Games and wagers

"Exponential" is scored, which means that I am very likely to both start and finish "Enter the Princes" by the end of January, which means that I am only going to be one month behind on the schedule I originally created for this project – which also means that I need to start seriously thinking about how to workshop MELISANDE.

The idea, of course, is that we test Act I (minus its rough-drafted closing number, which may be one of the last things I complete) before I get too far into Act II. Since much of what exists in the first act is likely to reprise and/or resolve in the second act, I need to know that what I've written can both read and play.

Larry and I are considering a concept album, which is probably better than having some kind of gathering in which we all try to sightread our way through the piece. Proof of concept only exists if everyone understands the concept in the first place, and I can hear you saying "but there's also the proof of concept that has to hold up to a first read, even if the material is not fully understood, and also if the material isn't fully understood after the first read then why not, what's wrong," and I might still refer you back to all of those writers and musicians who have said that a piece of music and/or writing can be appreciated by anyone who recognizes quality but comprehended only by those who have equivalent knowledge.

Which is one of the reasons why we read quality literature and listen to quality music and look at quality works of art and experience quality theater more than once, taking what we love and working towards a greater understanding of it. (If something turns out to have less quality than we imagined, we leave it behind.)

This is also, by the way, what is so devastating to writers and composers – the process of watching your best work degrade as you improve. The opening number to MELISANDE still holds up, but I notice my music becoming more nuanced as the act progresses, which (fortunately) works dramaturgically (and this may be one of the reasons why Sondheim advocated for scoring an entire piece in order instead of skipping around) but may become problematic as the project continues.

I've also sort-of-kind-of mentally committed to playing a piano recital sometime this year, after telling myself that I was not interested in playing recitals (that link, by the way, leads to an absolutely crackerjack post in which I set out a theory of education, go read it), and at first I was disgruntled by the obligation of having to play a recital simply because I taught beginner piano ("is that a line note or a space note? line or space? does it have a line going through it?") and then I started reading about music, like writing, being another form of organized thought and I started listening more carefully and thinking more carefully and practicing more carefully and now I've figured out that if I can play a recital perhaps I can teach better piano.

And, you know, charge better rates.

Because –

and look how deftly I've segued into Middlemarch –

I really don't want to have to make my income off games and wagers.

This, by the way, astonished me. To see George Eliot come down on the side of "earning money from cards and billiards is good, actually" was not at all what I was expecting. I've always carried a bit of contempt for the online poker players and the MTG fanatics and anyone who gets excited about prediction markets, like, go build some kind of skill that can benefit the next generation, and yet Eliot has Farebrother teach and minister during the day and earn money playing games at night:

Then again it was a continually repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate’s esteem, that the Vicar should obviously play for the sake of money, liking the play indeed, but evidently liking some end which it served. Mr. Farebrother contended on theory for the desirability of all games, and said that Englishmen’s wit was stagnant for want of them; but Lydgate felt certain that he would have played very much less but for the money.

If I understand that paragraph correctly, it means playing games for money makes you smarter.

And yet whist, at the time, was bounded by a single deck of cards – and today's games shift their boundaries at the discretion of the house. Note the alleged X algorithm update (have we seen any real data on this?), in which positive posts might be weighted more positively (pun intended) than negative ones. To earn money on X, you have to play the game in a way that satisfies both the user and the client (which really makes X closer to Uber than anything else, or maybe a variant of WorkMarket).

And we know what Eliot thinks about playing games that trap you into pleasing others, because we have that disastrous scene in which Lydgate has to vote between Farebrother and Tyke for hospital chaplain. Lydgate deliberately arrives late, assuming the vote will have already settled in one direction or the other, but Bulstrode counts the ballots ("counts the ballots") and announces a tie that only Lydgate can resolve, forcing Lydgate to announce publicly what he had hoped to privately avoid.

So I should rewrite that phrase, three paragraphs above, to mean playing bounded, agentic games for money makes you smarter. Either you win the money or you win knowledge, after all.

But playing games that other people control is a lose-lose.