Finite and Infinite Games

 
Finite and Infinite Games
by James Carse
Ballantine Books
1987

 

 

About halfway though the first chapter of "Finite and Infinite Games," I got a sinking feeling that was quickly confirmed. Unfortunately, Carse isn't really writing about game-games, he's writing about society.

 
A finite game is a game you play with the goal of winning; an infinite game is a game you play with the goal of continuing to play. So anything where people compete with each other, and/or anything that comes to a definite end is a finite game. Going to school and earning a degree, getting a job in a particular profession, winning an election, successfully seducing someone - all these are finite games. Society is a finite game that contains other finite games. Human culture, writ large, is the one and only infinite game, that contains everything else within it.

 
Of  course, where there are games, there are players, and this is where Carse displays his big 'man thinking about society' energy. This book was published in 1987, but feels like it should have been written 20-40 years earlier, when this kind of social theory was more fashionable. 

 
The book is full of declarations like 'finite players do THIS; infinite players do THAT,' that sound profound, I guess, but also don't really sound like real people. Finite players take their games seriously. Infinite player are some sort of enlightened individuals who somehow float above all the petty squabbles beneath them. They sometimes join in finite games, but always with a wink and a nudge, because they know it's just a game.

 
It's a short book, and it's written in short declarative sentences. You could tweet this book, and it would seem normal there, just another steady stream of hot takes on Twitter. Carse goes in for brevity and wordplay in a way that's sort of poetic, but also isn't really the best way to communicate. Nothing needs to be justified, nothing qualified; it's all just true because he says it like it is.

 
I find this book interesting and frustrating because there are glimpses of truth in what he's saying, but he usually states them in such a way that there simply must be a better source for the same insight. 

 
I also find his morality troubling. Every action is judged based on its relation to games and their rules. He's fortunately able to say that (successful?) genocide is bad because it erases a portion of human culture (but not because it hurts or kills people?) But slavery, he claims, is just another finite game, which often have rules that let players torture each other, and that's not immoral, because everyone freely chooses to play. Sure, maybe you 'chose' because the alternative was being murdered, but that was still your choice, player! The cooperation of the oppressed is real, and understanding it is necessary to learning how oppression works, but Carse's description of it is facile, simplified to the point of absurdity and falsehood.
 

I don't recommend this one. If you're really interested in applying his ideas to actual games, just read part 1 and stop there. If you're interested in a good 'man thinks about society' book, read Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life or Anthony Giddens's Modernity and Self-Identity instead. Read something where the author seems to understand what people are actually like, where his commitments to concise writing, binary opposition, and deducing everything from the first principles of a metaphor don't totally overwhelm his commitment to saying something truthful.

Flung Out of Space

 
Flung Out of Space
Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith
by Grace Ellis
art by Hannah Templer
Abrams Books

2022

 

 

Flung Out of Space is the graphic novel equivalent of a biopic - a lightly fictionalized account of its subject's life that attempts to faithfully portray real events in a comprehensible narrative. 

 
The book covers the period in Patricia Highsmith's life when she first became famous. In the beginning, she's working as an anonymous comic book author who's writing Strangers on a Train at home at night. She's also picking up women at a nearby bar.

 
Highsmith's public persona is smart, self-confident, and disdainful of anyone she considers her inferior (which extends to antisemitism and misogyny.) Privately, she's conflicted about her lesbianism. She likes flirting, likes sex, and is charismatic enough to make it look easy - but she feels guilty, considers herself mentally ill, and fears the social price she'd pay if she were found out.

 
Highsmith gets set up on a date with Stan Lee, and parlays the encounter into a second job writing for his comics company too. She uses the money to pay for a therapist, and later takes a seasonal job as a salesgirl at a department store to help afford it. She seems to fall in love with a woman she meets in group therapy, and also gets engaged to a man for the sake of respectability.

 
She finishes Strangers and her agent sells it to a publisher. It's a hit, and Hitchcock makes a movie of it. She gets her heart broken by her girlfriend, turns that into inspiration to write Carol. She meets with publishers to try to sell Carol, gets rejected over and over, until she finds someone willing to publish it under the guise of a pulp thriller. She breaks up with her boyfriend, quits therapy, quits comics, and finally goes to a lesbian bar instead of just her local. 

 
Templer's art is black, white, and grey, with shades of orange that seem to express the emotional intensity of the scene. We see visual representations of the thoughts that fill her head as she writes. The faces are expressive, perhaps especially when women are flirting.

 
It's funny to think of Patricia Highsmith as being part of the history of comics. I sort of doubt Stan Lee's biography would mention his one date with her as a significant turning point. She insisted on writing anonymously, so unless the companies she worked for kept impeccable records, we might never know exactly what she wrote. Templer uses the public domain hero The Black Terror to depict Highsmith's thoughts about superheroes. He is one of the characters Highsmith sometimes wrote for, and the skull logo on his costume fits well visually with her other violent thoughts.

