Playground

by Richard Powers

Dementia with Lewy bodies: One out of every three-hundred-and-some people in this country suffers from it. One in thirty Americans with dementia of one kind or another—one in ten my age or older. If you count all kinds of cognitive impairment, one in five. That’s not an exclusive club. Too many members for a mathematically literate person to bother asking, Why me, Lord?

In sixth grade, when he was eleven, Rafi discovered Danish snap-together blocks. Something about those standardized, interlocking components in bright primary colors, all meshing tightly into any clean creation he could dream up, made Rafi feel that the mangled planet might yet be fixed.

He was a creature of scientific rationalism, too moral to suspect what Evie had discovered: eager young girls required camouflage.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they’ll have passed the real Turing test.

‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ William Blake.”

RAFI COULDN’T ACCEPT THE IDEA that his one obligation was to read all day long. It felt like a trap, something he would pay for down the line, in life’s rigidly scored zero-sum contest. It never occurred to him that he’d paid for it already.

He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens: “At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play. . . .” Judging from the lines he’d sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.

“Give it stakes, dude. Make ’em pay to play!”

I called Seedbed Partners and took the three-quarters of a million. It was more than enough to get me going. It was also an insane amount of debt for a child with an uncertain prospect and no sense of business. But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose.

And a corollary: the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf. I suddenly had character to spare.

But they sat on the shelves of the special library that I built for them—more than two thousand titles—waiting for the day when I might have a little gaming group again.