Daily Reflection 3.11.21

[readoldthings]

Sun Tzu tells us:

Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. 
  

One of my occasional bad habits is playing strategy video games. I'm not much of a gamer and I don't play regularly. Instead, I go through a phase of a few weeks or months where I play a lot of games, and then I don't play any at all for months or years after that. So I don't have a wide variety of games I play-- just a few, and all of them old. My favorite is called Mount and Blade: Warband. This is a medieval-type of game in which you start out as an errant warrior and you can slowly rise to become a king or a general or a merchant prince, depending on how you want to play. I like these sorts of games especially because they're almost unbelievably boring and don't require very much attention, except during big battles and the like. So I use them when I want to do something else, like listening to a lecture series on a subject which I couldn't concentrate on if I didn't also have a distraction. 

I'm getting to a point, and it isn't just how nerdy I am. The point is, in a game like Mount and Blade-- or my other favorite, Civilization 4-- note that both of these titles are old enough to have been replaced twice over by sequels; one of the advantages to not playing a game until it's 10-15 years old is that it's still new to you but it's either cheap or free--

Anyway. What I was going to say is, in a video game like Mount and Blade, you can win by doing the exact same thing every single time. 

And this is true of videogames generally.

Of course, this exactly contradicts what Sun Tzu is saying here. 

When you're dealing with human beings, if you do the same thing every time, you will eventually lose. This is true whether you're trying to win a war or a fistfight, or a political campaign or a marketing war. Human beings adapt. 

On the other hand, when you're dealing with your own internal Enemy, with your own passions, addictions, and habits of thought and behavior, here again the advice is: Do the same thing. Every time. The cultivation of good habits is the cultivation of good habits; meditation is meditation; prayer is prayer; these things will always work in the overcoming of vice. 

And they also always work in the overcoming of those vices, passions, and bad habits which seem to have an external cause-- that is, which originate in evil spirits. Demons, in other words, are more like opponents in a videogame than like human beings. 



Knowing this, don't we also learn something about the difference between God and the Devil?

Comments

[sdi]

So the juxtaposition of Sun Tzu's words with your commentary tying it to video games reminds me of an old lecture by video game designer Brian Moriarty. He's talking about the Paul is Dead phenomenon, and what game designers can learn from it: things that are arbitrary, even random, when dressed up to look like they're not, can act as something of a distraction or feint on the mind of the game player, turning it back upon itself:

We didn’t know why a hand kept popping up over over Paul’s head. But it had to mean something, didn’t it? And look how far we took that simple, meaningless pattern. Let your players employ their own imaginative intelligence to fill in the gaps in your worlds you can’t afford to close. Chances are, they’ll paint the chaos in exactly the colors they want to see. What’s more, they’ll enjoy themselves doing it. But the credit will be yours.

This isn't directly related to this verse... it's more applicable to one you covered several days ago (If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the Enemy from engaging us [...] All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way.). And it's exactly what I was talking about in a comment on that day, too... what I took as you repeatedly using a tactic (talking about diversion) may say more about myself than it does about you, right?

That ties back to what Sun Tzu says about knowing yourself, and knowing your opponent: what Sun Tzu and Moriarty are describing is a way of misdirecting that process: using a getting your opponent to assign his own properties to you, thereby impeding him ability to understand either. And as Sun Tzu said, if you know neither your opponent nor yourself...

Anyway, it's a fun lecture and might be of interest as an hour-long commentary on two verses :)