But There is no Spoon

The words “its only a game” often pop up in News Feed threads, especially in times of stress and disagreements, I for one confess to having nodded inwardly and having agreed to that sentiment when the proverbial soother is being tossed forcefully from the perambulator by one protagonist or another.

This morning however on my daily commute from Huddersfield to St Helens I found myself analysing this a bit deeper, I tend to do my most profound thinking and deepest navel cleansing at 5am on the M62.

The internal mind nut being crunched this morning being that if it is only just a game why does it in reality matter so much to people?

Logic says it’s a game, nobody dies, nobody starves, nobody other than you gives a flying turd in an tumble dryer about your team coming back from 3-0 down to win 3-4. Your significant other tuts and tosses their eyes skywards when you tell the truth as to why you are swearing at the computer or why you spend an entire day staring at player listings.

That same logic would also say that the game is pointless, it brings no material benefit, it does not put food on the plate, it certainly does not put money in the bank, so what does is it do, why do we play it?

This is where the finger grubbing around for fluff in the navel of my brain came up with the reality of it.

The game is real!!!

Not real in the sense that we are all in an alternate Universe and actually are football managers, even I am not that far over the chair (yet), it is real in as much as it fulfils emotional needs of enjoyment, challenge, competition and most of all in T100’s case I believe in belonging to a “tribe”, a tribe of individuals we can relate to has having the same emotional needs as ourselves, we feed in to it and we feed off it.

As such what affects us in this “virtual” World carries effects into the “real” world, otherwise why would be hurt by a stinging comment from A, a rebuffed transfer bid from B, an unexpected defeat against C, etc. Why, and I challenge anyone to deny it, have they given a post match interview when having a shower after their match result has come in!!!

As individuals we invest a lot of time and effort into this game, as such when that time and effort fails to reap the hoped for rewards our reaction is a tangible one in the same way as if we had planted wild flower seeds in a garden only to see weeds grow.

In this sense the game is real, it matters to us, it is a non-physical world that we inhabit, in which our emotional responses to situations are the same and get carried into the physical world.

For those facilitating our existence in this “virtual” World the reality of it must be even more profound.

We are all real people, we are not pixels, we are not projections, we have neither taken the red nor blue pill, we must remember that we are interacting with real people with real feelings and as such I reiterate this game is real.