Nietzsche and Game Gene Theory: Nietzsche is Tied with Huizinga for Being Nearest to Game Gene Theory

Nietzsche, Friedrich
1844, 15 October to
1900, 25 August

by Geoffrey Hamilton
November 5, 2005

I began this survey of philosophers in 2003 looking for a thinker who may have discovered the logic of the game gene before I did. I expected to find someone who would use the idea of a game seeking disposition within life. To date I have yet to find that specific reference. However, right now, besides Huizinga, I think Nietzsche comes very close.

I recall the first I heard of Nietzsche was back in 1982. I wrote my first play Iblis and my partner in the college theatre production mentioned the "Superman" and "Will to Power" theories. I soon afterwards discovered that Hitler honoured Nietzsche for these and other ideas, and so I was turned away from a serious look.

Coincidentally, at the same time I had come to believe that all actions by people are essentially selfish and driven by a desire for the feeling of power of some kind. This, now I discover, is what Nietzsche also believed in in his will to power theory.

Eventually, I grew away from his idea as a general motive in life because too many things are clearly not done for any feeling of power. Nietzsche's theory that the feeling of power can be created even in the most lowly of situations is an exageration which nonetheless fails to cover all actions. I began to look for other drives.

My research material for the late 80s consisted in science magazines, science radio and tv programs along with various fiction and the constant observation of people in general. My main literary influences at this time were Thomas Kuhn and Dostoevsky.

While working on my first novel The Thought I eventually came to a concept I called Context Theory and to the theory which I temporarily called The Trick (a genetic motive for living and reproducing which tricks life into existing and having offspring.) Later I would incorporate all this into game gene theory. I also found simolution made more sense than evolution at this stage. I finally read a Nietzsche book in 1994, The Birth of Tragedy and a year later, The Geneology of Morals, along with bits and pieces of his other works. I enjoyed him and saw some parrellels put didn't pursue him much further.

At the time my own theories left me with two main questions that still needed to be answered: I couldn't explain why people watch or play games and I couldn't understand which particular motive could trick life to exist all the time. Now, in 2005 with the gamegene theory nearly complete, I realize that in 1996, before I had found my answer, I was at a similar stage as Nietzsche was in his final writings, except he didn't ask these same two questions. He had different games to play so couldn't go to exactly the same questions.

These are things that are parrellel.

Nietzsche tells us the first thing to examine is a philosopher's moral stance if you want to understand why their concept turned out as it did. My own context theory says examine the context before the content, which is in effect the same advise. In respect of our moral ideas though we contrast sharply. He relished life and wanted to encourage it through a kind of loser's elitism, meaning he attacked all popular tastes and judgment almost just for their popularity, but usually for their 'absolutism without a cause'.

My moral concept is that I am interested in mitigating life and ending all suffering through a kind of democratic nihilism: meaning, if life cannot choose to come into existence then it shouldn't.

These two moral poisitions are fundemental to where we ended up. He wanted to bring a violent imperial virility to life. I want a stirile, but fun nontheless, individualism which can bring peace and silence to existence.

Even with these great moral differences he frequently came close to discovering the game gene concept. He skirts over it again and again. He sees a drive within the character of people that is inherited which allows false ideas to have meaning and even may cause life to thrive, but he could not see the final step to games due, in my opinion, to his elitism.

Instead of accepting the fantasies and falshoods of people as evidence of a phenomenon to be studied, he attacks it with the premise, hidden even from himself, that truth really should be absolute - you dumb peons - or it's worth nothing.

This is not to say that he openly supports absolutist assertions, rather he is one of the greatest critics of them, which he, and his time, lumped in with metaphysics and so poisoned that well. But like all famous philosophers, the metaphysics of the first premise is something he excells in.

His main premise as a seeker of knowledge is that all knowledge is relative. From there he promotes science as one way to obtain systematic relative information. But he doesn't want to over-emphasize the abilities of scientists to reason and does find much wrong with them. What he does in his hap-hazard way is discover most of what I call context theory.

Nietzsche begins by noticing that people create concepts in their own image, make people out of them, cherish or spank them like children, lie to themselves with them. He sees through it to how there is no actual defining line between any part of knowledge. All of it is continuous in time and space and even the tools used to attack knowledge like mathamatics and logic have no relation to reality except as our children. So far it is all very similar to many of the ancients including the sophists and skeptics.

Context theory, likewise, was an outgrowth of my realization that all choices of context are arbitrary and that the lack of any absolute context means that all contexts are arbitrary and personal - all are equally correct and incorrect including the concept of a human. However, I nevertheless recognized that choices are made, so I proceeded to discover how they are made. The game gene theory is the answer, and it has the explanitory power.

Nietzsche came close to discovering the game gene. His first book has the claim that existence can only be justified through art not ethics. In The Gay Science he even says man is biologically adapted to lies and errors, even innocent and happy ones, which arrive from an intellectual instinct to play. It's almost the game gene theory, but he seems to have said this by accident because he doesn't use it again. He does elaborate on it though and by doing so seems to anticipate simolution o r evolution-with-no-values and the connection to the game gene.

Nietzsche's version of simolution says that those who get reality wrong and think in absolute terms with clear delineations will have survival advantages over the truth seeking skeptics - they have what he calls life-preservative errors/power. Those that live in an accurate frame of mind will always be in flux, while those that are illogical and unjust represent the "primeval mechanism" at work in all of us. What I would say is the game gene's function.

In doing this he says that we make objects into people. We cannot help it we must add all the value we imbue people with onto anything that we can invest ourselves in. This observation is essential in seeing how the game gene works. We are not objects or subjects, animal, vegetable or mineral. To each of us, and that means every life form , we are, to each other, either part of someone's games, or we are nothing. Which is why some of the best human relationships are with objects like cars or stamps, and in inter-species friendships, like pets.

There are masses of parallels between Nietzsche and my theories, but the main ones of context, gamegene, and simolution theories are in his works in embryonic stages. Perhaps given more time in his life, or given a different personality, he might have found the game gene for himself.

GRH