I’ve played plenty of online games (as have most people who have computers). I find it strange that we play games that offer different levels of “difficulty” and we don’t think twice about it. Solitaire is the game that got me thinking about this. Solitaire is Solitaire – 52 cards, win by stacking in numerical order by suit, everybody knows the game. So how, exactly, does a computer game add difficulty levels to such a simple game? Whether you play with a 3-card draw or a one-card draw, it’s 52 cards. The answer is that the computer program alters the probability numbers – in other words, the games are rigged – and we seem just fine with that. There is no such thing as a more difficult game of Solitaire than another without an overt change in the rules. But that’s not what’s happening here; this is a deliberate alteration to make a game unfair and call that “difficult”.
This is what we’ve come to accept in today’s world as the norm. How many of us actually understand what goes on in the computer world where we can say that our online transactions are safe? More and more, we put our financial lives and our personal privacy at stake through online activity and we trust nameless and faceless entities to protect us, never knowing that they may be the first link in a long line of betrayal – and we wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not so unlike the games: we don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t seem to want to be bothered with demanding better. Have we become so collectively incurious that positing the questions concerning corruption or legal parlor tricks is asking more of ourselves than will ever happen? After Assange and Snowden how do we know that anything has really changed… because somebody said it did?
How many other systems do we take for granted and just accept? How many are rigged against us? Is it too late to fix it?
