One thing I’ve been thinking about a but over the past few years is how standardization is really strange and sort of paralyzing. For how many hundreds of years were there hundreds of regional variants of chess, each with their own history and culture? But at some point these things have become standardized and whatever natural tendency they had to change has been neutered completely. Same thing with a pack of standard playing cards: are those going to have kings, queens and jacks on them forever, even after any sort of resonance these concepts once had have vanished?
Dialectics: standardization just changed the form of the diversity. As standardization came to resolve contradictions in rulesets, it allowed a broader amount of play and deeper tactics and strategies which now define the diversity found. It also makes accessibility higher, so the diversity came in the form of education levels and such too.
That’s not to say it’s all good, just that the shift is a very normal sort of centralization like you find in many fields.
One thing I’ve been thinking about a but over the past few years is how standardization is really strange and sort of paralyzing. For how many hundreds of years were there hundreds of regional variants of chess, each with their own history and culture? But at some point these things have become standardized and whatever natural tendency they had to change has been neutered completely. Same thing with a pack of standard playing cards: are those going to have kings, queens and jacks on them forever, even after any sort of resonance these concepts once had have vanished?
Dialectics: standardization just changed the form of the diversity. As standardization came to resolve contradictions in rulesets, it allowed a broader amount of play and deeper tactics and strategies which now define the diversity found. It also makes accessibility higher, so the diversity came in the form of education levels and such too.
That’s not to say it’s all good, just that the shift is a very normal sort of centralization like you find in many fields.
Idea: replace the king with Stalin, queen with Mao, and the jack will be Lenin.
Stirner will be the joker