[FRIAM] A public letter to Nick, cc: any that write here

[uǝlƃ ↙↙↙]

As a kid, we had a version of soccer called "hackball". There were really no rules except "Don't purposefully hurt people." Each of us had multiple instances of hurting each other. Broken bones were not rare. There was a lot of blood. Scoring was pretty ill-defined. Etc. 

To us, it was a lot of fun. But to an onlooker, it was nonsense. [⛧] Each new person brought their own baggage to the "game". But I'm using scare quotes because they're necessary.

A tennis game performed for an audience is a game. Our ... collaboratively, dynamically, lazily defined "soccer" was nothing like a game. There really was no winner or any kind of concept of "success". If your posts to this list (or anywhere) are *intended* to be a game, you need a way to enforce the rules. You need a moderator/referee. Until/unless you get that, your performative game of tennis is *nothing* like these conversations.


[⛧] To head off a false inference, we had a handful of girls who would play. So it wasn't the merely physical aggression of males.

On 2/15/21 11:56 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> When two tennis players slash it out for the cup they are playing against
> one another.  But they are playing for us.  Why can't that be a kind of
> conversation?

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