Through Game Theory we have been duped into thinking our best strategy is to not trust one another. But beyond that Christ’s death on the cross – a deliberate ‘loss’ – subverts the very idea of strategy at all.

At Golgotha, God declares the end of strategy.

God will not play our power games.

God is.

God loves.

There is no win or lose.

All too quickly the early church – mostly under the influence of Paul, I would argue – lost this message and began to make itself into a ‘strategic organization’. We don’t really know the effect of Paul’s journey to Rome, what we do know is that in 313CE Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian. Why? Because he believed that the Christian God had given him victory in battle. Where did he get such a theology? Surely not from Christ. Constantine was a brilliant soldier, and an astute military strategist. Is is possible that there is a thread that leads from Paul’s strategy to evangelize Rome to Constantine’s conversion?

I’m clearly speculating. But what concerns me about Constantine is that from there on we see Christianity moving from a religion of the poor and the oppressed, to a religion held up by the rich and powerful as one which supports them.

This is a long way from the cross, and it seems a long way from us too. But I believe that if the church allows itself to be tied up in strategies, to ‘winning’ people for Christ, it will end be moving towards power-politics, towards support for wars, and away from genuine concern for ‘the other’.

To give oneself for ‘the other’ is to lose. It is to be engaged in transformative relationships, rather than tactical change. It is to love. To know grace. And grace and love have no strategy.

Thanks if you’ve got this far. Month old babies don’t make for clarity of thought, so apologies if it could all have been clearer

Peace over the Easter Weekend.

Technorati: Christ | Constantine | Politics | Power | Strategy | Via Crucis

But Jesus appears to confound all strategies. His incarnation is without fanfare. He tries to stop people talking about healings, he slips away for days at a time, and refuses even to defend himself against trumped up charges.

In the recent Adam Curtis documentary, ‘The Trap’, Curtis suggests that much of the distrust we see in modern life is rooted in the Game Theories that became popular in the Cold War. In a popular Game Theory problem, ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ it turns out that our best strategy is not to trust one another. If we want to win, we need to be selfish.

It struck me during that documentary that what Christ is doing when he stays silent at his trial is refusing to even enter the game that the strategists plotting against him have set up. It is as if he deliberately loses, because by losing he is totally subverting the very idea of the game.

And this is where Paul and Judas go terribly wrong. Presented with amazing opportunities to ‘do something for Jesus’, they fall into strategy, they throw their chips in and enter the game. Why didn’t Paul imitate Christ and keep his mouth shut? Because his strategy was always to get taken to Rome, and to take part in a ‘power play’ with Caesar.

On the cross the religious leaders taunted Jesus – if he’s so powerful, why doesn’t he save himself? This was the final temptation Jesus faced, the same one the devil ended with in the desert: take part in the power play. Jesus emptied himself of all that power, emptied himself of strategies, because he had to be emptied of the Self – the Self that pretends that it is powerful and influential. The Self that pushes the ego forward, rather than looking to the Other.

It is the same temptation that we face today. And my concern is that the movement known as the ‘Emerging Church’ is going to be tempted to be ‘strategic’ – to enter power-plays. And I think this would be a very wrong route. Which is where I’ll end in the next post.

Technorati: Game Theory | Strategy | The Trap | Via Crucis

Emerging Church: Game or Ritual?

As The Believer points out, one aspect of games such as Dungeons and Dragons is that of fantasy. When you enter a game, you are entering ‘role play’ – becoming someone else. Becoming a fantasy self.

This is something I have critiqued in more detail here. But to summarize, if the Emerging Church risks being seen as a game for some – with rules and power accumulating – then the parallel risk is that it becomes a fantasy, and will inevitably suffer collapse at the end of a fantasy cycle. It will become an ecclesiastic Gizmondo (beautiful article, well worth reading).

So what might be a way forward? How do we avoid the game, with its disjunctive effects, de-marking winners and losers? How do we avoid the unhealthy tendency to masculine competitiveness?

We might meditate on the gospel as a D&D scenario. A wise wizard gathers characters around him. They journey from place to place, meeting monsters, overcoming problems, asking questions. They have a quest, they are immersing themselves in a new kingdom. For some, the quest is a game – there are going to be winners and losers. And certainly, Jesus plays within a defined set of rules. He plays a part.

But, firstly, he also subverts the games different groups want him to play: he plays dirty. By bending the rules he subverts the the boundaries of the game, and thus begins to play in a whole new dimension. Others cry ‘foul’ and get him sent off… But it’s at that point that Jesus refuses to engage in this mission as a game at all. By dying, by ‘losing’, he presents the ultimate criticism of the competitive, religious fantasies that both his followers and opponents projected onto him.

Secondly, he presents a criticism of the power-accumulation that defines ‘good play’ in so many games. He empties himself. He works in the economy of gift, passing things on rather than pooling wealth.

Thirdly, he rises again to present an entirely new concept of play. The universe is now fluid and self-organizing. Where there were once rules, there are now governing dynamics. Where there were once blocked walls, places our characters could not go, limiting screens, there is now freedom to roam. Spirit. No temple.

