” 121 This involved guaranteeing for oneself “a gain which is greater than or equal to the value of a play for 1, irrespective of what 2 does.”122 In order to make this argument, von Neumann had to posit distinct values for each possible play in a game, drawing on the concept of payoffs in poker: “Indeed, the rules of the game F prescribe that each player must make his choice (his personal move) in ignorance of the outcome of the choice of his adversary. It is nevertheless conceivable that one of the players, say 2, "finds out" his adversary; i.e., that he has somehow acquired the knowledge as to what his adversary's strategy is. The basis for this knowledge does not concern us; it may (but need not) be experience from previous plays. At any rate we assume that the player 2 possesses this knowledge. It is possible, of course, that in this situation will change his strategy; but again let us assume that, for any reason whatever, he does not do it. Under these assumptions we may then say that player 2 has "found out" his adversary… In the light of the above we can say [that] the value of a play of the game F is a well-defined quantity if one of the following two extreme assumptions is made: Either that player 2 "finds out" his adversary, or that player 1 "finds out" his adversary. Freedman 151-153. Ibid. 122 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1944) 106-108. 120 121

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In the first case the value of a play is V1 for 1, and -V1 for 2; in the second case the value of a play is -V2 for 1, and V2 for 2.”123

Von Neumann completed the movement from a primitive proof of non-repetition to the fully dynamic process of backwards induction, which he used to solve complex decision trees formed by the many lines of play that a game consists in, like so:

In von Neumann and Morgenstern, a game of perfect information such as chess can be “strictly determined” through this process of backwards induction. The uncertainty inherent in chancebased game mechanics results in an environment of asymmetric information that muddies the water with regards to this strategy, but ultimately the same principle ought to hold for these games as well; von Neumann and Morgenstern conclude that they have demonstrated, at least in the abstract, the “existence of a definite value (of a play) and of definite best strategies” for all of these games. They have determined the rational form of the optimal strategies; they have solved any and all fundamental problems of chess, poker, and so on; from this point onward, all theoretical progress in chess, 123

99

Ibid.

for example, was to be a mere matter of course, finding through experience the correct path to this optimal strategy, as von Neumann and Morgenstern’s own method for its actual derivation was impractical.124 34. Following Steinitz’s dominance, the teachings of Tarrasch (1862-1934) spread across the German chess community. He adapted Steinitz’s principles to the combinational style of play that Steinitz had neglected: “The aspiring young Masters of that day began to fashion themselves upon Steinitz’s games in preference to those of any others; and thus arose the Steinitz school. It could not be said to be an imitation of the Steinitz method but rather a combining of the Steinitz technique (not Steinitz’s scheme of the game) with the otherwise usual method of playing, whose tendency was the quick development of pieces. The latter Steinitz had neglected. The founder of this new style, the man to give the lead in it, and indeed the most prominent representative of that epoch, is Doctor Siegbert Tarrasch. Furthermore Tarrasch developed another branch of Steinitz’s investigations, namely, the correct treatment of the opponent’s cramped positions, which was not merely a small or less important branch. The greater freedom of space is by much the most important of the Steinitz permanent positional characteristics. Most of the others (like the advantage of two Bishops or the disadvantage of a weak point on the other side, etc.) may force a cramped position.”

Tarrasch is notable here not necessarily for the content of his ideas but the effort Tarrasch devoted to their spread and propagation. Rèti suspects that he could have been a more successful 124

Ibid., 124.

100

player had he not eschewed the old Renaissance tradition of keeping secrets from competitors and “always published his knowledge and given it to all the others.”125 Tarrasch scored positive match records against Steinitz but never properly challenged him for the title of world champion; this was instead achieved by Lasker (1868-1941) in 1894, who defended his title against Tarrasch in 1908, and whom Tarrasch was ultimately never able to surpass. Lasker is characterized by Rèti as a sort of “philosopher-king” of chess, who approached chess as an instrumental effort in a greater philosophical project. As a result, his work was geared towards ironing out the finer details in the existing theories exemplified in the play of Steinitz and Tarrasch: “The other masters endeavoured to create a specific chess technique. They studied the peculiarity of the board and of the pieces and propounded general maxims as ‘two Bishops are stronger than two Knights’ or ‘the Rook should be placed behind the passed pawns.’ Those are maxims that have no general value and, to a great extent, so far as they apply to progressive chess technique, require certain qualification: yet they are glasses for the short-sighted and have their uses. Lasker acknowledged only universal laws of the struggle and by means thereof he triumphed

Rèti 39-42. Rèti’s passing comparison of Tarrasch-era German games to attrition-based trench warfare in the cited excerpt merits further discussion here. The metaphor is even more apt when extended to the old pre-Morphy style of play exemplified in Anderssen; in that style, the fetishization of the decisive battle betrayed itself in the classic sacrifices and crowd-pleasing plays characteristic of Anderssen’s famous games the records of which came to be circulated within the chess community much like war stories or myths would circulate through culture on a perhaps broader scale. These findings can be further related to the challenges that met capitalism starting in the later half of the nineteenth century. Tarrasch’s dogmatism thus represents one of the last hurrahs of the cult of the decisive battle, which, as we will see, will prove ultimately untenable later on under revolutionary pressures in all spheres of culture. 125

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over Steinitz and Tarrasch and proved the errors and defects in their chess technique. Therein lay his merit in chess. So to improve his powers, that attack and the necessary defence went hand in hand, was for Lasker not a matter of chess principle only. The latter troubled him but little. It was the struggle as such that concerned him… Where Lasker was most original was in his application of the principles of development.” 126

Lasker’s victory began a period of stagnation in chess in which a select few masters, all adhering strictly to the SteinitzTarrasch school with perhaps the occasional deviation, claimed repeated tournament wins over the younger generation. This period ended formally with the rise of Capablanca. At thirteen, Capablanca (1888-1942) became the best chess player in Cuba; in 1921, after almost a decade of unsuccessful attempts to arrange a title match, Lasker ceded the title to Capablanca, whose tournament results had spoken enough for themselves. When the title match was finally played a year later in Havana, Lasker, appearing out of shape at best and past his prime at worst, resigned after playing fourteen games and winning none. During his seven-year reign as world chess champion Capablanca described his own play as follows: “My individual style of play does not in any way reflect my Southern origin. Inclined to simplicity, I always play carefully and try to avoid unnecessary risks. I consider my method to be right as any superfluous ‘daring’ runs counter to the essential character of chess, which is not a gamble but a purely intellectual combat conducted in accordance with the exact rules of logic.”127

Ibid., 54-56. Webster McNairy, 400 Best Chess Strategy Quotes (Greensboro: Life Strategic, 2013) 23-24. 126 127

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Capablanca expanded and improved Morphy’s principles of development, triggering a revelation of sorts in a young Rèti, who notes on Capablanca’s play that “instead of applying Morphy’s principle of developing all the pieces as quickly as possible he was guided in his plan by some plan based as much as possible on positional considerations.”128 One consequence of this revelation is a critique in the vein of Kant of chess theory itself, of the notion that a rule or a law can exist in chess in the same way they exist in the realm of science. Rèti rails heavily against this notion: “As we younger masters learnt from Capablanca’s method of play, by which each move is to be regarded as an element of a scheme, that no move is to be made for itself alone (contrary sometimes to Morphy’s principle that every move should have its concomitant development), we began to see that moves formerly considered selfunderstood and made, as it were, automatically by every good player, had to be discarded… A difference in principle exists between scientific rules as we know them in connection with Physics and Mathematics and the so-called chess laws. That difference becomes clear when we consider that Nature’s laws prevail under all conditions, while the universal strategical chess principles are maxims of treatment which may, perhaps, in the majority of instances, find a practical application, yet, in some cases, are better not resorted to. Just as in life no universal rules of conduct can obtain, and just the man who invariably acts in accordance with the most approved principles will not perforce become great, so it is with chess principles.”129

What, then, does a “rule of chess” consist in? For Rèti and his hypermodern contemporaries, the only rules of use to the chess

128 129

Rèti 109-110. Ibid.

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player, outside of the governing rules of the game, take the form of maxims which can be, but are not necessarily always correct to follow. Perhaps the older generations may have been able to get by with “routine play” and rigorous and unchanging application of the Steinitz-Tarrasch principles, but for the hypermodernists, “extreme deliberation is called for when one plays independently of rules and on the lines of one’s own particular plan; and the source of the greatest errors is to be found in those moves that are made merely according to rule and not based on the individual plan or thought of the player.”130 For any such maxim, the chess player must decide how to act depending on the context of the move in consideration. Making sense of this context requires a holistic approach, an “individual game plan” which draws on knowledge of the opponent, the circumstances, the relative states of knowledge of each player, and so on and so forth in order to determine the best overall route to victory. Another consequence of this view is the appearance of the midgame, which few dared to seriously theorize about before Nimzowitsch (1886-1935). Nimzowitsch posited that in the ambiguous state between the opening and the endgame, one could exert positional control without explicit use of pawns, i.e. with the threat of movement generated by off-center pieces; this also involved efficiently breaking up the chains of pawns that were especially common at the time. Although none of the first-generation hypermodernists managed a world championship title (Nimzowitsch issued a challenge to Capablanca in 1922 but failed to raise the requisite hefty funds), Rèti became the first to defeat Capablanca in eight years at the 1924 New York tournament, in which Capablanca finished with an uncharacteristic second place. Capablanca seems to have become anxious that the competition was catching up to him after another 130

Ibid., 119-120.

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weak performance the following year in Moscow, but two years after that he was once again able to take home the gold at the New York round robin over Alekhine, Spielmann, Vidmar, Nimzowitsch and Marshall. This made Capablanca the clear favorite going into his title match with Alekhine. However, Alekhine came to Argentina in peak physical and mental condition and engaged a lesser-prepared Capablanca in the longest championship match that had been played in chess up to that point; to the surprise of everyone including himself, Alekhine emerged victorious after 34 grueling games (+63=25). Capablanca distinguished himself from the dogmatic Tarrasch line of theory not by the hypermodern rejection of universality but with a unique style of combination and mental play. “In general in a combination the first surprising and beautiful move is the sacrifice,” explains Rèti, “[but] with Alekhine, it is mostly the final move that takes his opponent’s breath away. He beats his opponents by analysing simple and apparently harmless sequences of moves in order to see whether at some time or another at the end of it an original possibility, and therefore one difficult to see, might be hidden. The striving not to allow himself to be deceived by the apparent simplicity of a position and by obvious moves led him slowly in the new direction, whilst his fellow-countrymen, Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch, by treading the old well-known paths, tried to approach truth in chess.” Correspondence with Capablanca added a “methodical groundwork” to his play, but Alekhine continued to deviate from the old principles of opening and development until his death as world champion in 1946.131 35. In 1900, Hilbert issued 23 problems or challenges in mathematics that served as a sort of starting point for mathematical 131

Ibid., 128-129.

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and logical development in the century to come. The second is the most important for our purposes: Hilbert challenged mathematicians to prove that the arithmetic system of axioms was both consistent and complete. The Principia Mathematica worked closely along these lines, but any hopes for the completion of such a project were proven utterly

misplaced

by

Gödel

with

the

publication

of

his

incompleteness theorems in 1931. In short, the incompleteness theorems demonstrate that if an axiomatic system is consistent, i.e. it contains no contradictions, it cannot be complete; for every such language, there must exist at least one statement in that language that cannot be proven. The Principia Mathematica was thus shown to have “irreparable holes;” it could never be made consistent without accepting some degree of incompleteness: “Gödel had the insight that a statement of number theory could be about a statement of number theory (possibly even itself), if only numbers could somehow stand for statements. The idea of a code, in other words, is at the heart of his construction. In the Gödel Code, usually called "Gödel-numbering", numbers are made to stand for symbols and sequences of symbols. That way, each statement of number theory, being a sequence of specialized symbols, acquires a Gödel number, something like a telephone number or a license plate, by which it can be referred to. And this coding trick enables statements of number theory to be understood on two different levels: as statements of number theory, and also as statements about statements of number theory. Once Gödel had invented this coding scheme, he had to work out in detail a way of transporting the Epimenides paradox into a numbertheoretical formalism. His final transplant of Epimenides did not say, ‘This statement of number theory is false,’ but rather, ‘This statement of number theory does not have any proof’... In the case of Gödel's work, the fixed system of numbertheoretical reasoning to which

106

the word ‘proof’ refers is that of Principia Mathematica (P.M.) Therefore, the Gödel sentence G should more properly be written in English as, ‘This statement of number theory does not have any proof in the system of Principia Mathematica’... We can now state what the effect of discovering G is. Whereas the Epimenides statement creates a paradox since it is neither true nor false, the Gödel sentence G is unprovable (inside P.M.) but true. The grand conclusion? That the system of Principia Mathematica is ‘incomplete’-there are true statements of number theory which its methods of proof are too weak to demonstrate… Gödel's proof pertained to any axiomatic system which purported to achieve the aims which Whitehead and Russell had set for themselves. And for each different system, one basic method did the trick. In short, Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved. Therefore Gödel's Theorem had an electrifying effect upon logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers interested in the foundations of mathematics, for it showed that no fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers…”132

The first appearance of the joueur petit a is no appearance at all, but a derivation; with these incompleteness theorems, the joueur petit

a

is

inscribed

in

all

logico-philosophical

progreṣs ̣h ͍̰̥̰̞̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱͜͝͠ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱̣̦ence҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̣f̦ortḥ.҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̣ W ̦̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ e ͍̰̥̰̞̣͜͝͠ṣha͍̰̥̰̞̣͜͝͠l̦ḷ ̦̣ṣe͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ẹ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̣̦r͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠e͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠p̦e̦a̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ṭ̦ed̦ ̣fai͍̰̥̰̞͍̰̥̰̞̣͜͜͝͠͝͠le҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̦d͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ ạṭtẹ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̦mpṭs͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ ̦̣th͍̰̥̰̞̣͜͝͠ṛo͍̰̥̰̞͍̰̥̰̞̣̦͜͜͝͠͝͠u̦gho ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ẹ̦ uṭ h ̦p̦u͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠n̦̣g̦̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ẹ t͍̰̥̰̞͍̰̥̰̞͜͜͝͠͝͠h̦is ̣othẹ̦r̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̣,̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̦̣as͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ huma͍̰̥̰̞͍̰̥̰̞̦̣͜͜͝͠͝͠n̦̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱s ̦ex̣i҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩s͍̰̥̰̞̦͜͝͠t҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ i̦n ̣ ͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠f҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩̣uṇdạm ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̣umạn ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱hisṭ̦or͍̰̥̰̞̦̣͜͝͠ỵ͍̰̥̰̞̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱͜͝͠ t͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠ọ ̦e̦x ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ nta͍̰̥̰̞̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱͜͝͠ l̦ o͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠p̣pos͍̰̥̰̞̣͜͝͠ ̦̣iti̦ọ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱n ̣t͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠o̦ ̣thi̦s̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ petịt ạ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ Heidegger ̻̜͍͎̮̝̞̮͔̬̲̲͎̱ 39. attempted a destruktion of the language of the self that Western metaphysics had been entrenched in since Antiquity in the 1927 Sein und Zeit. He recasts the classical

132

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York: Basic, 1979) 25-27.

107

philosophical construction of the self, the union of mind and body that can determine to itself that it is thinking and that it therefore exists per Descartes, as dasein (“human being in the world”). For Descartes, the activity of Being had been thinking, i.e. the cogito, selfawareness of one’s existence as a thinking mind, etc. For Kant, Being had ceased to be a predicate entirely, motivating his critique of Descartes’ ontological proof of the existence of God. For Heidegger, Being is that by virtue of which things that are, an activity whereby that which is reveals itself to and in consciousness, the principle of existence that is within things. In Heidegger’s view, most of the Western tradition of metaphysics had become misguided in the ontological investigation of Being, instead getting caught up in ontic investigations of particular beings in space, which never reach universality in themselves; all of the standard modern philosophical concepts like form, substance and will are not Being, but certain kinds of beings. This raises problems for the question of “what is Being?” itself. We couldn’t ask this question without presupposing its answer in the use of the word “is.” There is a vocabulary with which we describe beings that is derived from experience. We experience beings and describe them according to how we experience them, but this doesn’t work at the level of Being, which precedes all experience and indeed all conditions for the possibility of experience. As dasein, our ontic distinction from other beings is that we are ontological; our basic understanding of ourselves is the pre-ontological basis with which we do ontology. Heidegger explains further that the threefold structure of dasein extends itself throughout time; quite intuitively, any given self has a past, a present, and a future. Dasein thus “reveals itself in terms of the past as being thrown into a world, in terms of the present as

108

being able to articulate our place within it, and in terms of the future; in terms of projecting ourselves forward and so on.”133 In Germany, Heidegger was read as a plea for a return to traditional values concurrent to the gradual emergence of Nazi ideology. Hitler completed his rise to office in 1933, backed by the German industrialists, landowners, and business and military sectors in the midst of “violent mass demonstrations of workers… from all parts of the country,” and within days, Nazi stormtroopers were set loose upon the riots alongside the police.134 He immediately began implementing concentration camps and testing international waters, first in Austria, then in Czechoslovakia, and finally in Poland. Italy and Japan sought similar expansion measures, with Italy’s eyes on Ethiopia, Albania, and Yugoslavia and Japan’s on China, the Phillippines, and the Dutch East Indies. With Britain distracted defending Finland from Russia in the winter of 1939-40, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg through Belgium and Holland towards France, entering Paris by June 1940. France’s defeat convinced Mussolini to submit to Hitler and join the war on his side. Churchill faced seemingly insurmountable odds, but he was never a man of “cut and dried calculations” and pressed onwards in spite of the overwhelming circumstances. His patience was ultimately rewarded; by December 1941, Stalin and Roosevelt had both been forced into the war against the Axis powers, while Hitler struggled with the logistics and coordination of a cross-channel invasion. For Hitler, war with the Soviet Union was “not only inevitable but also the culmination of his ambitions, allowing him to establish German dominion over continental Europe and deal once and for all with the twin.” Germany’s first engagement with Russian forces at

Roderick, “Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism,” in Self Under Siege, Teaching Company, 1993. Lecture. 134 Harman 488. 133

109

the border failed to “guarantee long-term victory,” and Hitler was able to prolong for some time, but not escape defeat at the hands of a combined Allied offensive.

135

The blitzkrieg approach proved

historiographically misguided and out of place against Russia; like the British, the Russians initially faltered, but were ultimately able to adapt, as noted by Freedman: “The successes of 1940 did convince Hitler that blitzkrieg was the way to win wars, so he adopted it as the basis for the attack on the Soviet Union. Soviet mistakes again helped with early progress, but the offensive soon faltered and the economic demands of the campaign were inadequately addressed. While celebrating blitzkrieg as a doctrine, its proponents paid inadequate attention to this experience in the East -- not only its failure but the objectives of conquest, plunder, and racial domination that shaped its course. In the end, the experience of the Second World War followed that of the First. The Germans found themselves fighting an attritional campaign after attempting to force a result with a winning maneuver.”136

At the time of writing, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with which the United States forced a Japanese surrender and the formal end of the war remain the only instance of nuclear bombing in human history. 39i. Dutch football experienced a minor boom in the 1950s after having remained significantly behind the rest of Europe in the game for the first half of the twentieth century. In 1948, for example, when the W-M had become the standard formation across all of Europe, Holland still used the antiquated Victorian 2-3-5. When 135 136

Freedman 142-143. Ibid., 210.

110

Michels came to Ajax in 1958, he built the system of totaalvoetbal instead upon a flexible 4-2-4 that could become a 4-3-3 with sweeper Vasović dropping back. A draw with Feyenoord in 1970 convinced Michels of the superiority of Feyenoord’s 4-3-3, which Michels could turn into a 3-4-3 with the same shift by Vasović. Wilson continues: “The notion of individuality within a system… is characteristic of the Netherlands at the time… As in architecture, as across a range of disciplines at the time - the literary theory and semiology of Roland Barthes, the anthropological theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan - so in football. Within the Ajax model, players derived their meaning, their significance, from their interrelationship with other players. To suggest that could not have occurred without a decline in faith is probably a theoretical leap too far, but again, it is hard not to see a link between Dutch football and the intellectual spirit of the time - and it is a beguiling coincidence that the two greatest exponents of system as an attacking force, Ajax and Dynamo Kyiv, sprang up in the Netherlands and the USSR, arguably the two most secular societies in the world at the time… What was revolutionary was that the interchanging of positions was longitudinal rather than lateral. In Boris Arkadiev’s Dinamo Moscow side, wingers had moved into the centre, and inside-forwards had played on the wing, but the three lines of defence, midfield and attack had, broadly speaking, remained constant. The great Hungarians, by withdrawing their centre-forward and sitting the left-half so deep, had blurred the lines, and with 4-2-4 came attacking full-backs, but Michels’s Ajax were the first to encourage such whole-scale interchanges, and what allowed them to do so was pressing. Suddenly it didn’t matter if there were 40 yards of space behind the deepest outfield player because if an opponent received the

111

ball he would be hounded so quickly it would be almost impossible for him to craft an accurate pass.” 137

This systemic approach to football survived in Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv in the later 1970s, which pioneered an absolute focus on universality. Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov sought the optimal strategy which could not be adapted to in the long run by opponents, that dialectic by which pressure and attacking options were used to elicit mistakes from the opponent. On this view, the fundamental truth of football was that offense came from possession, and all strategy was derived from this truth: therefore, it could be correct for forwards to defend or for backs to attack; everything depended on circumstance. Like Michels before him, Lobanovskyi emphasized the relation between the individual to the system and vice versa; individual skill was “only of use within the context of the system,” and the best football involved the true synthesis of individual creativity and systemic structure in which spontaneous genius could occur. 40. After Sartre (1905-1980) was released from captivity by the Vichy regime, he began work on a number of classical existentialist pieces influenced heavily by the works of Hegel and Heidegger that he studied so diligently while in captivity. In 1943, the same year the Vatican was bombed by an unidentified aircraft, Sartre advanced in the Être et le néant a new reading of Heidegger’s being-for-itself, i.e. that which is not dasein. Put simply, Sartre’s conception of l’être-ensoi, or Being-in-itself, is what is; it is material determinateness, the external world of material objects, that which is determined to exist. On the other hand, l’être-pour-soi, or Being-for-itself, is what is not; it

137

Wilson 100.

112

is the experience of consciousness that takes on Heidegger’s tripartite structure of past-present-future. Sartre speculated later on that anti-semitic tensions had manifested themselves in the years leading up to the war out of deepseated passions that preceded their objects and therefore assumed the premises required by their truth. The anti-Semite makes the same choice that people make when they choose to “live a life of passion rather than one of reason,” but instead of pursuing “objects” of passion, the anti-Semite values the state of passionate irrational hatred in itself, and thus relegates the object of this hatred to the status of other, an external, material determinateness separate from and not considered as a self, in the sense of a proper tension between être-pour-soi and être-pour-autrui. Beauvoir extended a similar analysis to the “otherization” of woman in history, tracing chauvinistic tensions all the way back to the invention of the tool, at which point “maintenance of life became activity and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal.” The result was, of course, the subjugation of Nature and Woman beneath the Man.138 Alongside these developments the Frankfurt school at Goethe University set to work on their own formulation of the critique of the capitalist implications of the Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that the social sciences that claimed to describe capitalism were themselves outgrowths of capitalism, so the Marxist needed a new tool to critique capitalism. Notable in the early Frankfurt works is the return to the dialectical method of Hegel, which Marx criticized as ignorant of the real-world conditions of the working class. The Frankfurt theorists solved for this by limiting themselves to only those dialectical methods which could be self-

138

Simone de Beauvoir, Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011) 75.

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correcting, which could be used to “weed out” previous false interpretations as they came to be known as false. 40⅓. Nash gave his groundbreaking dissertation in 1950 in which he introduced the concept of a “competitive equilibrium” in two-person games. Nash defines the set of all equilibrium points for a given two-person game as “simply the set of all pairs of opposing ‘good strategies.’” Strictly speaking, this set is the ”profile of strategies, one for each player in the game, such that each player's strategy maximizes his expected utility payoff against the given strategies of the other players.”139 Good strategies in this context are thus those that maximize payoff independent of the strategies of other players. In the simple case that a strictly dominant option exists for a player, an equilibrium point exists for every combination of such dominant strategies on both sides. This concept of total utility for a player drew from the contributions of the early Austrian school beginning with Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre in 1871, while the equilibria can be traced to Cournot’s duopoly model of 1838 and Walras’s subsequent analysis of markets in 1874 by which “the static theory of the economic universe emerged in the form of a large number of quantitative relations (equations) between economic elements or variables (prices and quantities of consumable and productive goods or services) that were conceived as simultaneously determining one another.” Schumpeter explains this model of equilibria as follows: “If the relations which are derived from our survey of the ‘meaning’ of a phenomenon are such as to determine a set of values of the variables that will display no tendency to vary under

139

Roger Myerson, “Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory,”

Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1999): 1072.

114

the sole influence of the facts included in those relations per se, we speak of equilibrium: we say that those relations define equilibrium conditions or an equilibrium position of the system and that there exists a set of values of the variables that satisfies equilibrium conditions.”140

However, another consequence of this method is the possibility that a strict solution does not exist for a game, in which case players tend towards equilibrium via mixed strategies Consider Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS), a two-player zero-sum game with perfect information in which each player chooses one out of three possible strategies at the same time and then receives payouts appropriately. RPS is perfectly balanced in the sense that no option is ever strictly dominant over all of the opponent’s possible options. Therefore; the Nash equilibrium, given perfect information, is to simply play a mixed strategy consisting in selecting each option with the same frequency, i.e. Rock ⅓rd of the time, etc. This remains the equilibrium insofar as the players collect no data or notes on the habits of their opponents, i.e. their relative preference for a certain option over others. Nash’s findings could be extended for n-person games, whereas the most complex example von Neumann and Morgenstern had been able to muster was a three-person game. Nash believed that the equilibrium concept, when taken together with von Neumann and Morgenstern’s theory of the “normal form” of games, had completed a “complete general methodology for analyzing all games.”141

140 141

Schumpeter 933-935. Myerson 1080.

115

40⅔. Prior to entering the war, the United States had fallen into a depression that rejected all economic logic of the times. Traditional wisdom before the Great Depression had always favored saving: Ricardo and Mill had “scoffed” and “pooh-pooed” at Malthus’ concern that saving could “somehow result in a general glut.” Heilbroner notes that this reflected the material facts of their time, in which “virtually the only people who could afford to save were wealthy landlords and capitalists, and any sums they put together were usually employed in productive investments of one kind

or

another.”

