Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Id & If

by jmgariepy · January 31, 2014

From the German “das Es” or “the It,” ids are the mind’s instinctual desires. The id represents our innate and base needs, that, some would say we are always repressing, and others would say are the ultimate driving force in everything we do. Freud was an angry and horny old man, so he tended to talk about the id in terms of aggression and sexual need. Our id, though, is always driving us to what would be most pleasurable, while causing the least pain. Stay warm. Eat food. Id isn’t the process required to find a place to sleep. Thinking your way through how to procure and maintain suitable shelter would be a job for your ego to fulfill. But the underlying drive to sleep right now would be powered by your id.

I’m not a student of psychology, so I don’t want to make a fool of myself delving further into a field I’m not trained in. I do, however, know games. And something that always impressed me when approaching a fully realized game is how much it operates like a mind. Even removing the ‘computer’ category from our games, all games require programming in order to function. That programming, however, needs a controller, or some sort of driving force, to move beyond its raw state as a box of parts. If you add players who are following a set of rules, the game and players becomes something greater. A two person game of Stratego, for example, involves at least five minds. The two players, Jaques Johann Morgendorff, the designer of Stratego and Hermance Edan and Harry Gibson, the designers of l’Attaque, the game Stratego is based on. Between the active participation of the players and the passive participation of the designers, the ego of the game ‘thinks’, leading us to the game’s ultimate id: revealing a player’s flag to his or her opponent.

I’m simplifying, of course. And I’m not even adding the role that developers and graphic designers worked into Stratego over the years, nor am I recognizing the fact that Stratego was derived from a possible three different classic Chinese board games. Or, for that, matter, I’m not adding in game culture biases for rules changes over the years, or the metagame that encompasses all games of Stratego. But all that stuff probably falls under the realm of the game’s Super-Ego anyway.

The analogy seams split a little when we look at more complex animals. I don’t think anyone can explain what the point of playing Dungeons and Dragons is—at least not in a concise manner that encompasses most players’ reasons for playing. Five players can sit at a table and push the game’s mind toward seven different ultimate ids. One for each of the four players, one for the game master, and two more for the designers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. That doesn’t make it any less a game. It just means that any conversation that discusses the ‘why’ of D&D will take many more paragraphs to explain (as is evident from all the forum chatter on Dungeons and Dragons, compared to Stratego.) Likewise, adding extra ids to your game might make it more complex, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the game is now more interesting. Despite what some poor game designers seem to think, we shouldn’t hold palm trees to puma standards. They’re both high-performance machines designed to dominate their environments by following their most basic natures. The fact that the puma uses a greater ego to navigate a greater web of ids doesn’t mean the palm tree requires more ids be as great. Games and palm trees should never be burdened with more ids than they need to flourish.

A funny little word. ‘If’ can mean either ‘assuming’ or ‘supposing’. It’s both absolute and fanciful, depending on the nature of the sentence. “If you mix blue and yellow, you get green,” is a very different sentence than “If Montezuma and the Aztecs attacked and killed Cortés, how would that have changed history?”

I rather like this poem by Rudyard Kipling, so I’m going to cheat a little and let Rudyard and the power of public domain do the rest of my work for me.

If—

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!