Only a Game

True Stories are Never the Only Story

There is seems to be a tendency to believe that modern philosophy denies truth entirely, that “nothing is true” – but this is a misunderstanding. There are still true stories. What philosophers in the last century or so have come to realise is that any given true story can never be the only true story.

In his book Critical Resistance, which summarises the changes in European philosophical thought from Nietzsche to Žižek, David Couzens Hoy notes that “there are different stories, and many can be true. A true story is itself only a particular way to tell such a story, never the only story. Other drafts are always possible.” He observes, following Foucault, that it is not that there are no universals so much as those things which are truly invariant possess a universal quality so thin that they are rendered uninteresting or useless. For this reason, the focus on universals can wildly mislead – either into believing there can be only one true story, or into believing that the stories that attain to invariance are the only ones of interest.

I have often quoted Korzybski’s adage that “the map is not the territory”; Hoy’s equivalent catchphrase is his rendering of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that “we should not confuse the model of reality with the reality of the model”. Bourdieu seems to have recognised a number of universal characteristics – that we are separate individuals, that we are confined to a given time and place, and that we know we are destined for death. But such invariant observations as these, Hoy notes, do not give us a path to absolute knowledge because their very implication is the absence of an ideal context-free perspective from which such a conclusion could be drawn. Bourdieu himself says “to escape even a little from the relative, one absolutely has to abdicate from the claim to absolute knowledge, uncrown the philosopher-king.”

Critical Resistance approaches its conclusion via Slajov Žižek’s paradox of reality, which (as Hoy puts it) asks: is there really no way that things really are? He notes that the two uses of ‘really’ in this sentence are not the same – the first concerns the ‘way’ that things are, the second the ‘things’ that are, and as Hoy himself notes “one could deny that there is a single way that things are without denying that the things are real.” We can quite happily accept that we live in a world of real things without having to acknowledge a real way to comprehend those things. He adds that Bourdieu might have said in this regard that the reality of the interpretation should not be confused with the interpretation of reality.

The challenge for our plural world has ceased to be determining the constituent elements of a single model of truth. This was the kind of goal that W.O. Quine’s ontological project was pursuing, supposing that we could tell what reality consisted of by identifying every entity our best theories allowed us to believe in. Certain philosophers are now justifiably doubtful that such a project could succeed, not least because (as Stephen Yablo observes) even our best theories are riddled with metaphor. We have thus lost any hope of finding the one and only true story – and this is a marvellous thing! For now we realise that even true stories are never the only story, and this recognition might free us from demonising those people whose true stories differ from our own.

The Legend of the Fiction Campaign

Based on a true story.

Once upon a time there was a non-fiction role-playing game entitled Only a Game, in which a verbose rambler wittered on about whatever happened to be on his mind. After a while, a small crowd of strange and wonderful people began to participate in the Game and in April 2006, nine months after it began, the rambler held a campaign discussing the metaphysical elements of science and religion. This Metaphysics Campaign ran for seven months, and provoked a lot of intense discussion.

In May the following year, the Game launched into a second thematic exploration entitled the Ethics Campaign. This went on for nine months, but was a much more demanding process on account of the higher standard of writing the rambler held himself too by this point in his life. When it concluded, a new campaign was putatively announced to begin in 2009, and it was suggested that this probably wouldn't be the originally intended Narrative Campaign that would have completed the original trinity of themes based upon a definition of religion as comprising essentially of metaphysics, ethics and a central narrative or mythology.

The seasons came and went, but still no new campaign. It seemed as if the players of the non-fiction role-playing game had drifted away, and the rambler was becoming ever more swept into carefully orchestrated set pieces such as a serial on the metaphysics of Michael Moorcock, and another on religion in science fiction. Perhaps he was no longer interested in campaigns any more... The players soon forgot about the promised new campaign, and went about their business elsewhere on the internet, frittering away their time on social networks or being sucked into the fictional worlds of whatever games had attracted their attention.

Finally, three years after the second campaign had concluded, there was a abrupt transformation in the rambler's thinking brought about by a serial concerning the role of make-believe in fiction. Fiction could be understood as a game of make-believe, and this, it transpired, had all kinds of consequences that required careful pondering. The rambler realised that if there was going to be another major campaign, it wouldn't be about narrative so much as it would be about fiction, and that in many respects the fiction campaign had already began – it just hadn't been formally announced.

But what of the legend that if the final campaign were to come to pass it would mean the end of Only a Game? Was this just a myth, or was it some kind of mysterious prophecy? No-one knows for certain. But the rambler had come to realise that nothing is just a myth, just as nothing is only a game. But what the strange folktale about the end of the Game meant, well, that was not so easy to guess, and there was really only one way to find out: to play the final campaign, and to discover what would happen...

Welcome to the Fiction Campaign.