Saving

was

thus

always

considered

“accumulation” as the net flow of money for the landowner weighed against his cost in “purchasing the tools or buildings or land to make still more money.” This changed in the nineteenth century, when: “...The distribution of wealth improved, and along with it the possibility of saving became open to more and more members of society. And at the same time, business became larger and more institutionalized; increasingly it looked for new capital not just in the pockets of its individual manager-owners but also in the anonymous pocketbooks of savers all over the country. Hence saving and investing became divorced from one another—they became separate operations carried out by separate groups of people. And this did introduce trouble into the economy. Malthus was right after all, although for reasons he had never foreseen… In 1929 the American private citizenry put aside $3.7 billion out of its income; by 1932 and 1933 it was saving nothing—in fact, it was even drawing down its old savings made in the years before. Corporations, which had tucked away $2.6 billion at the top of the boom after paying out taxes and dividends, found themselves losing nearly $6 billion three years later.”142

142

Heilbroner 144-152.

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Keynes affirmed the logic behind the stimulant New Deal projects that had stagnated “behind a dam of governmental apathy” in the 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. In Keynes’ view, economics had developed too great a focus on the “long-run” implied by the market structures in Smith, etc., and in doing so had become blind to the processes that occurred within. For Keynes, “in the long run, we are all dead,” and it was the warping of the market in the short-run that merited further discussion. Investment on this view followed a “typical pattern” of “first eagerness to take advantage of a new opportunity; then, caution lest enthusiasm lead to overbuilding; then inactivity when the market has been satisfied for the time being.” If another investment project of comparable size is ready to “step into the breach” when one dies out, the “economy will sail smoothly along,” but contraction occurs in the absence of such a substitute. There was no “inherent economic mechanism” that naturally solved unemployment; in other words, there could exist Walrasian market equilibria without full employment: “Unemployment had reached the point at which some sort of action was dictated by pure political necessity—after all, this was a time when there were riots in Dearborn and a ragged march on Washington, when families huddled for warmth in municipal incinerator buildings and even scrabbled for food in garbage trucks. Relief was essential and began under Hoover; then, under Roosevelt, relief turned into leaf-raking, and leaf-raking turned into constructive enterprise. The government was suddenly a major economic investor: roads, dams, auditoriums, airfields, harbors, and housing projects blossomed forth. Keynes came to Washington in 1934—this was when he made his notes on the impression of President Roosevelt’s hands—and urged that the program be extended further. The statistics showed that the

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bottom had fallen out of private investment activity: business expansion, which had pumped out $15 billion in wages and salaries and profits in 1929, had fallen to the appalling figure of $886 million in 1932—a drop of 94 percent. Something had to start up the investment motor that hoisted the economic car up the shaft, and he hoped that government spending would act as such a stimulus by bolstering the nation’s general buying power… Had the government not begun to open the valve of public spending, in all likelihood private business would eventually again have led the way: it always had done so in the past, and despite the severity of the Great Depression, it would in time unquestionably have found new avenues of adventure. But it was impossible to wait. The American people had waited for four long years, and they were in no mood to wait much longer. Economists began to speak of stagnation as the chronic condition of capitalism. The voice of Marx rang louder than it ever had rung in the past; many pointed to the unemployed as prima facie evidence that Marx was right. The mumble of Veblen was discernible in the faddish vogue of the technocrats, who wanted to call out not the proletariat but the engineers. And there was the still more chilling voice that never wearied of pointing out that Hitler and Mussolini knew what to do with their unemployed. In this welter of remedies and advocacy of desperate action, the message of The General Theory, the civilized voice of Keynes, was certainly moderate and reassuring. ”143

41. Game theory was adopted as a key tool of analysis for North American think tank RAND, which was set up by an air force grant during the war and later became an independent hub for postwar analytical methodology in national defense and public policy. RAND took particular interest in the work of von Neumann, who saw the group as an “institution that could showcase [his] new techniques.” One consequence of RAND’s developments, perhaps 143

Ibid.

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unforeseen by von Neumann, was the extension of these techniques to ethics in the form of social welfare functions. Arrow (1921-) showed in 1951 that the democratic process alone could not maximize total social welfare relative to all individual preferences, and indeed, such a formulation of total welfare functions could never satisfy every individual in the group given certain standard assumptions about their preferences: “Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or ‘social’ ordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is startling. Arrow's theorem says there are no such procedures whatsoever— none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite reasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences.”144

Therefore, the social welfare function cannot attempt to handle all possible orderings of individual alternatives, and therefore must drop at least one of Arrow’s following conditions: SO: Per Arrow’s definition of the social welfare function, it must produce a “weak ordering” of the alternatives; in other words, the result of aggregating orders of preferences must itself be an order of preferences. Plott tried relaxing this

144

Michael Morreau, "Arrow's Theorem" in Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (Winter 2014). Web.

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condition in 1973; the results have since been generally considered “unpromising” UD: The domain of the social welfare function must be unrestricted, i.e. it must include all logically possible orderings of alternative choices given the widest possible range of preferences of each individual. The social welfare function can drop this condition, in which case it settles for a restricted domain of profiles IA: The social welfare function must preserve the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Per Arrow’s illustration,145 consider a hypothetical election held by having each individual fill out a list of each candidate from best to worst. If one candidate was to die after the election was held, the election would proceed by blotting out the dead candidate’s name on each ballot, with the rest of each ordering preserved. This condition can be dropped in favor of a weaker independence in order to improve ordinal information for the social welfare function, in which case “social preferences on a pair of options should only depend on the population's preferences on these two options and on what options are indifferent to each of these options for each individual”146 WP: The social welfare function should prefer an alternative if it is preferred by every individual in the group. Sen railed

Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New Haven: Wiley & Sons, 1963) 26. 146 Marc Fleurbaey, “Social Choice and Just Institutions,” Economics and Philosophy 23: 23. 145

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against this “welfarist” condition on the grounds that it excluded non-welfare factors entirely, i.e. “physical characteristics of social states, people's motives in having the preferences they do, respect for rights, equality”147 ND: The social welfare function is “not to be imposed” and cannot be “dictatorial,” i.e. one individual’s preferences never outweigh another’s in a vacuum, and one individual cannot decide everyone else’s preference with his own. If this assumption is dropped, a dictator is created 42. The first international order of business after the war was reorganization, primarily through the United Nations. The Marshall plan was enacted to “revive the economies of Europe under US hegemony,” in opposition to Stalin’s attempts to circulate communism throughout eastern Europe. Berlin was split between the so-called “capitalists” and “communists” in 1948: “Germany had been divided into four occupation zones, and so had its capital, Berlin. Now the US, Britain and France merged their zones and introduced a new currency, which had the effect of cutting them off from the Russian zone. Russia reacted by imposing a blockade on the movement of goods and food by road and rail to West Berlin, which was an isolated enclave in the midst of their zone. A huge US and British airlift succeeded in keeping the supplies flowing—and became part of an Anglo-US propaganda campaign about the ‘defence of freedom.’” 148

147 148

Morreau, “Arrow’s Theorem.” Harman 544.

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US-Russian tensions climbed to unprecedented heights after the Russians performed tests for their first atomic bomb in 1949. The stage for the first true nuclear game had been set, as there were now two players with competing incentives and desires and nuclear potential, rather than just the United States. Schelling of RAND championed deterrence as the only proper nuclear strategy in the 1950s, and McNamara implemented the strategy of mutually assured destruction as Secretary of Defense in the following decade. Nuclear power had pushed the United States and Russia past the conventional bounds for players in the game of international politics; no other nation had enjoyed the luxury of a technology that the entire world knew had the potential to destroy entire cities overnight. McNamara hypothesized that equilibrium could be reached in a conflict between two such states without a war ever coming to fruition, as the threat generated by this capacity was essentially infinite. The focus for every other nation, then, is to reach this point in technological development, for the nations that already had, to strive for advantages in every other conceivable regard. The attempted hegemonic expansion by the United States into Cuba broke down in 1959 when the guerilla revolutionary armies of Castro and Guevara entered Havana. Castro’s regime sought to strip Cuba of the economic dependence it had developed on the United States through cheap Russian imports and reform in the business sector in favor of the working class. In 1961 the CIA failed miserably to stage a coup at the Bay of Pigs. After this point Kennedy had on his hands the world’s first nuclear crisis: “Kennedy’s government had learned that the USSR under Khrushchev was secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. The US could already hit Russian cities from its bases in Western Europe and Turkey. The Cuban missiles would provide Russia with the same capacity to hit US cities. Castro and Che Guevara

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welcomed the missiles, assuming they would be a deterrent against a US attack on Cuba. Undoubtedly this was mistaken, since there was little likelihood of Russia risking the destruction of its own cities in a nuclear exchange merely to please the Cubans. The US government, however, was prepared to risk nuclear war in order to get the missiles removed. How close the world came to nuclear war was later revealed by the president’s brother, Robert Kennedy. ‘We all agreed, if the Russians were prepared to go to war over Cuba, they were prepared to go to nuclear war and we might as well have the showdown then as six months later.’ Transcripts of the US presidential discussions show the government of the world’s greatest power was indeed prepared to risk nuclear war with Russia. They also show the Kennedy obsession with Cuba was connected to a wider issue—the fear of an erosion of US global hegemony.” 149

In October 1962, the world evaded mutually assured destruction when Arkhipov convinced Captain Savitsky aboard the Russian submarine B-49 not to fire the nuclear torpedo the submarine was carrying. Kennedy finally gave the order to dismantle the antiballistic missiles in Turkey and Italy on the same day, and further deescalation followed as the US gradually withdrew its naval blockade on Cuba. Capitalism had lost Cuba, but this was a small price to pay, if any price at all, for the world to remain intact. 43. We shall thus return to the discussion of Wittgenstein’s Investigations with regards to the archaeology of the game. As we have seen, the linguistic turn motivated fundamental developments in the earliest strands of game theory. Our languages are now more complex than ever, and with them, our games, yet throughout history they have shared something ineffable which links them all together 149

Ibid., 569-570.

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in this concept of game. As we have theorized over the years about richer concepts like attack and defense, strategy and tactics, mind and body, nature and culture, so too do we now realize our goals and desires, both individual and collective, in more sophisticated and diffuse ways. This extends to individual and social projects as well as operations of power on the individual and national levels. For the later Wittgenstein, what is important is no longer what the language of philosophy can say, but what it cannot say. This necessitates a transition away from the totalizing, universal language of the Tractatus and towards the more diffuse dialectic of the language-game. Lyotard explains this concept as follows: “Each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put-in exactly the same way as the game of chess is defined by a set of rules determining the properties of each of the pieces, in other words, the proper way to move them… It is useful to make the following three observations about language games. The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent the rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a "move" or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is suggested by what has just been said: every utterance should be thought of as a ‘move’ in a game.”150

This formulation is made even more complex when we consider with Derrida the fundamental difference between the

Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Condition (Manchester: U of Minnesota, 1984) 10. 150

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spoken word and the written sign; each carries with it different implications, and a difference in one does not necessarily carry over to the other. On the later Wittgenstein’s view, philosophical problems arise when we make a sort of “category mistake” when partaking in these language-games and “mismatch” terms, i.e. when we speak of metaphysics, we are attempting to apply the language of substance to a field it is not suited for. The project of the very specific languagegame of philosophy is to iron out these errors in the application of language. All of the syntheses and sublations that game theory has thus proceeded through have mobilized it for increasingly diverse purposes. With language now properly assimilated into the notion of the game, the most primal and fundamental interaction of existence emerges before us, the great meta-duel which everyone is always engaged in the playing of, and alongside it a parallel, inverse, deferred world of laws, rules, postulates, ideas, arguments, theories, and everything else the duelists have done with words over the years to attempt to explain their experiences that is simultaneous and concurrent to it. Every moment that occurs in the first world will, in the long run, produce infinite interpretations in the second. Per the incompleteness theorems, we can see that the meta-duel is always played in a state of informational asymmetry; this is a fundamental condition for the possibility of a duelist. Let us return to the metaphor of RPS and consider duelist d entering the world of this particular game. Duelist d wishes to defeat duelist f in this game of RPS. Each knows the general process by which the game is played with the exception of one imperfection: for d, the game is RP, and there are no Scissors, and for a, the game is PS, and there is no Rock. Suppose the duelists d and a meet for a session of RPS. Duelist d has done his research and knows that paper is the best option in the game. Likewise, a knows well of the dominance of 125

scissors in his game. So duelist d plays paper and duelist a plays scissors. Duelist a informs d that d has lost, and d does not understand why; after some minor squabbles, duelist a explains the misunderstanding, how this option Scissors is the non-Paper option in the game, and how Scissors actually beats Paper, and so is the dominant option in the game. This single event creates two opposing movements in each duelist’s base of knowledge, a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense by which the two duelists now duel in a new world. The first is shared between them: d has lost and a has won. Furthermore, each now has a new option to consider that previously did not exist to them. For d, the new option directly affects the way he wishes to play the game; he thought that Paper went even or better with the field of possible options, but Scissors turns everything on its head. Duelist a, on the other hand, is less inclined to believe anything has changed on a grand scale. Sure, a new option has been brought to light, but the only person that even knew about it between the two of them had not even used it in fear of punishment. Duelist a thus concludes that Scissors is still probably the best option. However, by the time the two play a rematch, d has reflected on his loss and comes back with Scissors, which ties a’s own Scissors. In the third tiebreaker match, a recognizes that d has played both Paper and Scissors in their games thus far, and is likely to pick one of these again; a concludes that Scissors is the best option in this case. But he has been duped by d, who pulls the unforeseen Rock to finally overcome his nemesis, the duelist a. In the transition from the first game to the second, each player’s knowledge of the objective structure of the game was expanded. The increase in knowledge between the second and the third, however, is completely external to the game; the duelists only learn new things about themselves and each other. Furthermore, the

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game is far from solved for both of them, and they could repeat this cycle ad infinitum without ever running out of things to theorize or strategize about. 44. As discussed earlier, when Zermelo, König, and Kalmár ported Kant’s ethical notion of the rule over to their game theoretic work, their theories took on a fundamentally proscriptive character, i.e. they sought to produce methods that could be followed by players to achieve tangible results. In von Neumann and Morgenstern, however, theory is used primarily to describe. The “minimax rule” is not so much a proscription for how to win games as it is a description of the behavior and risk management of rational actors in certain situations. While this does provide a line along which to develop prediction of opposing behavior, it does not in itself produce a true Kantian rule that can be followed by one who wishes to be a “good” player of games in order to achieve meaningful results. As seen in Arrow, this latter line of game theory bleeds at least a little bit into ethics proper with the use of models as references for the craft of policy, while the former type of rule-based prescriptive theory lends itself instead more specifically to the competitive sporting and gaming spheres. A synthesis of these two methods appears first in Harsanyi (1967), specifically with regards to the application of Bayesian statistics to Nash equilibria in simultaneous-move games and the resulting manifold of methods for finding mixed-strategy solutions. Harsanyi shows that the predictive value of the von Neumann-Nash line of game theory can produce rules that a player can follow in order to achieve, at least on their end, a mixed-strategy Nash equilibria in which their play can be said to be optimal, i.e. it mitigates risk as best as possible. Applying Bayesian probabilities to the actions of players creates the perfect manifold of information 127

regarding risk for game theory to work with: since these probabilities are subjective, when taken together, they represent the sum of all information which can be said to be available to the players of the game in question. Even if d doesn’t have perfect information about what will happen when he makes move x, if he can assign probabilities to possible outcomes, he can strategically cover each of these possible outcomes in proportions which are correct in the Zermelo-König-Kalmár sense. After the game ends, d may find out that these probabilities were wrong, i.e. there may have been an option available to his opponent that he did not know about, but this only means that he could have mitigated his overall risk, in all possible universes, even better by having performed the same calculations with more accurate probabilities. We need not admit to the existence of absolutely objective probabilities, the sort that the probabilities on which d operates would be measured against, in order to make this transition; this would be sufficient to justify the Bayesian approach, but it is not necessary. We only need to say that as far as the game is concerned, the player qua player is constituted in part by their state of uncertainty, their set of information, taken as a part of the whole of information that they could possibly have, relative to their opponent and the game state. When we last left the duelists a and d they were locked in an eternal duel with each other, each trying to get a mental edge over the other by predicting their in-game behavior. Now let us consider the implications of these two duelists discovering and subsequently joining a greater society of duelists with whom they must compete. On the one hand, as these duelists play each other more and more, their community will follow the same transition that occurred with d and a when they first discovered the full set of rules to RPS. On the other hand, once this initial transition is finished, and the entire group is playing the game with full and proper knowledge of its

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rules, there is no pure strategy that a single duelist could always apply in order to achieve the best possible results at all times. Maynard Smith suggests in the Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982) that a dynamic theory rather than von Neumann’s static theory is more appropriate for the production of tangible results in such environments. The mere knowledge of the existence of Nash equilibria does not and cannot in itself guarantee a duelist any tangible advantage over their peers. If any pure strategy Nash equilibria exist in competitive games, they are likely infinitely approached by the highest echelon of competitors rather than simply achieved and maintained. The population of Uta stansburiana, the side-blotched lizard, is in constant flux. During puberty, these lizards develop their eponymous blotches alongside its throats corresponding to one of many distinct reproductive strategies: “Males with orange throats are very aggressive and defend large territories. Males with dark blue throats are less aggressive and defend smaller territories. Males with prominent yellow stripes on their throats are 'sneakers' and do not defend territories (receptive females also have yellow-striped throats).”151

On one side of the gender binary, the orange- and bluethroated males feud amongst each other over territory and females. On the other side, there are the biologically-sexed females alongside the yellow-throated male-born lizards that possess far less testosterone overall than their orange-throated brethren and join the females in rejecting the occupation of territory altogether. Sinervo and Lively observed from 1990 to 1995 that the relative population of each throat color cycles on a five-to-six year basis, i.e. each Barry Sinervo and Curtis Lively, “The rock-paper-scissors game and the evolution of alternative male strategies,” Nature 380.6571 (1996): 240. 151

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reproductive strategy meets different levels of success relative to the proportional presence of each morph in the community: “As in the game where paper beats rock, scissors beat paper, and rock beats scissors, the wide-ranging 'ultradominant' strategy of orange males is defeated by the 'sneaker' strategy of yellow males, which is in turn defeated by the mate-guarding strategy of blue males; the orange strategy defeats the blue strategy to complete the dynamic cycle. Frequency-dependent selection maintains substantial genetic variation in alternative male strategies, while at the same time prohibiting a stable equilibrium in morph frequency.”152

Consider the analogous relations in Lacan’s model of sexual difference in the distinctly human language-games of knowledge and power, which Žižek compares to the transition between the early and late Wittgenstein: “Lacan proposes these so-called formulas of sexuation where the masculine side is defined by the universal function and its exception, [as in] all x are submitted to a certain function, but then there is one, at least one, which is the exception. [With] the feminine side, you have the paradox of non-all, le pas-tout. There is no exception, but for this very reason, the set is non-all, not totalizing. To give you a simple philosophical example, the early Wittgenstein is masculine, you know, [the Tractatus] proposes… a certain universal structure with the exception of the mystical... What the late Wittgenstein does… he no longer talks about the mystical exception. There is no exception, but for this reason, you cannot totalize language. Instead of simple universal structure, you get only this partial feminine resemblances and so on and so on. So again, you get first universality with an exception, then you 152

Ibid., 243.

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get this irreducible plurality of language-games, [outside of which] there is nothing… but they are not-all, you cannot totalize them.”153

Lacan equates these differences to the fundamental tension of contradiction within the traditional Aristotelian logical square. In the original Aristotelian logic, the particular judgement is read “minimally,” i.e. to say “some x are y” is to say that at least some x are y, possibly but not necessarily all of them. Lacan instead chooses to read this judgement “maximally,” in the sense that to say that some x are y entails that not all x are y. So, for Aristotle, a universal truth implies at least one particular truth, since if all x are y then of course some of them must be, but for Lacan, such a universal truth implies no particular existence in and of itself, i.e. the statement “all unicorns have at least one horn” can be true if there are no unicorns. 45. We have seen that technological progress has historically carried with it fundamental shifts in the way knowledge is conceived and approached by society. Recent literary critics have begun to associate this relation with what is called the postmodern trajectory, defined by Roderick as follows: “If we were really in a postmodern society, we wouldn’t still be discussing things like “the self” under siege or ‘the real’; they would simply have disappeared. We would be in a way transparently communicating one with another as in an earlier example when I talked about the stock market crashing due to the computer rationality. Well, if we had really reached the postmodern in its fullest sense… it would be the computers unplugging us and not the reverse… The postmodern is a blurring of the lines between Slavoj Žižek, “On Jacques Lacan," Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 2011. Lecture. 153

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human being and machines, a blurring of the line between reality and image. It is a society – actually I can’t even really use that word anymore – it is a world, if you will, a grouping of the world in which reality is simply that which can be simulated, Xeroxed, copied… At some point in the development of technology human beings ceased to be the reason of things and things took on their own reasons… technological things.”154

As executional and operational barriers to entry in the language-game of knowledge are dissolved by the universalization of access to knowledge via technology, the purely scientific aspect of knowledge, le savoir de, the “knowledge of,” wanes in significance relative to le savoir-faire, the “knowledge of how.” Lyotard continues: “Give the public free access to the memory and data banks. Language games would then be games of perfect information at any given moment. But they would also be non-zero-sum games, and by virtue of that fact discussion would never risk fixating in a position of minimax equilibrium because it had exhausted its stakes. For the stakes would be knowledge (or information, if you will), and the reserve of knowledge-language's reserve of possible utterances-is inexhaustible.”155

Once all of the bare facts of the game’s rules are known by all, the playing of the game is quite different, and so it was that d and a were forced to learn more and more about each other in the pursuit of more accurate predictions, thus “playing each other” moreso than “merely” playing “the game itself.” This is what Foucault meant when he famously equated knowledge to power, declaring these as two sides of the same coin: a game theory is only a game theory Roderick, Fatal Strategies in “Self Under Siege,” Teaching Company, 1993. Lecture. 155 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 67. 154

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insofar as it produces tangible successful results for the player applying them, therefore, to have knowledge in a game is to have power in it, and vice versa. In a world in which all possible scientific knowledge is contained in publicly-accessible library computers, the only knowledge that remains to pursue is a sort of economics of knowledge of how best to access, possess, or otherwise utilize these computers, and then how best to apply this knowledge in the production of successful outcomes for the rational individual. This shift corresponds to a rapid expansion over time in the scope and complexity of game design principles across all genres of games. The most important example of such design principles in the twentieth century is undoubtedly the evolution of the trading card game from the playing cards that began their spread during the Renaissance. In a trading card game such as Magic: the Gathering or Duel Monsters, a set of core mechanical rules is established alongside a few general classifications of cards, i.e. Monsters, Spells, and Traps, or Lands, Creatures, and Spells, and so on. The same holds true for a traditional card game such as poker or go fish. However, in the trading card game, outside of the base abstract card types, there are no limits set on the additional rules, or effects, that individual cards may bring to the table. Žižek explains the relationship between these new-age methodologies in game design with the Lacanian pas-tout: “I think [trading card games] are a nice example of the feminine non-all, because in contrast to a standard card game or chess game, where you have certain universal rules, and then you have elements and you have to use them obeying those rules… Here, each card, in a way, brings its own rule… The point is not that you have a card which is simply worth more than another card within a certain set of rules. No, you must look closely at those small letters which say, ‘if you have this card, and you have an attack card that you see on the opponent’s side, then you can revive

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another card, and kill all the opponent’s, on the condition that the opponent doesn’t have that, [and so on]…” 156

The Spell card is always a Spell card, but beyond this fact, the game designer can create Spell cards with any conceivable effect in future releases. This means that in a sense, there is no end to the number of changes that may come to pass in the universal structure of rules within a given trading card game. This model of periodic releases is of paramount significance to the earliest trading card games, most notably Magic: the Gathering (MTG), Duel Monsters (DM), Pokémon (PKMN), and the Versus System (VS). Once a traditional trading card game leaves the possession of an individual designer for a corporation, its continued existence is necessarily tied to this corporation’s material gains; if Wizards of the Coast one day ceased to be a company, so too would its intellectual property Magic: the Gathering, at least in its current form. More recently, Fantasy Flight has attempted to levy the restrictions placed on design by this model with the living card game model, but at the time of writing, the “big 3” of DM, MTG, and PKMN have yet to be surpassed in any meaningful sense (profit to parent company, amount of players, cultural significance, etc.) by one of these living card games.

156

Žižek, “On Jacques Lacan."

