Board Games and the End of Civilization

They buzz you in, you climb the stairs, and at last you’re inside the party. You greet the birthday guy, he introduces you to a couple of humans, you exchange the mandatory sentences, then drift away because you’re hungry. You load up a small plate, and that’s when you notice her, somewhere across the room. 

At some point, she’ll feel it, being watched, and sure enough, eye contact happens. Maybe she doesn’t smile, but the air tightens anyway, as if some invisible department of reality just signed off on it. 

Half an hour passes, and your bodies, pulled by a minor gravitational anomaly, finally collide. It begins with a harmless excuse, maybe the spritz pitcher. Then the ritual starts: a remark, a laugh, a look, “by the way, I’m…” and the aperture widens. A mutual acquaintance, or a place in the city you both know.  You are not quite in sync yet, but you can tell it might work if the exchange lasted the whole party, except it won’t be allowed to. Some moron pulls out a board game, and you are shoved into carriages and onto rails. All the situations that had spontaneously formed in the corners of the house collapse into a single field. One table. The unifying and faintly fascist aggregation of many souls under what is called a game, but that you already recognize as unpaid labor, all to please the guy who suggested it, tonight’s resident loser. 

Bodies regimented, geometrized into a satanic seal, constrained and bored, cut off from the natural expansion of their essence that, left alone, who knows, in a few years might even have produced life, a child. Instead, you are catapulted into listening to a civil servant standing up and loudly explaining the rules. Then the arguments begin, about unwritten rules, about house variants. The game becomes the preparation for the game.  Do me a favor, for the sake of our European civilization. Learn again how to be indecorous. Why do you not show enough contempt for the depth of degradation imposed by Americanism? Why not bring bullying back into fashion? Point at the hunched ones who lack the courage to live a party the way it has always been lived since man first stood upright. 

You find yourselves at the gates of thirty, or well past them, forced to listen to a stranger explaining a game in which the only people who actually want to win are those life has already bruised. It would be your ancestral duty to make them understand that the only game worth playing is called life, and we all end up in the grave anyway, so why rehearse it? 

At what moment in time did it become socially acceptable to pay fifty euros for a board game and propose it to fifteen strangers as a grand entertainment? What was the triggering event that allowed this prayer to lead to death? The 1981 divorce between the Bank of Italy and the Treasury? Does the absence of antitrust laws that allow private television exist? Vatican II? No one knows, yet here we are, slowly bleeding out. She is no longer looking at you. Her eyes are on the floor, and perhaps she is crying inside. Someone has taken out their smartphone. Someone stares into the void past their vanishing point. Someone keeps talking to keep the previous conversation going, disturbing those who actually want to play. Real frictions emerge between the orderly and the anarchic, but once sublimated by the rules of the game, they never quite erupt into truth. They settle into awkward silences. They disguise themselves as ironic remarks, and dissimulation becomes the only interesting meta-game to watch. 

Forty minutes of your life have passed, and no one will give them back to you; your ass hurts, and you feel like you are at a funeral while people make noise with unsheathed laughter. Now and then, someone desperate shouts to move the game along so the ordeal can end, but like in an abyss, the plea sinks into the darkness of the shouting that only Italians in small groups can produce. You remain polite. You do not stand up. You wait for it to end. A rage starts building inside you, something you will have to purge through deep breathing.

You still try to understand what brought you here.

You think it would have been better to stay home.

You do not quite know how, you do not quite know who won, but the game is over.

Its completion has sterilized the field. Everything that had sprung up spontaneously is contaminated for the rest of the night. It is midnight now. Some people start putting on their coats, you turn around, and she is gone. She left without saying goodbye. Maybe she was never there, and it was a hallucination.  Chaotic mingling is perfectly aligned with the generation of conscious life. It is the will of the higher celestial spheres that, through the micro-management of the field, shape the emancipation of the self. And instead, nothing. Sterility prevailed, and even tonight, civilization failed to advance.

Even in that house, as you walk away through the cold streets, you think you have witnessed the horror of barbarism. The commodification of fun, of code, of explanation, of competition, of the lie, of order, of the immobile, of death. And you see the West's decline. And you find yourself hoping the external enemy, the one who made the board game a social ritual, might cease these petty assaults on the collective mind that lead to our quiet, undisturbed extinction.

You would almost rather hear bullets whistling through the trenches, just to have one moment of truth, of unveiling, before Europe’s final oblivion.

Board Games and the End of Civilization