The most meaningful move in the game is to enter it for it’s impossible to choose to leave. Sometimes a player is kidnapped by a loved one and their brainboard is removed: as far as the players are concerned they just become a different person. The one who played the game, typologically prefigured by the person who had yet to play, died during the surgery no matter what their body did next.
This is not to say that people don’t die while playing the game. The mechanics of each encounter are agreed on the spot by the players as well as the details of the stake; what makes the game an instance rather than a category is the nature of the bet. Only knowledge, memories, instincts, skills, feelings are recognized as valuable. Brainboards record the stake, register the winner, and wield the delicate brutality of programmable RNA to burn from the losers’ mind whatever it was that they had waged. (Asking what the winner wins, other than not losing, is to misunderstand the nature of players and game.)
Betting one’s will to live is an obvious way to die. There are others, subtler. Most people can survive more than they think. Yet souls have knick-knacks hiding load-bearing walls.
As in every game there’s a game played on top of it: every win and loss a move on itself. Waging and losing a hard-won vision of grace can be a successful gambit or a shortcut in some unshareable undeniable vision of a precisely carved-out self. Stakes can be planned to shape the behavior of others, less to win the game than to prevail somewhere and against somebody else. Once your morals and goals are up for grabs you end up playing a zero-sum game against yourself. Every game won or lost a nudge towards some blind tropism from some temporary alliance of fragments of your self.
Few of those who haven’t lost their capability for horror ever experience anything else. Kidnappers aren’t entirely selfish, nor their victims in general ungrateful. But those in the game wish to remain so. If there’s a collaborative side to the game, a stable emergent of the never-ending free-for-all, is the way they protect from non-players the awful integrity of their neural shackles. People can for example lose the parts of themselves that make them incapable of murder.
This is rare, though. There are parts of cities, and most importantly parts of the economy, where the game is everything and everything is the game. The compulsive patterns of neural sacrifice makes their shifting selves strange and unstable but far from unproductive. Players win and lose riches — an irrelevant side marker to the true tally inside their skulls — but the game grows wealthier. Tha game expands, with constraints, with consequences, with side effects.
It’s not hard to suspect that the creation of the game was a move in some other contest. The brainboard quickly burns that suspicion away.