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Dawn of the Duel In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)

T

he English duel finds its roots in the ancient Latin duellum, meaning war, which was later replaced by bellum.157 However, the concept of the duel predates

the Latin language and likely the very concept of language; for humans duel, have dueled, and will so continue.a Approximately 65.5 million years ago, the dinosaurs were destroyed by a meteor or something. In this initial proto-duel preceding all other conceivable duels, nature triumphed over life and punished the Earth for its insolence with a long ice age. In Space Odyssey 2001, Stanley Kubrick hypothesizes that the first duel resulted from the discovery of armed This is a lie, as everyone knows that the original duelist was the Based Loli. See b. b I know the Based Loli / the real Based Loli. Which Based Loli in the preceding sentence is the true Based Loli? Can the true and the real be said to be the same? Can the same be said of each Based Loli? We are confronted with the set of all possible Based Lolis, whom extend throughout time and space infinitely in infinitely many parallel universes. The remainder of the chapter shall be spent channeling the wisdom of all of these Based Lolis the existence of which has just been posited. 157 a

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combat. In the opening scenes, an alien obelisk tells an ape to pick up a tree branch and hit his friends very hard with it. In doing so, the schizophrenic ape uses intention by utilizing the thick branch to perform the intentioned act to harm his friends for not getting him fries at the drive-thru. Furthermore, he creates power relations by inducing his friends to do what he says in order to avoid future harm from more branch-hitting. It matters not whether the duelist came before the duel or vice versa. The project at hand is an archaeology of the duel proper, which includes the whole organic model of dueling consisting in the interplay of the duelist with the duel. This structure has Japanese roots; it is the child of author Kazuki Takahashi; it represents his artistic vision and the purpose for which the duel was created. In the original stories of Yugi and the Pharaoh, Duel Monsters is a card game invented by the American Pegasus J. Crawford under the Egyptian influence of the Millennium Eye. At this time, Dennis Frogman was too busy learning the natural arts from the frogs while meditating in the mountains. The first time the duelist ever duels, the very first time he experiences the interaction of cards, he finds himself in a peculiar situation. He reasons to himself a certain play in his mind, determining for whatever reasons that that play is the best one for him to make, and something different than expected happens. “If I play Fissure on his La Jinn, my monster will be able to attack him directly!” the duelist thinks to himself. So he plays the Fissure and declares an attack, but alas, his monster has fallen into a trap, and is destroyed by Mirror Force. He thinks to himself, “The Legendary Fisherman must be the best card with the right set up, he can attack directly through Spell cards!” But when he duels with his Umi WATER deck featuring his favorite card, he draws poor hands and never seems to be able to make his combo work. The duelist has

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experienced the first and most fundamental duality that governs the game, that of theory and practice. The most basic distinction: at its core, the most fundamental aspect of the experience of dueling is the input of the duelist. Therefore, it is a game of decisions. The duel is a machine that receives input from the player and produces an output that consists in a complete game state, and it repeats this process until a declaration of victory for one player is present in a game state. But the game states produced do not rely only on the players’ input. There are certain random factors, or at least factors purported to be random, that significantly impact the flow of the game. These are things like the opening dice roll, shuffling decks, etc. The game necessitates that these factors are completely random, in that it is the intention of the game that players’ decks are perfectly randomized when shuffled, that their dice are not rigged, and their cards are not marked. Since we are inquiring into the very nature of the duel, we should assume that this is the case, even if it never holds true in reality. The duel is therefore a formally causal nexus in experience. We are thus led to two theses of equal weight and proportion: the duel thesis and the duelist thesis. Per the former, the duel consists in two parts, decisions and chance. The decisions are a priori structures, made on the basis of the duelist’s reasoning and thought processes, whether they occur during the game or prior. Chance is supplied a posteriori by experience, when the duelist actually finds himself dueling. Per the second, the duelist affects the state of the duel in two ways: first, by making a decision which in itself and by itself moves the game state forward, and second, by creating at least part of the material circumstances in which the two duelists duel by simply being a human being at one side of the table. And so at the behest of the figure in white, Dennis Frogman began to do battle with the devil’s herb, that potent ineffable state of mind that leads you to believe, if only for a second, that absolute 137

understanding is within arm’s reach. It was not the devil’s. He borrowed mine, if we’re being technical about it. Dennis Frogman solved all philosophical problems in the duel in the midst of his endeavors in the Emerald Dream, captivated by the devil’s herb and channeling its natural energies. Reason was set upon the duel directly from the Dream, the work of the herb, and starting at this moment all philosophical progress with regards to the duel was to be purely technical in nature; that is to say, there were no further paradigm shifts to occur in the theory of the duel; humanity had settled on the correct concepts and directions in which to expand them. The figure in white was pleased by these developments, and the two set their sights on the greatest conquest any duelist had known up to that point, the hundredth conference, the great tournament upon the yachts in the heart of the land of the King. In this tournament, Dennis Frogman had the first of many encounters with the joueur petit a, the intangible presence which pervades all duels and all types of duels, whom can never be exorcised despite the greatest attempts of Reason, and whom the figure in white had previously warned him about. Even more elusive than the legendary BYE, the joueur petit a did not even enter as a competitor, but lurked within the very structure of the rules that governed the tournament, ever-present in diffuse social relations throughout the tournament proceedings. These duels proceeded along the dimension of laser tag; they were still primitive, primordial duels making only brief tangential contact with the absolute truth. Screaming. Scream scream more screaming. Scream scream scream scream scream scream scream scream screamsream scream more screaming. Scream scream scream scream scream scream scream scream screSCREAM she hates myself SCREAM ream scream more EVEN I hate myself MORE we hate ourselves SCREAMING but Dennis Frogman prevailed, but the

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joueur petit a was there and saw to it that he failed in his ultimate quest before achieving the dream. Dennis Frogman was left alone by the figure in white to ponder the failure of his Enlightenment and his attempt to subject the duel to the totalizing force of Reason. It could not have been a misapplication of principles. His execution had been perfect. There should have been no player in the room on that day that could have bested Dennis Frogman. He had to go farther and completely give himself over to the devil’s herb in order to unfold these contradictions. And so he plunged back into the Dream, without the guidance of the figure in white, and simultaneously he plunged inwards into his own soul, to find out the true identity of this being called Dennis Frogman. What is your name? Another failure. A mere setback. Reason will prevail. What is my name? Absolute and utter destruction. Desolate failure and not a sliver of hope. Your sins will burden you for all eternity, and the millions of souls that haunt you will never fade away. Can anyone truly be an International Yu-Gi-Oh Superstar? International Yu-Gi-Oh Superstar. I had first seen those words used by Jae Kim to describe Evan Vargas in his coverage of one of the first and most important regional crew battles in dueling history. I had been so close so many times, but every attempt seemed to fall short, but just farther enough than the last to keep me going. Sometimes it felt like there was someone watching me that was always able to point out even the most trivial of flaws.158 This was the

Jae Kim may or may not have actually said this. We must now inquire as to the form and content of the this which Jae Kim may or may not have actually said; this this must be thusly dissected and properly isolated from its context so that the mind can truly come to know it. When we do so, we find that the this is only this word, this, which carries with it certainly a shape consisting in four letters, but no meaning, no content, nothing to be interpreted beyond this material sign. We must thus conclude that there could be no this for Jae Kim to have said in the first place, and the question of whether he did or did not is moot. 158

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beginning of Dennis Frogman’s theory; the figure in white had watched his duels so long ago, remarking on his shortcomings and his misplays until he was finally able to hear, and occasionally even follow direction and see success. Slowly, minor corrections were linked together by Dennis Frogman’s understanding and some general principles began to take shape; they were then fleshed out over the course of his travels, with each new experience adding to the understanding. Theory is the first step the duelist takes past their own experience within the duel. One plays a game and is then inclined to think about why certain things worked out in their favor, others against, whether or not a win could have been achieved had something else happened, and so on. At this initial stage, the duelist’s experience is still a fundamentally individual one, albeit one that necessitates tensions and clashes with other individuals within the world of the duel. The duelist’s individual instrumental Reason propels them through their quest for self-expression through and within the duel. One’s self-expression cannot exist within the duel without the suppression of another’s, for this is the nature of the zerosum game. And so the duelists continue to duel. However, this movement of self-realization is not completed in the individual. As duelists share their experiences, the boundaries of Reason expand across the duel, resulting in deeper and more universal principles and concepts. The movement of Reason throughout the duel completes itself with the extension to all duelists the absolute truth, that truth which all rational observers are fated to accept in the long run. This movement runs parallel to the road of the King, who extended the revelation of Dennis Frogman to the entire community of duelists. At this moment, the duelists all shared this Clear Mind which had been developed by Dennis Frogman, and then the King after him, and because all theoretical problems in the duel

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had been solved, progress was initially able to continue at an unprecedented rate. But even after the complete ascension of the King, he was thwarted in his journey to the West at the great conference which united all of the social and communal faculties of Reason which had developed across the world. The absolute Reason codified by the King thus collapses inward upon itself, for under a god who bleeds there can be no unity and no agreement. The links between general propositions which had crystallized in the years prior began to dissolve, and the dueling community divided itself into camps over many theoretical issues that the Clear Mind of the King could not have foreseen. What, then, was left of the metaphysical structure of the duel? There were certainly no fundamentals to be spoken of. Pure reason was too generic, unable to cope with the rapidly changing paradigms and paradoxes of such a tumultuous period, and similarly, practical reason was too clouded by the illusion of recency which is necessitated by a shrewd eye towards the metagame. Principles of design seemed to violate principles of deckbuilding and technical play and vice versa. It seemed that the duel had descended back into the dark ages in which there was no conceivable rational structure to be applied to any developments within the duel. This was not a death of the duelist, but rather, a death of a certain life in the duel; its organic nature seemed to falter. Dennis Frogman mused on these developments for a long time. At the very first moment at which this Reason had been made an instrument to the duelist, the duelist had not tapped into a properly ethereal movement that extended beyond time or space; rather, this was a historically conditioned set of concepts mobilized for the purposes of the duel in a specific set of socioeconomic and spatiotemporal circumstances. From the beginning, the duelist’s 141

reason was an individual one. It was not the duelist’s, but rather, it belonged to the union of body and mind within the duelist, the rational actor whom exists prior to the duel and prior to their first encounter with the duel. Parmenides, Socrates, Augustine, Caesar, Descartes, Napoleon, Bach, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Morphy and so many more after them, these were names of those geniuses throughout history who had become so perfectly in tune with their own senses of Reason that they became able to perform miracles by simply setting their mind to a task and doing it. This process of selfrealization is shared throughout all duelists of the past, present, and future, but at the same time it is individual; it cannot exist without the unique set of circumstances that define that individual and the power within them. 尾獣, 血継限界, 卍解, 千年アイテムを, or even D の 意 志 ; theory, practice, genius; mind, body, culture; art, science, religion; these were all different paths to different moments of the same movement of self-realization within the duel. And so the figure in white appeared to Dennis Frogman atop the Seer’s Tower in Chicago and instructed him to say their name.

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The Shadow of the Pharaoh Another testament of my terrifying experiences with children… For five years I am totally terrorized and spend hundreds of dollars for… some of you have also the misfortune of children or knowing them, do you know what is, Yu-Gi-Oh, these magic cards… My son does not have too many of them, only like, ten thousand… I think we adults are already too senile, too stupid to understand [this]… [It is not] like a standard card game or chess game… Slavoj Žižek, “On Jacques Lacan” (2011)

A

proper archaeology of the duel begins before it was introduced to America. It is well-known at this point that Duel Monsters was not initially

intended to be a competitor to the dominant trading card games on the market. Rather, the game was introduced as a sort of side plot in the first 遊戯王 manga, and was met with such an unexpected cult following that Takahashi was inspired to make a spin-off product along with another manga entirely devoted to the game. From the perspective of the game designer, Duel Monsters began as an attempt to design a trading card game without a card type devoted to resources. MTG, for instance, has its notorious system of lands: a player must pay mana to play cards, and this mana is produced by amassing lands which the player may place from their hand onto the playing field once per turn. As a result, MTG decks are said to have “mana curves,” a general structure of “mana costs” of cards, which determine in part the core strategy of the deck. Duel Monsters has no

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such system of mana, lands, or card costs beyond the minimalistic factors of cards and Life Points (LP). The earliest English correspondent of note for this period of the duel is Edo. The first instance of power creep in the freshman year of the duel becomes a multiplicity of instances, and within the span of half a year the duel had already developed to complexities that demanded for rational principles to be applied to them.

1. The attack barrier was established, broken, and rebuilt repeatedly throughout these six months. Hitotsu-me Giant was the first best monster in the game. Aqua Madoor broke this initial attack barrier with a higher defense, thus establishing an equivalent barrier for the defense stat; then Gemini Elf completely violated these standards and set new ones. The Pharaoh notes that Madoor is “likely responsible for partially justifying Elf to us,” and that “Madoor gave the game more time at a time where more time was not wanting, necessary, et al... Madoor came to the game YEARS ahead of its proper time, years ahead of worthwhile nuance.” The defense barrier correlates to time. The attack barrier correlates to hand and board position, or total card advantage.

2. The Pharaoh cites the presence of the “Zaloog principle” in White Magical Hat by the end of August 1999. Attacking the hand allowed duelists to interact on another level. As early as 2002, Edo remarks on the impact of the White Thief and its dynamic interplay with the system of conserving and 144

applying the early answer cards (Fissure, Raigeki, Dark Hole, Trap Hole, etc). While it is impossible to say for sure, the Pharaoh speculates that Exodia may have had a brief period of dominance around the turn of the millennium. By August, all five pieces of the Forbidden One had been released, along with Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity. The only Limited cards were Trap Hole, Dark Hole, and Raigeki -- a duelist could play three of each Exodia piece, three Pots of Greed, and three Graceful Charities -- and the presence of a defense-position Aqua Madoor was relatively commanding at the time for a passive deck like Exodia. Perhaps the aggression encouraged by White Magical Hat with Raigeki and Fissure was enough to displace Exodia in the metagame. Whatever the case may have been, the first national dueling tournament was held at the Tokyo Dome in August 1999, and its results have most regrettably been lost to the annals of time. In April 2000, the Limited list became the Limited/SemiLimited list and introduced a number of new restrictions. The Pharaoh summarizes: “April 1 brought the first Limit List change in the game's history. Trap Hole was Unlimited. Reborn, Graceful, and HFD were all Semi-Limited. Exodia, its limbs, Pot of Greed, Change of Heart, Mirror Force, and Last Will were all Limited. The ramifications of these changes were important, but the hearts of various decks were mostly untouched. The monster effects around which one could build up a deck were all left alone: only the Spell supports were harmed. These changes left most of the Traps specifically made to counter certain Spells as dead cards. They were bad before, but now they got worse. Deckout as a deckplan took a slight hit - you no longer had your opponent helping you to your

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win condition as much, because they wouldn't be running as much Greed and Graceful.”159

Card design expanded on the Zaloog principle on April 20 with Magic Ruler’s infamous trinity of Confiscation, Delinquent Duo, and the Forceful Sentry in April. Attacking the hand was clearly a substantial means of interaction between duelists. An interesting factor of this era noted by the Pharaoh is the presence, or lack thereof, of Crush Card Virus; while it was legal, it was eschewed in favor of Witch of the Black Forest who just barely missed the attack cutoff for the Virus. Harpie’s Feather Duster was Limited roughly a month after it became Semi-Limited. Magic Ruler’s Snatch Steal was the only other new Limited card in this move. Pharaoh’s Servant Introduced Cyber Jar and the six original recruiters, among many others, two months after that; the Pharaoh cites PS-JP as having a far longer list of relevant additions than any of its predecessors. The infamous rule of missing the timing originated in 2001 as a result of an unintentional interaction between Archfiend of Gilfer, released in a magazine in February, and Woodland Sprite, from Mythological Age in November. It was not a new rule, but a clarification, a revelation of a rule that had already existed but had never been known by any duelist. Without the rule of missing the timing, Woodland Sprite and the Archfiend of Gilfer constituted a victory condition in themselves; this was deemed too powerful, and the clarification on missing the timing was issued as a means of dealing with this. Ironically, a year later, the two-piece Cyber-Stein combo became available on a wide scale in the original Japanese Structure Deck: Kaiba; this infamous deck was Kaiba’s weapon of choice in the 2001 GBA game Duel Monsters 6 EX 2. The metagame seems to have carried on with only minor tweaks in the list until 159

Pharaoh Atem, “Earl-y YGO History,” Duelistgroundz.com 19 Jan. 2011.

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February of the following year, when Harpie’s Feather Duster finally joined Raigeki on the Limited list, with the Stein/Megamorph combo apparently supplanting Exodia for the most part. These were determined to be more Limit-worthy than either piece of the Stein/Morph combo, as neither of those combo pieces will guarantee the player a winning position in the absence of board-clearing effects. It became clear after the release of Controller of Chaos at the end of April 2003 that a mere Limited/Semi-Limited list was not sufficient to maintain a proper competitive balance in the game. Edo is a key figure with regards to cultural grounding during the implementation of the original Forbidden list. Today, the duelist takes for granted the potential for a card to be banned outright; but this was not always so, and a vocal minority spoke out against the idea that any of the cards they had endeavoured to collect could be banned and made useless in tournament play. Edo condemns these naysayers, and encourages the harsh changes to the metagame spurned by the banning of cards like Yata-Garasu and Change of Heart. Yata-Garasu took the Zaloog principle to lengths that were deemed absurd. Injection Fairy Lily had left the concept of the attack barrier in ruins. Meanwhile, the English TCG grew on the side with a strictly limited card pool; the order of release of cards was not preserved, nor was the concept of a Forbidden list at first. Gemini Elf played a similar role in the TCG as in the OCG in setting the attack barrier, and when the Invasion of Chaos did occur in the TCG in 2005 it prompted the need for a Forbidden list as in the OCG. In the dark ages, the interactions were very simple, as between Madoor and the Elf, centered around the basic mechanics of combat and simple removal. Very few cards merited attention on the first Limited/SemiLimited lists; three Pots of Greed sounds absurd to the contemporary duelist, but in the context of Gemini Elves and Aqua Madoors, Trap 147

Holes and Fissures, Pot of Greed’s value is more or less static; it could never guarantee the duelist anything more than one extra card, which could be a monster to commit to the field for battle or a Trap Hole, Fissure or the like to remove one of the opponent’s own. When the cards Pot of Greed can draw are Chaos Emperor Dragon, CyberStein, Ring of Destruction, and so on, the picture is very different. It is unlikely that a hard line can be drawn between the days of purely static card value and the Gilfer-Stein-Chaos era in which cards began to gain value dynamically, i.e. by virtue of each other, but what is clear is that after this shift was completed, at least to a certain extent, certain cards needed to be Forbidden, and other cards that had previously seemed innocent now required attention as well. This can be said for the TCG as well as the OCG, although the transition seems to have happened at a staggered rate for the former along with certain deviations (La Jinn → Mechanicalchaser → Gemini Elf). Suppose two duelists have 40-card decks of 40 Hitotsu-Me Giants each. Neither know that any other card exists. They play a game in which both duelists start with 1200 Life Points. Neither duelist starts the game with any cards in hand. Duelist d goes first and normal summons. If duelist a normal summons and attacks to destroy both duelists’ monsters, duelist d normal summons on his next turn and attacks to win. If duelist a normal summons and does not attack, duelist d normal summons and attacks to win next turn. If duelist a does not normal summon, duelist d attacks to win next turn. Now suppose duelist a discovers Aqua Madoor, but is only able to acquire 20 of them before she has to duel duelist d again. Her deck has 20 Hitotsu-Me Giants and 20 Aqua Madoors. Duelist d goes first and normal summons a Giant. Duelist a sets an Aqua Madoor. Duelist d reads the set as a Hitotsu-Me Giant, draws, summons a second Giant, and attacks. Duelist d’s Life Points are now 400. At this point, regardless of her draw, duelist a’s next turn will consist in

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trading one monster for one Giant and passing with a defense position Madoor. Duelist d draws and summons another Giant, then passes. This repeats until duelist a misplays or duelist d misplays or decks out, a misplay in this context being anything other than drawing, summoning, and trading. Duelist a discovers Gemini Elf next and replaces every Madoor in her deck with an Elf. Duelist d goes first and summons a Giant which is immediately destroyed in battle with the Elf of duelist a. Assuming correct play over the next few turns, duelist a wins with many cards’ worth of advantage over duelist d. Duelist a goes first and summons an Elf. Duelist d sets a Giant and passes, then duelist a summons another monster and attacks; this latter process repeats itself until duelist a wins. These small increases over time in the ATK and DEF of the average monster are the earliest and most primitive forms of power creep which occupied the early history of the duel. When the defense barrier increases, a very subtle shift occurs in favor of the duelists with the new highest-DEF monster; with the addition of a Madoor, Madoor duelists become favored in stalemates. When the attack barrier increases, the corresponding shift is far less subtle; as seen in the last example, the Elf duelists will only lose against non-Elf duelists if they misplay; the burden to lose is entirely on the Elf duelist in a vacuum, with no regard to who goes first. In the examples with Aqua Madoor, note that duelist a can still only win games in which she goes first, assuming duelist d plays perfectly; the Madoor merely gives duelist d more or different ways to deviate from such perfection. Gemini Elf, on the other hand, actually increases the percentage of total games that duelist a can win in the absence of her opponents’ misplays. Recognize that in principle these relations remain constant across shifts in the starting hand size; for the standard starting hand size of 6 we only need to assume that the first six turns occur with each duelist drawing and passing before further interactions begin. 149

Similarly, to consider the implications of duelist a going first we need only assume that duelist d goes first and passes and that duelist a will not attack on her first turn. Next we turn our attention back to the so-called Zaloog principle. Suppose our two duelists elect to increase their starting Life Points to 2000. Duelist a has now come into the possession of 20 White Magical Hats and elects to replace her Elves with these. These will only affect the game if the opponent of duelist a misplays given a starting hand size of zero. However, suppose the game opens with duelist d drawing and passing, then duelist a doing the same, then duelist d repeating this once more. Finally, duelist a draws, summons a Giant, and passes. Duelist d now draws to three Giants in hand. If duelist d summons a Giant and trades, and duelist a’s card in hand is a White Magical Hat, duelist d will begin his next turn with two Giants in hand to duelist a’s Hat on field and two cards in hand. White Magical Hat has created card advantage for duelist a off of the trade initiated by duelist d, and further trades will end in duelist a’s favor as long as she draws Giants to trade with. Note that if duelist a draws only Giants, the end result of the decision by duelist d to trade is the same, i.e. he will lose; he will merely lose with more cards in hand if he loses only to Giants. This is not a meaningless disadvantage, for having less cards in hand makes considerations of risk easier for duelist a throughout all this, i.e. the probability that she will misplay decreases. The same can be said for duelist d, who actually has less options available to him with less cards in his hand, and therefore there are less possible misplays on his part; however, the burden to lose the game is still not his, and his correct plays will not guarantee his victory in the absence of a misplay from duelist a. Nonetheless, we can tell that to a degree Hat’s effect seems redundant in these games which have been primarily decided by battle. What,

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then, happens when we introduce alternate win conditions to these models? Suppose, in the absence of the clarification on missing the timing, that duelist a builds a deck with 38 Hitotsu-Me Giants, 1 Woodland Sprite, and 1 Archfiend of Gilfer. Games between duelist d and duelist a will proceed as in the original example, except when Archfiend of Gilfer is drawn. In the subgame in which the Archfiend and Sprite are drawn together, we will assume duelist a wins, as duelist d has no removal cards or counter traps to interact with the combo. This assumption effectively makes the Archfiend and Sprite a “two-card Exodia,” i.e. the duelist wins upon assembling this nexus of cards irrespective of Life Point totals. Duelist a can also guarantee victory by simply summoning the Archfiend and attacking enough with it, but this will generally only happen when duelist a is going first, i.e. in games that duelist a would already be winning in the 40card Hitotsu-Me Giant mirror match. Duelist a’s goal is to “be in” the subgame in which she draws Sprite and the Archfiend, and with a deck full of Hitotsu-Me Giants, her only way to guarantee this is to survive long enough to draw them. Suppose duelists d and a begin a duel with 8000 Life Points each, except duelist d has added a White Magical Hat to his deck while duelist a was adding her Sprite and Archfiend to hers. If duelist d draws his Hat at any point at which duelist a has one but not both of Sprite and Archfiend, its effect will merely threaten to cut off her alternate win condition at worst, and even directly punish her for playing too passively at best; neither function could have been fulfilled by a Hitotsu-Me Giant. The same will hold true for later combos such as Cyber-Stein/Megamorph and Sangan/Chaos Emperor Dragon. Duelist a now discovers Fissure and Trap Hole, and decides to test them out individually in sequence. She duels against duelist 151

d’s 40-card Gemini Elf deck with 20 Gemini Elves and 20 Fissures. Duelist d goes first and summons Gemini Elf. Duelist a draws Fissure and activates it. Duelist d draws another Elf, summons it, and attacks. From here, duelist d will win if he does not misplay. Now suppose duelist a goes first, draws a Fissure, and passes. If duelist d summons his Elf and attacks, duelist a will destroy it with Fissure; then if she has drawn an Elf, she will summon it and attack, and from there she will win if she does not misplay. Next, duelist a plays another game with 20 Gemini Elves and 20 Trap Holes. If duelist d goes first and sets a Trap Hole which is traded for an Elf on the following turn, she will similarly win if she does not misplay after that point. In this initial period, we have seen that for the most part, cards fit into one or both of two rigid categories, the first consisting in cards like vanilla monsters, Pot of Greed, Raigeki, Harpie’s Feather Duster, Heavy Storm, Dark Hole, Fissure, Trap Hole etc., which gain value or create advantage for the player by themselves and in themselves, and the second consisting in the pieces of the earliest combos such as Woodland Sprite, Archfiend of Gilfer, Megamorph, and other effect monsters which, when played together, created primitive alternate win conditions that transcended rudimentary methods of card advantage such as battle or draw effects. Cyber-Stein is perhaps the first to transcend these categories, as there were probably scenarios in these early formats in which someone could have used CyberStein’s effect not necessarily for a one-turn kill, but to destroy an opposing threat in battle and establish a sort of field presence afterwards. However, the original Chaos combo, in which Chaos Emperor Dragon destroys a Sangan which adds to its owner’s hand a Yata-Garasu which is summoned and declared to attack in order to effectively win the game, is the first to completely invalidate these categories with both relevant combo pieces. Both Sangan and Chaos Emperor Dragon can be used to generate advantage for the player by

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themselves, either with their effects or simply by being monsters on the field that can attack and defend, and in addition to this, they constitute a win condition together via Yata-Garasu, which holds the combo together as a middle term by simply existing in the deck. With the advent of these Chaos cards and more, the Limited list had to become the Forbidden/Limited list; it was no longer enough to simply limit players to one of a card effect per game, i.e. with Pot of Greed, Raigeki, Dark Hole, etc. Chaos was thus born of a synthesis of these old models of static and dynamic card value, and after it had come, the duel could never be the same again. These first-generation Chaos decks were the initial reason any cards were ever deemed necessary to Forbid in the first place. The Forbidden list concept was universalized throughout the English and Japanese games by the 2004 World Championships, the last hurrah of the original Chaos format. Having played with the Chaos cards for much longer than the rest of the world, it seems at least understandable, if not predictable, to the American critic that Japan would emerge on top of this tournament. What is perhaps more remarkable is the structure of the winning deck which blurred the traditional lines between Chaos Control, Chaos Beatdown, and Turbo Chaos. The latter three decktypes comprised 26 of the 31 decks present at the event, but Grabher-Meyer found the winning list of Masatoshi Togawa difficult to classify in his profile: “Togawa’s deck is a hybrid of Chaos Beatdown and Chaos Control, but this in and of itself is unremarkable. It’s common to see an experienced player mix two approaches from different Chaos variants in order to try and find a beneficial medium between the two, and thus have an edge. What isn’t common to see, though, is a deck where the division is made so obviously… It’s really a brilliant ensemble, allowing the deck to commit one way or another for its primary focus, as well as offering dynamic

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balance for any situation. The side deck has a yin and yang–type appearance once broken down, with most of the cards having an opposite counterpart. It’s a great approach, one that let Togawa adapt at a fast pace… The importance of Scapegoat, Magician of Faith, and other cards in a play environment that uses the forbidden list is displayed by Togawa’s deck, but the most valuable lesson could be in his overall approach. The concept of having a split-type deck that can then be balanced one way or another through the side deck is pretty original, and the versatility offered by that approach can, in some views, be credited with Togawa’s victory.”160

Key in Togawa’s approach was the transitional side deck by which the aggressive monsters in the main deck (Breaker the Magical Warrior, D.D. Warrior Lady, Shining Angel) could be swapped in varying degrees with more controlling monsters such as Spirit Reaper, Don Zaloog, Mystic Tomato alongside the standard answer Spells and Traps, including a full set of Book of the Moon.d In Grabher-Meyer’s

reading,

the

Forbidden

list

environment

necessitated a flexible approach utilizing the side deck, with the traditional concepts of attack and defense occupying different sides of the spectrum. It followed further from this reasoning that the aggressive Chaos style was preferable for the first game, and after side-decking in the later games of the match, when the hybrid player knew of the threats he needed to answer, the more controlling style would find more success. In the world of the Forbidden list, the “pure turbo” strategy finds no place in this winning formula; in the long run, the right mix of aggression and defense will overcome this at the highest level of play, or so it was thought.

