This essay on board games is my latest publication in The Other Journal. In it I analyze pleasure and different forms of play using frameworks from psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as well philosopher, C. Thi Nguyen. This has been so much fun to bring personal passions and hobbies together. I hope that it offers more ways to reflect on why play is so significant and what is revealed in the way we play. Here’s a short excerpt:
We can reach for something beyond our reality only when we bring ourselves to the failure of that reality. Winning is pointless, and that’s the point. In Lacanian terms, striving play exposes us to the illusory nature of the object of desire (winning the game), inviting the real of our desire (to keep playing) to irrupt into our symbolic-imaginary. From striving play we come face-to-face with an earned pleasure and the realization that the struggle was the goal; the victory was just the arbitrary placeholder that facilitated our enjoyment. Importantly, one experiences this earned pleasure only after a good-faith investment in the game’s symbolic-imaginary (i.e., in the striving play). You have to take the game seriously and really work toward victory as the game posits it; otherwise, the victory doesn’t bring you to its point of failure.