MAGAZINE ARQ 55 | December 2003

Playings

The dark room has no boundaries, like a game of blindman’s buff. Boundless space appears suddenly in a small place. We can build different towers with the same 48, red, yellow and blue wooden blocks (don’t let it fall!). There are the Chinese puzzles, seven pieces that form endless figures, from a cat to a ship. We win a kingdom if we can hop on one foot without treading on the lines on the ground; we’re out if we guess wrong how many dice in our shaker.
Both large and small-scale decisions sometimes reflect this state of alertness that helps us react to the unexpected. Our player’s luck is an equation of chance, rules we did not choose, astuteness and skill. All players start equal when the game begins, but by the end there is a single winner.