Jason Grabher-Meyer, “Deck Profile: Masatoshi Togawa,” Metagame.com 30 July 2004. 160

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Vargas put these principles to the test with a true anti-meta deck at the debut of the Shonen Jump Championship series the following December. At SJC GenCon Anaheim, the Sandtrap anticipated the traditional tripartite structure of beatdown, lockdown, and turbo, and created a main deck with direct answers to all three decktypes. The Sandtrap eschewed Chaos from his deck completely, citing the reliance of the Chaos cards on Painful Choice, and instead chose to create a deck capable of defeating everything else by virtue of having the right cards at the right time for each possible threat. For the aggressive Berserk Gorilla decks, Vargas played a Prickle Fairy and three Smashing Ground. For the defensive Scapegoat decks, he had two King Tiger Wanghu and a Blade Knight, alongside three Dust Tornados for more lockdown-oriented decks. Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer and three Scapegoat of his own alongside two Hallowed Life Barrier in the side deck rounded out his answers to the pure turbo Chaos decks along with the Dark Magician of Chaos combo decks. He started well but burned out in the later rounds of the main event, but managed to secure an invite to Nationals at a regional side event with the deck. In the grand finals of the first Shonen Jump Championship, the Chaos Beatdown/Control hybrid reigned supreme once again, this time winning the first English Cyber-Stein for John Umali: “The finals match, between Miguel Flores and John Umali, lasted quite some time. They’d faced each other in the top 8 in an event the previous day, as well as knowing one another from other events. Earth deck against Hybrid, the first match was a series of elaborate exchanges that ended with a recovery from topdecking by Umali: a spectacular attack was the result, and Umali’s first win was clinched… The second match was far tighter, again involving a great deal of card for card exchanges: Umali constantly kept a card count going, and veteran

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players that were present could notice that he was actually making purposeful mistakes in his spoken count to attempt to throw off Flores. Highlights of the game included a Giant Rat play involving Axe of Despair that not even Umali could wrap his head around for a couple minutes, and an incredible finish where Flores attempted to force a draw. At 1000 Life Points to Umali’s 200, the game had come down to a mutual recovery from topdecking. Seeing that he had an advantage, but that the situation could change easily, Flores attempted to Ring of Destruction Umali’s Reflect Bounder to push to game three. He flipped his Ring, declared his target, and started to scoop his cards. Umali stopped him though, much to Flores’ surprise and that of the crowd. He flipped Raigeki Break, targeted his own Bounder, and blew it away on the chain before Ring could hit it. The damage was negated, and the hard-fought extra turn brought Umali just what he needed: Black Luster Soldier, and victory.”161

The reign of Chaos Beatdown/Control in the TCG lasted for three more Shonen Jump Championships, ending with friends and teammates Andrew Fredella and John Jensen agreeing to a prize split in the finals of SJC Orlando with different takes on the same decktype. Three of the first four Shonen Jump Champions belonged to the premier Team Comic Odyssey, an elite group of competitors that had grown out of the heart of California. With the anomalous exception of Orlando, Comic Odyssey had established a monopoly on Cyber-Steins in the debut SJC season under the guidance of 2004 United States National Championship Theeresak “T” Ponsoombat. Julia Hedberg, “Shonen Jump Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG Championship Series: In Review,” Metagame.com 5 Dec. 2004. d At time of writing, Jarel Winston is one of the most important duelists alive. Dennis Frogman is a proud card-carrying member of Pro Winston Nation, and the Winston Congregational Choir’s hit single “Why’d You Summon That D.D. Crow (Courtney Waller)” is a landmark spiritual masterpiece. 161

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The first serious competition to Comic Odyssey came in the form of Team Savage, a ragtag group of renegade theorists that the Sandtrap and his friend Jae Kim brought together from all of the farthest corners of the United States. Hot off a sponsorship deal with a store in Florida and eager to prove themselves, Savage contacted the tournament organizing staff for the first SJC of the new Advanced format in April 2005. In the main and side events, Comic Odyssey maintained its iron grip on Cyber-Stein, with Eric Wu’s Chaos Zombies taking home the main event over Keanson Ye’s Sacred Phoenix Zombies and the Sandtrap’s innovative Soul Control deck. After the end of the main event, however, Savage won a hard-fought five-on-five team battle, with the deciding match coming down to Kim’s clutch Tribe-Infecting Virus and a barrage of Night Assailants to take full control versus Odyssey’s Kevin Hor, the only person at the time to own two Cyber-Steins. Kim later described the impact of Savage’s success as having ushered in a new, post-Odyssey era. Dueling was now “about more than the actual tournament,” as the dueling world at large had become captivated by the bickering of the two teams and eager for the unprecedented spectacle of a clash between superstars the likes of which had never before occurred in the duel. “[Comic Odyssey] are unquestionably one of the best teams in the nation,” Kim continues, “in fact, they were unquestionably the best team until last Sunday. Now their reign has ended. Indeed, a new era has begun.”162 While the decks of the format shifted gradually to the classical Goat Control lists after this event, Comic Odyssey’s dominance continued in the main events, with Ryan Hayakawa becoming the first and only duelist to ever win two SJCs in a row after Houston in May, then New Jersey in June. Having remained mostly dormant since their win in the team battle at Pomona, with but a few deep 162

Jae Kim, “A New Era Begins,” Pojo.com 6 Apr. 2005.

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Swiss runs by Vargas and Kim that ultimately fell short of the coveted prize cards, Savage returned in full force two weeks after New Jersey at Charlotte to face a new challenger in the form of Team Overdose. Formed after an East Coast regional at the beginning of April 2005, Overdose had barely fallen short of defending their home turf from Comic Odyssey at New Jersey, but their performance nonetheless put them on the map as competitors; two of their nine members had finished in the top 8, with the other seven fielding respectable 7-2 finishes in Swiss. Outspoken Overdose representative Rhymus Lizo lost what may have been one of the highest-level Goat mirrors played at the time to eventual winner Hayakawa in the semifinals, with the third and final game coming down to Lizo bluffing with the wrong card: “I was beating myself up for a week, and I don’t even know why— it’s a card game. But that week was crazy. I felt bad about it. I never should have set Snatch Steal instead of Premature Burial against Ryan… [since he summoned his Black Luster Soldier the next turn].”163

The main event of Charlotte, the last SJC before the 2005 United States National Championship, came down to the first grand finals of the format in which Comic Odyssey was absent. After a run through Overdose leader Kris Perovic on the bubble in Swiss and Grabher-Meyer, “Community Profile: Rhymus Lizo,” Metagame.com 25 June 2005. This key misplay could be said to be one of the “most Rhymus Lizo things Rhymus Lizo ever did.” Lizo’s successful tournament runs early on were characterized by his signature “acting-heavy” style, with Lizo relishing in any and all opportunities to gain advantages by sending convincing false signals to opponents. In this case, Lizo’s bluff, ironically enough, did accomplish its purpose, and had he kept the Snatch Steal instead of the Premature Burial he would have indeed been in a prime position to punish the Heavy Storm and Black Luster Soldier that his bluff successfully baited out of Hayakawa. 163

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Crew!! representative T-Money Cox in semifinals, Jae Kim faced Overdose’s Anthony Alvarado for the last SJC-EN Cyber-Stein with the only Zombie deck in top 8, with a Side Deck featuring two Mind Crush and, to everyone’s surprise, three Trap Dustshoot. Kim was unable to overcome Alvarado despite a grueling and close game 1, but neither Overdose nor Savage had failed to validate the “new era” Kim had written on three months prior. With not one, but two nonOdyssey teams duking it out in Charlotte’s grand finals for a CyberStein, the National Championship around the corner seemed to be anybody’s game. Meanwhile, online play had started to catch on, culminating in a culture of “team warring” in which representatives from the various dueling forums and websites of the internet fought for glory and dominance. Indeed, Hedberg seems to have been correct when she called 2005 the “Year of the Team” in Upper Deck’s coverage of the United States National Championship. In the beginning of the online duel, there was Obelisk Blue; then, there was Duelistgroundz. There, a team sprouted up by the name of Alpha Omega, led by one Max Suffridge. The Swiss rounds of the National Championship were chockfull of high talent showdowns. Despite keeping his trusty patented Team Overdose Toothbrush on his person, Perovic lost two quick games to an undefeated Hayakawa. Hayakawa fell in the last two rounds, first to a renegade Jonathan LaBounty, then to teammate Jerry Wang. Armed with a Goat Control decklist featuring a small suite of Gravekeeper monsters, Suffridge fought his way through a top 8 shockingly absent of any Comic Odyssey members. Overdose teammates Coronel and Wang fell to Suffridge and Team Nexus’s Miguel Garcia respectively in the semifinals, leaving none of the three dominant teams represented in the finals. Instead, Suffridge swiftly took two convincing games over Garcia, and that was it; 159

Suffridge had made dueling history with a win that no one could have seen coming. This is the story of the first Goat Control decklist that most duelists today come into contact with. The shadow of the Pharaoh draws to a close with the explosion of power creep in August with Cybernetic Revolution. At this point TCG and OCG sets were released within months of each other; the same set had just been released in Japan in May of the same year. With the release of the Cyber Dragons, we see the completion of the traditional cycle of the dueling metagame that has continued to this day. The key target for Metamorphosis was no longer the controlling Thousand-Eyes Restrict, but the explosive Cyber Twin Dragon. Cyber Dragon invalidated large swaths of monsters in the format, much like Berserk Gorilla and Gemini Elf before it. Past this point, power creep follows a distinct historical cycle in which it repeats its own developments; to the Pharaoh who has watched all developments in the duel from afar since the very beginning, everything after the Cyber Dragons is merely a footnote to the Cyber Dragons.

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The Ballad of the Mind Sculptor Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of [Louis Napoleon]. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

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esource theory in the simplest sense is the project of the accumulation and organization of possible knowledge of game states. When talking about

resources, we are asking questions of what it is we can know about the game state and how we can come to know it. Determining the expected value of a play, and determining a player’s information set objectively by extension, relies on the reduction of the game state to distinct and measurable pieces called resources. We can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that chaining your Mystical Space Typhoon when it is targeted by Breaker the Magical Warrior’s effect has a higher expected value than not chaining it because card advantage tells us first that all other things held constant, you would rather your opponent not have that set backrow card, and second that this fact should appear as clearly and distinctly to you as does the fact that one is greater than zero. The first best deck in the history of Magic: The Gathering was known to the community simply as “the Deck.” The story goes that sometime around May of 1995, Brian Weissman pioneered card 161

advantage with the first deck to ever “dominate” a “metagame” in Magic. The Deck was one of the earliest examples of what is now called a “pure control deck.” While most decks typically alternate to some extent between playing actively reactively, the Deck was notorious at the time for refusing to cast a single threat up until the very end of the game, when its pilot had answered each and every one of his opponent’s cards with one or more of his own. The revolutionary factor of the Deck was its universality. No matter what cards the opponents were playing, and no matter how they chose to play them, a purely reactive deck could always engineer a prolonged game in which it countered all opposition and eventually grinded out a win. A Counterspell could always claim at least one of the opponent’s cards, even if it was their own Counterspell. A Wrath of God would always set the opponent’s turn back to square one, no matter how many creatures they had amassed. Weissman directly relates the importance of card advantage in the late game to the inherent chance factor in MTG qua card game. For Weissman, card advantage is the prudent player’s method of mitigating this factor as best as possible: “So why does card advantage win? Besides the obvious reasons (more options, better ratios, etc.), the answer lies in a general property of Magic as a game. As much as optimists tend to ignore it, Magic is a game in which luck is often the deciding factor. When two players of relatively equal skill pair up with competent decks, the winner will almost always be the person with the luckier draw. But skill in deck building and card play can compensate for some degree of luck, and that skill often comes in the form of card advantage. Good players know how to take advantage of having good luck or of their opponent's having bad luck, and good

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players generally have a solid understanding of card advantage.”164

The first serious challenge to this totalizing principle came in the latter half of 1999 in the form of David Price. Price identified a fundamental flaw in the card advantage-centric model of the Deck, which he saw fit to exploit with aggressive decks and cards that did not guarantee trades or card presence in themselves. For Price, control through card advantage was one way of winning a game of Magic, but it was not and could not be the only way. Price famously and elegantly summarized his position of “time advantage” in an interview as follows: “People like control because they think it shows that they're good Magic players. Active decks, on the other hand, produce threats, and control decks must have the right answer to the right threat. If not, they're in trouble... while there are wrong answers, there are no wrong threats."165

This was more than a mere discovery of an alternate method of achieving success in Magic: The Gathering. When Price got on the Pro Tour with a distinctly aggressive Constructed deck and subsequently won Pro Tour: Los Angeles in March 1998, he proved that skill in Magic consisted in more than just control. On Price’s view, an argument could be made that aggressive decks were even harder to play than the Deck, since the active deck is typically the initiator of decision trees, especially in the early game. A control player must match their answers to the opponent’s threats, but the

Brian Weissman, “Taking Card Advantage,” Daily MTG: Forgotten Lore 12 Oct. 2009. Web. 165 Sullivan, “Old Wisdom from David Price.” Starcitygames.com 6 May 2015. Web. 164

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player of the “active deck” is granted the luxury of picking the right times to play the right threats. The control player, on the other hand, is forced to answer when the opponent threatens, and cannot answer when no such threat is present. These conclusions led Flores to develop the concept of the relative role in the groundbreaking Who’s the Beatdown in 1999: “The most common (yet subtle, yet disastrous) mistake I see in tournament Magic is the misassignment of who is the beatdown deck and who is the control deck in a similar deck vs. similar deck matchup. The player who misassigns himself is inevitably the loser… You see, in similar deck vs. similar deck matchups, unless the decks are really symmetrical (i.e. the true Mirror match), one deck has to play the role of beatdown, and the other deck has to play the role of control. This can be a very serious dilemma, [especially if] both are playing aggressive decks.”166

In October of 1998, Urza’s Saga would bring a new menace to the forefront of the Standard environment. Three cards were banned since the beginning of the new Standard format at the end of 1996, at which point Standard shifted from a restricted list to a banned list. After the so-called “Combo Winter” of 1998, the DCI saw fit to ban two cards in December, then six more cards the following March, with a seventh emergency ban later in the same month. The decks of Combo Winter were neither control decks like Weissman’s nor aggressive like Price’s; these decks were a new beast that eschewed the old paradigms of card and time advantage entirely. Instead, during Combo Winter, when a deck drew to take its fourth turn, it would simply win the game if the player had amassed the proper combo pieces. There was a definite outcry from the playerbase to

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Mike Flores, “Who’s the Beatdown,” The Dojo 1 Jan. 1999. Web.

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Wizards to “fix” the format; Wizards had moved swiftly to stem the loss of players as quickly as possible. The first Affinity decks in Standard were variations on a preconstructed Mirrodin deck called Bait and Bludgeon, released alongside the Mirrodin (MRD) set in October of 2003. Disciple of the Vaults from another preconstructed deck created a crude engine of cheap artifacts and Atogs and Megatogs to eventually win with them. The selling point on these decks, and the set in general, was the focus on the artifact. Before, artifacts were intended to be the jack-of-alltrades cards, and Wizards of the Coast sought to experiment with mechanics that would permeate horizontally across all deck archetypes in the way that artifacts had done in the past. In decks such as those of Weissman and Price, the cards were more or less designed to have value or power which is intrinsic. The threats Price dealt in were in the vein of Jackal Pup, i.e. simple fast attackers, and Weissman’s answers and Serra Angels were similarly universal in their function; both decks remain universal in their cards’ functions. In Rosewater’s account, Affinity was to be the first set that was designed to be “modular” rather than “linear,” and to this end, the design staff wanted to create effects based around synergy: “The first extreme is linear design. In a linear design, cards are designed to clump together in obvious groups. They have a very narrow but focused synergy. When you look at the set, it becomes quickly apparent what cards belong together. Onslaught block is an example of a very linear set. The tribal spine of the design forces players to naturally connect cards that share, take advantage of or affect a particular creature type. Linear designs tend to be filed with linear mechanics. Linear mechanics force players to build decks around a single aspect of the cards… Modular designs are open ended. The best metaphor for a modular design is bunch of Legos. Each individual piece can fit with many other individual

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pieces. The idea is ‘here's a box of Legos, what can you build with it?’ Unlike linear design, modular designs are much harder to grasp at first glance. The connections are not so obvious. Mirrodin is very much a modular design. It was created to allow pieces to have much wider synergy. Modular designs make use of modular mechanics. Modular mechanics are designed to maximize their use with other cards and do not tend to force players to have to play with a lot of a certain type of card.”167

In this initial statement of purpose for the design of the first set in the Mirrodin block, the intent for the newly synergistic artifact cards is clear: they should be able to fit into many different kinds of decks at once, ultimately promoting deck diversity. Wizards wanted to design cards that would “open doors instead of shutting them.” The Affinity mechanic was touted by Rosewater as the synthesis of the linear and modular design philosophies: “[Affinity] demonstrates how linear and modular designs move along a singular axis. Affinity by its nature is very linear. A card with affinity wants the player to play with many of that style of card. But as the size of the subgroup increases, the mechanic takes on a more modular feel. Affinity for artifacts in Mirrodin, for instance, feels much less linear than something like goblins would feel because half of the cards in the set are artifacts. In addition, artifacts are much more modular by nature (it’s much easier to stick a random artifact in any deck) thus affinity for artifacts has a less constricted feeling. Sure you want a lot of artifacts, but the avenue open to how to do this is a much greater path than say a deck full of goblins would be.” 168

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Mark Rosewater, “Coming Together,” Daily MTG 6 Oct. 2003. Web. Ibid.

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This may have held true prior to the release of Darksteel (DST) in February, at which point the opposite would come to be true: the Affinity mechanic created a deck in itself, revolving around artifacts and effects which no other deck could use as effectively. Synergy was now itself an organizing principle of a specific archetype of deck, a principle which excluded itself from other archetypes. It became overwhelmingly clear to Wizards of the Coast that Skullclamp and Arcbound Ravager had come to define the format in and of themselves moreso than any single card, much less any artifact card, that had preceded them: “Skullclamp… was everywhere. Every competitive deck either had four in the main deck, had four in the sideboard, or was built to try and defend against it. And there were a lot more successful decks in the first two categories than in the third. Such representation is completely unhealthy for the format. Your deck has to either have Skullclamps, or have Skullclamp in its crosshairs—a definitive case of a card ‘warping the metagame.’”169

Affinity seemed relatively tame at the onset of the Darksteel Standard format at Pro Tour: Kobe, with only two copies in top 8, but by May, Affinity had formed a cold grip on the format, with threefourths of the Nationals-qualifying decks from Regionals containing Skullclamps. For the first time in five years, Wizards had created a disaster the likes of which only the banned list could amend. Skullclamp was banned in June, and seven of its cohorts joined it on the banned list nine months later. Towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Wizards met with a different sort of crisis in the form of a newly competitive market for trading card games. MTG had come to Aaron Forsythe, “Skullclamp, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Daily MTG 4 June 2004. Web. 169

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prominence far before any other card game of its sort, enabling its designers certain luxuries for a period of time. By 2008, after the explosion of the World Poker Tour had subsided and card games were properly viewed as a legitimate activity by the non-gaming society, this time had drawn to a close, and MTG needed reforms at the marketing level to keep up with its new competitors. One such reform was the Mythic Rare, a new rarity of card introduced with Shards of Alara (SOA) in October. Prior to the Mythic Rare, MTG was the only remaining TCG on the market that stayed true to the model of a pack containing at least one card of each rarity: one rare, three uncommons, and so on. In order for MTG booster packs to compete in the newly-stimulated TCG market, there needed to be a greater “lottery” factor in opening them: “We came to realize that we don't have the luxury of defining Magic solely against itself. The trading card game genre has created some standards that evolved from decisions made after Magic's creation, rarity being one of the best examples. The idea of a TCG with only three rarities is antiquated… Magic is the only major trading card game currently printed with only three rarities. If we want to stay competitive in attracting new players we have to keep up with the industry standards… What is it about this "industry standard" that helps acquire new players? Two things. First is the issue of expectation. The majority of players are going to come to Magic having already experienced this standard, and they are going to expect any new trading card game they try to function like the games they already know. As I often talk about in this column, meeting expectations is very important. Second, there’s a reason things become an industry standard. They work. Knowing that you have the potential to open something you can show off to all your friends is very compelling and helps draw new players into the game… We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally

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speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards.”170

One such “epic-feeling” card was Jace, the Mind Sculptor, one of the greatest duelists of all time. The Mind Sculptor went to college with Seto Kaiba and Paul Schafer. Jace brought Tezzeret within inches of his life and left him for dead on Kamigawa, escaping to Zendikar where he would become embroiled in a classic struggle in the history of the MTG metagame. Jace, the Mind Sculptor did not immediately warp the metagame when it was printed in Worldwake (WWK) at the beginning of 2010. In fact, for the first eight months after the Mind Sculptor’s release, the community was calling for the banning of a different boogeyman in the form of Bloodbraid Elf -- more than half of the top 8 decks of the previous year’s World Championship had been Jund variants built around the infamous Elf. Shards of Alara Standard Jund was the quintessential midrange deck of its time: it could trade off with faster aggressive decks in the early game for a favorable position, and it could beat the slower decks by playing the role of aggressor itself. It was only after the Alara block rotated that the Mind Sculptor could assume full control over the format. Standard proceeded for four months after the rotation in October without a hitch. In the Standard portion of the 2010 World Championship in December, Kibler made a small splash by going undefeated with a blue-white (U/W) control deck called Caw-Go, featuring four Mind Sculptors and four Squadron Hawks. There were no equipment cards present, although Sword of Body and Mind had been released in Scars of Mirrodin (SOM), but the Hawks and Mind Sculptors alone were sufficient to create a card advantage engine 170

Rosewater, “Year of Living Changerously,” Daily MTG 2 June 2008. Web.

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ahead of its time. In his tournament report, Kibler compared the interaction between the two to Ancestral Recall: “Have you ever fetched up three Squadron Hawks then Brainstormed with Jace to put two of them back and then fetched them up again right away? That's Ancestral Recall right there. What other Standard deck gets to play with that?”171

Kibler’s innocent find did not come to full fruition until Pro Tour: Paris in February of the following year. There, Mirrodin Besieged (MBS) had added Sword of Feast and Famine to the mix, and the response from ambitious Caw-Go deckbuilders was the inclusion of an equipment suite via four copies of Stoneforge Mystic. Between these creatures, the importance of the “enters the battlefield” triggers is apparent: upon entering the battlefield, Squadron Hawk replaces itself with more copies of itself while Stoneforge Mystic replaces itself with the coveted Sword of Feast and Famine. All three of the Caw-Blade decks in the top 8 of Paris contained only eight creatures each, and out of those 24 only two were neither Mystics nor Hawks. In April, nearly every Magic Online Standard Daily event was won by a U/W Caw-Blade variant, and all of the top 8 decks of Grand Prix: Dallas in the same month contained four Mind Sculptors. If anything, the release of New Phyrexia (NPH) in May made things even worse. The best cards in the set, as far as Standard was concerned, were, in no particular order, Batterskull, Deceiver Exarch, Sword of War and Peace, Despise, Surgical Extraction, Spellskite, and the Phyrexian Mana cards; in the months following NPH’s release, Caw-Blade variants arose with all of these cards and more. Even

Brian Kibler, “Undefeated at Worlds with Caw-Go,” Starcitygames.com 10 Dec. 2010. Web. 171

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Beast Within, a key answer card for Valakut, could find a home in decks with the Mystic and Hawk. When later variants looked to improve their mirror match, Luis Scott-Vargas pioneered a red splash for Cunning Sparkmage with Basilisk Collar, and others tried the same color splash for the Deceiver Exarch-Splinter Twin combo. Towards the very end of NPH, it may have been the case that the best Caw-Blade deck played black for Vampire Nighthawk. The hold exerted by the Caw-Blade deck over the SOM block standard format was very different from that of the Jund deck that preceded it. Jund had the best threat in its format in the form of Bloodbraid Elf, but Caw-Blade was blessed with all the best answers. Kibler noted in his Worlds report that even the primitive Caw-Go deck felt like it had “the tools to fight through just about anything the major decks [could] throw at you.” He later wrote on the more mature Caw-Blade lists: “The secret to Caw-Blade's success is rooted in the fundamental resource systems of Magic. Better than any other deck in recent history Caw-Blade is built to make profitable resource exchanges. Whether that resource is cards or mana or life or tempo the deck has the tools to sculpt the game in its favor from start to finish… Look at that list again. Mana Leak. Spell Pierce. Squadron Hawk. Sword of Feast and Famine. Dismember. What do all of these cards have in common? They may look like a motley crew but they share a very important trait. They are all capable of creating resource advantages…”172

Neither Jund nor Caw-Blade fit into the same categories as the decks of Weissman and Price had. The complexity of the former decks allowed them to play a far more dynamic game than the battles Kibler, “Deconstructing Caw-Blade,” Starcitygames.com 5 August 2011. Web. 172

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between Jackal Pup and Serra Angel of old. What made a deck dominant in this new age was neither pure aggression nor pure defense, but the proper midpoint between the two. Neither was CawBlade, at least initially, a combo deck like those that ran rampant during Combo Winter. Forsythe continues: “As for interactivity, when you lose to Jace / Stoneforge decks, you still feel like you're playing Magic: you cast your creatures, attack and block, yet, if your opponent plays well enough, eventually fall under an avalanche of card advantage and efficient tutoring. Game play like that is a far cry from past Standard environments containing ban-worthy cards, wherein you might get decked by a Tolarian Academy–fueled Stroke of Genius on turn three, or die from 20 on turn four to a combination of Arcbound Ravager, Disciple of the Vault, and Cranial Plating, both frequently at the hands of less proficient players. Those games felt more random and less satisfying, and the outcry to do something about it was loud and clear.”173

Price’s old adage did not hold true for Caw-Blade, as the Mind Sculptor could produce the right answer for any situation. This allowed the deck to choose its relative role in a different way than Jund had: while Jund had simply shifted gears by playing its threats at different times, Caw-Blade could be simultaneously aggressive and controlling, active and passive, proactive and reactive, because it literally had both the best answers and the best threats. At this point, the distinction between aggression and control had been broken down entirely by the proliferation of complexity in card effects; neither of these terms carried any meaningful information about good decks in the new era because the new decks simply did not fit into one category or the other. The Jund style of deck became known 173

Forsythe, “Standard Bannings Explained,” Daily MTG 20 June 2011. Web.

