The Art of Rules, Ctd.
From Game Culture:
Games are supposed to be safe places, where we experiment with strategy and compete without fear of consequence. When we play, we come to even the most violent, sadistic variety of game bearing an implicit assumption — an assumption so ingrained and absolute that we don’t even acknowledge it consciously — that we are not responsible for our actions. One of the deepest evolutionary tenets of play, embraced not just by us humans but by the entire mammalian world, is that play is free of repercussion. Play, at least temporarily, is supposed to liberate us from morality.
Brathwaite has smashed this covenant, brilliantly, and anyone who plays Train — or even reads about it — will never be able to approach a game so naively again. Forever after, they will have no choice but to question the mechanics of the games they play, to interrogate their rules instead of blindly following them and to be wary of their shifting contexts.
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