 
Highsmith comes across as charismatic and compelling, but also so incredibly insecure and obsessed with status that it seems sad. She didn't want to be associated with comics or pulps, even publishing Carol under a pseudonym. Her internalized homophobia made her miserable, and she was contemptuous of other women and anyone who wasn't a WASP. 

 
I felt invested in what would happen to her though, and I really liked the art. Queer women, fans of Highsmith's writing, and maybe people interested in comic book history would probably all enjoy this one.

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

 
 
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
The Authorized Graphic Adaptation

by Miles Hyman

adapted from the short story by Shirley Jackson
Hill and Wang
1948, adapted 2016

 

 

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is, as you might guess from the title, a graphic novel adaptation of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery." It was adapted by artist Mikes Hyman, who is Jackson's grandson. 

 
This might be one of the rare cases where it takes longer to read the comic book version than the original (though not by that much) because Hyman slows the pace of his adaptation to build suspense at a few key moments.

 
The art reminds me of the murals that got painted in a lot of city halls as part of the WPA's Federal Arts Program. It's very distinctive, because few if any other comics look like this, and it fits really well with the text, which has always felt like it took place during the Great Depression to me.

 
"The Lottery" is deservedly famous, and caused a bit of a stir when it first came out. On a specific day of the summer, in a small town in New England, the whole town gathers, as they do every year, for the lottery. It's an old tradition. 

 
First, the head of every household draws a slip of paper from the old box. One slip has a black mark. Then, everyone in that house draws again, and one family member is the final person to get the second black mark. What happens is, of course, also a very old tradition.

The Inugami Curse

 
The Inugami Curse

by Seishi Yokomizo
translated by Yumiko Yamakazi
Pushkin Press

1972, reprinted 2020

 

 

The Inugami Curse is a Japanese mystery novel. Originally published in 1972, and just recently translated into English, it's set in the immediate aftermath of WWII, with soldiers returning home from the war playing key roles in the plot. Yokomizo wrote a series of mysteries featuring detective Kindaichi - according to the publisher of the translation, this one is the best-known in Japan. My sister was reading it last year while we were both in Ohio, which is how I learned about it.

 
The patriarch of the wealthy and powerful Inugami family, and founder of the family-owned silk manufacturing company, has died, and so the extended family has gathered at the family estate to learn how the inheritance will be divided. Detective Kindaichi is there too, because the family's lawyer is afraid that the reading of the will is going to lead to murder.

 
The old man never married, but he had three mistresses and a daughter with each mistress; each daughter had a son, and the three grandsons have been helping to run the company. The oldest grandson (son of the oldest daughter) is Kiyo. There are months of delay after the old man's death before the will is read to wait for Kiyo to return home from the war. When he does, his face is disfigured by injury, and his mother has commissioned a creepy rubber mask that looks like his old face for him to wear at all times. The other family members wonder if this is really Kiyo, or if his mother has disguised an imposter to secure her share of the fortune.

 
In addition to those grandsons, there's a girl Tamayo who's the same age. She's the granddaughter of a local priest who served as the old man's benefactor before he became rich. (The old man and the priest are also rumored to have had a gay affair.) Tamayo has an adopted brother who acts as her bodyguard. There's also another grandson, this one a secret, the same age as the others, whose mother was a much younger mistress, that the three daughters frightened into running away shortly after she gave birth. His location is unknown.

 
So, the will gives Tamayo a few months to pick one of the three main grandsons to marry. The couple will inherit everything, and the others nothing. If all three grandsons die before the time is up, Tamayo alone gets everything. If Tamayo dies or doesn't marry before the time's up, the main grandsons each get ⅕ of the fortune and the secret grandson gets ⅖. If any of the main grandsons die, their share goes to the secret grandson, but if he dies, his share goes to charity. 

 
It's kind of a complicated set-up! Naturally, everyone is upset by the will. Kindaichi observes that it gives the main grandsons a motive to kill their half-brothers, and/or to rape Tamayo to force her into marriage, Tamayo a motive to kill the three main grandsons, and the secret grandson a motive to kill all the others.
 

Sure enough, during the months before the marriage deadline, two of the grandsons are killed, seemingly by a soldier with a hidden face, who's variously suspected to be either Tamayo's adopted brother, or Kiyo, or the secret grandson. We learn the true nature of the old man's relationship with his benefactor, the truth about what the three sisters did to the other mistress, and in general, we see almost everyone revealed as violent, amoral, and selfish. Finally there's a third murder, and then Kindaichi solves the case, too late to do very much good.

 
Yokomizo's writing uses a lot of short sentences. It's generally very direct, even journalistic. But he also editorializes sometimes! Yokomizo tells us there will be murders from the beginning, points out every time Kindaichi misses a clue or fails to realize something, and passes moral judgment on the characters and their actions. I liked the foreshadowing, but wished he'd trust me to know that murder is bad without him needing to be preachy about it. In this translation at least, he overuses 'demonic' as a descriptor for the crimes, says they're 'chilling' and 'straight from hell' and so on, to an extent that I thought sort of detracted from his otherwise very straightforward prose.