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as Midrange, while Caw-Blade successors were called “aggrocontrol,” or tempo, succeeding combo as the latest synthesis of the offense-defense distinction. This in conjunction with the unique MTG market conditions in 2011 made Caw-Blade unlike any Standard deck that had preceded it as well as those that existed alongside it. As shown by Spaniel, the $100 price tag of Jace, the Mind Sculptor guaranteed that any competition for Caw-Blade’s throne would fall short in the long run as the Caw-Blade decks became more competitive: “Imagine a standard game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with one key difference: Scissors costs slightly more to play than the other two strategies. Let C be this cost. The solution to Rock-Paper-Scissors is fairly straightforward - each player randomizes completely between his three choices. Adding the slight cost to Scissors changes things. If you kept randomizing equally among Rock, Paper, and Scissors, then you would still only win a third of the time with Scissors. This is an undesirable situation because you will have to pay the cost regardless, while you could play Rock or Paper, still win a third of the time, and pay no cost. Consequently, randomizing among all three strategies is not the solution to the version of the game where Scissors is costly. Instead, players play Rock with probability (1 - C)/3, Paper with probability (1 + C)/3, and Scissors with probability 1/3. Suppose we add a rule that a Rock versus Rock matchup means that both win with probability 1/2 (a "mirror match" in Magic terminology). In that case, Scissors wins with probability (3 + 2C)/6 while both Rock and Paper win with probability (3 - C)/6. As such, Scissors wins more often than Rock or Paper. However, Scissors does not have a greater payoff than the other two strategies - whatever a Scissors player gains in win percentage it loses in the cost it paid to play that strategy… If Scissors is absent from the metagame, then Paper will go unchecked and dominate the format, and Rock will have no

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strategies it can beat. Yet if Paper is destroying the metagame, then suddenly Scissors goes back to being a great strategy… Contrary what might have been the expected equilibrium, players still run Scissors with probability 1/3. To compensate for the fact that Scissors costs something to play, Paper becomes more popular and Rock fades away.”174

Assuming a perfectly competitive three-deck format with perfectly symmetrical matchups in which one deck S has an arbitrary cost attached, the deck R with a winning matchup versus S will be punished by its equally cheap counter P more often than it wins against S, even though the cost attached to S does not decrease the probability of someone playing it. To be clear, there are limits to Spaniel’s analysis, and the model may not accurately apply to every MTG format; for instance, the analysis goes out the window the instant four distinct deck archetypes are simultaneously and equally viable. However, the reign of Caw-Blade serves as a unique natural experiment that produces results in line with those of Spaniel: To beat the Mind Sculptor in the long run, players were literally forced to play Mind Sculptors of their own. Caw-Blade forced even the cards that were good against it out of the format with its prohibitive price; in the long run, its answers were never wrong. In at least one regard, the Mind Sculptor represented the ultimate triumph of the Mythic Rare. The Mind Sculptor created the exact sort of brand image Wizards had sought in the Mythic Rare; he was the epitome of a card coveted for its rarity and power. Promotional images of the Mind Sculptor were everywhere. Star City Games media manager Evan Erwin predicted in April that Jace’s ties to the Magic brand had become too strong for the card to ever be banned in Standard: William Spaniel, “To the Rich Deck Go the Spoils,” TCGplayer.com 1 July 2010. Web. 174

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“Planeswalkers are a cornerstone of the Magic brand, and Jace is the number one planeswalker. Magic is no longer just a collectible card game, it’s an ‘entertainment property,’ and as such, has various ties to things beyond the game… The fact is, Jace, the Mind Sculptor will forever be an iconic card in Magic. It showcases both the dominance of blue and the planeswalker card type. It is a mistake in the very best way. Every player who has one or a playset… treasures it, because it is special, powerful, and unique... [Jace] basically sold Worldwake by himself. He’s the reason we all wanted to buy a ton of Worldwake… Jace was the card everyone wanted from day one.”175

Erwin’s predictions proved false on June 24, when Wizards made a substantial announcement regarding the Standard banned list for the first time in six years. By NPH Game Day, it had become overwhelmingly clear to Wizards that they could no longer ignore the problem of low tournament attendance. Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were both banned in Standard. Ironically, neither of Caw-Blade’s actual namesakes were banned, and the weakened Caw-Blade deck remained arguably the best deck in the format, accounting for three of the top four decks of the US National Championship later that year. The fourth and winning deck was Ali Aintrazi’s U/B control deck tuned finely to beat Caw-Blade. The bans had not destroyed Caw-Blade outright, but they had made it just weak enough to finally be brought to the ground by Aintrazi. To understand the impact of these events, a deconstruction of the concept of tempo is necessary. Tempo is the relative marginal utility of an additional unit of resources from one duelist to another. There are many fundamental, or irreducible, resources that vary from 175

Evan Erwin, “The Magic Show #229: Ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor?”

YouTube 14 Apr. 2011. Web.

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game to game; in MTG, there are at least lands (mana), life (time), and cards. When taken together, these resources constitute the touted “advantage” in terms like “card advantage” and “mana advantage.” For any two of these resources, each duelist has different utility curves for each, since they each function in very different ways; sometimes, more cards are better, and sometimes, more life is better. Furthermore, each duelist can force trades in these resources which can transcend these categories, meaning that each rational duelist wishing to play a removal card must consider how much more important to them that their removal card in hand is than its target is to the opponent. Tempo is the organizing principle of all of these relations; when a duelist “has tempo,” they are “setting the pace of play,” because their decisions are improving their position relative to their opponent, all things considered. Caw-Blade was a tempo deck because it was always doing this; in the long run, the Caw-Blade deck would come out on top in any decision tree. However, because CawBlade warped the format around itself, it was not distinguished from anything else; the main diversity in the format was the diversity in Caw-Blade lists. In a world where all decks fit into the same relative role, ipso facto none do. From this we can see that in the world of the duel, tempo is everything, and by this very fact, it is also nothing, and vice versa.

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Ghost Flood and the Proof of Evolution Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an Agent, has died. But where they have failed, you will succeed. I’ve seen an Agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips into them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules and because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be. Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

T

he first chess computer was not a computer at all, but a man hidden inside a crude machine. In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a complex

machine that could carry the impression of playing a game of chess with a human opponent. The Schachtürke was a life-sized human model attached to a table with clockwork and a hidden seat inside it, where a director would secretly direct the movements of the model. It began touring Europe in 1783, losing narrowly to Philidor in May. After Kempelen’s death in 1804, the machine was sold to Mälzel, who began his own exhibitions ten years later, first in Europe, then in the Americas. By the 1860s, the secrets of the machine had been exposed by former crew members, but the ideal of a chess-playing machine remained ingrained in the public mind. Poe’s meeting with the machine in the 1830s led him to a number of hypotheses on the nature of machines with regards to a game such as Chess:

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“The Automaton does not invariably win the game. Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case — it would always win. The principle being discovered by which a machine can be made to play a game of chess, an extension of the same principle would enable it to win a game — a farther extension would enable it to win all games — that is, to beat any possible game of an antagonist. A little consideration will convince any one that the difficulty of making a machine beat all games, is not in the least degree greater, as regards the principle of the operations necessary, than that of making it beat a single game.”176

For Poe, the Turk’s losses necessitated its humanity, as there is no conceivable difference between the task of designing a pure machine that can play chess and that of designing a pure machine that can never be beaten by a human at chess. Almost a hundred years passed before the contemporary scientific community began to accept even the possibility of a program defeating a Grandmaster in 1949, when Shannon proposed a chess program that used von Neumann’s minimax principle to evaluate possible board positions. In 1950, Turing wrote the first chess-playing computer program, and in the same year, Church and Turing independently concluded that in principle, a machine operating under simple rules of the form “under condition C, perform act A” could solve any problem with an algorithmic solution. The question for Turing, then, was not whether or not a chess program could solve the game of chess so much as it was about whether or not a machine could be designed “in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish its performance from a human performance.” This corresponded to the prevalent Skinnerian

Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” Southern Literary Messenger 2.5 (April 1836): 323. 176

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behaviorist attitudes of the time, as it implied that “the behavioral test is conclusive for the presence of mental states.”177 Seven years after the Church-Turing thesis, Simon predicted that within a decade, a computer would be able to defeat the World Chess Champion. A year later, researches from Carnegie-Mellon published results on the alpha-beta pruning algorithm, which allowed chess programs to “search to roughly twice the depth achievable with a minimax search when the move ordering is close to best-first ordered. Hsu continues: “The alpha-beta algorithm relies on the observation that we don’t really need to look at all of an opponent’s responses to our bad moves—we just need one refutation. If the bad move endangers (hangs) the queen, we just need to know that our opponent can capture the queen on the next move. However, to determine a valid refutation, we must examine all of our responses to it. In the hung-queen example, we would need to examine all of our responses to the queen’s capture to make sure that our opponent indeed wins the queen without adequate penalty. The same refutation principle applies to the opponent’s bad moves, which also just need one refutation each. This idea of refutations leads to an optimal search tree.”178

In designing Deep Thought from 1988 to 1995, Hsu identified two fundamental problems for the chess-playing computer: winning the match itself, and doing so under tournament conditions, i.e. regulated time control. Defeating a Grandmaster in blitz chess, for instance, was achieved with relative ease in 1977. Similarly, if a J. R. Searle, Mind (New York: Oxford, 2004) 47-49. Note that the rules by which a Turing machine operates take the same form as the rules proposed by Zermelo, König, and Kalmár. 178 Feng-hsiung Hsu, “IBM’s Deep Blue Chess Grandmaster Chips,” IEEE Micro (March-April 1999): 74. 177

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computer is given an indefinite amount of time to solve every possible position by brute force, it is almost tautological that it will win against any human opponent; however, such a program might not be finished running if we started it today and let it run until the heat death of the universe. Standard tournament time regulations favored the human, as Levy was able to adapt efficiently to the robotic playstyle of Cray Blitz in 1984 without losing a game, and Kasparov was similarly unimpressed by his meeting with Deep Thought in 1989. Just as chess theory for humans began with the opening, so too did chess processing for computers: a chess program needed to be equipped with an “opening book” by which it could navigate the early stages of the game. IBM was the first to move away from this model with Deep Blue in 1991, with an “extended book derived automatically from a Grandmaster game database.” Campbell explains: “Prior to conducting a search, Deep Blue first checks whether a move is available from the opening book. Finding a move, it plays it immediately. Otherwise, it consults the extended book; if it finds the position there, it uses the evaluation information to award bonuses and penalties to a subset of the available moves. Finally, Deep Blue carries out a search, with some preference for following successful Grandmaster moves. However, because there is always the possibility that opening theory has overlooked the strongest move in the position, Deep Blue still has the opportunity to discover it. In some situations, where the bonus for a move is unusually large, Deep Blue can make a move without computation; such automatic extended-book moves allow the system to save time for use later in the game.”179 179

Murray Campbell, “Knowledge Discovery in Deep Blue,” Communications of the ACM 42.11 (Nov. 1999): 66-67.

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Key in this method is the raw evaluation of moves by Deep Blue: it was able to search through databases of Grandmaster games to literally draw its own conclusions about how various positional principles weighed against each other. Deep Blue had the capacity to prefer better chess moves over worse ones, and the goal of its designers was to program it with the most effective search biases to enable Deep Blue to consistently find the objectively best moves. When Deep Blue first played Kasparov in Philadelphia in 1996, an error resulted in the program playing an entire match without reference to an opening book; in spite of this, the machine was able to derive opening theory on its own for the first thirteen moves. In addition to the revolutionary concept of the extended opening book, Deep Blue was equipped with an endgame ROM interface that allowed it to recognize common endgame patterns, mainly those resulting in draws. In Silver’s analysis, despite Deep Blue’s radical improvement over the standard opening book technologies of its time, it was this endgame processing that would ultimately signal the “beginning of the end” for Kasparov. A year passed after 1996 before Deep Blue and Kasparov met again. IBM dubbed the newly-upgraded processor “Deeper Blue” and scheduled a rematch with Kasparov for May 1997, this time in New York City. Having reflected on his 4-2 win over Deep Blue the previous year, Kasparov knew that his goal was to take the machine out of its comfort element; he knew well of the advantage that lay in moves and positions that were “new” to Deep Blue. After just five turns in the first match of the set, Kasparov had created a game state that “had literally occurred just once before in master-level competition out of the hundreds of thousands of games in Deep Blue’s database.” Kasparov had succeeded in duplicating the earlier

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conditions of Deep Blue playing through the early game without access to its opening book, and went on to take the first game, but not without a sort of Pyrrhic victory for Deep Blue. On Deep Blue’s 44th turn, it made a move that Kasparov later discovered had served the sole purpose of maximizing the number of turns it would take Kasparov to checkmate, i.e. to maximize the chances of an error on Kasparov’s part allowing Deep Blue to draw. In short, Deep Blue had passed up an opportunity to guarantee that mating would take at least twenty moves for Kasparov to mate, because it had found a line that required even more moves from Kasparov; Kasparov interpreted this as the computer being able to “see mates in 20 and more,” a capacity which was, at the time, unheard of for man and machine alike. With Kasparov clearly flustered, Deep Blue took the second game in dominating fashion, with Kasparov completely missing a line in the endgame which would have guaranteed him a draw. He later reported that he was “so impressed by the deep positional play of the computer that [he] didn’t think there was any escape.”180 Kasparov’s subsequent accusations of foul play fell on deaf ears, and he drew the next three games, unable to decisively outplay Deep Blue in the endgame. In the sixth and final game, Kasparov opened with the Caro-Kann Defense of his rival Karpov, in what was either a sign of humility, a last-ditch effort to disorient the machine in the opening game as Kasparov had managed to do before, or a little bit of both. Kasparov’s inexperience with the Caro-Kann showed in the end, and Deep Blue took the game and the match less than twenty turns in. Deep Blue’s forty-fourth move in the first game had been the result of a software bug. It had absolutely no effect on the mechanical outcome of the game, since Deep Blue resigned the turn after, and it was fixed by the programmers before the next game in the series. 180

Nate Silver, Signal and the Noise (New York: Penguin, 2012) 226-230.

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Deep Blue had not only outplayed Kasparov; it had accidentally created a mental advantage for itself, a machine, over Kasparov, a human. A conscious mind had been gamed by nuts, bolts, and electricity. Since the second Deep Blue-Kasparov match, computers have consistently

remained

firmly

ahead

of

humans

in

chess.

Grandmaster-level programs are standard practice affairs for the contemporary competitive chess player. The Ghost Flood suggests that the duel could suffer a similar fate. The question remains as to what it means for a machine to play a game. We have seen that play arises in humans and other animals as a natural social function in specific historical circumstances, but the possibility of machines permeating this realm of play implies an equal possibility that they could achieve consciousness exactly like ours. Per Searle’s Chinese Room argument, it is at least clear that if a computer is able to speak a language, be it the Chinese language or the language of chess, the sense in which it “understands” that language is different from the sense in which a human can understand that language. We need not draw Searle’s radical conclusion that the machine could never come to understand the language in any sense. Derrida advises against the notion of “animal” as an all-inclusive term for non-human life: “I avoid speaking generally about animals. For me there are not ‘animals.’ When one says ‘animals,’ one has already started to not understand anything, and has started to enclose the animal into a cage. There are considerable differences between different types of animals. There is no reason one should group, into one and the same category, monkeys, bees, snakes, dogs, horses, arthropods and microbes. These are radically different organisms of life, and to say, ‘animal’ and put them all into one category, both the monkey and the ant, is a very violent gesture. To put all living things that aren’t human into one category is, first of all, a stupid

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gesture – theoretically ridiculous – and partakes in the very real violence that humans exercise towards animals that leads to slaughterhouses, their industrial treatment, their consumption… All this violence towards animals is engendered in this conceptual simplification which allows one to say ‘animals’ in general.”181

The same argument ought to be extended to machines, as while the Mechanical Turk and Deep Blue were both machines, and could both be said to understand chess in a sense, these two senses would be very different. The Turk understood chess because the person controlling it understood chess, and in this case the understanding is clearly traceable to the controller of the machine. In the case of Deep Blue, even if there is no consciousness present, there is still a machine which in a sense produces some understanding of chess, as it is now commonplace for a chess computer to produce a move that is new to a human. Searle explains that being a computer in the latter sense is “not an intrinsic feature of an object, but a feature of our interpretation of the physics of the phenomenon,” concluding that “Turing machines are not to be found in nature… they are to be found in our interpretation of nature.” Consciousness on this view is simply the “mechanisms that mediate the input stimuli to the output behavior” that a rational human observer recognizes as similar to their own.182 The limits of a human chess player are defined by the peak play of the computers of that player’s time, while the limits of a chess computer are defined by that humanoid consciousness the replication of which can be infinitely approached but never truly achieved by machines. When computers achieve notable status in the playing of any game, that game ipso facto ceases to be a purely human Derrida, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Zeitgeist, 2002. Deleted scene posted to YouTube, 4 Dec. 2007. Web. 182 Searle, “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence,” Google Singularity Network, 2015. Lecture. 181

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activity; its material circumstances have moved beyond a purely human scope and outwards into the “not-human.” For a computer to get ahead of other computers, it must think more and more like a human. For a human to rise above her peers, she must think more and more like the best chess computers. In

games

involving

some

degree

of

chance,

the

human/machine distinction is more pronounced, as these games force calculations of risk on the margin upon rational players. In situations of imperfect information, a rational human actor defers to the expected utility principles of von Neumann and Morgenstern which in turn were inherited from Bernoulli: “Expected utility theory [was] the foundation of the rational-agent model and is to this day the most important theory in the social sciences. Expected utility theory was not intended as a psychological model; it was a logic of choice, based on elementary rules (axioms) of rationality. Consider this example: If you prefer an apple to a banana, then you also prefer a 10% chance to win an apple to a 10% chance to win a banana… The apple and the banana stand for any objects of choice (including gambles), and the 10% chance stands for any probability. [Von Neumann and Morgenstern] had derived their theory of rational choice between gambles from a few axioms. Economists adopted expected utility theory in a dual role: as a logic that prescribes how decisions should be made, and as a description of how [rational actors] make choices.”183

In order to model a duelist’s “benefit,” or relative in-game position resulting from a certain allotment of resources, we observe such a curve first in isolation, then alongside the analogous curves

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) 262. 183

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for every other resource, and determine relative to material circumstances an optimal allotment of all such resources. Utility is a representation of consumers’ satisfaction from quantities of goods rather than the objective value of those goods. Given that resources are that which gives a duelist the ability to take actions that ultimately alter the game state, a duelist’s utility of resources will represent his or her benefit from the ranges of actions offered by those resources. This gives rise to risk aversion, which most individuals purchase insurance in the real world to mitigate: in a vacuum, uncertainty reduces total utility, as one would rather the chance of getting struck by lightning when they go outside is 0% rather than anything higher. However, Kahneman notes that the theory leaves out a different sort of aversion entirely: on the standard view of expected utility, there are no differences in principle between a loss and an equivalent gain, but a truly rational actor, in the tautological sense in which all humans are rational actors, would be more averse to a loss than they would be attracted by an equivalent gain. The example Kahneman gives is a simple gamble: you are given the opportunity to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, you will receive $150, but if the flip is tails, you will lose $100. A rational human acting to maximize expected utility will take this bet every time, but most people in the real world would not: “The missing variable [in expected utility theory] is the reference point, the earlier state relative to which gains and losses are evaluated… Evaluation is relative to a neutral reference point, which is sometimes referred to as an ‘adaptation level.’ You can easily set up a compelling demonstration of this principle. Place three bowls of water in front of you. Put ice water into the lefthand bowl and warm water into the right-hand bowl. The water in the middle bowl should be at room temperature. Immerse your hands in the cold and warm water for about a minute, then dip

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both in the middle bowl. You will experience the same temperature as heat in one hand and cold in the other. For financial outcomes, the usual reference point is the status quo, but it can also be the outcome that you expect, or perhaps the outcome to which you feel entitled, for example, the raise or bonus that your colleagues receive. Outcomes that are better than the reference points are gains. Below the reference point they are losses. A principle of diminishing sensitivity applies to both sensory dimensions and the evaluation of changes of wealth. Turning on a weak light has a large effect in a dark room. The same increment of light may be undetectable in a brightly illuminated room. Similarly, the subjective difference between $900 and $1,000 is much smaller than the difference between $100 and $200. The third principle is loss aversion. When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.” 184

A computer program does not exist in the same material circumstances as a human being; a machine does not have an estate or a bank account or bills to pay or the inclination to procreate and maintain a family. This does not matter so much in chess, where there is no uncertainty beyond the opponent’s decisions, but in poker there is a pronounced impact on the role played by machines. The potential power of machines with regards to games of uncertainty is therefore the ability to completely disregard these developments from Kahneman. In the second decade of the new millennium, aspiring poker engine programmers have moved away from simply trying to program human poker expertise, i.e. prediction and pattern

184

Ibid., 273-274.

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recognition, into a computer and towards a wholly algorithmic approach, resulting in situations like the one in which CarnegieMellon’s Claudico bet $19000 to win a $700 pot, a decision no rational human would make.185 If machines and other species can penetrate the realm of play, and with it language, we must all but accept the full force of the Darwinian notion that knowledge is, first and foremost, a set of “convictions of the minds of monkeys,” a very specific languagegame that has developed within and throughout particular sets of material circumstances through many iterations of historical conditioning, or indeed an innate capacity in our species produced directly by the process of evolution to suit our natural habitat and environment. It is tautological to say that reason is what allows us to have things like societies, governments, economies, etc.; a species with no language quite simply cannot “own money” in the same sense that a human can, because it has no language to determine what would could for it as money in the first place. Language is, by the same token, irreversibly tangled up with play, games, and dueling, but only for homo sapiens. Machines have adapted just fine in the world of chess without writing their own Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, and they are currently making strides in poker while often railing against prevailing notions of “game theoryoptimal” poker play. Whether or not a machine could ever be conscious misses the point of the argument entirely: it is sufficient to simply say that machines can play the same games as humans while doing so in a fundamentally different way. In other words, the word “play,” but not the word “chess,” changes meaning in the passage from the statement “Kasparov plays chess” to the statement “Deep

Byron Spice and Emily Watts, “Pros Rake In More Chips,” CMU News 8 May 2015. Web. 185

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Blue plays chess.” We need to take no further stance than this on the issue of the possibility of a conscious artificial intelligence. The realm of play must always be defined against that which cannot be played. This latter sphere will differ from species to species, and in the case of humans and computers, we find that their respective such spheres are more or less inverses of one another. When these spheres change, so too do the defining principles of the species for which they exist. There are not only infinite possible variations between games to be found across cultures, but indeed an infinite frontier of possible material conditions for the birth of a duelist. We ought not to be surprised to find a race of sentient beings in another galaxy far more proficient at dueling than we.

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Clear and Distinct Mind They say it’s lonely at the top and whatever you do You always gotta watch motherfuckers around you Nobody’s invincible, no plan is foolproof We all must meet our moment of truth Gang Starr, “Moment of Truth” (1998)

T

he theory of the duel begins with the rejection of results-oriented thinking. This is the fundamental principle of the Clear Mind, the necessary condition

for a duelist to surpass human limitations and perform the sacred sublime Synchro Summons which are the proof of our evolution. The story of the Clear Mind, however, begins long before these Synchro Summons were ever performed. The first Clear Mind was that of Seto Kaiba, who ascended to the top 4 of the Battle City tournament in order to face his nemesis Yugi Muto, the King of Games, in the semifinals. In the universal realm of the Clear Mind, all dueling is solved, uninhibited by irrational concerns of the animal mind. It is only through pure reason that the Clear-Minded duelist will find the strength to continue making the “right play” despite being punished for it. This is because the Clear Mind does not play to win, but instead plays for its own sake, for the sake of playing well in itself. Hoban expands: “Your goal in every game you play should not be to win, but rather to play perfectly. As Chapin said, it is a cause and effect relationship. By definition, the correct play is better than every

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other play given the knowledge that you have. If you make the correct play, you are giving yourself the best chances of winning. If it does not work out, you still played it right. There is a reason it is the correct play, because it works more often than it does not.”186

Kaiba had played his duel with Yugi long before he stepped into Alcatraz Tower to formally do battle with his opponent. He had played his next match against Marik many times as well; he had researched every possible factor in duels with both opponents extensively and optimized his strategy for each, correctly predicting the endgame of his duel with Yugi and finding the best and only tech card capable of defeating Marik’s Winged Dragon of Ra. Furthermore, he had himself just literally defied fate itself, per Kisara, in his previous top 8 duel against Ishizu. It is not likely that Kaiba considered the possibility of facing Joey in the finals – although this did nearly come to pass – but it is shown that he at least maintained some data on Joey’s deck as well. How, then, did it come to pass that this Clear Mind fell short of its stated goal? How does one defeat a duelist who is always more knowledgeable, who has always thought one and just one move ahead, who cannot falter in any contest of information? The initial move of consciousness which makes all other forms of conscious experience possible is the self-definition of consciousness in which the Self, the I, is posited against the external Other, the not-I. The same holds true for the Clear Mind, which itself cannot exist outside of its relation to the Distinct Mind, by which the principles of knowledge are reduced to utter particularity. This Distinct Mind plays the role of the bricoleur, immersing itself in results and intuitions rather than claims to universal knowledge. The

Patrick Hoban, “Overcoming Tough Losses,” Alterealitygames.com 26 Mar. 2013. Web. 186

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Distinct Mind knows what has worked for it, and it knows this for a wide range of situations; it favors intuition and feel rather than the principles of the Clear Mind; it is results-oriented and it knows it, and it tangibly uses this to its advantage. Where the Clear Mind has turned itself outwards in an expansive trajectory, the Distinct Mind is reflective, turning in upon itself to better understand the material and historical conditions for its existence. In doing so, it realizes that even the most universal logical thinking is subject to the constraints inherent in being a bodily process of the human organism. Sperling continues: “We need emotion to aid us, and yet people sometimes ignore or attempt to suppress it. The ability to roughly estimate distances between objects just by looking at them is not useless just because one owns a ruler or tape-measure. Often you will not have the time or incentive to get the ruler out! The same is true of the ‘tool’ of logical thinking. You need something else to rely on where you can't decide which play is more logical, or you don't have time to fully contemplate the situation.”187

The limits of the Clear Mind exist not in the mental, but in the physical. While the Clear Mind always pursues the optimal game plan from the very beginning, the Distinct Mind is fundamentally reactive; it takes note of its environment and circumstances and constructs a proper response to them in the moment. So when Kaiba enacts his last resort, the Final Attack Orders, and places Yugi in a thoroughly unique game state that he is not likely to have any experience in (no card does anything remotely close to Final Attack Orders’ effect in the series), Yugi does not despair or even bat an eyelash, and continues making effective plays as opportunities

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Matt Sperling, “Be Emotional,” Channelfireball.com 13 Sept. 2009. Web.

