Backgammon, nard, billiards: games about overlapping narratives (part 3)
Part of the series Perceiving complexity
Let’s continue with the billiards. There is a great variety of games in this genre, they are about immersion in a non-quantifiable mental fluidity and the satisfaction of creating some coherence, some organization in that environment. If you can achieve that, you can claim the mastery of that fluidity. It is not about defending a claimed domain and breaking into someone else’s claimed domain, like in football or tennis (which are also about a non-quantifiable environment). The same as in backgammon or nard, the personal domain, the personal narrative is in a fluid overlap with that of the opponent and it needs to be made first understandable for a human mind to be claimed.
Games like eight-ball pool, nine-ball pool or snooker are about breaking apart a static mental plateau and let the mental fluidity unfold in a controlled psychological environment. From the range of possible human psychological experiences I have knowledge of, my perception is that only the gender relations achieve such a feat.
The man has a static mental plateau as control over who is fathering the children. The woman has a raw reality perspective to pursue her interests in such a controlled environment. The man likes the freshness and fluidity of such a perspective, he is dominating the woman. Willy-nilly, she has to assume responsibilities for the complexity and the mental abyss the raw reality perspective supposes, the man uses these responsibilities as a cushion in limiting the amount of complexity he has to face and he plunges into the feminine psychological experience to let his plateaus break apart and experience a fluidization of his mind.
The initial break shot is like the crumbling of the previous static plateaus and the fluidization of the mind. The balls are all over the place in unexpected places. Then you have to find the coherence, a newly refreshed one. In eight-ball pool, it is about picking a side you find easier to solve. The other side is the pressure of other people who have too such fluidizations of the mind of their own and they are trying too to achieve projection of mastery of social structures.
Pocketing your suit of balls is about discovering how they would make sense in a mental structure from the point they are at the moment. If you can achieve that, you can pocket the eighth ball, which makes you a winner. This ball is like a new mental plateau with you as its master. You went yourself through the fluid complexity that mental structure floats upon, you found your way to the coherence, it is a coherence you feel now how it is related to the fluid complexity, you have a grassroots connection to that complexity when you use that mental structure, you lean on that complexity when you need to face other people who may have their own takes on that mental structure.
Nine-ball pool is about a single suit of balls, it is not about focusing on your own suit, but a race to reach first the apex ball. It is in the idea that once the plateau is pulverized and all over the place, there must be a path to reach the coherence. Who will project mastery and control of the situation with expertise about how that mental structure relates to the complexity of the real life? The balls must be pocketed from the lowest number to the highest number. If the player misses pocketing, the other one takes over. You can work your way to the eighth ball, only to miss the ninth and then see the opponent pocketing it and winning the game.
Snooker is something like “okay, I got the idea with this fluidity, I am more comfortable with its concept of pulverizing the mental plateau”. The table is bigger, the pockets and balls smaller and the structure of the game encourages the players to not just smash the rack at the beginning, this would only give chances to the opponent.
The notion of winning is not about reaching the apex ball as a new mental plateau, but about the overall performance as an indication of the expertise in working with the fluid complexity. Pocketing a red ball is like the synchronic effect of your projected organization over the specific randomness of that context. Pocketing next the colored ball is like the diachronic effect of that projected organization. You are aware that your decisions can have all kind of unexpected consequences beyond your current bubble of knowledge.
The final part of the game is still conceived as a succession of progressive steps towards the apex ball, something like “how else could we project the idea of a crowning achievement?” Still, you can pocket the apex ball and yet not win the game if the opponent has a higher score. The winner can be decided before reaching the apex ball. This is acknowledging the importance of the overall expertise in working with the fluid complexity. The focus is not so much on reaching a new mental plateau. It is not so much about reaching first a pre-existing Platonic idea of a mental plateau in order to give stability to your own narrative.
The carom billiards have another take on the real life observation that reaching a new mental plateau may not be enough. This genre of games is not so much about realizing the unintended consequences beyond your bubble of knowledge. The psychology is still linear, it is like a sequel to the outcome of games like eight-ball or nine-ball pool. The feeling that pocketing the apex ball may not necessarily grant you stability and control of the situation gives way to a game in which you show expertise in working just with your apex ball and the opponent’s apex ball. And also a third ball as the general circumstances in the world that you need to affect and make use of in order to show the relevance of your perspective.
You show how you can bring a new coherence by working with the complex fluidity and affecting the apex ball as the symbol of the mental plateau for that psychological structure (while the opponent’s ball is the opponent’s point of view). The concept of winning such a game is about earning the higher score by showing such expertise.
The previous billiards games had only one cue ball in the game. The player takes over where the other one left, since there is no personal mental plateau and no personal static point of view. It is a build-up in working through that fluid complexity towards a resolution about who is reaching first the mental plateau or who shows more overall expertise.
In carom it is not about an initial break shot to pulverize the existing mental plateau. The plateau is there, it is a plateau that has been experienced regarding how it relates to the fluid complexity, but it keeps being disputed until it is obvious who has more mastery in dealing with the complexities it is floating on.
Given that the plateau already exists, there are two points of view and two cue balls. The player who at the moment is in control of the game sees the opponent’s ball from a point a view that has to be affected towards a new coherence. When the other player has the chance to shoot, he does not continue where the previous one left as in the previous billiards games. He notices where his own ball is and sees it as his own cue ball. It is about two points of view, not about who reaches first a coherent point of view regarding the randomness of a specific situation.
The issue with these billiards games is that they are not about facing the real complexity of the raw reality, they unfold in a framework shielding you from too much complexity. They are still valuable in experiencing and exercising how a classical human mind works. The women too find them valuable, the result of the feminine cushion shielding and masculine organization makes the world meaningful for them too, they assume too this result as orientation in their lives and they can play such games the same as the men.
There are cultural areas in which the women went beyond this classical human psychological framework and managed increased levels of stand-alone use of the raw reality perspective, which also supposes really taking in consideration that complexity. This raised the stakes for the men and you have games like backgammon, where rolling the dices introduces a level of unpredictability closer to real life (the concept of colored balls in snooker has some valuable similarities). The dices in this game have similar roots to the depth of religious perceptions in the Jewish and Indian worldviews, you really face the mental abyss of the raw reality.
