#TheGame23 - The Game of Games

::: by Eris Omniquery :::
:::

We're all playing The Game 23: THE metagame, the game of games.

"The Game" is a conduit that can allow one to enter into the most bizarre strategic situation in the history of strategic situations. A sort of primer, if you will.

To conceptualize this, you need to know the definition of "metagame":

The Metagame, or game about the game, is any approach to a game that transcends or operates outside of the prescribed rules of the game, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.

To beat "The Game" while still thinking about it requires one to go outside the prescribed rules and into the territory of metagame.

Game theory is the science of strategy. It doesn't just apply to some recreational games, but strategic interactions among self-interested agents of all kinds, from social media interactions, economics, and even politics.

The Legendary John Von Neumann made huge contributions to game theory.

What is THE metagame, as opposed to any particular metagame? It involves the ultimate strategic situation, the "end of history", and THE metagame is the race to arrive at the end of history (the resolution of the ultimate human strategic situation).

Now, let's combine two premises:

All the world's a stage
All the world's a game of games.

What you get is the notion of an "alternate reality game" or "an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions." This is the format of The Game of Games: an ARG to end all ARG's.

In the very early internet, around 1993, a group of computer nerds and hackers devised two models of two strategic situations: global memetic apocalypse and global memetic singularity. The source is this excerpt from Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture by Douglas Rushkoff.

This memeplex evolved through the deepest parts of internet culture, expressed in locations such as here that references the infamous Cicada 3301 ARG, Virus 23, as well as " a memetic super-virus that was engineered to break the bonds of social slavery."

Others have added to this emergent ARG, such as the offshoot #TheGame23 - Creating meta-narratives as a hypersigil within a larger ARG scenario, for personal and societal transformation.

At this point you're probably wondering what is the End Game of the Game of Games anyways? The answer is an Emerging Memetic Singularity in the Global Knowledge Society.

You don't need a God-A.I. for a singularity, just a sufficiently advanced internet and a society of sufficiently skilled internet-users. The Memetic Singularity is the main event of THE Singularity, the meat of it, the technological singularity is the after-party.

So just where did my Autonym Eris Omniquery originate from? By engaging in memetic backtracing, hopping from influence to influence, one will arrive at the work of famous 20th century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and his speculative scheme of auto-evolutionary dreams. Whitehead worked with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica, which had HUGE implications for the foundations of mathematics. This led to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Wittgenstein:

A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.
 
This is also strongly related to other concepts such as the Glass Bead Game and Infinite Games.

Anyways, the point is that games are much more important than the vast majority of game-players realize. "Get good or get gibbed" as the pro gamers say. Garbage time is running out. We don't want no scrubs.