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present themselves. The first of Kaiba’s three cards in deck after Final Attack Orders is Monster Reborn, which he uses for a Fusion play for Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon. This enables Yugi to use his Double Spell to create a Dark Paladin of his own, at which point his De-Fusion puts Kaiba dead on board. Yugi’s Diffusion Wave-Motion is a redundant “win-more” card here; he wins solely because of the line Kaiba chooses, this being in itself a completely defensible line of play. The only one of Yugi’s Final Attack Orders targets that ends up impacting the game is the De-Fusion, which is not necessarily obviously an optimal pick, but at least makes sense to consider as an answer to a probable range of threats from Kaiba. Now armed with both Obelisk and Slifer, Yugi faces Marik in the tournament’s grand finals, and he goes into this duel with one more gift from Kaiba: the Fiend’s Sanctuary card which Kaiba had prepared for the Winged Dragon of Ra. Having played out every possible dueling scenario against Ra, Kaiba knows that Yugi will lose to Marik, yet he knows he cannot let Marik win, both out of pride and concern for the fate of the world. His solution is to duel vicariously through Yugi, and together the Clear and Distinct Minds face Marik and the most powerful Egyptian God, the Winged Dragon of Ra. The speed duel was born in the passage from the ancient to the modern. The most important card in this transition is undoubtedly Royal Oppression; it is questionable whether or not TeleDAD would have been as interesting a format as it was had everyone known about this key development from the start. After TeleDAD, Oppression saw play in increasingly explosive archetypes, until it was consistently a staple in every contender for the best deck in a format, for format after format. It is in this new era that the next King of Games would ascend to his rightful throne. At the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, there existed a fear within the top echelon of duelists that misplays had ceased to exist, 193

that the duel was now designed to incentivize suboptimal play. The first round of Jarel Pro Winston “Pro”-Files documents this fear extensively. Cesar Gonzales remarked in 2011 that “back in the day… there was something called [a misplay], but now… A misplay is a move that you do and get penalized for… Now there’s no such thing.”188 It was generally thought that the roll of die to determine who went first was altogether more important to the outcome of a duel than the decks or skill of the duelists. It is remarkable that Hoban would begin his explosive rise in such an environment given his commitment to absolute principle-oriented play. At this point, Hoban was consistently “bubbling,” just falling short of top cut or grand finals of YCS after YCS. This changed with his reading of Next Level Magic, which forms the starting point for the major theories advanced in the Road of the King. Hoban’s critical move away from Chapin’s Theory of Everything is as follows: for Chapin, the fundamental resource is the ability to continue playing the game, i.e. the object of the game is to win the game, but for Hoban, the object of the game is to win the tournament. While Chapin takes for granted that “the object of a game” is to “deny our opponent the option to continue playing the game,” Hoban is not satisfied with this, and goes even further to say that “winning any one game has very little meaning… what we’re actually trying to do is win tournaments, not just a single game.”189 However, Hoban misses the even greater implications of this criticism: that the object of a game might not be to win the game or the tournament, but simply an irreducible win itself, the win that permeates through all games, tournaments, and other possible instances of the duel. This is, of course, in line with the principle-

Jarel Pro Winston, “This Is A Winston ‘Pro’File With Cesar G,” YouTube 30 Nov. 2011. Web. 189 Patrick Hoban, Road of the King (Medina: ARG Game Center, 2016) 45-47. 188

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oriented methodology of the Clear Mind, which would be content losing a thousand tournaments in a row if it was known beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Clear Mind had played absolutely optimally in each of them. We have seen that the expansion of the Clear Mind carries with it an epiphenomenal development of a Distinct Mind that is, by its nature, constantly at work undermining the Clear Mind’s project of universal knowledge. For Lacan, this is the objet petit a in the psychoanalytic function, the surplus of meaning that “sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation.”190 Where the concepts of games and play are concerned, however, it is difficult to envision this surplus as an “object” in the traditional sense. Instead, for every community of duelists that pushes for long-run success through a communicative reason, e.g. game theory, we will find at least one conscious mind, a duelist in itself, a joueur petit a who works to subvert that universal knowledge-power instrumentally for shortrun results; otherwise, there would be no question of being “resultsoriented” at all, as the “better duelist” would always win for reasons which are obvious to all. The joueur petit a is “that guy” that no one wants to lose to, the one who could never possibly win outside of a fluke; their nature is, indeed, to be the fluke in the duel itself, to embody it and embrace it and push it as far as it can possibly go. The Pharaoh’s critique of the Road of the King is integral in understanding the role of the joueur petit a for our modern King: “However, this pales in comparison to the biggest flaw the work has: at one point, it suggests a course of action that is regarded as bribery. On page 233 the book proposes a certain behavior that would constitute a UC-Cheating infraction, which carries a penalty of Disqualification from Official and Sanctioned events. Further,

190

Žižek, “On Jacques Lacan.”

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all Disqualifications are reported to the game’s Penalty Committee for review: players may be Suspended from all events for their behavior at times… Literally, a book partially about gameplay has stumbled into potentially getting players Suspended in the future. There is no greater way to fail at playing a game than to be Suspended from that game for a perceived inability to follow that game’s rules: and this book has just suggested a course of action that, if taken, would show an inability to follow the game’s rules… This flaw cannot be forgiven.”191

Dennis Frogman does not share the Pharaoh’s ultimate conclusion from this mistake; this is not an unforgivable flaw, and very manageable provided the proper amendments in future editions. In fact, it could even be seen as understandable; if a duelist really wished to optimize their chances of victory in every way possible, doing so will inevitably lead them to the border between legality and illegality per policy. Since policy’s effect in the duel is always intertwined with the movement of interpretation by judges and tournament staff, it makes sense that a duelist pursuing complete perfection might come across a few conclusions which seem legal to them, but that are made illegal in application when a judge interprets them as such. This is not to say this would be an incorrect interpretation by the judge; but neither was the conclusion born of pure illegality, as it “seemed legal” to the Clear Mind, and why would the Clear Mind have any reason to doubt itself? However, this is a paradigmatic example of the work of the joueur petit a in that it reveals the hidden byproducts that occur on the margins of the search for final knowledge in the duel. When one attempts formulate any sort of absolute rule in the duel, be it a theoretical or mechanical proposition, the speaker or writer of such Earl Ratliff and Dan Parker, “Hoban’s Road of the King,” YGOrganization 31 Mar. 2016. Web. 191

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remarks posits a universality of reason, a totalizing structure of knowledge that the remark is to fit within. This entire structure is irreversibly intertwined with the power of the duelist and can be referred to as the good in the duel, in the sense that plays or players can be good, powerful, skilled, potent, worthy of fear, etc. However, as shown by Roderick’s remarks on Derrida, this movement cannot totally exclude the possibility of ranges of interpretation rather than a single interpretation by which any rational reader or listener could “tune in” to the same structure of knowledge that is posited by the universal remark: “If I take a pawn off a chess board and just put it here, you will still know it’s a pawn but it won’t be able to make any pawn moves. To make the right moves, it will have to be on a chess board and deployed in a game. In other words there will be conditions within which it will make sense to move the pawn two squares forward. One of them won’t be to set the pawn on this thing and say: I am going two squares forward because looking ahead of me I don’t know what would count… is that a square? In other words, it’s just not the way the game is played… Just like reference couldn’t be what gives our words their meanings and our uses of them and so on, neither can intentionality of speaker… This does not mean that we cannot intend; we can, but it means we cannot fix meaning by our intentions… There is no interpretation that can bring interpretation to an end. Good books, really great texts, do not cut off interpretation; they lead to multiple interpretations.”192

Such is the case with Hoban’s book. When a truly great mind writes, it does so in such a way that its remarks will develop with the

Roderick, “Derrida and the Ends of Man” in Self Under Siege (1993). Lecture. 192

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human species long after their writer is gone. In fact, the very metagame of the duel has grown to represent the clash of dueling values in which Hoban ascended to the top. Hoban maintains today that deckbuilding is the primary source of utility in the duel; Daoudi has come out defending the opposite position, i.e. that technical play is primary. Weeks before this chapter was written, Hoban played a Burning Abyss Monarch deck at the United States World Championship Qualifier considered by a significant portion of the community to be a suboptimal variation of the Burning Abyss deck. When a great mind moves within the duel, the movements affect the very fabric of the community of duelists in which they exist. No final development in knowledge will prevent further such reappearances of the joueur petit a throughout all conceivable generations of duelists. The joueur petit a illustrates a pragmatic view of reason in the duel, contra Russell and the early Wittgenstein and in the vein of Dewey, Habermas and Rorty. Lévi-Strauss calls this results-oriented approach to language-games bricolage, a kind of “mythical thought” by which the so-called bricoleur applies a “limited repertoire” of knowledge to “whatever the task in hand, because it has nothing else at its disposal.” This is opposed to the traditional scientific method, which may be illustrated in a craftsman or an engineer, e.g. the same opposition as that between Takahashi’s Yugi and Kaiba, Watanabe’s Mugen and Jin, Kishimoto’s Naruto and Sasuke, Dickens’ Darnay and Carton, etc. Lévi-Strauss continues: “The analogy is worth pursuing since it helps us to see the real relations between the two types of scientific knowledge we have distinguished. The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are

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always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogenous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the bricoleur’s means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project… It is to be defined only by its potential use, or… because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that ‘they may always come in handy.’”193

We should not be surprised to find duelists at the absolute top level of play restraining and restricting the extent and depth of the theories they communicate to the public in the form of articles and such; there are certain things that the highest-level duelists must keep secret to themselves, away from their competitors. At the same time, this forms a constraint on the expansion of the Clear Mind as part of the natural process of the evolving metagame of language. If we join Dewey, Habermas and Rorty in declaring the true to be nothing more than that which is destined to be accepted by all rational players in the long run given perfect conditions of communication, we find the analogous true in game theory to be the full extent of theories which can be universalized and communicated between competitors in a perfectly competitive state of equilibrium. Generally, the highest echelon of duelists will be motivated by certain truths beyond these theories, truths they keep to themselves, which nonetheless can never reach full maturity insofar as they are never communicated. This repressed, individual part of the game theoretic mind will always be open to exploitation by opposing bricoleurs who approach the game from an entirely different perspective altogether. 193

Claude Lé vi-Strauss, Savage Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1966) 16-36.

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One criticism elevated by Pennington towards the chapter of the Road on Hoban’s “Circle” notes that this “Circle” is itself simply an environmental condition which Hoban essentially got lucky with.194 In fact, many duelists of today begin their journey to the top not with an in-person Circle, but with a computer and the Internet. This alternate approach to finding a properly nourishing competitive environment dates back to Suffridge and the YVD team warring era, which later evolved into the Dueling Network in 2011. While the Dueling Network existed, it was undoubtedly the best tool for playtesting that existed for casual and competitive duelists alike, accounting for much of the expansion in the Clear Mind from 2011 to 2014. In playtesting sessions on the Dueling Network, duelists are able to play many more games in a given amount of time than they would be able to in person. When the playtesting process itself is accelerated, so too is the rate at which the metagame evolves, and along with it the rate at which the average duelist comes to theoretical conclusions about the format which are then either validated or discredited by further experience. With the recent return to paper playtesting necessitated by the closing of the Dueling Network, we can expect to see a resurgence in the role of the bricoleur in the metagame, now able to exploit the community’s relative lack of knowledge of the ins and outs of the format. In light of these findings, we ought not to view the Clear and Distinct Minds as mutually-exclusive methods, but simply two opposing Floresian relative roles that a duelist must vacillate between on their path to the irreducible win, two different methods of achieving tangible goals that can be mixed and matched to fit the situation. The joueur petit a is simultaneously everyone and no one;

Allen C. Pennington, “Road of the King Review: Part 3 – The Circle,” YouTube 10 Aug. 2016. Web. 194

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one may lose to the joueur petit a in one tournament round and become the joueur petit a in the very next.

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Frame Zero Uh-huh. No, motherfucker, no… Earth, dude. No, I’m talking about the… Yeah, with the dinosaurs. No, if you get to the dolphin people you’ve gone too far. All right, man, I’ll talk to you later. Okay. “A Rickle in Time,” Rick and Morty (2015)

O

ne of the later theses of the Smash Brothers is the opposition of mentalities between players on the East and West Coasts about how best to approach the

game of Super Smash Bros. Melee. Old-school heroes of the East Coast like Christopher “Azen” McMullen and Kashan “Chillindude” Khan pioneered what modern fan favorite Kevin “PPMD” Nanney calls “dissecting the game.” The former developed a nation-wide reputation for his then-unparalleled mastery of all twenty-six of the game’s playable characters, and the latter delivered Ken Hoang, the West Coast’s beloved “King of Smash,” his first-ever loss in a tournament with his eponymous “best-option-at-all-time” Fox combo. This is staunchly opposed to what PPMD labels the “West Coast mentality” that prioritizes the understanding of the player rather than the game. While Azen, Chillin, and their early East Coast contemporaries made waves in the metagame with their innovation and technical mastery, Ken Hoang and right hand man Joel “Isai” Alvarado were dominating tournaments on the West Coast through the simple, tried-and-true method of outplaying opponent after opponent. For the first two years of national-level play, Ken, the original King of Smash, was absolutely dominant with Marth. Beginning in 2006, however, Ken’s reign began to crumble under 202

pressure from three competitors: first PC Chris, then KoreanDJ, and finally Mew2king, the second and last King and the first God of Melee. In the Melee community’s first tier list, Sheik is placed at the top, and most top players, including Ken, agreed with this placement at the time. Before Ken, the Sheik of Recipherus was racking up tournament wins across California, and Isai, who was known to be capable of beating Ken from very early on, was rumored to have a Sheik, supposedly even more terrifying than his signature Captain Falcon, that he would use almost exclusively under duress in crucial doubles matches. From a mechanical perspective, Sheik simply appeared to be the best, as Mew2king himself argued as early as 2002. The journey of Jason Zimmerman of Cinnaminson, New Jersey begins with a simple proposition: Fox versus Marth is the most even matchup in Melee, “as close as you can possibly get to a ditto.” Mew2king got his chance to prove this near the end of the 2006 MLG season, the last before the release of Brawl, the next iteration of the Smash Bros. series. In the first round of the Level 2 bracket of MLG New York Playoffs 2006, Ken lost to his nemesis Azen for the second time in his career in what is widely considered one of the greatest comebacks in the history of Melee. This left Ken to face Mew2king in round 1 of the losers’ bracket. This was prime MLG Mew2king, the stereotypical “basement space animal” that came prepared with one of the most technical Foxes of his time. Mew2king succeeded in exposing the weakness of Ken’s advancing short-hop neutral-airs – today Marths are conditioned to autocancel neutral-airs in place against Fox perhaps because of this very set – and became the first Fox to defeat Ken in a high-profile tournament setting, leaving Ken with a career low 7th place. Old-school East Coast theorist Neo speculated at the start of the 2006 season that Mew2king’s Fox was “changing the game,” that 203

frame-perfect Foxes like Mew2king threatened to force every other character out of viable competitive play. However, the “no items, Fox and Final Destination only” meme did not come to fruition until the 2006 MLG Championships in Las Vegas. In loser’s finals, KoreanDJ’s Sheik prevailed against Ken, pushed against the ropes and “trying every last trick in the book,” first with Marth, then with Fox, and even with his old partner Isai’s beloved Captain Falcon. KoreanDJ advanced to grand finals to face PC Chris, armed with a Falco that had set wins over Ken and a new Fox that had unlocked “a new peak to his talent.”195 In the two grueling sets that followed, KoreanDJ’s Fox narrowly overcame PC’s Falco only to fall in game 6 of the second set to PC’s own Fox on Final Destination. In what was to be the “last Melee tier list” before Brawl, Fox was finally promoted to best character in the game, and per Mew2king’s principle of the MarthFox matchup, Fox and Marth were placed together in a tier above the remaining 24 characters. Being the fastest character and among the hardest to control, Fox’s wider margin for error made his results seem underwhelming in the early years of the game, but after Las Vegas it seemed clear that a Fox that made no mistakes could not lose. In the grand finals of MLG Long Island 2007, the last before Melee was dropped from the MLG circuit, KoreanDJ was the spitting image of Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur. Wife muses that “KoreanDJ was an artist when he played Melee… Watching him compete, you could see him making things up as he went along — trying out brand new strategies in the middle of high stakes matches. He once compared his playing to freestyle rapping; for him, Melee was art.” The tension between

this

Distinct-Minded

style,

the

“fountainhead

of

innovation,” and the scientific, theoretical, principle-oriented Clear Mind of M2K became iconic and was culturally inscribed in generations of Melee players to come. Like Morphy, KDJ faded out 195

Chris Fabiszak, Team Ben (Montrose: Wilshire Press, 2013) 81-83.

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of Melee fame after Long Island, pursuing other professional endeavors, while M2K began a reign that was “second only to Ken’s with respect to length, and comparable to none in terms of the gap he created between him and the rest of the field.”196 For this prime M2K, punishment is always optimized. M2K compiled wide ranges of bare mechanical facts about Melee long before things like frame data were standard knowledge among top players. Therefore, when he connected with a hit in the “neutral game,” or the state of the game in which both characters are able to act normally, he would know exactly how much his character could “punish” the opponent with the resulting hitstun and spatial relation. “If I get a hit,” he says in the documentary, “I want to take it as far as possible.” With Melee off the MLG circuit and tournament stakes far lower, the later M2K played more Marth and Sheik than Fox, citing consistency issues with Fox, but he maintained throughout that he “mained all of the top 3 [characters].” His Marth found little trouble dispatching of Ken’s entire team, including the King himself, in an ironman-style crew battle at Zero Challenge 3 in July 2007. When Melee returned to the big stage at EVO World 2007, however, M2K suffered a catastrophic defeat to the up-and-coming Jigglypuff player Mango, a West Coast reincarnate of KoreanDJ, who then began his own meteoric rise to Melee godhood. Mango is called a “natural” in the documentary, having a knack for figuring out game mechanics intuitively and being able to devote his conscious mental efforts towards the other player’s mindset rather than his own execution as a result. Mango’s punishes were not as developed as M2K’s at face value; instead, the early Mango pioneered a new-age form of “spacing” by which his Jigglypuff would weave in and out of the opponent’s range so as to elicit a reaction that is simple and

196

Ibid., 87-90.

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easy to punish. He coupled this spacing with soul-crushing reads and gambles that bolstered his “suffocating” mental presence. The dominance of Mango’s Jigglypuff was succeeded almost immediately by Hungrybox, leading a significant portion of the community to view Jigglypuff as potentially the best character in the game, since the two most recent best players both played her. PPMD identifies alongside this rise for Puff a sharp decline for Marth and Fox: “[Fox and Marth]… you know, they tanked when Brawl came out and Melee ‘died,’ and those are the two characters that would really be able to check Puff really well… In my opinion, I think Fox fell off because people didn’t want to put in the work as much, because you have to keep grinding to get good with the character… and then Marth, so many good players, Ken, Azen… all just quit with Brawl and went to Brawl… so Marth just really fell off at that point, there was just no new innovation and all of the stuff Marth had that was keeping him ahead of other characters was caught up to… Over time, people weren’t complaining about Fox and Marth so much anymore as they were complaining about Falco and Puff, and primarily Puff… It’s maybe not so weird to think about, but saying she was definitely the best character and overpowered is still a little bit weird in today’s thinking, I believe.”

PPMD’s own rise to the top from late 2010 to early 2011 inched Falco ahead of Jigglypuff in the eyes of the community. At this point, all five gods of Melee had been established: M2K had remained a litmus test for international-level talent with his Marth, Sheik, and Fox, Mango had dominated first with Jigglypuff, then with his own space animals, Armada had come from Sweden to the original GENESIS and shown the world how good of a character Peach could be, Hungrybox had begun taking sets off of Mew2king, Armada, and 206

a semi-retired “sandbagging” Mango, and finally Peepee began to overcome his demons first in Hungrybox, then in M2K, and finally Armada. The budding eSports industry brought Fox back to the forefront of the metagame at EVO 2013, where Mango performed one of his signature runs through losers’ bracket to win the tournament using only Fox for the first time. At this point, Fox “definitely returned to the place of the best character, all of the complaints about Puff fell off as Hungrybox began to fall off more… You couldn’t consider Falco the best [anymore] at this point, you could consider him maybe top 2, still… but there was just so much Fox that you couldn’t make an argument that [anyone] could be better, really.” PPMD summarizes the trend as follows: when the game is thriving, Fox and Marth appear to be the best, and when the financial support that enables the effort necessary on the part of Fox and Marth players to make this so does not exist, Falco and Jigglypuff appear to be the best.

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When the stakes are higher, the highest echelon of

competitors have all the incentive they need to put in the effort necessary to overcome the joueur petit a, often lovingly referred to as “Falcomaster” within Melee circles. This does not necessarily occur as a result of the theory developed by high-level competitors; although this could very well be the case, eSports-style training regimens can also develop purely physical capacities in competitors that subsequently influence shifts in the metagame. In the former case, we see PC, M2K, and KDJ thriving in the late MLG era with the neutral/punish theory that developed primarily in M2K – on this theory, since Fox’s moves are unilaterally faster than those of the rest of the cast, the range of moves that are unsafe, or punishable, for the opponent are at their largest. This theory reached new heights starting in 2011, when the late Hax proposed that a theoretically optimal Fox could literally always win 197

Kevin Nanney, “House Call,” YouTube 6 May 2016. Web.

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solely through the use of his Shine, which hits in a single frame and is thus impossible to react to. This position was a direct reading of the tool-assisted simulations (TAS) that had started to appear as early as 2006, summarized by Hax as follows: “…you can only make the argument that Fox isn't the best at human level play; at TAS level he is factually the best because of one fact alone: he has a 1-frame move that makes him invincible and beats anything jointed in the game. anything disjointed (i.e. Marth's moves) gets stuck in lag and punished… there is only one thing certain about TAS level play: that Fox is #1 and Falco is #2 because they literally cannot be hit… a TAS level play tier list would probably read ‘1. Fox 2. Falco 3-26. Equal; all lose to powershielding.’”198

For Hax, this conclusion makes Melee a fundamentally defensive game; at the highest level of play, there is never incentive to incur risk by making reads which depend on correctly prediction an opponent’s decisions when one can simply react to all such decisions instead. Per this conception of Melee, absolutely optimal play always results in a stalemate once both players have picked Fox; neither player will make any move because they will all be punished perfectly every time. Insofar as people continue to play games of Melee that reach any end at all, we can see that a fundamental condition of human play of Melee is the imperfect aspect of prediction, while the corresponding condition of machine play is the absence of such prediction and eventual stalemate between two perfectly-reactive Foxes. While the computer engines of today compete with one another for higher Elo ratings in chess, this would be an open-and-shut question for Melee; no corresponding

198

Aziz al-Yami, “Don’t Approach,” Smashboards 12 Oct. 2011. Web.

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competition among conceivable Melee engines would ever need to occur outside of the single unending stalemate. The question for the human where Melee is concerned is therefore not frame 1, i.e. the point from which the perfect punish can be measured by the perfectly reactive Fox, but frame 0, i.e. the point at which the human decision itself is made. Per Derrida, for whom the now, la maintenant, is always “disappearing in its appearing,”199 infinitesimally deferred to the past by the very fact that it is perceptible to the conscious mind at all, we see that this latter frame can only be approximated by human perception and never exactly pinpointed due to the way in which “frames work.” Nesler explains: “Melee runs at 60 frames per second. A frame becomes our unit of time within the game. In order to discuss consistency with very tight input windows, it is important to recognize how frames relate to actual time… In actuality button presses must be started before the frame that they are intended to influence… When we play Melee we are forced to approximate exactly when in real time the transitional lines between frames occur. Because you are not capable of knowing exactly when the inputs for frame 16 are read (because you don't have an internal metronome so precise and more importantly you have no way of syncing your internal rhythm with that of your GameCube), slight lapses as described above are impossible to avoid with certainty.” 200

As human reaction times are repeatedly pushed to and beyond their limits through increasingly harsh training regimens, we are left to speculate as to whether or not a human could ever transcend these physical barriers entirely and play a perfectly

199

Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Bulletin de la Société Française de

Philosophie 62.3 (1968): 97. 200

Alex Nesler, “How Frames Work,” Alex’s Puff Stuff 11 June 2015. Web.

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reactive game of Melee. We are forced to conclude that if this ever came to pass, the duelist in question would, in principle, cease to be human; they would be the first member of a new species altogether capable of approaching play in radically inconceivable ways. This would undeniably constitute a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the sphere of Melee and could potentially signal an even greater such revolution in human play altogether. Applying these conclusions to Hoban’s Theory of Influence, we find that human capacity within any particular set of competitive rules will naturally expand with the ability of the human body to perceive new potential advantages within the game, to interpret an existing game state in a new way. The end to the search for perfection within any game ends with the human body qua human altogether: there is no end to the amount of new resources, or new ways of talking about resources, that may appear to the duelists of any given game.

