playing war

It's really fun to pretend you're at war. Brandishing a banana at your invented enemies makes the world a very exciting place, everything becomes a prop. When you point your banana and shoot to kill, that you yell "boom" or "pow" rather than actually shoot doesn't make it any less fun. When you start using a banana like a gun, the world instantly becomes an exciting place and you become a man with clear motives and fears. When you have a banana gun, you have reason to run uncommonly fast, to dodge behind cars and get greatly increase your blood pressure, you suddenly start seeing things in high definition.

The physical movement that pretending you're holding a gun and that the world is full of danger entails is probably a large part of what makes it so fun, pumping adrenaline makes it impossible to not get caught up in your imagination. If your body plays its part your mind will join in.

Pretending your banana is a gun and the world your enemy is also terrifically entertaining because it lets you construct the world even more egocentric than usual. Buildings and shrubbery and the anonymous pedestrians that populate a city are cold in the sense that they have nothing to do with you, you don't matter. When you play war, you make what was an impersonal structure into a prop in your life, a random person is now your threat and the ferns are their cover. You supply them with a motive that revolves around you and you engage them insistently.

The drab scenery of McGill campus on a rainy, unseasonably cold September Sunday is thrilling when you populate it with nameless assassins and their hideouts. Its perverse and morbid but nonetheless true that a tree is much more exciting when you imagine there is someone ready to kill you (kill in the lighthearted sense, but it would still be disappointing) hiding behind it, you observe it minutely and that care is rewarded. When you are looking so concertedly and suspiciously at something and it moves, it is as rewarding to kill it with your banana as I imagine it must be for a bird watcher to see their bird. The experience is charged with the fear of the murderous world. Even if it turns out to have been a bird, the anticipation of the surveillance alone is animating.

When I was in the south of France I "played war" often with the kids. Theo, 14, and Jules, 8, in particular. Theo had made machine guns out of discarded plywood with which we would hunt each other. If "shot" we had to sulk back to our "base" before resuming the game. You "shot" someone when you yelled out your unique bullet noises while pointing at the other person before they pointed and yelled at you. I suspect everyone has instinctual bullet noises inside of them ready to erupt when they have the chance to point and and yell, we're probably born squealers or boomers, pistols or bazookas. Knowing that Theo or Jules could be anywhere electrified everywhere and made piles of wood or giant "bobines" into props and part of a thrilling, murderous narrative rather than the sleepy, meaningless stuff they really are. It was like a video game.

Video games are the obvious thing to relate all this too, playing war is like being in a role playing game shooter, rpg shooter. But its also much better and I think much more innocuous because your body is the motor and locus of the excitement rather than the visuals of a TV screen. There's no blood and guts implied in all the electrifying narrative world I've been describing, it originates from and is fueled by a more general notion of "getting" him or her before they "get" you which makes the heart pump and, until physical exhaustion, a self perpetuating excitement.