The Rules of the Game:

Playing Chess is an exercise in empathy. The most skilled players can see the board from the perspective of their opponents. They can project what the rational Other will do at any moment, at least as a set of possibilities. Because the player, however, is not in possession of his opponent’s will or temperament, there are limits to his knowledge, and in accordance with those limits his own power over the board itself is restricted, and the game is rewarding for its novelty. This reward ceases to be the case when either player is so hopelessly dominated by the aggressive will to dominate that the game becomes controlled and predictable. At that point, even that player’s claims – that it is in fact his opponent who wishes to dominate – become mute, for they can be fairly regarded as sheer strategy, and they might be dismissed as cheating for their deceptive quality. The unwritten rule in Chess is this: that in enjoying the impersonal beauty of the board, one made impersonal by the extent to which even a loss can be perceived as beautiful by the loser, one must remain focused upon the goal of using one’s own power to bring about an end that is in accordance with the virtues of a true competitor who persists in an attempt to win. Yet Life cannot be reduced to the competition, even if it were all expressed as a game, for were it entirely competitive then all ready the will to win would have become the will to dominate and kill the game itself, reducing its impersonal beauty to personal depravity, simply because any attempt to compete with those who are unwilling to compete, but who seek only to participate, would as such bar participation to those people. It follows that to disadvantage another for one’s own gain and against that person’s consent can only be done in the spirit of reserving one’s right to participate, and so long as one has all ready been included one can no longer accuse the disadvantaged party of pettiness under the auspices of a competition that that party had not consented to or by reference to one’s own will to win coming into conflict with that of the opponent. Such plaints will obviously fall on deaf ears when the public is aware that what had become a competition was supposed to have been an entirely different sort of game to begin with: a cooperative friendship.

Dm.A.A.