After dinner we played a card game that included our almost-five year old grand daughter. A simple game, called “Go Fish” was played with intense delight by the child. The game is a matter of alphabet matching. She is learning the letters of the alphabet. Her pleasure visibly grows as she masters the rules of the game.

There are many “games,” varieties of activities involving rules which are informal, unwritten, tacit, that we affirm as guardrails, boundaries for social processes. Ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks, whether executed in “old school” fashion by verbally communicating at the counter, or online by iPhone involves understanding a correct sequence of actions that are key to success.

These lines of quotation written by Nietzsche remind that a pivot point of play, is the wide variance between the spirit/intelligence of the players. I have often poorly estimated the differences in ability to learn, to process experience, the intelligence of individuals around me.

Life is a collection of games. The species homo sapiens are pack animals, players together in an array of overlapping games. There’s competition, and  there are games of collaboration (team play). Sometimes the game may be a deadly one. The player across the table is in fact an enemy that intends to kill you in the course of play.

Intelligence matters. Concealment is an aspect of a game. Take care, hide your cards until the propitious moment to make your play! How often have I taken pains to appear as an average player.

Nietzsche observes that a style of obscuring one’s mind is also a “tell.” A tell is an involuntary manifestation, a subtle clue linked to the hand which one holds. We twist and turn, to cover our eyes,…

Is my practice of virtue, kindness, generosity, civility – a successful pretense? What about enthusiasm? And you?

There are people
who cannot avoid the fact
that they have spirit,
however much they might turn and twist,

holding up their hands
to prevent their eyes from giving them away
(as if their hands did not betray them too!)

: in the end,
they are always shown
to be hiding something,
namely spirit.

One of the most subtle ways
of deceiving people
(at least for as long as this is possible),
and successfully pretending
to be more stupid than you really are
(a skill that is as handy as an umbrella, in day-to-day life),
is enthusiasm:
including what belongs to it
– virtue, for instance.

Because, as Galiani said,
and he must have known
–: vertu est enthousiasme.

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Butler, aphorism 288