Nothing more serious than a game
ALEXANDER DEMENTEV, EDITED BY VIOLETA KERSZBERG
Someone throws a die, someone says “again,” and the world reorganizes itself under those small laws. In a courtyard, two children draw the lines of a board in the dirt with a stick. A stone becomes a ball, a rope marks the goal. A plastic table, four chairs, a deck of cards.
Perhaps everything began with a game. Civilization itself, before anything else, was that too: a shared wager.
Neither pastime nor distraction, play is the stage where we invent meaning. A community is a community because it plays. That is the true exaltation of the game.
Everywhere on earth, someone is playing. In the dusty courtyards of Mexico, spinning tops hum with fire. In the cafés of Istanbul, hands strike the pieces of tavla — the dry sound of chance. In Nigeria, children press their fingers into the sand to move the seeds of ayo. In Moscow’s parks, old men confront queens and pawns over frozen tables; in India, carrom players slide their disks with the tropical grace of chess masters.
In Andean towns, coins are still tossed at the toad, and in Iceland, when snow closes the streets, card tables glow like little hearths.
There’s a moment, just before the deal, when anything could happen. No one yet knows the hand they’ll get, but everyone holds the same tremor: the illusion that this time luck might change. Board games are like that — small theaters of the world. Within them we argue, lie, celebrate, curse; we negotiate pacts and betrayals with the same solemnity as in a Russian novel.
For centuries they were the heart of social life. In the nineteenth century, cards were almost a religion: played in salons, on ships, in trenches, in kitchens. The deck served both to kill time and to read the future. Every match is a ceremony of uncertainty — no one knows which card will fall.
The game, always the game: a language without borders. It travels the world as a universal tongue. Playful symbols become a lingua franca: chess, born in India, reshaped in Persia, refined in Arab cafés and triumphantly adopted in Europe, ended up as a global sport — with championships, federations, and a shared mythology on every continent. Today it’s played in parks, on screens, in prisons. Thirty-two pieces repeating the same battle for centuries.
We like to think of play as the opposite of seriousness. That playing means wasting time, taking a break, drifting. But anyone who has seen a child defend their invented rules knows there’s nothing graver than a game in motion. Johan Huizinga, the philosopher who wrote Homo Ludens in 1938, said it his way: civilization is played.
And he was right. Because play doesn’t live only in rules, or in the cleverness of the next move. It lives in shared emotion — in the body leaning over the table, in the laughter or fury that bursts when someone cheats, in the silence before a good hand. Most of us don’t remember the Sicilian Defense or the Queen’s Gambit, but we remember the afternoon when a grandfather let himself lose, with a smile that lasts longer than all victories. Nothing more serious than a game.
It’s enough for someone to say, “Shall we play?” and everything changes tone: the air lightens, hierarchies dissolve, ages blur. Above all, we draw closer — the game never exists in solitude. It calls, unites, socializes. In it we recognize ourselves as members of a community, even if that community lasts only a single match. There’s a secret equality in play: for a moment, we are all players.
Each gesture — shuffling, throwing a die, hiding a card, moving a piece — is a form of contact. Even rivals need each other; one cannot exist without the other. In shared play there’s something of the first fire: a silent agreement to imagine together. Perhaps that’s why, when it ends, a faint nostalgia remains, as if a small society had dissolved.
If games grant us community, their absence takes it away. When play goes out, something in the world goes out with it. Human history is full of games that vanished without anyone noticing their last turn. How does a game die? Not all at once, but little by little: one afternoon someone promises a rematch and never returns; another leaves the deck in a drawer, planning to take it out tomorrow; one day, there’s simply no one left to play with.
Objects remain: a deck without a table, a board without pieces, a die lost in a drawer — a game that has lost its rules. Like a language without speakers.
In fin-de-siècle Austria-Hungary, for instance, Tarok reigned: seventy-eight cards, like tarot, filled with imperial figures and allegories of fate. It was played with cunning, deceit, small calculated betrayals. Each match was a miniature novel. It’s no coincidence that Zweig, Roth, or Musil mentioned it: Tarok condensed the psychology of an empire playing at maintaining order while the world was changing its rules.
Today only its remains survive: illustrated decks kept in glass cases, the colors still vivid, the figures upright — but no one quite remembers how to move them.
A deck whose rules were never passed down. A pack turned relic, a portable museum of collective emotion. Perhaps civilization itself is nothing more than that: an interrupted game we keep trying to resume.
