Of My Moleskine Notebook

What’s in a game? A game that has an objective after it’s many twists and turns and pieces of confusion alike. What’s in an objective of a game? Play to win.
Three words I have read so many times in the same order of sequence. Like a mantra or a magic wish that might just come true if recollected about often enough. Play to win, play to win, play to win, play to win.

Play. Win.

In a game with an objective, there is the main winner, there is the main loser. Shades of gray do not count at the first basic stage, because right now, on the first game, everything is simple. You’ve got practically nothing to lose, except for the reputation of not losing.

So you play, you calculate, back fire, launch and block. You score, and realise it was an opening slot for your opponent, who strikes back and puts you back in your first square in three steps in clacks of four. But you win nonetheless. May be by a slight pinch. May be by a landslide. Either way, triumph under your nails have never felt so good before.

So you play yet another game. And become a statistic. Or win. Again.

These past few months have had me in that situation. A cold slaughter of an innocent mind of another if not my own. Not to refer to a real board game, but to life itself. I realised that the more mannered and polite the game is to be, the even more cruel torture it causes.

The instinct to win is not from the inside of us. It is merely a whole new person entirely which takes up your anatomy with the sole desire to conquer. It’s a state of mind, a whole new person in psychosomatic format, burned into a disk, to be taken out at times of needed will. In other words, the winner is Winzipped and kept away.

Like what Yasmin Ahmad once said, something about the people who are the closest to you that hurt you the most. Well, the winner is you, and when she is down and feeling revengeful, she attacks. She hurts. The winner plays to win over you. The loser made empty shell of useless tactics and strategies.

So tell me, if you were playing a cold hearted game of two players with limited time aside. And that other Winner came in.

What would happen?