Life as a Quidditch Game

'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players'

- As You Like It , William Shakespear

"Life is like a game" and "Life is NOT a game!" are probably familiar words to all of us. For a while, I disliked the former statement, perhaps because the word "game" conveys a sense of manipulative and rule-binding rigidness that I didn't wish to associate with my life. After all, how can you be playful with life if you wish to succeed? However, I eventually realized that life and game-playing have a much intimate symbolic resemblence than we commonly regard. In this blog, I wish to address how game-playing is tied to our most fundemental learning patterns and self-awareness as social beings.

Game-playing in Harry Potter

Broom-riding is perhaps one of the most iconic part in J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World. Combinding broom-riding with a competitive sports - even more facinating! The Quidditch's has always instrigued me in terms of how it resembles the break-down of our roles in life. Thus, to point out the links between game-playing and life, I wish to start us off by looking at the rules and player make-up of the Quidditch game.

Consider the categories of players in teh Quiddich - three Chasers, two Beaters, one keeper, and one Seeker. The Chasers are the primary scorers who shoots the Quffle through the enemy team's goal; the Beaters defend their team members by batting away the Bludgers (aggresive, auto-tracking balls that attempt to hit the players off their brooms); the Keeper defends the goal; finally, the Seeker's job is to catch the Golden Snitch, through which the ally team immediately earns 150 points and put and end to the game.

Are the roles and their interactive relationship familiar? Each of us "play" a set of roles in life. Some of those roles are short-term-goal-driven, while others are long-term-goal-oriented. We are simultaneously the Chasers that accumulate small achivements, the Keepers and Beaters that defend ourselves from the threates, the attcacks, and the unkown in our surroundings; most importantly, what makes our life fulfilling and meaingful? It's the visioning and the pursuing of the Golden Snitch; it takes a whole lot of effort and time because it swiftly flashes in the distant; without training, persistence, and vision, we can't even recognize and approach it. However, once you've reached it, the satisfaction (150 points instantly!) is worth a "million" goals (of scoring with the Quaffle). It is crucial to note that catching the Golden Snitch doesn't neccisarily win the game, since the total end score account for the "true" victory of the game. Despite that, when you catch your Golden Snitch, the rule-bounded victory doesn't seem to matter anymore, because what you've obtained is a self-actualizing state of trencendence.

George Herbert Mead's Game and Play

The application of game-playing to our existence as social beings is not something new.

I was especially facinated by Sociologist George Herbert Mead's emphasis on how "play" and "game" account for the cognitive development of our self-consciouness; Mead points out that children undergo three stages of development. They begin with the preparatory stage, characterized by behavior imitation. In the "play" stage, children starts parcticing playing the role of the significant other (for instance, a parent, a superhero, an animal, etc.) Here children's cognitive ability limit them to only taking the single perspective of the character that they playing the role for; furthermore, they ask themselves questions such as "what would Spiderman do when saving the city" and "what would mother do when caring for a child". Finally, in the "game" stage, children became able to not only see throgh the eyes of the role that they are currently playing, but also how their roles interacts with those of other players'. In other words, they can now see the big picture of how the players and the rules interact to work as a whole. Mead calls this the generalized other.

What we can derive from Mead's idea, then, is that game-playing is a building block of our life as social beings; we are constantly undergoing all three stages in different parts of out life. When we enter school, we imitate and practice the role of a student, and take the perspective of our peers, professors, the admissions, and so on.; when we start a new job, we undergo trainings that are basically simulations of "play" and "game" that reinforce or rediness as a functional part of the company. In short, it is through rule (pattern)-learning, role-taking, and player-interactions that we become aware of who we are, how to function, and how to behave in society.

The Game-playing Mindset

Since game-playing and our life as social beings have such common grounds, I believe that how we approach and incorporate game-playing into our life are intricately linked to life satisfaction, a sense of belonging, self-worth, and so on. The game-playing mindset can indeed help us frame fundamental mechanisms in different life settings. However, the "trap" behind the game-playing mindset is that we often deduce a game down to mere rules, wins, and loses; furthermore, given the widely celebrated and pursued efficiency in modern society, what we seek through game-playing has become simpler than ever - to merely facilitate a temperate escape from the socially assigned roles (as a parent, worker, student, etc.) and a relief from stress. Little do we know, this rigid, mechanical mindset prevents us from acknowledging the fulfilling, generalizable aspects of game-playing; consequently, we revert back to this childish stage where we enclose ourselves in a single-person perspective (as in the "play" stage), and all we care about is "winning" in its most superficial sense. We as the players now become the game being played; we feel constrained by the rules and the performances of our teammates. This is perhaps the reason why some of us don't like the analogical transfer between life and game-playing. It's because we hate to think of ourselves as creatures defined only by rules and roles.

The Healthy Mindset

So, is life a series of games after all? Perhaps it is in the sense that both of their backbones constitute sets of systematic rules and roles. However, we must acknowledge that a game is much more than the sum of its parts. Just as how Meads articulates, games START with learning and abiding to the rules; however, as you probably have expereinced while learning a new game or a new sport, when you become increasingly proficient, a portal of “unwritten" rules and insights become available to your mind. If you actively seek and utilize these generalizable insights, game-playing becomes much more inspiring and fruitful. Most importantly, it adds a sense of freedom and vividness into the game-playing process.

Through games, we learn to take perspectives of others; through the interactions with other "players"and the responses we recieve from them, our identity and sense of self are progressively shaped. Through games, we expereince simulations of values that can be generalized to real-life situations. When you switch between different lanes in MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games such as League of Legends, do you see that the interdependence of the champions resemble the structure of social institutions in real life? When you play abstract strategy game such as chess, do you see that the planning and the execution of strategic process resemble the clash of the business mindset between rival firms? When you play sports games such as tennis or badminton, do you see that the flow and the rhythm that keep the game going resemble the maintaining of the tacit harmony between two co-workers? Can you see life as a Quiddich game? What do you see at the end of the game? Do you see yourself being the Chaser who accumulated the most scores with the Quaffle, or being the Seeker who catches the Golden Snitch?

Following assigned rules and roles are inevitable responsibilities in our life. However, that doesn't mean that we have to be puppets. In mandarin, with use the expression of "being a chess piece" to describe a person becoming others' means to an end. Matering the rules and our roles can indeed help us process and complete certain goals more efficiently; however, if our vision doesn't go beyond the rules-bounded roles, we unwittingly transform into a robotic entity that rigidly act and think only with accordence to them; eventally, that's what we gradually decay into: a chess piece in others' game, accompanied by a sense of bordem and constraint would eventually dominate our mind. If we learn to jump outside the rule-bounded backbone of life, we get to harvest the fulfilling aspects of our roles that grant us a sense of vividness and freedom in life.

To become the game master and find your Golden Snitch, practive to ask yourself the following:

What makes the gaming process meaningful and fulfilling to me?

How have my game-playing skills and mindset develop as an individaul and as a team member? What is it about me that has become different as I gradually master the game?

What are the insights of game-playing that can be generalized to the "games in life?"

What do you see yourself at the end of the game? How do you play and interact with other players to get there?