The Great Game

It is a day when I can and do choose to blog on one of those miscellaneous topics not determined  either by the calendar on the one hand or by some large policy or news issue that I am blogging about. I think that I do only a relatively few of my blog posts fall into that category. So I want to discuss the idea of the great game. It seems to me that a great deal of the world’s business is determined by the play and progress of a great game. This great game is not the only important story in the world but it is an important story. Of course there are many games making the human world go around law suits are clearly games of a kind and so are some of the more small and clever wars. The trades, arbitrage, mergers and currency swaps that shape our financial and equity markets are clearly akin to games in countless ways.  Then there are the absolutely game related activities like bidding competitions for Olympic and FIFA World Cup cities as well as for the Super Bowl, the Cricket and Rugby and other championships including five or six really great basketball championships. There are the maneuvers played by the militaries of each country that can afford it with other countries which are called war games. If as I acknowledge and believe these games all matter then is there some kind of other great game?

Well my New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl recently and played nineteen games of actual foot ball to achieve that –I do believe that this mattered. Spain won the World Cup winning lots of soccer matches on the way and I think those mattered too.  If all of that mattered and was made up of games that really matter then is there room for a great game?

I do believe that a lot of thrillers are based on fact.  Spies, smugglers, hackers, security analysts, bodyguards, assassins and other live out a complex whirl of life and death gamesmanship. It can indeed matter quite a bit who wins and loses and how the game is played. So if all that is really being played out and makes a difference is there a great game?

I mean a game in which perhaps most or all people participate in some way but in which really only a tiny percentage are really players in the strict sense. I mean a game where of these  million or so players maybe only a few thousand are actually playing as full-time major players with largely mutually understood rules and a considerable amount of mutual awareness. I mean a game that is a real game though few see it.  Once in a while a hint of its existence is dropped and that is about all there is to it.

Well, I had a day free to blog as I pleased and so I played with this idea. An odd idea really. I do not know if I will return and bring it to some closure or not. For I really haven’t said much of anything here have I?