Response Paper 9

In Preparation of Session 10
Denis Telofy Drescher
June 15, 2014
I like my Fridays. I only have a single course in the morning, so the weekend starts
early for me. However, one Friday a few weeks ago, I walked to the commons with
a friend of mine and mentioned that I was reading Innite Jest. e moment I had
pronounced the nal voiceless alveolar stop, I realized my mistake and braced for the
harrowing question she (the friend) was bound to ask: Whats it about?
e response paper assignment put me in a similar predicament, and aer a few
hours of vacillation, I considered throwing a dart at the book and making the rst
concept its tip would dent rather than pierce the protagonist of my response. en I
just seled for tennis again.
e blurring of the boundary between the map and the territory, which Pemulis
excoriates so vehemently on page 333, happens to be something that I and friends of
mine have tried to exploit before. e game of Eschaton (see also New York Times)
shows vividly how the map-territory distinction applies to some games. In chess and
go, there is still an allegory to a hypothetical territory underlying the map; in tennis
and the board game Othello, no such territory comes to mind, but still factors that
inuence a game of chess or Othello, such as someone bumping into the table, are
invariably considered outside the game just like the snow falling on the Eschaton map.
In the case of tennis its especially hard for me to see where the map ends and the
territory begins, partially, because I know too lile about it. Players change sides regu-
larly in the book, so the position of the sun seems to be part of the game (even indoors,
curiously). Pemuliss puing hallucinogens into the other players water, however,
seems to be outside the game. A players always keeping to the back of the court when
playing against Orin Incandenza to thwart his strong lobs may be inside the game
again. e extend to which the the whole life of the students has to be streamlined
My predilection for bathos allowed me to dodge the question saying Its about tennis.
Which, oddly, is the year (BCE) of the Bale of Issus.
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for the purpose of the perfect tennis education is further evidence of the game that is
played outside the game (Holl 12).
A game that I know beer is the board game Othello. Othello, moreover, has the
advantage over tennis that there are extremely good specialized AIs, programs that
play the game with a near-perfection that no human can reach. Many human players in
tournament situations, however, rely on strategies that no current AI considers. ey
know that they are fallible and that their opponents are too, so rather than making
the assumption that their opponents will play perfectly, as the current AIs do, they
study the games of opponents they will likely be paired against and try to nd ways
to trick the opponents into making mistakes. us the dividing lines that circumscribe
the game are dierent ones for AIs and humans, with only humans being desperate
and empathic enough to take the individual habits or weaknesses of their opponents
into account.
A conservative opponent, for example, may be prone to avoid x-squares in early
midgame. If the player can play a series of just suciently bad moves to (a) throw this
opponent out of their opening book and (b) maneuver them into a situation where
all moves are signicantly worse than a move to an x-square, then the conservative
opponent may more than undo the advantage the other player had allowed them. Of
course, the player can test the strategy only alone or against good friends or else the
opponent may nd out about it and prepare for it.
As I conceded above, Othello is not an allegory for anything in the real world, so that
there is nothing that could be considered to be simultaneously outside and inside the
game, like Kienplan, which leads to at least one major dierence to various metaphors
in Innite Jest (Kelly). Ingersoll is motivated by in-game considerations when he hits
his ball at Kienplan. is act outside the game, he claims, ought to have in-game
consequences. To him, hence, the game or territory is connected to the real world
outside the game via the materials they use as map symbols for in-game resources.
e outside world, in turn, is connected to the symbolized world of the game via the
players intent. In eect, we end up with a triangle of map, territory, and agent, of
which each can inuence the others once Penn has established the missing link, and
thus has allowed the mayhem to spill into the real world.
at also explains why Pemulis is so invested in banning the link. Schacht observes
that Pemulis is in denial about his likely withdrawal symptoms and their implication
of addiction. For Pemulis, drugs are something that he is knowledgeable about and
that his will has perfect control over. He doesnt want to acknowledge that his will
It seems hard but not impossible to me to extend a game AI in such a way that it can learn the habits
of its opponents, but since the AI can play near-perfectly to begin with, the use of such a feature
would be mostly in pointing them out to the humans, so they can rene them.
e squares diagonally adjacent to the corners.
Intended as gender-neutral singular again.
e thousands of opening sequences they have memorized.
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is a product of his brain, which is embedded in the real world, so that his will can
be compromised by what he does with his body. e connection is highlighted, of
course, by the usages of map as in to eliminate ones map for commit suicide. e
theme of the compromised will becomes central again in the context of AAand Gatelys
experience:
ere are some denite cultish, brainwashy elements to the AA Program
(the term Program itself resonates darkly, for those who fear geing brain-
washed), and Gately tries to be candid with his residents re this issue. But
he also shrugs and tells them that by the end of his oral-narcotics and bur-
glary careers hed sort of decided the old brain needed a good scrub and
soak anyway. He says he prey much held his brain out and told Pat Mon-
tesian and Gene M. to go ahead and wash away. But he tells his residents
hes thinking now that the Program might be more like deprogramming
than actual washing, considering the psychic job the Diseases Spider has
done on them all. (Wallace 369)
Another striking lesson from the game is that its abstraction adds lile to the ab-
straction that many people build up to fortify themselves against suering that is not
abstract in the least. In many readers, I presume, the statistically calculated doubly
ctional death tolls in Eschaton will elicit similarly weak emotional reactions as the
absolutely real death tolls they may read in a newspapermany of these deaths each of
us can help avert, for example, because they are due to curable or preventable diseases
rather than nuclear weapons.
Works Cited
Holl, R. e Narrative Game: e Reading of David Foster Wallaces Innite Jest as Play.
Anchor Academic Publishing, 2013. Print.
Kelly, Adam. e Map and the Territory: Innite Boston. 2013. Web.
New York Times. Calamity Song by the Decemberists. 2011. Best quality. Web.
Wallace, David Foster. Innite Jest. Lile, Brown Book Group, 2011. Print.
And it also means face somehow.
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