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Gender and the Problem of Playstyles [You]’ll need a totem… Some kind of personal icon. A small object that you can always have with you, and that no one else knows… No one else can know the weight or balance of it, so when you examine your totem, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you’re not in someone else’s dream. Arthur, Inception (2010)

H

ere is one way of thinking about dueling. A duel is an equal, objective playing field where two duelists simultaneously test their ability to

navigate complex webs of decision trees. Some plays are just better than others. It is the duelist’s duty to choose the best plays from the ranges of possible plays presented to him throughout the course of a game. We can argue about whether or not you should have made play A as opposed to plays B, C, or D, but one or both of us is wrong. The deck is the duelist’s weapon. As such, some decks are just better than others. It is the duelist’s duty to find the most powerful and consistent deck available to him within the legal card pool. Once this ideal deck is discovered, the duelist may feel uncomfortable with it; it then becomes his duty to overcome these limitations in order to pilot this deck to its fullest potential, which is just higher than that of any other deck anyone could be playing. Here is another way of thinking about dueling. A duel is a work of art developed by two authors at once. The deck, then, is the duelist’s paintbrush, and every

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duelist approaches his canvas and develops his work with his own unique style. When we talk about the “best play,” we are engaging in a project of ranking all of the possible plays in a given situation for every situation. This ranking is based on what Sullivan labels expected value (EV). Sullivan summarizes, “with all known information available to you (cards you hold, cards you've seen, current metagame), if you made a decision a million times, the EV is the average result of that decision. A play with a more successful average result has a higher EV—if you were to make that decision, you'd get a better result most of the time. It doesn't matter if you don't end up getting that better result or not in any specific moment but that on average you would have.”201 While duelists argued over the problem of playstyles long before his rise to prominence at the turn of the decade, Hoban is perhaps one of the most easily-recognized contemporary advocates for the rejection of playstyles, and undoubtedly one of the most outspoken. Hoban’s project with regards to this rejection centers around a distinction he draws between the best play and the optimal play. Hoban defines the best play as that with the highest EV given perfect information, “the play you would make if there were no unknowns.” Shrewd readers will note that disagreements about the EV of plays in a world with perfect information can typically be resolved systematically and rather easily, and Hoban’s examples are befittingly minimalistic: “Why play around Mirror Force if you knew he didn’t have it? Why set two if you knew he had Heavy Storm?”202 If the best play is the play with the highest EV given all possible information about the game state, the optimal play is the

Adrian Sullivan, “Making Your Best Play,” Starcitygames.com 16 Jan. 2014. Web. 202 Hoban, “Do Playstyles Exist?” Alterealitygames.com 24 Jun. 2013. Web. 201

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play with the highest EV given your information about the game state. The basic idea here is that your play decisions are necessarily relative to your particular information set at any given point in a game. Suppose that your opponent has an empty field, save for a set backrow, and you begin your turn with a face-up Thunder King RaiOh. You topdeck a Gene-Warped Warwolf, and hesitate to summon it. You can threaten more, perhaps even lethal, damage if the summon is successful, but you will be strictly worse off if your opponent punishes you with a Torrential Tribute or Mirror Force (or whatever). Your decision here will depend on what you know about your opponent and his cards. Sometimes adjusting your play to your information set will move you farther from the best play, so to speak. We may “play around a card that isn’t there,” as we often say, perhaps falling for a clever bluff by the opponent. No matter what you know or don’t know about your opponent’s cards at the time you make your play, you are unequivocally better off summoning your Warwolf and attacking with it and Rai-Oh if your opponent has 3900 life points and his set card is a Mystical Space Typhoon. Regardless of the game state, a duelist with absolutely perfect information, down to the order of his opponent’s deck, pays no mind to any notion of risk, except where specific unique card effects are concerned, i.e. Sixth Sense. It is only when the duelist begins to consider wide ranges of possible games and game states that a different line of play becomes attractive. Information asymmetry thus gives rise to the concept of risk in the duelist’s decision-making process; indeed, we find that these concepts are inversely related. As the duelist gathers more information about the game he is playing in, he will find that his plays naturally involve less risk. Conversely, in the absence of information, the duelist must prepare for multiple possible game states. The calculation of Hoban’s optimal play goes above and 213

beyond the simple rational derivation that produces the best play given perfect information. Joe Giorlando expands on this idea, noting that while such derivations are useful tools for navigating complex play scenarios, they are not practical given the rigors of premier-level tournament play. Since dueling involves variance by definition, we are necessarily committed to some economic calculus of “average” utility across some range of possible games. This range is a totality never fully comprehended, as we are only ever in one of these possible games at a given time. Within a single game state, we may be able to rationally derive the best or perfect play for a duelist to make at any given point in time. However, this is only a part of what a duelist does in a duel. There are certain unknowns that force him to consider multiple possible games, yet he can ultimately make only one move (as opposed to making two alternative plays at the same time, which would be nonsense). Hoban and Giorlando term their solution to this dilemma the “law of averages.” The duelist must use probability as a tool to simplify the complex and diffuse web of decisions he is faced with.203 This leads us to an important and seemingly damning concession: as Hoban summarizes, “the optimal play is not guaranteed to work out.” It is unavoidable that the play with the highest EV given your set of information will sometimes have you play into a Mirror Force that really is there in spite of overwhelming odds. This leads many to question the project of the optimization of the play. Pedigo articulates a familiar concern in arguing that dueling requires far too many distinct and separate disciplines of knowledge for one to be reasonably expected to apply them all in such perfect and precise conjunction so as to make the optimal play every single time. As Albans reminds us, producing in-game advantages can often Joseph Giorlando, “Playstyles? Of Course,” Alterealitygames.com 25 Jun. 2013. Web. 203

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require very minute uses of time, such as pausing to think before setting certain cards or making certain plays. An extreme but nonetheless familiar example is the easy tell that a duelist may give to his opponent by pausing to consider activating one of his set cards when his opponent declares an attack before allowing the attack to go through. This action can in some cases produce an effect in the attacking opponent that the duelist may find quite useful: the opponent may be forced to play more conservatively in the future with the suspicion that you may be able to punish an over-extension. However, in sending off this tell, the duelist has redefined his opponent’s position in the game by widening his information set, as the opponent now knows what he needs to be playing around. Note that at times it can be quite difficult to recognize the minute ways in which these actions affect the duelist’s position. By granting the opponent access to some extent of knowledge about the cards the duelist has, he may be conceding the ability to pull off a useful bluff with one of these cards later in the game. Pedigo notes that this is a difficulty in principle rather than practice. Even if you could learn everything there is to know about science, mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anything and everything else that could possibly be of use within a duel, you still wouldn’t have mastered the duel. The wide ranges of games that the duelist must consider given his imperfect information are socially, not rationally, constructed. There is nothing written into the rules of the game that makes you suspect that your opponent might have a Dimensional Prison set when you attack with ElShaddoll Winda and he pauses to consider his response. You have this intuition because of your prior knowledge of the metagame, and in particular, the knowledge that Dimensional Prison is a commonly played answer to Winda. (This becomes more obvious when the plays we are concerned with are deckbuilding decisions rather than 215

in-game technical play decisions.) Returning to the metaphor of the totality, the duelist finds himself as paradoxically constituent of this totality. One cannot duel without contributing in some part to the metagame, no matter how minute or small this contribution is. The duel is therefore a fundamentally dynamic game. It evolves with its duelists, as its duelists are a part of it. Hoban’s response introduces a new distinction between the perfect play and the perfect duelist. Hoban concedes that a perfect duelist who makes the best and perfect play whenever prompted (whatever this means) is strictly inconceivable. He insists, however, that the perfect play is a very effable, comprehensible thing, holding firmly onto his project of ranking possible plays. Contra Pedigo, Sam Black offers a critique of this notion of perfect play. While Hoban’s optimal play (he prefers the term “correct,” but the concepts are the same) may exist in the abstract, worrying about it is not necessarily useful to the duelist. “Often,” he muses, “the correct play isn’t even something that will enter into the list of plays you’ve considered.”204 Black does not altogether reject the larger project of the ranking of possible plays. He allows that an optimal play probably does exist in the abstract, and more importantly, that each individual conceivable play in any given context can be compared and ranked against each other. Rather, he advocates a more comprehensive, holistic approach to evaluating plays. For Black, a single conscious in-game decision is nothing above and beyond its context within a game. The optimal play depends not only on the situation in which the duelist finds himself when he makes the play -- contextual things like how many cards the opponent had in hand, how long certain cards had been set, a certain expression the opponent made a few turns ago -- but also on everything that followed in the game from that point forward, Sam Black, “Making the Right Play for You,” Starcitygames.com 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 204

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including the subsequent decisions the duelist will make up until the end of the game. It follows that evaluating clusters, or lines, of plays, rather than individual plays, makes for a more rewarding enterprise. This requires a concession of a substantial degree of analyticity in our arguments, evaluations, and theories regarding what happens in observed duels. To misplay is not to have committed to some specific isolated in-game decision rather than a superior alternative, but rather, to have allowed the game to progress to the context that produced such a suboptimal decision. This is the most constructive way in which one can “know one’s own playstyle.” Analytics like Hoban will be quick to warn against looking to this knowledge of playstyles for justification for any in-game decision. Damo da Rosa explains that style is a passive characteristic in that it consists entirely in decisions the duelist has already made, echoing Sartrean and Beauvoirian arguments against concepts like race and gender. Consider where we would start if we wanted to talk about Jeff Jones’s playstyle. What we mean by playstyle here is, of course, the set of psychological conditions of the self that cause us to feel inclined towards or more comfortable with particular modes of play. How do we make sense of this? Even the best psychologists and neuroscientists in the world have to look at data of some sort to draw conclusions about what’s really “going on” in a subject’s mind. As duelists, our job is no different. We watch the duelist in question play, and look for tendencies towards particular lines of play in particular game states or whatever. We look at the range of decks that the duelist has played in the past, and try to figure out which sorts of decks he performed the best with. In short, we gather data from observed events in the past. The decisions you make define your style, not the other way around. Damo da Rosa reminds us that no dogmatic commitment would influence the perfect duelist. Suppose we observed a duelist play absolutely perfectly across twelve 217

tournament rounds. There can be no question that the person in question will have exhibited what we would call many different styles, perhaps even multiple conflicting styles within the same game. Damo da Rosa allows that style can and probably should influence one’s deckbuilding decisions. As the Sandtrap reminded us in 2011, you’d be an idiot to go to Nationals with the same Plant Synchro deck as everyone else if you know that you’ll play better with the Scrap deck of your own creation. I think, however, that Damo da Rosa fails to see the larger implications of this concession. His reasoning parallels Black’s own; both agree that you ought to consider your own style in choosing the deck they play in a given tournament, because if you know enough about your style in this context, you know which deck you’ll be able to pilot “closest to its fullest potential” on the day of the tournament. Hoban would note here that you would be misplaying by failing to render yourself able to pilot the best deck available to you, and he may be right. But only a critique of the duelist’s preparation is possible on these grounds. It remains true that to make the most out of your situation in a decision tree, you ought to take into account how you know you will act at future decision points. Black thus concludes that the optimal play in a given situation in a tournament match must depend in part on the duelist making the decision. As Sullivan notes, this does open up the worry that a duelist might be able to “shut down conversations on the merits of a play.” Sullivan agrees with Damo da Rosa that refusing to discuss the optimal play in a vacuum will stunt one’s growth as a duelist. So too, however, will refusing to discuss the factors that could make that play suboptimal for you. We must concede to Damo da Rosa that the play that you ought to make at any given point in a duel has nothing to do with whether or not you think you’re an “aggressive player” or

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“conservative player,” because no matter which one you label yourself as, you will only have labelled yourself as such because of what you had seen yourself do in prior games up to that point. Sometimes you were right to be aggressive in the past, and sometimes you were wrong, but we run ourselves into misplays and losses when we give undue weight to specific instances where we were aggressive and rewarded for it or perhaps where we were overly conservative and lost because of it. In other words, what Sullivan has shown us is that the project of evaluating the play itself relative to the best play can persist on the individual level. If the duelist has perfect information about the state of the particular game he is playing in, there will always be at least one best play for him that can be determined objectively. What does this mean for the optimal play? Remember that optimization arises from the absence of information. If you know everything about the game state, you can derive the best play objectively. When there’s a chance that you’re playing in a game where your opponent’s set is Mirror Force and there’s a chance that you’re playing in an identical game except the set is a Mystical Space Typhoon, you can never be quite as sure; on some level, you’re always taking a gamble if there’s something you don’t know about the game state. Note that there is always a fact in the matter as to “how much” information you “have” at any given point in the game, even though we don’t technically “have” or “accumulate” information in the sense that we do with sensible countable objects. In other words, your opponent creates uncertainty in your mind where previously there was none when he modifies the game state in certain ways. As long as your opponent’s Mirror Forces aren’t visible to all players in his graveyard, each Spell or Trap card your opponent sets is a new “possible Mirror Force” that you will have to play around where previously you wouldn’t have to. To give an 219

uncontroversial example, this is why “dead drawing” certain Spell or Trap cards is not always the worst thing in the world; sometimes, you can “generate value” with them, so to speak, without even having to activate them by simply using them to make your opponent think about something in a certain way. Furthermore, the motion of each duelist’s information set along the altering and differing pieces of the game state is asymmetrical; when your opponent sets that new Spell or Trap card, you have to hazard a guess at whether or not it’s a Mirror Force, but he most certainly doesn’t. We have already seen that a duelist is, at least in a sense, constituted within the game state in which they are present by their set of information relative to the whole of possible relevant information they could have. Roderick traces an analogous metaphor for the self in a different, more general sense to Freud, who framed the conscious mind as a “captured, tiny garrison in an immense city, the city of Rome; with all its layers of history, all its archaic barbarisms, all its hidden avenues, covered over by civilization after civilization.”205 The mind can push the boundaries of this garrison outward via the traditional project of Enlightenment, the expansion and progression of Reason, and so on and so forth; but so too are these borders constantly pushed inwards by mass communications, those socioeconomic motives that seek to gain when others are operating on limited information. In this picture, the whole of the city represents the total pool of available or possible savoir de, while le savoir-faire are the various efforts employed to alter the garrison boundaries in one way or another, these efforts being in themselves microtensions which are within the whole but at the same time something above and beyond it.

205

Roderick, “Philosophy and Post-modern Culture” in Philosophy and

Human Values (1990).

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In Freud’s model, all knowledge, both conscious and unconscious, exists ultimately in the service of the sexual act. However, from Lacan’s changes to the Aristotelian logical square discussed earlier, we can see that the true ideal of this knowledge is a tension within, rather than a metaphysical appeal to a fundamental binary difference between sexes that is external to and prior to them. Each self is defined by its own internal tension. In the case of the duelist, while the principle of savoir de remains constant across all duelists, each will follow their own unique path to truth, their own personal flavor of savoir-faire. We need not take any stance on any issues of free will to say that this latter path consists in choices made by the duelist from one game state to the next. The only way one could ever have an idea of what their own play style might be is to watch themselves play as a neutral third-party observer; in other words, if we are saying a certain player is aggressive, we must have seen that player play aggressively at some point, perhaps even a majority of the time. It is not sufficient to say that aggression in this sense is reducible to purely material facts about the individual, things like personality, temperament, relative risk aversion, inclination to tilt, and so on; for it is just as conceivable that such a simple, material fact about the individual would manifest themselves in a completely opposite play style. Suppose no one has ever seen b duel, but they have interacted with him in daily society well enough to have a feel for his disposition. Suppose further that the general consensus regarding this feel is that b is quick to anger; perhaps someone spotted him during a bout of road rage, or he acted up in line at a restaurant, etc. Without ever seeing b duel, there is nothing to suggest that this particular personality trait would make him any more inclined towards overall aggression over defense in the duel. In the final analysis, the same holds true for sex with regards to gender; this latter concept is more like a styling of the body, a certain spin put on 221

it as opposed to other possible spins, while the former is a static, biological quality that itself possesses only this limited descriptive power. If gender with regards to sex is the use of the body as an instrument in an act of expression or communications, then gender with regards to playstyle will henceforth be referred to as the duelist’s use of their own self as an instrument for expression within the duel. Every duelist has their own unique set of strengths and limitations within the duel; by gender, I mean here to refer to the means by which they apply these strengths and limitations. The French genre may make the use I am proposing of this term more palatable to the reader: just as we imagine the changes that occur throughout history in particular genres of music, so too can we conceive of ways in which certain “genres of duelist” have been “gendered,” influenced, changed, grown, evolved, etc. throughout the history of the duel. Per PPMD’s Inner Game-inspired revelations, we have seen that instruction, in the most basic and traditional sense, has fallen short in producing top-level competitors. Speech and literature can only describe a game; they cannot offer any meaningful proscriptive instructions. If a book could tell you step by step how to win a game every single time, the game in question would ipso facto cease to exist. The proper instructive theoretical writing in any competitive environment is therefore that “valid instruction derived from experience” that “guides us to our own experiential discoveries of any given possibility.” The implications of these writings are twofold. First, the student must “listen to technical instructions” without falling into “traps of judgment, doubt, and fear.” Second, the teacher must teach “in such a way as to help the natural learning process and not interfere with it.”206 All instruction takes this form regardless of whether or not a physical teacher separate from the W.T. Gallwey, Inner Game of Tennis (New York: Random House, 1974) 5355. 206

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student is actually present. Gallwey concludes that “the key to better tennis-or better anything-lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the unconscious, automatic doer, Self 2.”207 Contemporary psychology uses these same concepts, with the reverse numbering; luckily, we are now properly equipped to make the following distinctions to eliminate any further confusion: Self 2 (or System 1) is simply the duelist’s gender with regards to playstyle, while Self 1 (or System 2) is the duelist’s conscious self, their reason, their game theory, etc. On this view, learning how to use a language is no different from learning how to play a game, just as the term language-game would suggest. Kahneman continues: “Acquiring expertise in chess is harder and slower than learning to read because there are many more letters in the ‘alphabet’ of chess and because the ‘words’ consist of many letters. After thousands of hours of practice, however, chess masters are able to read a chess situation at a glance. The few moves that come to their mind are almost always strong and sometimes creative. They can deal with a ‘word’ they have never encountered, and they can find a new way to interpret a familiar one.”208

The conscious self chooses one optimal play out of a set of options, but never the entire set of possible options; for this task, the duelist is supplied by the process of gender with a manifold of options that has been conditioned into them by their particular historical circumstances. We have already seen that this distinctly human process provides us with at least one advantage over artificial intelligence: while computers consider every possible option in a set at all times, through proper theory and application humans are able to eliminate consistently poor options from their vocabulary, much 207 208

Ibid., 10-24. Kahneman 239.

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like misspellings of words or violations of grammatical rules. Wobbles explains: “Certain moves or options become off-limits to your brain because you can instantly recognize they will be poor choices. It’s not even a conscious decision to avoid them, after awhile. When you see them, they feel and look wrong, even if you can’t consciously explain why… One of the strengths we (currently) have over computers--particularly in complicated games--is that they tend to brute-force everything. They consider all options… We often don’t know why we value certain options, or we measure it in abstract ways that we can't don't quantify effectively just yet; it’s our intuitive pattern-matching ability that lets us achieve competency in extremely complicated tasks and beat computers at them. For now, anyhow…”

The relevant conclusion from Wobbles here is that “style comes from the mistakes you can’t help making,” or more specifically, that “style happens when your decisions are not optimal but you automatically gravitate towards them, when your brain prioritizes decisions which may be weak or have negative consequences due to preference and habit.”209 Coming to terms with their own individual form of this stylistic conditioning requires the duelist to turn their attention to the set of their past in-game choices, since no one can tell exactly when they began to intuitively rule out a certain option: while an event may happen to you that makes you say to yourself “I will always set MST against Chaos Dragons,” this is something different from the point at which you actually begin to intuitively rule out this option. A style, or gender, or genre, is therefore only as good as the community’s ability to identify it. Ultimately, the dichotomies of attack and defense, activity and 209

Robert Wright, “Rules,” Compete Complete 31 Dec. 2013. Web.

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reactivity, mental and mechanical, theoretical and practical, etc. are all subject to an endless historical process of change, and what one generation of players consider aggressive may have been the epitome of defense to the previous generation. The only constant is the most general unit of human effort, which can always be directed towards any number of distinct projects of expression within the duel.

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The Death of Dennis Frogman Jimmy died to-day He blew his brains out in-to the bay In the states of mind It’s my own private su-i-ci-de Green Day, “Jesus of Suburbia: I. The Death of St. Jimmy,” American Idiot (2004)

W

hat is your name?

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My name is Dennis Frogman. I solved all philosophical problems in the duel.

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Forget about Dennis Frogman. I’m asking about you.

I cannot answer on behalf of anyone other than Dennis Frogman, for I can be none other than him despite my greatest efforts to the contrary.

You are not Dennis Frogman. You created Dennis Frogman. What is your name?

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Why did I create Dennis Frogman?

Because you needed to.

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Dennis Frogman is nothing if not believed in. He cannot exist at all if he does not exist in the hearts, minds, beliefs, buying habits and summer reading patterns of his global fan base of over 22

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gazillion. Dennis Frogman was always everything that Matthew Ferguson Cashiola could never be. So in the ostensibly darkest hour of angsty teenage Matt, alone and failing out of undergrad, when the thing I needed the most was simply something to believe in, the best thing my mind could muster was Dennis Frogman, who led me on my first journey to solve all philosophical problems in the duel. This would not be the first time my mind did this. After the förlusten of September 2014, it became difficult for me to relate to Dennis Frogman at all. I visited Chicago during one of my deepest ruts of depression. As I read the Language, Truth and Logic in a park overlooking the Navy Pier, I saw the figure in white watching me atop the Sears Tower for the first time in almost a year. Dennis Frogman reminded me to say a quick prayer in tribute to the performances of the great duelists that preceded me years before at the North American World Championship Qualifier. We sang in native Dunmeri and blessed the grounds with the good will of Dopecat.

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That night, I drank something involving rum atop Trump’s hotel, and the figure in white returned once again. I believe it was at this time that I became absolutely certain that a female’s body was under the robes. “What is your name?” At this moment, Dennis Frogman summoned the Grinder Golem and its tokens, and declared his great attack, and from the resulting damage he cast his Inferno Tempest and set his body on fire. He made no sounds of pain while he burned, but kept singing his frog song. “Goldenrod, and the 4H stone, the things I bought you when I found out you had cancer of the bone.” I saw the Phoenix rise from the ashes that fell from where his body once was. “All the glory that the Lord has made, and the complications you could do without, when I kissed you on the mouth.” If only he had kissed her on the mouth. Well, he did, but not right then and there. Manners are important. Dennis Frogman sacrificed himself so that the Phoenix might rise for me, and for what? “What is my name?”

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I fought the figure in white on that hotel pier for what felt like days. This was spectral training, an apparition of my own subconscious personified in order to engineer my discovery of self. As she pushed the pointed hilt of Sunder into my flesh and towards my heart, I finally realized that which she had been sent to reveal to me. “You are me, and I am you, and we are two sides of the same coin.” The Clear Mind of the King was thus inverted completely, pushed inward instead of outward, and a great rearrangement of the nous followed. I became one with my joueur petit a, for this was none other than my gender, my conditioning, my individual method of expression within and beyond the duel. The body of Dennis Frogman lends itself to two distinct interpretations that exist alongside each other. We are thus once again and will henceforth always be Dennis Frogman.

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The Name of the Pharaoh I strove with none; for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart. Walter Savage Landor, On His Seventy-fifth Birthday (1850)

T

he pivotal movement of the dueling reason that occurs in this book begins and ends, as do all movements of theory in the duel, with the Pharaoh.

Most of the preceding pages have been pure bluff; hidden for the meticulous reader are the important bits and pieces, which are still only bits and pieces of a picture that can approach but never truly reach completion. When I first began writing these remarks at the behest of Dennis Frogman, I was visiting family in Massachusetts, staying in the basement of my aunt and uncle’s home in the woods of Great Barrington. Upon returning to civilization for the 2011 United States World Championship Qualifier, I realized my isolation had changed something in me; dueling felt like a cursory affair, it felt like I was merely going through the motions, even being guided by an invisible force at some points, yet I was winning more than I had at any previous premier event. I believe this was the first time I was in tune with my inner Pharaoh. The whole of my endeavor in coming to terms with and understanding this phenomenon is constituted in the work of this book. If the earlier work of Dennis Frogman sought to decisively solve all philosophical problems of the duel through timeless analysis, this work seeks rather to “solve” them by altogether dis234

solving the concept of solving the whole of such problems. Just as the Pharaoh ultimately had to leave Yugi to return to his own historical context and to resolve the material tensions that resulted from his presence in the Millennium Puzzle, so too must all universal theories of the duel pass on to their respective historical birthplaces along with him. New environments will always continue to come and go within the duel, and every duelist will develop their own Pharaonic wisdom for and within these times and subsequently amend or even discard them when they cease to fit the reality of the duel that is the present for the duelist. In the wake of the Pharaoh’s departure and the death and subsequent rebirth of Dennis Frogman arises not a theory, but a philosophy of games, which this book seeks to set in motion once and for all where the duel is concerned. Just as aesthetics has adopted its philosophical subject as art in the form of music, literature, etc., so too should it adopt games and dueling. Given the increasing range of space that games continue to occupy within the public and private spheres, it is an embarrassment to the human species in the year 2016 that such a literary tradition has yet to truly flourish to the degree that it has for the other arts. No one else would do it, so Dennis Frogman had to.

