Sean McCoy at the Western Gate
Confucius was traveling in the west in Wei. Yan Yuan asked Maestro Jin, "How do you think the Master's journey is going?"
Maestro Jin said, "It's such a shame! Your master is finished!"
Zhuangzi (Brook Ziporyn, trans.)
In the 4th century BCE, Lao Dan, court astrologer to the Duke Xian of Qin, walked to the top of the highest hill in Chengzhou and looked out over the city. As the quiet autumn wind wrapped itself around him like a pifeng, the old master found himself overcome with sorrow. "The kingdom," he said, "will soon draw its final breaths."
"The people," he concluded, "are like rotted logs in a swamp."
So it was that Lao Dan set out into the West, to live his remaining days in solitude. But the guard at the western gate, a man named Yinxi, stopped Lao Dan, saying, "Aren't you Lao Dan, court astrologer to the Duke? Where are you going in your traveling clothes?"
"I am going into the West to live my remaining days in solitude," replied the old master.
Yinxi bowed very deep before Lao Dan and cried, "Master, I beg you for the good of the country, record your greatest wisdom before you leave. I cannot allow you to pass through this gate without doing so." Lao Dan agreed. So he sat on the side with brush and inkpot, and carefully inscribed the eighty-one chapters of the Daodejing. When he had finished, the old master passed through the western gate and never returned.
The noble-minded revere ebb and flow, empty and full, for that is the movement of heaven.
I Ching (David Hinton, trans.)
Let's imagine, together, what it's like to play a roleplaying game. Let's call the roleplaying game "Mothership." But not yet, we haven't gotten that far. We're just getting together to play a game of some kind, and we trust we'll work it all out as necessary. Someone has the idea that it will be in outer space, another that we will play down-on-our-luck spacers, travelling perhaps from job to job. A third decides that we should be thrust into strange and frightening situations beyond our understanding or control, things so strange they seem supernatural—perhaps they are supernatural. Perhaps this last person is the referee. Perhaps they keep this thought a secret for now.
What more do we need to begin? Paper and pencils to keep track of whatever needs tracking, sure. Open minds and hearts, of course. But very little by way of rules. Not yet, anyway. Instead, we play first, and play makes its demands, and we rise to those demands as best we can. Someone tries to fly a spaceship through asteroids, so we find ways of deciding how good a pilot they are, and how difficult the asteroids are to navigate safely, and how to make those two things talk to one another. It's not difficult. Much easier, for instance, than mapping the location and velocity of thousands of asteroids, and having the player describe exactly which buttons and levers they push on the ship's helm. Better in this case to assign some integers, roll some dice, and move on. We expect we'll need to fly a ship through an asteroid field again someday, so we write down how we represented the pilot's skill, and the asteroids' difficulty, and what dice we rolled and how. It's not difficult.
Another day, you want to sneak past a group of hostile androids guarding a doorway in a derelict space station. The referee draws a map of the room, and the major objects in the room. She puts a dot where you are, and five more dots: one where each android is. You explain what you do, how low you crouch, which pieces of rotting corporate furniture you hide behind. You explain that you watch the methodical patterns of their flashlights cutting across the dark, and wait for the right moment to move to the next spot on your planned route through the room. "What kind of shoes are you wearing?" the referee asks.
"Oh, no. I'm wearing big steel-toe work boots. They probably still have dried mud on them from the rain storm we went through last time. They were so useful then." You laugh a little, knowing they'll be a liability today.
It takes a few minutes of talking things out, but soon enough everyone is satisfied that the important details have been accounted for. The referee makes their decision. They don't even roll any dice. It never occurs to any of us that we might need to.
Heaven and earth are not humane.
To them all things are straw dogs.
The sage is not humane.
To him all the people are straw dogs.But is not the space
between heaven and earth
itself like a bellows?Empty it is but never exhausted.
With each and every movement,
more and more emerges.Where instructions are many,
blind alleys multiply.
Maintain instead the center within.Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 5 (Brook Ziporyn, trans.)
If Aristotle is the foundational philosopher of Western thought, then perhaps Laozi holds a similar place in much of Eastern thought. And if Aristotle established metaphysics as first philosophy for the Western philosopher, then Laozi begins instead from what we might call "metapolitics." Which is to say, while Aristotle might understand the universe to be made up of things defined by their material and physical components, Laozi seems instead to posit a universe made of things defined by their political relations to one another. And so in the Daodejing he takes as his topic "the sage," who leads others without effort or thought or credit.
In the fifth chapter of the Daodejing, Laozi uses the image of a straw dog. To heaven and earth, he says, "all things are straw dogs," just as to the sage, "the people are straw dogs." These are small ceremonial objects, created in preparation for a prayer for rain. An early commentary from the Huainanzi on this chapter explains,
When we make straw dogs or clay dragons, we paint them yellow and blue, decorate them with brocade, and tie red ribbons around them. The shaman puts on his black robe and the lord puts on his ceremonial hat to usher them in and to see them off. But once they've been used, they're nothing but clay and straw.
The dog, created from worthless straw, is then respected and adorned with expensive fabrics to exalt it in preparation for the ceremony. But after the prayer is complete, it no longer has any use—it's merely straw once again. We throw it onto the floor, or into the furnace. It doesn't exist, then it does, then it doesn't. Perhaps Mothership, too, is a straw dog. Our Mothership, I mean, the one we play when we play Mothership.
Game designers seem largely Aristotelian to me: treating players as physical objects that obey physical laws, that sit inert until presented with some stimulus or another, that respond predictably, with knowable desires, and with resulting behaviors that can be catalogued and categorized and manipulated. But what if players are instead political beings first and only? What if they are already going about their way, walking to work, talking to one another, what if they are already playing before the game designer ever sets pen to paper?
What if the game designer were instead the empty hole in the wheel, one who holds the axle of play, around which the players gather like spokes? What if he flowed like river water to carry the boat of play to whatever port the players seek? What if the game designer put on his traveling clothes and left through the western gate?
A courteous handsome young man
well-versed in the classics and histories
people address him Sir
everyone calls him a scholar
but he hasn't found a position yet
and doesn't know how to farm
in winter he wears a tattered robe
this is how books fool usHan Shan, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Red Pine, trans.)
Mothership did not always exist. Mothership does not always exist. Even now, as we sit and admire our box sets, as we read the words on the pages in the books in the box set, Mothership doesn't exist. When we play Mothership, while we are playing it, then it truly exists. When we are not playing it, when we have stopped playing it, then it transforms instead into a book or an idea or a possibility of an idea. "Remember," the book reminds us, "most likely you've been playing games of imagination and pretend since you were a child" (WOM 4). It also says, "Don't worry about the rules" (WOM 22).
This Mothership is an expedient object, something we create instantly to serve immediate needs, cobbled together from whatever things are around: vague snippets of a movie or a novel, an image that followed us out from our dreams, a childhood ghost. And, perhaps most prominently, a handful of books written by Sean McCoy and company. These books are not Mothership, of course. They are merely about Mothership. Mothership doesn't exist, then it does, then it doesn't. We are not playing Mothership, then we are, then we aren't.
Where instructions are many, blind alleys multiply. I do hope this is clear. We gather straw together, from the ground. Worthless in itself. We tie it up into the shape of a dog. We wrap it in embroidered cloths, store it in a bamboo box. It becomes a god. Before the ceremony, the representative of the dead and the priest each keep a fast to prepare themselves, to make themselves pure enough to receive the straw dog, the god we made together. After the ceremony is complete, we trample the straw dog underfoot. We collect the straw once again from the ground, worthless. We put it to fire, and we watch it burn away.