Life as a Stoic Board Game

Stoicism is a framework we can use to understand why we do what we do and thus bring our behaviors more in line with rationality. We can apply this framework to make our choices more conscious and rational, as opposed to being more animalistic and driven by our less rational impulses. I’ve personally expanded on that framework to use Stoicism as a lens to treat life like a board game and to play my turns as consciously and rationally as possible. Pierre Hadot reminds us that Epictetus says that life can be like a board game:

Epictetus used a comparison taken from dice games:

“How, then, can one preserve firmness and calmness of mind, and at the same time the attentiveness that saves us from careless and thoughtless action? By following the example of those who play at dice.  The counters are indifferent, the dice are indifferent. How can I know in what way the throw will fall? But to be attentive and skilful in making use of whatever does fall, that is now my task. And so likewise, my principal task in life is this: to distinguish between things, and establish a division between them and say, ‘External things are not within my power; choice is within my power.” Discourses 2.5.2-4 

These days there are many types of board games we play.  Press your luck games involve seeing how far you can go towards an objective while avoiding bad consequences. Engine building games have you use in-game mechanics to tweak your point/resource generating engine to accomplish an objective. Deck building games have you purchase various cards to fill out a card deck you pull from to play your turns. There are too many other types of games to list, but taking all of them together as a larger metaphor of living a good life works well to help us determine right action.  

Sometimes all we can do in the game of life is play the cards we are dealt. By understanding more about both our current situation and how we’re interpreting it, we can play our cards selectively instead of just tossing out a random card out of our hand. We can expand things so much more than Epictetus did. Let’s examine how I would play life as a board game through a Stoic lens.

The Dichotomy of Control and the Three Stoic Disciplines

First and foremost: I’d mostly pay attention to how I place my pieces, as opposed to what my opponents do. They will do what they do. I have no control over it, so there’s no point in dwelling on it. This is a very loose example of what the Stoics refer to as the Dichotomy of Control (DoC). The only thing we control in life is our judgments and decisions about handling what happens. If the only way I can be happy with playing my turn is if someone else makes specific moves, there’s a good chance I will have a miserable turn.

From a strategy standpoint, there is merit in paying attention to what your opponents are doing. But life isn’t about winning; it’s about playing well. I have a lot more fun playing games with my friends when I focus on remembering my goal is to have fun, and focusing on my turn often allows me to do just that. I have a friend who takes a notoriously long time deciding what to do for his turn in a game. I have no control over how long he takes. If I focus on the waiting, I’m likely to get frustrated playing with him. Instead, if I realize there’s nothing I can do until he makes his move, I can enjoy the current experience, chat with my other friends, contemplate future options, or even sit quietly for a few moments while he decides.

In many ways, the ability to focus on what you control instead of what you can’t is a resource that can be spent. The Stoics even have a term for this resource: the Discipline of Assent. Life is less about what happens to us and more about how we interpret those things. Life happens, and we make judgments about what all of that means.  But we have a moment of time to decline assenting to those judgments. Thus we can change the narrative that unfolds in our minds, and therefore we can change the downstream emotions that result. If I walk up to someone on the street and push them, they will likely be upset with me. However if I push them out of the way of a speeding car, they will hopefully be a bit more appreciative. It’s not the stimuli that matter, but rather how the person interprets the situation. We can train ourselves to reserve judgment on things until we can pass them through the filter of reason. Therefore we will be less subjected to the whims and vagaries of our impulses and emotions and, thus, less affected by outside sources. In other words, they get to ignore a lot of the status effects of their fellow gamers. They no longer have to accept “I’m in a bad mood today because some jerk cut me off in the morning,” and instead can understand their mood is mostly dependent upon the narrative they are telling themselves.

This, in turn, allows them to apply the Discipline of Desire. Depending on what judgements we assent to, we’re then going to make a decision about what is desirable or not. This is also referred to as the Discipline of Desire.  Our evaluations of what is good and bad influence what we want to happen, and by exercising control of our assents, we can change our desires. In game terms, this means we get to be happy however our turn works out because it’s what we have built our engine to ingest whatever happens, instead of only focusing on what we hoped would happen. By focusing on what game we’re playing instead of what we hope our fellow players do, we can enjoy our game that much more. 

The final discipline in Stoicism is the Discipline of Action. The Discipline of Action is a natural extension of the Disciplines of Assent and Desire. If you correctly exercise the first two disciplines, you will act rightly. In game terms, how can you do anything other than play well and enjoy yourself if you remember that you are playing a game that is meant to be fun? 

Prosochē

According to Hadot,

Prosochē is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit.” (Hadot, 1995, 84).

Stoicism is also about aretē, which is sometimes translated as Virtue, but can is also translated as Excellence according to Chrisoph Jedan: “The Stoics took for granted the general meaning of aretē as ‘some sort of excellence’” (Jedan, 2012, 51). One of the major goals of Stoicism is to move in harmony with our inner nature, which translates to playing our game as well as we can with the player mat we have and the in-game “engines” we’ve built. In this case, engines are mechanics to the game of life that involve taking inputs of one resource (time, money, cognitive energy, etc.) and translating it into a resulting resource (money, status, skill in a task, etc.). By understanding more about the various inputs and outputs, we can structure our turns better based on the resources we have on hand and are looking for. By understanding what engines I use, I can monitor my inputs and outputs to ensure a seamless flow in processing things and handling life.