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Appendix A. Fragments of the G.O.Y.G.O.: The Limits of Sabermetrics Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world… What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to a reinterpretation of individual and stable data… Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverted lenses. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Beginning arguably with the 1927 Murderers’ Row featuring the likes of Ruth and Gehrig, the Yankees became the team to beat in American baseball, with a reputation for its pool of talent as well as its budget for assembling that pool. By the end of the first millennium, the community began to question whether or not the economic structure of the game had become warped to favor the Yankees; they had more money than any other team with which to nurture a deeper pool of talent than any other team had access to. Beane’s 2001 Oakland Athletics lost a heartbreaking fivegame division series set to the Yankees after winning the first two games back to back. They lost stars Giambi, Damon, and Isringhausen to free agency and trades, and went into the 2002 season with a measly $39 million budget, the third lowest in the league (the 2002 Yankees had $125 million). Beane had all but settled into the model of “creating closers rather than buying them,” well aware that

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he did not have the budget to maintain the stars his organization had shown to be capable of creating. DePodesta’s application of sabermetrics starting in 1999 posited that even the best baseball teams were guilty of misallocating their budgets even in this late stage in the growth of the baseball industry. Specifically, DePodesta argued that on-base percentage was critically undervalued throughout the MLB: on average, he thought that “an extra point of on-base percentage was worth three times an extra point of slugging percentage.” Lewis continues: “[DePodesta]’s argument was radical even by sabermetric standards. Bill James and others had stressed the importance of on-base percentage, but even then they didn’t think it was worth three times as much as slugging. Most offensive models assumed that an extra point of on-base percentage was worth, at most, one and a half times an extra point of slugging percentage… A player’s ability to get on base – especially when he got on base in unspectacular ways – tended to be dramatically underpriced in relation to other abilities. Never mind fielding skills and foot speed. The ability to get on base – to avoid making outs – was underpriced compared to the ability to hit with power.” 210

These examples provide us with a natural experiment with regards to resources and their impacts within games and metagames. For DePodesta, the fundamental resources in baseball were money and expected run value. All exchanges in baseball could be reduced to the latter value, which was an average of the impact of every possible event on a baseball field on the possibility of scoring runs, i.e. a baseball team scores, on average, .55 runs from the position of no runners on base with no balls, no strikes, and no outs. Lewis labels this value the “Platonic ideal” for DePodesta, and we can make 210

Michael Lewis, Moneyball (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003) 127-129.

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similar observations with regards to the MTG resources proposed by Chapin, Flores, Sacher, et al. To be clear, at the end of the day, the Yankees and the Athletics are playing “the same game” of baseball: the rules are the same, they are both working within their budgets to produce the “best” baseball team they can. What the Moneyball examples show is the endlessness of the search for the proper definition of “best” in this context; even with their grossly inflated budget, they found a way to waste it on traits that were flashy and crowd-pleasing but not necessarily integral to winning games of baseball. In a way, this is a clear example of the emergence of the joueur petit a, a paradigm shift and all of the philosophical baggage that comes with it, but now that Beane and DePodesta’s philosophies are well known and have been taken to World Series titles, it may be more accurate to say that the metagame of baseball has sketched out two relative roles based on the socioeconomic conditions of the “players,” or teams. Lewis is quick to note Beane’s mantra: “if we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.”

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Even Beane’s strategy must come at a cost,

represented in the film by the team locker room’s vending machines requiring the players to insert their own money, the prospect of having to fire players because they have done “too well,” and so on. The Yankees, by contrast, can undoubtedly afford to give all of their players all of the free sodas they need during practice, and a wellperforming Yankee can usually rest assured knowing his legacy is in good hands insofar as it is tied to the Yankee name. Lewis may be right that baseball is a “fundamentally unfair game,” but so too are all good games. The existence of imbalance gives rise to the relative roles which allow for diverse metagames and clashes of values that become exciting to spectate in and of 211

Ibid., 119.

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themselves in the form of individual games. We ought to remember Portnow’s explanation of “perfect imbalance” and its place in game design: “You see, the beautiful thing about imbalance is that it creates a metagame, an evolving state of play that keeps any one playstyle from being definitively correct which in turn allows for the player to experiment with different approaches to the game and gives players an interesting and evolving problem to think about. This allows players at all play levels to be continuously changing their strategies and growing, which in the end, means that rather than having a brick wall of memorization or reflex skill to overcome before really getting to participate in the strategic or experimental side of the game, players can grow naturally, coming up with strategies that fit their skill level and then abandoning them as their skills develop…”212

One scene in Sorkin’s film adaptation of Lewis’s book comes to mind: “The Visalia Oaks and their 240 pound catcher, Jeremy Brown, who's scared of running to second. This was in a game six weeks ago,” Hills’ character narrates to Pitt as Beane as they watch the grainy game footage. “This guy's gonna start him off with a fastball low and in because he hasn't read the book on our guy and doesn't know that low and in is where he eats. Jeremy takes him to deep center and he knows that if he runs it's a stand-up double and he's running. And now he's gonna do something he never does. He's gonna round first base, he's gonna take the turn…” Brown slips and falls, and he is visibly confused at the reaction of the first base coach. “And now Jeremy finds out why. Watch his face because this is art.

James Portnow and Daniel Floyd, "Perfect Imbalance,” Extra Credits 01 Aug. 2012. Web. 212

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He's just found out the ball went 60 feet over the fence. He'd hit a home run but he didn't know it.”213 Is this not the very essence of the environmental conditions for the emergence of the joueur petit a? The opposing pitcher has made a small technical mistake in his evaluation of the batter. A pitcher that knew Brown’s statistics might not have thrown a hittable ball for him. But this key imperfection in the opponent’s informational state, the product of all of their analytic work, leads to one beautiful blaze of glory for Brown, who himself cannot believe what he has done. The analogous historical event in the duel is likely found in the breakout of Chaos Dragons in the hand of Reed at YCS Dallas 2012. Reed famously responded to Pro Winston’s question of why he played no Tour Guides from the Underworld that “[he] couldn’t afford them:” he did not have a theoretical justification, he admitted they would have probably made the prototype Chaos Dragon deck even better, and now that he had made 2nd place at a YCS he was planning on trying them out. The Chaos Dragon deck arose as an answer to the question of “how to maximize one’s chances to win an event in the absence of Tour Guide,” not to the question of what the best deck in the format was. Reed saw and dueled in the same format as Sarhan and all of the other duelists that chose to play Rescue Rabbit variants at that event, and came to a radically different conclusion about how to get ahead of competition within that format. As in the case of the ultimately failed initial revolution of Marx and Lenin, so too does the joueur petit a have to settle towards more diffuse ends in the long run, as the opposing pitcher will certainly never make the mistake of throwing low and in to the unassuming Jeremy Brown again. The film appropriately ends with a fade to black on the note that “Billy Beane is still the General Manager Oakland A's, trying to win the last game of the season.” For 213

Moneyball, dir. Daniel Bennett, Columbia, 2011. Film.

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if he does not, they will continue to discount him, for such is the nature of the joueur petit a, to be discredited, repressed, denied speakership, and to carry on in spite of this, content with repeated bubble performances or second place finishes. The Clear and Distinct Minds are not opposing terms at all, but in a Kierkegaardian sense, different phases of the same eternal relationship relating itself unto itself. Since the sabermetric strategy comes necessarily attached to the player of a more dominant strategy, it relies on the mistakes of the Yankees in order to get ahead, or at least this is what the contemporary baseball theorists will tell themselves as long as the Yankees continue to win in the end. In the wake of Oakland’s loss to the Twins in the playoffs, an announcer proudly declares that “What the Minnesota Twins exposed is the fact that the Oakland A's were fundamentally not a sound baseball team. They had a flawed concept that started with the general manager and the brain trust thinking they could reinvent baseball. You can't approach baseball from a statistical, bean-counting point of view. It's won on the field with fundamental play… And you don't do that with a bunch of statistical gimmicks. Nobody reinvents this game.” 214 Reed’s Chaos Dragon deck ultimately suffered the same fate at the 2012 North American World Championship Qualifiers, where Chaos Dragons fell not to Rescue Rabbit, but a reformatted Wind-Up deck in the hands of Tyler Tabman. Just as the short-run success had been rationalized, excused, accounted for, and ultimately solved with the re-emergence of the Wind-Up deck, so too was the A’s unexplainable win streak no longer an anomaly but a mere short-run hiccup, corrected in the playoffs when their luck inevitably ran out. I propose, however, that if the same game had been played by the Twins and the Athletics instead at the beginning of the season, 214

Ibid.

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with the same result, there would be no need to make such a triumphant declaration, and the game probably wouldn’t have been seen as a notable exhibition of any principle at all. It is only after the initial success of Oakland that they become a target for the “traditional” teams, a problem to solve, a gimmick to figure out. The joueur petit a will always emerge as a natural byproduct of any development in any metagame; for every “one” that exists on the highest strategic level, i.e. the level at which baseball team managers make roster decisions, for a game, there must be at least a “two.”

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B. Fragments of the G.O.Y.G.O.: Notes on the Melee Tier List There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. Selina Kyle, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

1. If we grant Mew2king’s theory that Marth/Fox is the “most even matchup in the game,” we are left with two fundamental archetypes that should permeate all matchups in Melee: the “space animal” neutral and the “Marth and friends” neutral. These correspond to the clash of values between KDJ and M2K in 2007 (MLG Underground Farmingdale) that has become iconic for the current generation of Melee. A. The space animal neutral is the final product of the American project of optimization beginning with Mew2king and ending with the Fox ditto Grand Finals of MLG Vegas 2006 as reflected in what was to be the last tier list (before Brawl) in 2007. In theory, Fox and Falco are the only characters allowed to approach safely in a purely neutral state. On this view, the other 24 characters are necessarily “mistake eliciters” that can only punish opponents playing suboptimally, and cannot win in a state of perfectly safe play. In the long run, as powershielding and other projectile counters become as intuitive as possible to the player, Fox beats Falco, and is therefore the “best” or “final” character played in Melee. B. The Marth neutral arises as a natural check on the project of optimization. The player that believes Fox is theoretically the best character plays Marth when Marth would be “easier” to play, be it physically, mentally, or both. In this case, the game is no longer

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symmetrical, and each player can now lose for different reasons. In principle, neither player will strictly dominate the other in the long run insofar as the players are human, as frame imprecision is fundamental to the condition of the human qua Gamecube player.

2. The theoretical Fox-Marth endgame was in a sense a repressed and deferred component of the game during the period after Brawl’s release. The highest level of Melee played up to that point was undoubtedly at the MLG Las Vegas Championship 2006, in which Ken’s style of Marth and Chu Dat’s wobbling definitively fell behind the space animal community that closed out in Grand Finals. Meanwhile, Brawl’s endgame was initially thought to be Meta Knight vs Meta Knight, then Meta Knight vs Snake, and finally Meta Knight vs Ice Climbers. Melee players resentfully watched this progression of the Brawl metagame while interest in their own game stagnated. A. During the so-called Brawl era, the prospect of banning characters became a primary point of interest within Smash communities. Mew2king’s dominance with Meta Knight triggered a brief period with Meta Knight banned in Brawl. Mango and Hungrybox made people question whether or not Jigglypuff was the best character in the game. M2K and Hax wrestled with the question of whether or not Puff’s ledge camping is a “legitimately gamebreaking” and therefore banworthy mechanic as late as 2014. By 2010, wobbling was banned at almost all major Melee events, especially in California and the Midwest. B. The Brawl era also left the Melee community fractured with little incentive for national, let alone international, travel. The European and Canadian scenes began nipping at America’s heels as they developed their distinctive styles and theories. Kage scored a win on Mango with Ganondorf, but was unable to maintain consistency afterwards. Armada’s runs with Peach and Young Link at GENESIS and GENESIS 2 followed soon after. In each case,

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the character used to score the upset is vastly underrated at the time at least in the American community.

3. The post-documentary era of Melee begins with Mango’s EVO 2013 win over Wobbles. Mango’s Fox was already consistently beating the only remaining top Puff representative in Hungrybox and after Grand Finals he had definitively proven that Fox had the same firm advantage over the Ice Climbers, even with wobbling, that everyone knew he had over Puff. Both Puff and Ice Climbers outplaced the best performing Marth at EVO 2013. A. If we take Hungrybox’s 2015-2016 results at face value, Jigglypuff is theoretically capable of adapting to any conceivable Fox. This is the hypothetical “666XX” which Hax has always trusted Fox to prevent Melee from becoming. B. The trend of “Ice Climbers deflation,” especially where results are concerned is well documented, but even with underwhelming modern results, anomalies in the short run have made it abundantly clear that Ice Climbers occupy a unique “local maximum,” or prisoner’s dilemma, within the game of Melee.

4. Recall that under the premises of optimization, it becomes trivial to distinguish between the relative ranks of characters worse than Fox or Falco, with the possible exception of Yoshi. From this perspective, there exist Fox dittos, then all other matchups, which tend towards or away from the attributes of Fox vs Marth in the long run. 5. Humans make mistakes by definition, and we are unable to turn Melee into a game of pure thought, despite our best efforts. Optimization is the collective process by which these mistakes are gradually ironed out on all sides. The inverse process is that by which mistakes are made subconsciously, as a byproduct of repeated attempts to execute. 6. Theory arises when the masculine mind attempts to totalize that which it has experienced in some given moment(s). The convenient 245

result would be a complete, clear, and distinct concept of best which is applied to all possible interactions one can experience in a game of Melee and prescribes one course of action above all others in each one. However, in this attempt a feminine surplus of meaning is always produced: the objet petit a in the psychoanalytic function. No theory can function without a magical MacGuffin to “set in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation.” 7. Imagine a world in which the theory of 20XX is no longer deniable by any rational observer. The year is 20XX-XY. A. This need not be the absolute endgame of Melee’s metagame, but it is at least far enough down the line that everyone agrees on the tier list and particularly Fox being at the top of it. B. Melee is still played by humans, but they have superhuman technical ability and have all resigned themselves to playing Fox. C. There are no more Jigglypuff mains. Hungrybox was an anomaly and is now dead, probably murdered in cold blood, like Caesar by Brutus, by the players of every other character that were infinitely tired of Jigglypuff and her cruel and unusual pound stalling. D. There are no more Peach mains. Armada was an anomaly and can no longer profitably switch to his Peach in a tournament set. He has not played Peach in many, many years. When asked about his Peach, he almost never responds. When he does, he twitches ever so slightly after a few seconds of silence, then his eyes roll back and his entire body appears to spaz out for another half-second before he returns to normal and says, “Who is Peach?” E. There are no more Falco mains. As predicted by the prophet Hax F. Money, perfect power-shielding has reduced

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Falco to a spectre of his former self, now only occasionally used in counterpick wars along statistical margins. Marth is similarly only used on Final Destination. F. There are no more Sheik mains. Sheik is a low tier. She loses to any character with any two of a spot dodge, a crouch cancel, and a dash dance. The Sheik mains have all given up on reaction tech chasing, except for a select few with mechanically-augmented bodies like Mew2king and Druggedfox. G. The objet petit a has survived. One Ice Climbers player exists in this world, although playing Ice Climbers is but a weird fetish to them at first, an occasional indulgence among their Fox main brethren. H. In any given period of play, even just a day of practice with three fellow superhuman Fox players with execution infinitely approaching perfection, the joueur petit a observes a swift decline in results in the one out of every ten games they play in which they pick Ice Climbers. The matchup is solved in Fox’s favor. Mango’s victory over Wobbles has motivated an entire generation of gameplay in the Fox vs ICs matchup. Every Fox targets Nana or Popo perfectly and optimally and if they make any executional errors, they are very minor, possibly not even enough to yield a single wobble. Every now and then, the errors will add up to the Ice Climbers taking a stock, eventually even a game. But the joueur petit a sees no rational reason to abandon their Fox altogether; this indulgence is still in the pursuit of defeating all the other Fox mains as a Fox main; they are only exploring different perspectives on the game to improve and broaden their own.

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I. Recall that counterpick characters still exist, but only as statistical anomalies, insofar as this world’s inhabitants continue to be human in principle, which is to say that they continued to compete over infinitely small margins of executional errors. While everyone is primarily a Fox player, they are still individual Fox players, with infinitely small differences in executional shortcomings. Some players occasionally miss powershields. Some players occasionally miss L-cancels. Some players occasionally drop chaingrabs. When these players meet in tournament, it may become optimal in a specific instance to switch to a pocket Marth, Peach, Jigglypuff, Falco, or so on for one specific stage against one specific player. Many characters are good for one-time wins, but the metagame always perfectly adjusts immediately and the Fox mains interpret the events of the tournament perfectly and instantly. Counterpick characters approach zero at the same rate at which the size of the stage list approaches 1. If the last legal stage is Final Destination, Marth is the best character. If the last stage is Battlefield, Fox is. If the last stage is Dream Land, Jigglypuff is the best character, but anyone who would vote for Dream Land as the only legal stage, or pick Jigglypuff to begin with, is immediately identified, located, quarantined and held under the Patriot Act. J. The Fox mains continue to yield minor concessions in tournament to the Ice Climbers of joueur petit a. One stock here, one game on Final Destination there. Since all of the Foxes approach perfection at shining out of Marth’s chaingrabs, joueur petit a realizes that his Ice Climbers can better serve the purpose of a Marth secondary to them,

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because no one can shine out of the perfect wobbles that joueur petit a is occasionally able to find. K. An infinite amount of time passes. The year is now 20XX+XY. The joueur petit a eventually finds one breakout tournament run in which they oppose all odds and win set 2 of Grand Finals with their Ice Climber counterpick. All of the infinitely small errors of the Fox mains have added up to a one-time national tournament win for the Ice Climbers of joueur petit a. L. The entire community immediately correctly interprets this event and recognizes that the Ice Climbers are, beyond all rational doubt, the most broken and degenerate part of Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube. Melee tournaments are run with optimal structure and efficiency, and all of the tournament organizers are in perfect agreement that the only just and rational response to the events of the past weekend is to ban the Ice Climbers in all sufficiently competitive tournaments worldwide and to burn all disciples of Wobbles at the stake for being witches. M. The newest edition of the 20XX hack pack includes the groundbreaking Melee patch of 20XX+XY in which characters can break out of grabs while in hitstun. Bowser’s flame cancel also returns. The joueur petit a turns into a car and flies back to their home planet of Canada. They are forgotten for the rest of eternity. 8. QED

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C. Third Outline of the G.O.Y.G.O. This is the third outline that ultimately became the later and final drafts of the G.O.Y.G.O. It has been included as a companion document to this book at the request of Dennis Frogman, Dopecat and the Sphinx. ~ed.

6͡5.̛5m̶ya di͏n̨os͝ di̴e͜ ͢2̛.8-͞1.5͟m̛ya̶ hom͞o ha҉bili̴s̵

1.9-0.7mya homo erectus 0.3-0.04mya homo neanderthalensis: cave ҉̨̹̹̲͖̠̬̩art, ornamentation 0.2͍̰̥̰̞͜͝͠mya first homo sapiens 3500-3100BCE Earliest records of senet 3000BCE Earliest ancestor of backgammon in Iran 1600-1100BCE Earliest Greek sports 1400BCE Mesoamerican ball game 1046BCE Earliest records of Go 776BCE First Olympic games in Greece 600-500BCE Sun Tzu’s Art of War 380-360BCE Plato’s Republic 350BCE Aristotle’s Politics 30-550 Earliest records of chaturanga in India 393-426 Romans outlaw paganism, end of ancient Olympic games 192-480 Fall of Roman empire 618-907 Earliest records of Chinese card game variants 638-651 Muslim conquest of Persia; chaturanga spreads to Arab world as čatrang 1274 Aquinas’ Summa theologiae 1283 Alfonso X’s Libro de los juegos

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1300 de Cessolis’ Liber de moribus hominum 1377 Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah 1417 Poggio’s recovery of the De rerum natura 1440 Gutenberg invents printing press 1453 Fall of Constantinople, influx of Greek immigrant scholars throughout Europe 1470 Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse 1475 Advent of Queen's Chess 1495 Vicent lost manuscript 1497 Lucena’s Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez 1512 Damiano’s Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de le partite 1513 Machiavelli’s Prince 1516 More’s Utopia 1522 Martin Luther finishes German translation of the Bible at Wartburg Castle 1543 Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium 1560 Ruy Lopez > Roman masters 1561 Ruy Lopez’s Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del Axedrez 1575 Leonardo di Bona wins first international master tournament 1584 Ruy Lopez’s book translated into Italian 1604 Supernova SN 1604 is observed in the Milky Way 1605 Kepler starts investigating elliptical orbits of planets 1605 Carolus publishes the first newspaper 1608 Lippershey constructs a refracting telescope 1610 The Orion Nebula is identified by Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc of France 1610 Galileo and Marius observe Jupiter's Galilean moons 1611 King James Bible published 1612 The first flintlock musket likely created for Louis XIII of France by gunsmith Marin Bourgeois

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1614 Napier introduces the logarithm to simplify calculations 1616 Zucchi describes experiments with a bronze parabolic mirror trying to make a reflecting telescope 1616 Galileo forced to recant 1620 Drebbel, funded by James I of England, builds the first 'submarine' made of wood and greased leather 1623 First English dictionary is published by Cockeram, listing difficult words with definitions 1628 Harvey publishes and elucidates his earlier discovery of the circulatory system 1637 Dutch Bible published 1637 Teatro San Cassiano, the first public opera house, opened in Venice 1637 de Fermat formulates his so-called Last Theorem, unsolved until 1995 1641 Descartes’ Meditationes 1642 Pascal invents the mechanical calculator 1642 Mezzotint engraving introduces grey tones to printed images 1643 Torricelli invents the mercury barometer 1645 Torelli invents the first rotating stage 1651 Riccioli renames the lunar maria 1651 Hobbes’ Leviathan 1656 Huygens describes the true shape of the rings of Saturn 1656 Greco’s posthumous manuscripts published 1657 Huygens develops the first functional pendulum clock based on the learnings of Galileo 1659 Huygens first to observe surface details of Mars 1662 Merret presents first paper on the production of sparkling wine 1663 Gregory publishes designs for a reflecting telescope 1664 Thomas Mun’s Treasure by foreign trade 1669 The first known operational reflecting telescope is built by Isaac Newton 1670 Colbert’s decree 1676 van Leeuwenhoek discovers Bacteria 1676 First measurement of the speed of light 252

1679 Binary system developed by Leibniz 1684 Calculus independently developed by both Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton and used to formulate classical mechanics 1689 Locke’s Essay 1710 Berkeley’s Treatise 1714 Leibniz’s Monadologie 1718 Ban on Galileo’s works lifted 1718 Edward “Blackbeard” Teach killed by Robert Maynard in a North Carolina inlet on the inner side of Ocracoke Island 1722-1725 Irish economic independence movement 1737 Stamma’s Essai sur le jeu des echecs 1739 Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature 1741 Handel’s Messiah 1748 Hume’s second Enquiry 1749 Philidor’s Analyse du jeu des Échecs 1754 Rousseau’s Discours 1754-1763 Seven Years’ War 1776 American revolution outbreak 1776 Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1781 Kant’s first Kritik 1791 Earliest records of baseball in the United States 1792 French revolution outbreak 1796 Edward Jenner administers first smallpox vaccine 1798 Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population 1799 Napoleon’s coup 1800 Schelling’s System des transcendentalen Idealismus 1801 Beethoven’s Quasi una fantasia 1804 Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstädt 1807 Hegel’s Phanomenologie 1812 Laplace’s théorie analytique des probabilités 1812 Battle of Borodino 1815 Battle of Waterloo 253

1817 Ricardo’s Principles 1818 Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 1832 Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege 1834 La Bourdonnaise - McDonnell matches 1837 Alexandre’s Encyclopedie des echecs 1843 von der Lasa and Bilguer’s Handbuch des Schachspiels 1843 Kierkegaard’s Enten – Eller 1848 Cambridge rules of football 1848 Marx’s Manifesto 1851 Anderssen wins London master tournament (Immortal Game) 1857 Sheffield rules, Sheffield FC 1859 Morphy > Anderssen 1859 Mill’s On Liberty 1860 Lausanne FC in Switzerland 1860 Forbes’ History of Chess 1861-1865 American civil war 1865 Buenos Aires FC in Argentina 1866 Steinitz > Anderssen 1867-1894 Engels publishes Marx’s Kapital 1871 London’s dribbling game against Sheffield 1886 Steinitz > Zukertort 1887 Preston North End’s dominance with 2-3-5 1887 Nietzche’s Genealogie der Moral 1891 Invention of basketball in Massachusetts 1894 Lasker > Steinitz 1900 Freud’s Die Traumdeutung 1903 Moore’s Principia ethica 1903 first MLB World Series 1910 Russell and Whitehead’s Principia mathematica 1910 Art of War translated into English 1913 Zermelo's Uber eine Anwendung der Mengenlehre auf die Theorie des Schachspiels 1914 Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, beginning of World War I 1918 End of World War I 254

1920 Deadball era officially ends, ball tampering outlawed 1920 Lasker resigns world title to Capablanca 1921 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 1921 Capablanca > Lasker 1922 Reti’s Die neuen Ideen im Schachspiel 1924 FIDE founded in Paris 1924 Tartakower’s Die hypermoderne Schachpartie 1925 Dewey’s Experience and Nature 1925 Nimzowitch’s Mein system 1927 Konig’s UbereineSchlußweise aus dem Endlichen ins Unendliche 1927 Alekhine > Capablanca 1927 Babe Ruth’s home run record 1927 Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit 1928 Kalmar’s Theorie der abstrakten Spiele 1928 von Neumann’s Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele 1931 Godel’s incompleteness theorems 1931 Tarrasch’s Game of Chess 1936 Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic 1938 Huizinga’s Homo Ludens 1938 Kristallnacht 1939 German invasion of Poland, beginning of World War II 1942 Camus’ Mythe de Sisyphe 1943 Sartre’s Être et le néant 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung 1944 von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 1945 End of World War II 1945 Popper’s Open Society 1946 Alekhine dies as world chess champion 1948 Botvinnik becomes world champion 1949 Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe 1949 Ryle’s Concept of Mind 1950 Nash’s dissertation on non-cooperative games 1950 Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism 1951 Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values 1953 Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen 255

1962 Levi-Strauss’ Pensée sauvage 1963 Derrida’s Cogito et histoire de la folie 1964 Cook’s Percentage Baseball 1964 Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man 1971 Kotov’s Think like a Grandmaster 1971 Johnny Moss wins first WSOP 1972 Fischer > Spassky 1973 Maynard-Smith and Price’s Logic of Animal Conflict 1974 Michel’s totaalvoetbal with Ajax 1974 Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis 1974 First computer chess world championship in Stockholm 1975 Foucault’s Surveiller et punir 1975 Karpov > Fischer 1979 Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 1979 Lyotard’s Condition postmoderne 1980 Kripke’s Naming and Necessity 1981 Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns 1984 Karpov > Kasparov 1985 Kasparov > Karpov 1989 Hellmuth > Chan in WSOP 1990 Butler’s Gender Trouble 1991 Baudrillard La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu 1992 Dream Team dominates summer Olympics 1993 Richard Garfield creates MTG 1993 Kasparov and Karpov both world chess champions 1996 Pac’s All Eyez on Me and subsequent assassination 1997 Billy Beane becomes Oakland GM 1997 Assassination of the Notorious B.I.G. 1997 Deep Blue > Kasparov 1999 Rawls’ revision of Theory of Justice

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