It’d be too easy to say, The Great Game is that of Life, wouldn’t it? But what would the other games be, then: side-quests? diversions? bonus rounds? What would be the main purpose of it? Honestly, there’s too many questions for the Great Game to be Life. In this paper, I will demonstrate that the Great Game is that of Laundry, and that Life is one of the Other Games that everyone likes to play now and again.
Laundry: everyone does it. We dirty our clothes; we wash them, wring them, dry them on a line or in a drum; we fold them later and put them away, with the promise to take them out and dirty them again. The Laundry cycle is a larger version of the infamous Spin Cycle in a washer. It never ends, has never begun; it only continues, and changes, like the medievel Wheel of Fortune.
In all periods in history, Laundry has been done: even before we wore clothes, I am sure we washed Ourselves now and again, our skin the garment of our lives. And afterward, with skins, we’d beat them, I’m sure, to rid them of fleas; wring them in the river to remove the ever-present smoke smell, hang them above the fire to reinvigorate the smokiness as we cavorted in the recesses of our caves. Later, we had fine clothes spun of plant fibers, and those we washed as well; and even later, with fibers of our own making, from labs and from oil deep in the earth, we washed them, trying to rid them of that oiliness that is their very nature. Of course, no soap can wash a garment of itself. So we continue doing Laundry.
But is Laundry a game? That is the important, the non-obvious, question. I leave the answering of that as an exercise to the reader.
Now that you’ve shown Laundry is a game, we can easily see that It is the true Great Game. Only Laundry has a purpose, a goal outside itself: all else is merely folly, wasting time between loads of Laundry. All else is another, lesser game, a diversion. Including eating, including children, including love, and death, and preparation, and destruction, and art. We’re just waiting for the final Spin Cycle to throw us on the line to be dried.