for a time, there was nothing. nothing was discernable from any vantage point. and not just in any of the major cities, but even in the woods and by the rivers and in the valleys there was still nothing. there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt. there was a source of knowledge, and authority, and it made the world work. we played imaginative games that echoed the principles we could see in this safe security - the good guys and the bad guys, us and them.

then there were lots of teachers, both good and bad. there is huge world that many people have tried to understand, and over time through refining those ideas we have a better idea of how the world works for more complicated, more mystifying reasons, reasons we can only understand a small part of one field of all the reasons. we were gonna have to think real hard and real long after listening to a ton of other people who had thought real hard and real long. if we got real lucky and were real smart and clever and dedicated we could maybe get to disprove the way other people said it was over years of long and hard work writing scholarly articles and making proofs. because what all those people before us had said had helped to make the world work all that time we hadnt been around for, so it had to mean something. it had to have made the world work. we played ominous games about destruction in plentiful, peaceful settings, in plush chairs, in comfortable living rooms.

then there was the internet. suddenly there were these discernable figures writing on blogs. i wrote in my blogs and you wrote in your blogs and they wrote in their blogs - or if not, livejournals, or facebooks, or myspaces, or forums, or message boards, or instant messenger, or e-mail, or youtube videos, or art on the internet, or songs or anything else. there were distant discernible figures. they offered explanations (often explanations of how other people's explanations didn't quite add up) of how the world must have worked because they were a part of the new way that the world works. the internet is the new way the world works. and so some blogger, speaking only through his blog and his e-novel and then later his printed works, which are the same thing except they are in print, and so now this blogger tells me how the world works, because he tells a story of the world that radically contradicts other world views and yet rings true for us, or at least, some of it does for some of us some of the time. his blog doesn't oppose the new republic or the new york post or the chicago sun-times or the british broadcasting corporation. now they all tell us how the world works. now we play guessing games about complex equations with lots of variables that we don't know the math behind. we play games of negation or of affirmation. we play games of who is right, of who gets what.

why do we play so many games?