Just suppose for a moment…  If you could imagine the ultimate game, one which you and I are outside observers,… As nonparticipants, god-like spectators removed, we notice something: the unending suffering, nuanced, background discomfort all the way to extreme agony of the players.

Additionally notice how the self-aware creatures assume their suffering is a direct result of an origin-mistake, a misunderstanding of the fixed power-relationship between a founding member of humanity and the deity/creator. One “mistake” leads to another which leads to another, suffering compounds, fratricide, war and enslavement as time passes. The arc of history is one of tragedy. Desire, life as desire, is no less than more fuel onto the a firestorm of suffering. Many have a bad conscience about that, as if the trauma is their fault. (Turns out they were in error about being at fault, but the insight being obscured and unnoticed, on account of their belief.)

One more thing, just suppose the deity-being that creates is empathic, able to “love.”

It is not only the sentient creatures, who must overcome suffering. Moreover how does the empathic creator assess this tortured place, this game-planet of unending suffering to be worthwhile? After all the creator is sole source of the totality of this agony. How does it overcome suffering? Is the tableau of suffering, life-as-suffering something that the creatures can manage to embrace?

Therefore the highest question of philosophy: Has existence any meaning at all?

…supposing him
to have been a god of love:
what a delight it would have been
for him to create a suffering mankind
in order that he himself might suffer divinely
and super-humanly from the sight of the continual torture of
his creatures, and thus to tyrannise over himself!

And, again, supposing him
to have been not only a god of love,
but also a god of holiness,

we can scarcely conceive
the ecstasies of this divine ascetic
while creating
sins
and sinners
and eternal punishment,
and an immense place of eternal torture

below his throne where there is
a continual weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!

In other words,
pain would be given to others
in order that pain might be given to one’s self,
so that in this way one could triumph over one’s self
and one’s pity to enjoy the extreme voluptuousness of power.—

Forgive me these digressions, which
come to my mind when I think of all the possibilities in the vast
domain of psychical debaucheries to which one may be led by
the desire for power!

The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans by J. M Kennedy, aphorism 113