Toy soldiers: as innocent as evil.

 

“The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”

Johan Huizinga

Games workshop make toy soldiers for addults. Miniatures are a direct descendant of toy soldiers what distinguishes the two is marketing terms to allow the illusion that playing with little figurines is not what it is. Rules in a game are a perspective on play. A framework of the roles of those who play. All games are distinguished by the role and the role by expectation. Every game is a RPG (including Zelda). 

Playing with toy soldiers in the context of a game. Is to empathize with inanimate objects. To allow our brains to connect and project on to the realm of is from the real of what could be. There is something very primeval about it. Man being distracted by the works of his hand be they fiction or games is idolatry yet the act of play shares life with the inanimate. Breaths life into the inanimate if only as long as there is play.

Why do we play? It is one of the things we are made of in the deadly serious game we call being alive. Culture is the magic circle all our intent is filtered through. We are role-playing life so far as life is personified by living. Language is the vessel of play. The brick and mortar of games. It carries our intent and shapes it. To quote the sultan from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen “life is rather like a game in that it is important to win”.

Harold blooms whole literary theory on the anxiety of influence. Is documenting the playful game of culture. Literature in many ways is a roleplaying game where the rules are who can owe the past the least. To change the past and possess it, if only through the act of living.

Poetry is truth and marketing is the lie that those who own cuture use to sell it to us… but play gives it life.  Play is the living part of life. The part that makes the tragic losses and pain of struggling with the clay to draw out its potential as a piece on the board. Every time we continue in play we learn not to get too attached to any rule system because they are only a framework of play.

We are the toy soldiers of cultural energy and the personification of potential. The vessel of what could be waging a war against what is. Mere pieces in a game that the fates are playing… and so we continue onwards till chance or choice takes us off the board. But the prize is the play. And the liberation of play is an awareness of our place within it.