THE GAME WITHIN - THE END OF GAMES
Part IV of Our Narrative Games Series
This is the problem of the way we get into and out of the play or game...what are the codes which govern these entries and exits?
-Brian Sutton-Smith, Child's Play
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It is a defining feature of all games, narrative or otherwise, that no game can be played forever. The magic circle that games (within or without) summon must always collapse or be eventually exited.
The Pevensie children cannot remain in Narnia forever. John Carter returns to Earth from Barsoom. It is dispatched (twice) and the Loser’s Club return to being … normal… their magic dissipated.
All games end.
Becase all games, narrative and otherwise, are mortal, like we who create and play them, which is why, in part, they are so precious.
But just because a narrative game (or any other game) ends don’t means it stays ended. Plenty of time, an especially good story will call a reader back to its circle. The Pensevie children might leave Narnia but they return to it as well. Same for a reader like me who read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the first time and, enchanted, read it again and again. Or like my goddaughter who reads a certain wizarding series every year.
We finish stories and in doing so finish their game within but then if the story rocks we will read it again, at another time.
The question we must ask ourselves is: what happens to the game within then?
Are we still able to play all the games of the story now that we are no longer innocent — now that we have eaten from its narrative apple? In other words: what happens to a story’s games and its play when we know the ending?
Fortunately for us, stories truly are a many-splendored thing. Stories, like those who make them and read them, truly contain multidudes. Even a close reader will miss vital details story on a first read that they might notice on a second read or a third or a ninth. Each reading deepens our appreciation of the story, reveals hidden complexities and symmetries, casts lights and doubt on what was certain and uncertain alike. Each reading provokes, in other words, a new pattern game, a new judgment game. The best stories in their complexities, in the infinity of their play, can ever be truly completed (like no game can really ever be mastered), are labyrinths of meaning that one can never truly emerge from.
But the story and their game within changes as well because in the time between readings we have changed, too – sometimes massively, sometimes imperceptibly.
As Italo Calvino noted: “Books remain the same, but we certainly have changed, and this later encounter is therefore completely new.”
No one ever reads the same story twice, as they say. Or as we might say: No one ever plays the same game within twice, either.
Because we are different people when we return to a story, the game within will be different, as well. Entirely different? Not necessarily, but different enough to make the game within another game altogether.