Interestingly, it seems that games are heading that way too. Check out Spore (review here) – a game from the creator of the Sims series that begins in the primordial soup, and can zoom in and out between organism and galactic levels. Players evolve species – and their characteristics are totally within their own control. The game doesn’t have a stock list, its governing dynamics simply work out how a fish with 3 legs and a huge head might move. Species then create cities, interact on-line with other cities other players have created, and take on whole different galaxies. Due to be released in Spring next year, it promises to be an extraordinary experience.

If we can face down the fantasy-self of the emerging expressions we are a part of – as Christ did in the desert – we can evolve something truly new. But unless we do so, we are destined to create something competitive and regulated, with its own winners and losers, its own D&D neeks and sports jocks. Let’s hope we do so. Let’s pray we don’t go Gizmondo: promising so much, disappointing so many, costing someone a fortune.

Technorati Tags: Arcade Game, Dirt, Dungeons and Dragons, Gaming, Gizmondo, Religion, Spore

Game or Ritual? This was the key question addressed in Level One.

Lévi-Strauss made the distinction between Games (“they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality”) and Rituals (“it brings about a union, or in any case, an organic relation between two initially separate groups”) and I proposed that it might be fruitful to meditate on whether our expression of Church was one or the other. Certainly, from the initial responses, it seems people have identified an unhelpful spirit of competition in Emerging Churches, which may be a hangover from their very masculine roots.

Dungeons and Dragons, about which an article in The Believer inspired this series, inhabits a grey (actually, misty, foggy or windswept might be better adjectives) area between game and ritual. It was perhaps a (knee)jerk reaction to jock sports – which are heavy on winners – but still definitely has aspects of a true game.

One of those key aspects is the emphasis on accumulation. Though there may not be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ as such, ‘good’ play is exhibited by the accumulation of power and wealth: special weapons, keys to open secret doors, coins which give leverage in various ways. The more explicit connection came later in arcade games such as Super Mario: more stuff meant longer life and greater power. (My personal favourite: Xybots. An absolute classic. After each level you basically descended to a shop, where you could cash your coins in for bigger weapons, better shields etc.) The parallels for us are obvious enough.

One thing that both rituals and games have in common is the need for rules – boundaries around which the action takes place. Elsewhere in the issue The Believer looks at Oulipian literature. Oulipo stands for “Ouvoir de littérature potentielle”, a loose gather of French writers who write within close constraints precisely because they believe that the constraints can be very creative. Similarly, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Van Trier explored the Dogme 95 system of film making as a creative, not restrictive act.

The really good rituals or games are those where the rules are fixed enough for there to be tensions created, and not so fixed that the action either becomes totally predictable, or so free that things degenerate into chaos.

In our meditation on rituals and games as they might impact the Emerging Church, we might thus far conclude that a) power is more obviously accumulated in games, but power-games exist very clearly under the surface in rituals too (which will bring us back to connect with Gift), and b) games and rituals both need rules – the issue is the extent to which those rules create disjunction, rather than union. Rules ought to be creative. Too intimately linked with power accumulation, they become divisive, promote unhealthy competition, which leads to denominations of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.

As the Emerging Church continues to… emerge/solidify/denominate, I wonder: is it becoming more game-like? The rules, though never written, are becoming clearer, and some might argue that power-resource-accumulation is already happening around certain people/movements. Perception or reality, the disjunctive effects of that could be dangerous.

Level 3 soon…

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, Gaming, Power, Arcade Game, Religion, Theology

One of the main articles, by Paul La Farge, was an exploration of Dungeons and Dragons, which, in typical Believer style, meant a gorgeous meditation on the history and culture of the game, building to the author playing an actual game with D&D’s founder (sort of), Gary Gygax.

La Farge writes:

“The appeal of D&D is superficially not very different from the appeal of reading. You start outside something (Middle Earth, Dickens’ London) and you go in, bit by bit. Along the way, you may have occasion to think, to doubt, or even to learn. Then you come back: your work has piled up, it’s past your bedtime; people may wonder what you have been doing. D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play the game you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions.”

However, in the course of the article La Farge explores the extent to which D&D actually is a game. He quotes Lévi-Strauss:

“Games appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers.”

La Farge notes that there are no real winners or losers in D&D, and there is no real difference established. So, rather than being a game, it is instead, perhaps, closer to ritual. Again quoting Lévi-Strauss:

“Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse: it cojoins, for it brings about a union, or in any case, and organic relation between two initially separate groups.”

Having read the article I began to wonder if the Emerging Church was rather too similar to D&D than we might like to admit. Men spending too much time in dark, dungeon-like rooms exploring deep worlds? I don’t even want to go there!

More seriously, I do wonder if this distinction between game and ritual gives us something to reflect on. It is interesting to note that the clichéd D&D player was ‘nerd’ as opposed to ‘jock’. Jocks were definitely into games, because they knew they could win. Nerds went for something more conjunctive, perhaps because they knew they couldn’t.

One might argue that the Evangelical model of faith, with hell for the losers, is very much like a game, with very high stakes. And the Christian ‘jocks’ love to play. But is that what God wanted? Has the Emerging Church become the ‘nerd’ version, the non-competitve, no losers model? We might want to claim that the expressions of church we are involved in are fully based on ritual… but are we ignoring the sense of competitiveness about our success when we do so?

So, I think it is worth reflecting: is the Church playing at game or ritual?

For now I’ve run out of credit.

for more soon…

Technorati Tags: Church, Gaming, Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons, Religion