be a game with few and simple rules. As a matter of fact, it often
is. Bridge, e.g., is composed of four sets of thirteen cards, each
ranking in turn from thirteen to one in power. After shuffling and
dealing, the four players try to make the most of the ranks and
powers that they have in their hands. All the rest of the game as
well as the entire science of bridge follow of necessity from these
rules. Chess would be another such game, although chance is
practically ruled out here. Whatever happens in chess is the doing
of the players, whereas in bridge the players get any one of a
practically infinite number of distributions of cards to play with.

Are there such intelligent, complex, and articulate games also
in the game of a thousand games? And are they ever serious enough
by themselves to stand a chance, even a slight one, of being fair
representatives of the players' lives?

This is the question that I kept asking myself after finding
too little satisfaction with many of the choices that psychiatry and
clinical psychology have made in these respects. All psychological
tests, including the projective tests, are games of that nature, i.e.,
supposedly samples of how the person in question is playing in real
life, but not too many tests have lived up to their promises, or
have done so only in a rather clumsy and, above all, quite limited
way. Diagnostic schemes and interviewing patterns, oriented toward
a person's affects and motives, may have been more successful, but
often they are not very articulate in their rules and regulations.
Particular players may hit the jackpot with a person in question,
but often they do not know how they did it -- a predicament that
cannot make for a very good game. And if these schemes and
patterns are articulate, their compositions often tend to derive from
a hodgepodge of reasons or no reason at all.

Counselling of a certain kind, psychotherapy, and psycho-
analysis are about the only "games" that stand a chance. They
do seem to sample a person's real life. Yet, they do not do so be-
cause the rules are few, simple, or even outspoken; rather they
sample a person's real life because the players take their time, and,
as they go along, implicit rules develop together with a handful of
explicit ones. The latter, however, are heuristic principles rather
than rules, somewhat like Darwin's survival of the fittest. If the

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