The Game of Love

I feel so unloved. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat worms. All that. See, I've got this game, I like this game, it's a wonderful game. But noone wants to play with me.

I feel so unloved. It's a great game, it's an amazingly fun, interesting, thought-provoking game. It's one of the only games I've ever played in which it's _likely_ that everyone loses. So if you have your choice of people to play with, you should choose carefully, lest you get a bad apple causing the world to end. Or at least causing Rome to fall. But me, I have no such choice. I can't find enough people to play, much less enough that I can pick and choose the players.

I feel so unloved. Although the more I think about it, the more I realize that if I did have the players for this game, probabilistically I wouldn't manage to win. If there were enough players, I'd spend the entire time playing the game and end up with nothing to show for it other than the bitter taste of defeat remaining any time I saw the box on my bookshelf. And since it's on my bookshelf that I see many, many hours a day, that would be a lot of bitterness. And I don't really want to become that bitter, 'cause then I'd be unable to find anyone to play other games with me either. I do get to play other games, so it can't be me, it must be that people realize that this game would be time consuming and just cause me to be bitter in the end.

I feel so loved. People prefer me just the way I am. They'd rather not spend a wonderfully enjoyable day playing one of the most fun games I own, they'd be willing to sacrifice all that, just so I maintain my mostly-bitter-free lifestyle. People are willing to not beat me, just so I don't have to live with the defeat. Gosh darn it, people like me!

I feel so loved! But I still want to play my game.