The God's of Risk

Today, I played Risk, the board game of Global Domination.

I may have lost, but the information I received greatly surpassed that loss.

While I was playing, I was observing all of my friends, who were moving their little soldiers around on the map of their world. I started thinking that the soldiers maybe had their own lives, their own  conciseness churning around in their heads.

Maybe these soldiers were alive in their own way, maybe they had families to think about, friends, lovers, and they were at war fighting for them. But why were they fighting the soldiers? Was it racism? Did each colour have a set of values and beliefs the other colours disagreed with? Did they just fight over the territory to have more land, to complete their mission?

Did all of the soldiers and canons agree that war was the answer to their troubles? Did some of them protest the war? Did some of these soldiers have faith, and got down on their knees before each battle and pray to their Gods asking for victory? But who were their Gods? Of course, we were their Gods, but how did they know of our existence? Was it the ash from one of our cigarettes that fell from the skies and landed in their world? Was it the tiny amount of saliva that dropped and hit one of the horses on the head during battle?

Well, the soldiers obviously knew something existed, but who were they praying to in actuality? One of the God was very concentrated playing, planing strategies and doing the best he could to win the game. Another was constantly on their phone, texting another God they were probably in love with. Another God had eyes as red as the army he was controlling, taking big puffs on his spliff before each turn, while I was laying on a couch, cradling my head trying to cure the hangover I had last night, while another still was not playing but watching us from a distance.

Imagine if one of the Green soldiers is praying for his family, his life, the victory of the battle, to someone who is doing rails of coke in a plane just out of his vision. How would he feel if he found out the truth, that the only reason for his existence is because his God wanted to get high, and he wanted to please the girl he was playing against?

Imagine if it's the same for us, the Gods are playing a game with us, and some of them don't care about us at all, all we are are little pawns on a table. We may give the same importance to our Gods as our soldiers give to us. As we pray to our Gods, some take us seriously, while others are shooting their semen all over us for the fun of it.

Later that night, something happened with one of the players that should have hurt me, but then I thought about that God above us who was inserting a frozen feces from his future self he had found in the plane of frost into one of his orfices, and life did not seem so bad.

That session of Risk opened my mind, and told me there are some higher powers who care more than others, and some who do not care at all and that's ok. It made me less scared of the Gods above us, of the unknown, and made them feel more human to me, more relatable in that way.

There was one final piece of information that I had forgotten though, something that made us all equal.

The Dice.

The laws of probability, the true Gods in this story. You can choose the best tactic to conquer a piece of land, but in the end, the dice have the final say. They are the ones who can make or break the game.

It made me wonder, do the Gods have their own version of Dice when they play with us?

===

Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded.
- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang