I Know Who Wins the Game of Thrones
But first, what is a game?
The word grows more interesting as our world—and language itself—grow more “gamified.”
The classic definition of a game—a set of rules for play or competition— emphasizes its structure. A football field and a Monopoly board both come with instructions. When you gamify an assignment at a school or office, you create a rewards system to make it more competitive.
Yet when I suggest language is gamified, I don’t mean language has more instructions; I mean language is more flexible. Our dictionaries and words are more open to play by everyone from songwriters and poets to the Twitterati. That includes the word “game.”
One early example is Robert Sherman’s “A Spoonful of Sugar” lyrics from Walt Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins: “In every job that must be done/ There is an element of fun/ You find the fun and snap/ The job’s a game.”
While Julie Andrews defines gamification here, years before the first appearance of the word, she gamifies not with rules, but with pleasures. The song of a bird or honey for the bee—or her own subversive nanny magic—make the rules of labor more tolerable.
But play, imagination, and fun are harder to define, so the standing definition of a game sticks with the rules.
Still, breaking the rules is what the rapper Ice-T had in mind when he wrote, “Don’t hate the player; hate the game” in 1999. In 2008, William Safire, in his On Language column, traced the phrase “game-changer” through business, politics, and baseball back to a 1930’s reference to the card game bridge. He also noted The Wall Street Journal called the Internet itself “a real game-changer” in 1995.
All of these references treat a game as the game—of life—and something to manipulate creatively.
Which brings me to HBO’s television show Game of Thrones. Towards the end of its first season, villain Cersei Lannister used the series title and gave it a tagline in one of her spiteful speeches: “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.”
Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the violent politics of a fantasy world of knights, queens, and dragons. The warring factions are often reduced to chess pieces on war maps.
This is Ice-T’s and also The Wall Street Journal’s and the Internet’s human game, where rules pale in comparison to the importance of strategies.
I learned in film school that many of the entertainments of my childhood had far greater connection to the real world than I’d ever imagined. A simple survey course on science fiction showed me the Vietnam War’s influence on the original Star Wars, the McCarthyism and Communism underneath 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the atomic fear rooted in Warner Brothers 1952 animated short Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.
Today is no different. Having watched Walt Disney Studios’ three-hour superhero sequel to a record 21 films, Avengers: Endgame, 48 hours before one of Game of Thrones central and final episodes, “The Long Night,” this past weekend, it was clear the strategies of factions and beliefs and leaders in the face of existential disaster are on our collective mind.
It’s Game of Thrones, however, that best illustrates the gritty cunning and compromise that make a winning strategy in our world, for good or ill. I honestly believe the show’s unprecedented audience is watching for the slightest insight into how we can survive our present politics and future.
That’s ironic considering both Game of Thrones and the Avengers movies have easily gathered record crowds from that fractured social climate. Headlines have declared Game of Thrones the last phenomenon that will pull off such unity, but I don’t know why. The same was said of shows like The Sopranos and Lost and yet television series and authors and phenomena continue to illustrate the audience’s willingness to come together for innovative and relevant writing.
Isn’t that the message of Game and Endgame too?
Then it occurred to me who will win the Iron Throne if he “plays his cards right,” and that’s author George Raymond Richard Martin himself.
While HBO’s showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have done a masterful job understanding, realizing, expanding and editing Martin’s world of Westeros, the map still belongs to its cartographer. The press, the fans, and the slick HBO machine have done a number on GRRM the last few years. He’s taken a lot of snark for failing to finish his story first and letting a couple of young upstarts steal his crown.
But who’s to say they have?
Has no one stopped to think that greater than the noble plans of Daenerys, or the wicked antagonism of Cersei, or, well, the pure luck of Jon Snow, might be the next move of their creator?
All George has to say after the final episode on May 19th is, “I lied.
“That’s not how the story ends and I’ve completed the next book.”
The crowds would surpass the army of the dead.
And George would give us yet another lesson in the unexpected and strategy. It would show players and lexicographers everywhere that in the game of anything—it’s not how you follow the rules, but how you play them, that matters.