Moose's Book Bus

 
 
Moose's Book Bus
by Inga Moore
Candlewick Press

2021

 

 

My sister recommended Moose's Book Bus to me, and it's pretty cute! It's sort of a fable about why, if public libraries and public education didn't exist, you'd want to invent them.

 
Moose tells his family a story every night, but eventually he's told all the stories he knows so many times that he wants something new. He goes to all his forest neighbors, but none of them have any story books. So he travels to the city to check out some library books there. Now story time is new and exciting, and his neighbors start showing up to listen. This is nice, but Moose's house is getting crowded.
 

So he goes back to the city library with a plan, and sets up a book bus that he can take back to the forest. His neighbors think this is nice, but they don't know how to read. So Moose teaches some of them, and some teach the others. Then they all start checking out library books from the book bus, to enjoy reading at home. They also still have communal story times at several houses, but now that they can all host, it doesn't get over-crowded like before.

 
Like I said, a cute little story about the importance of public services and civic involvement, and the drawings of forest animals are also very sweet.

Justice League: Death Metal

 
 
Justice League: Death Metal
DC Comics

2021

 

 

Justice League: Death Metal is the final companion volume to Dark Nights: Death Metal. It tells a single story that expands on something that happens in a couple of panels in the original - after Wonder Woman freed Superman and all the other captured superheroes from evil Darkseid-Batman's prison, Nightwing led a mission to rescue the Legion of Doom and sabotage the antenna that Batman Who Laughs was using to receive 'crisis energy' from the remnants of the multiverse.

 
So, we follow a very motley team of Nightwing, Hawkgirl, Starfire, Cyborg, Detective Chimp, and Lex Luthor as they attempt to save some of the worst supervillains on Earth from being used as parts in an evil machine. They have to fight evil Starro-Batman and evil Martian-Manhunter-Batman along the way, and then immediately fight the villains they rescued. Also, no one trusts Lex Luthor, which seems wise.

 
Nightwing's thoughts provide all the voiceover narration throughout, making this a story that's focused on Dick Grayson's character development at least as much as it is on the rescue mission. It's most similar to the Flash and Green Lantern stories from the first companion volume, and probably belongs up front there, rather than being saved for the end.

The Hod King

 
The Hod King
by Josiah Bancroft
Orbit

2019

 

 

The Hod King is the third book in a quartet, following Senlin Ascends and Arm of the Sphinx. The story started with one hapless man trying to find his lost wife, who he got separated from within minutes of their arrival at the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. Early on, I thought he would wander his way to the top, encountering some sort of 'sorry Mario but your princess is in another castle' scenario in every floor along the way. Fortunately the series is much better than that.  By now Senlin has made friends, they've become air pirates, and are now on an espionage mission assigned by the mysterious Sphinx...
 

Bancroft has two talents that have served him well so far. The first is seeding the early parts of his books with clues and mysteries that all come together in moments of revelation further in. The second is setting expectations at each point for what might happen next, and then finding some way to do something better and more interesting. 

 
And despite the steampunk technology and fantastical vertical city setting, the problems within the Tower are all too realistic - class and gender inequality, slavery, the corrupt rule of self-serving elites. I daresay Bancroft might be a feminist. He certainly writes a variety of women characters well, and he depicts complaints about rich men that you rarely hear other men voice.

 
This book is split into three sections as we observe the events of about a week from three different viewpoints. First Senlin, disguised as a tourist, sent to investigate the coliseum where enslaved 'hods' fight as gladiators. But since his wife Marya lives on this ring of the Tower with her new rich husband, Senlin can't resist the chance to finally make contact. This goes poorly, and Senlin is enslaved and sent to live among the hods, where he reconnects with some characters from previous books who blame Senlin for their own enslavement.

 
In the second section, acrobatic Voleta tries to enter high society by being introduced with great fanfare as the Sphinx's niece. Her mission is to contact Marya while Senlin and Edith do their political spying. She finds the competitive upper-class partying on this ring almost unbearable. Accessing Marya also means dealing with several men from the royal family, who turn out to be much more dangerous than she expected.

 
In the third section, Edith acts as the Sphinx's official emissary to the local government. She befriends another woman with cybernetic implants from the Sphinx, but this other 'Wakeman' has been operating without new orders for over a decade. She's trying to do right, but no longer really trusts the Sphinx any more than she likes the locals. Also, the royal family and their guards decide to either seize the Sphinx's airship or blow it out of the sky!

 
One of my friends described this book as the Empire Strikes Back of the series, and I think it's an apt comparison. Our heroes end up outsmarted and beaten back at every step, one captured, several injured, one killed. But they also make new allies, and maybe find themselves in a position to succeed in the Sphinx's mission next time...