Part of that engine is my internal nature, makeup, and character.  I refer to my character as my player mat. A player mat is like a character sheet from Dungeons and Dragons, but it is also a place that often stores our resources and otherwise represents our current state.  It has various stats, some of which we can increase by “investing points” or spending time training.  Some stats are set.  But the more we understand about our specific makeup and what makes us tick, the easier time we have with the Game of Life. As Plato was fond of saying, “Know Thyself” and a good understanding of your player mat is a good way of getting a firm grasp on who you are and what you are capable of in the moment. By focusing on my strengths and what I do well, I can know how to capitalize on them. Similarly, if I know what I’m weak at, I can be better and take that into account. I then have the choice to either give it more training time, or avoid those areas, depending on what is right in the situation. Our player mat and in-game engines are all based on what our past experiences are. Stoicism encourages us to understand them both so we can rationally and consciously choose how we play our turns. As Margaret Graver says, “Merely being affected by something in one’s surroundings is not perception: a camera or tape recorder does that much, and so does a writing tablet. One needs also to be aware of one’s own affectedness, that there is a change taking place in one’s perceptual apparatus.” (Graver, 2009, 23).  That is to say, our player mat is an active part of our game, and understanding what comprises it is a big part of moving in harmony with our nature.

In treating life as a board game, this comes down to remembering the game you’re playing, and keeping your turns rational and conscious instead of just playing whatever cards you have in your hand. By thinking through your turns and really examining the board state, you can make sure that the game you’re playing is really the one you want to play, and that you’re playing fairly both for yourself and all of your fellow players.

Oikeosis

The best way to play our turns is going to be rooted in our individual character (nature) and the roles we are acting out in a given situation. A firm understanding of these will give us the most coherent strategy when it comes time to act. But our roles are not created in isolation; we’re playing with all of our fellow humans:

On this point Anthony Long describes how for the Stoics, we must differentiate our rationally oriented mental judgements, from our socially constructed selves that tend to be temporarily shaped and re-shaped by whatever happen to be a period’s ‘dominant social values.’ (Johncock, 2023, 28)

We’re all playing the same game together, and the more we can work with our fellow travelers on this planet, the more likely we are to enjoy our game.  But this takes understanding what parts of our player mat are intrinsic to us versus those that we’ve learned from the society we are part of. Some of our mat we can change through training or spending points, but parts of our mat are set either by fate or genetics. I can’t really change my height or who my parents were, but I can work out more and likely increase my lifespan. That being said, we are social creatures, and Oikeiôsis is always meant to be front and center in our lives:

The fundamental feature of a social or communal nature for the Stoics instead refers to how, when you think and act, you do so with an awareness that you are part of and constituted by a greater whole. This requires an appreciation that everything about us that appears to be “individual” or “personal,” instead borrows from and shares in something that is dispersed beyond ourselves and is common to all. (Johncock, 2023, 28-29)

Another Stoic tool that can be useful is a “view from above.” Usually, this is about viewing things from a more cosmic scale as a way to reframe what we’re experiencing and put it in context. But for me, it’s about remembering that life is just a board game I’m playing, and it’s up to me to make it through the turns that didn’t happen the way I would have liked.  Sometimes, I draw a bad card, or it seems like I just have no good plays to make. I may be confronted with a death, or a setback in my professional life, or some other dispreferred indifferent. But that’s ok because I can still put it in the context of the larger game and remind myself that the game is what I make it.

Ideally, we can understand enough about the game we play to understand what our appropriate actions (kathēkonta) are. This means taking into account both the current board state, as well as that of our player mat and current cards we have the ability to play.  Those cards have a cost, and it’s up to us to find the appropriate resources to play those cards and perform the right action. In order to know what card to play, we need to know how our engines work, as well as what the circumstances we find ourselves in are, instead of adding a lot of judgements to them. That takes a lot of self-awareness, especially awareness of how we see the world and how the stories we tell ourselves continue to our general worldview.  By looking at life as a board game, we can abstract away some of the more significant issues, and really get a good idea about what the appropriate action is going to be. As Jedan points out, the board state we’re dealing with is going to ultimately determine what our best play is:

It is not claimed that an action could be appropriate but wrong in the circumstances. Rather, the text should be understood as dealing with the obvious point that what is appropriate depends in most, if not all, cases on the circumstances, some of them so extraordinary that it will be hard for the non-sage to determine what to do. (Jedan, 2012, 134)

Conclusion

None of us are sages, as that is likely an asymptotic goal.  However, we can use frameworks to help us understand what the right action is and how to make our decisions easier and get just a little bit closer to aretē. This makes our turns at the game of life as rational and conscious as possible so we can focus only on what is in our control, and through doing so be truly excellent. Using Stoicism and metaphor to reclaim our ability to make our choices as rationally and consciously as possible is a great way to find a happy and resilient life, and a great way to better play our turns at the game of life.