We all like our games, whether they be tennis, gossip, golf,
hunting, betting on horses or stocks, winning votes, customers,
quizzes, laughs, attention, or what not. Some of them are more
physical than others, although even domino or rummy is physical
of sorts. The pieces have to be put in place, and cards have to be
dealt, their faces hid from the partners, and the like. Some games
are more complex and elegant than others. Compare boxing to
fencing, checkers to chess, or even a poor ball game to a good
one. And some games are more serious than others. Playing the
stock market has probably led more often to pervasive success or
individual catastrophies than has a tennis game, a good tease, or
a yo-yo contest.

Life as lived by people, however, is more complex than all of
them. It is the game of a thousand games at once, played on all
kinds of levels and with one, two, ten, hundreds, and even millions
of partners all side by side. No single one of these games can be
claimed to be a fair representative of a person's game of life, and
most of them are not even adequate emissaries. Yet some of these
games man is engaged in, or a certain sample of such games, may
rank higher than other games or samples. To be played at all, some
games simply require more of a person. The purely physical,
simple, and irrelevant games will probably do less for us than the
intelligent, complex, and articulate ones. The latter are more likely
to approach a person's game of a thousand games, no matter how
short they still fall of representation.

An intelligent, complex, and articulate game may very well

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