There is a new book planned for next year. The narrative is centred on My|self a[1] fictional character, a player in a surreal game of waiting. The character should be understood as a kind of illusionist in the sense of Prospero who conjures a strange world into existence. It’s a chance to explore our curiosity about human behaviour and about the strangeness of individual lives in an existential crisis. It is also a chance to explore the singularity of in-game play in the mind ‘fascinated and[2] jaded’ by paiting. Paiting is introduced as the phenomenon of waiting for a no-exit endgame, indefinitely waiting, infinitely. The pandemic was an existential crisis faced by many at a moment in time, T, a surreal game of waiting with a philosophical underpinning that the next move could be your turn to die.
Although waiting was a hallmark of the pandemic, paiting has its own social ontology allowing us to build a model of the experience. At that moment in time, T, when a pandemic was declared, paiting created a zone of irreality[3] ‘that which is beyond the real’ where isolation and the surreal gaming of survival is housed within one’s labyrinthine mind. A surreal game in one’s mind is a way to deflect from the reality of the crisis. A selfish intuition already exists in the real non-cooperation game of the Prisoners’ Dilemma delivering an eponymous equilibrium, the Nash equilibrium. Players know the loss. So, if there is potential for an IRL individual to become a fantastical player in a parallel world as they wait for an endgame, is there a vision that could frustrate the selfish dominant strategy? Our Faustian pact with Nature requires us to obey the rules and regulations in order to survive. Therein lies the kernel of the Prisoners’ Dilemma: do we obey or not?
That individual with a vision is described throughout the narrative as My|self and whether it is you the reader or this narrator, for My|self a surreal game in the mind provides a way to understand[4] the existential crisis. It may sound simple, playing a surreal game of waiting in one’s mind, out-manoeuvring an opponent to win. But the pandemic scaled the game dynamics up with unlimited number of opponents from[5] ‘the magnetic chain of humanity’ coupled with limited interaction. A time span (of days) of discrete time is created. There is a memory of a yesterday. To think was to see the world as an infinite series of memories. So, we begin our storybook by asking: is it rational to assume that people act rationally in an existential crisis? Like Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne we may have believed in the new reality and in the value of our natural instincts on how to behave in it. Thus, the bounds of a reasonable answer could be explored using game-theoretic norms that unite gamers and games, norms of trust and cooperation, cheating and dishonesty, naivety and strategy, deduction and deception. We’ll argue that the pandemic became a surreal game at that moment, T, and each of us a ‘fantasy-self’ player, a psycho-analytical illusionary construct that contains the in-game strategies of trust, honesty and responsibility. It is the ‘ultimately unknowable reality’: having chosen to play you cannot block out true reality. It’s as if we were thrust into a magic irreality, a dismantling of an ordered life and an estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality.
Borrowing concepts from philosophy, neuroscience, game theory and adding in some of the features of the virtual gaming genre to the narrative we try to frame a surreal game between fictional players, waiting in a magic quantum realm for a no-exit endgame. The key to unlocking an endgame is to introduce one’s conscience as a non-player actor. One way to visualise the topology of the game is to define a player’s mind as a superset of the brain, conscience as a proper subset of the mind, analogous to a non-playing character NPC of the immersive virtual reality gaming genre but with a twist: the game manager GM in this surreal game of waiting – you, the reader and myself – is no longer in control of the dreamscape.
Paiting splits My|self into a logical and mystical self. It provides a reason to pursue an endgame and to navigate a solution based on reason and self-awareness; reason can convert a survival instinct into coherent actions. The recent pandemic was a learning experience: survival was a key lesson. If it ever was a no-exit game of waiting, then rational individuals had to learn what to do ‘with no sense of what was coming tomorrow’. If we allowed our mind at a moment in time to open up a fantasy of imaginens and ‘what ifs’ we could be transported to an ever-changing nature of reality and our actual behaviour could be condensed to that of fictional players trapped in a parallel universe game. A player in an IRL game has to learn what to do and how to react. Learning to connect thinking, and acting, may be relevant too in an existential crisis, and we would agree in part with[6] Weselling’s intuitive arguments that there is an inspiration, a selfish intuition that ‘falls from the sky’. Her narrative around instinctive ‘knowing’ in art translates to an individual living through an existential crisis.
But could our parallel experiences of reality really be described as a ‘game’? There is the emergent field of quantum game theory[7] exploring interactions in the quantum realm. There is a rich literature on survival games and creative gameplay, and gaming tools create a challenging and survival-focused gameplay experience. Who to trust, what decision to make, are often key challenges[8]. Even setting aside the impossibility of predicting patterns of behaviour, real or imagined, the question seems[9] ‘mathematically laughable’: trying to define a game from the small data of a single event like a pandemic or wildfire or any existential crisis. There’s a debate[10] going back to Schopenhauer about definitions of what is a game? It’s inconclusive, is it something people do for fun? Is it a competition? Our answer relies on a shorthand description of knowing it when it happens, and ‘exactly how confident you need to be to call something a game is up to you’. But as you experience daily the events of an existential crisis like a pandemic you become aware of mutual interdependence and a selfish strategic intent to survive.
An existential crisis is more than a single event, it’s waiting for an endgame, waiting infinitely with a sure risk of death, ρ > 0. Are you more likely to wait? Is your neighbour waiting? One player has to take a decision taking into consideration that everyone will take decisions too, being aware that each decision has its consequence, leading to an endgame. So, each player has to minimise the maximum loss, the minimax outcome. It might be difficult to find an analytical solution but to handle this, My|self’s conscience is introduced to play as a fantastical player to parallelise the minimax outcome[11], thus creating a surreal in-game outcome concurrent with a real in-game outcome. The min is My|self as a real person[12] and the max is conscience as a non-player actor, and the method employed which performs the computation of in-game payoffs is defined as interpolation. This is ‘another life’ as the poet[13] expressed, and ‘any given moment is likely to be underpinned by what went on before or what is to come’ in this parallel universe of waiting indefinitely for the endgame.
Paiting teaches otherness and patience. But waiting also necessitates a complete modification of ‘being’ in the world and this modification in itself transforms the game from a rational place to what Sartre called ‘the magical world’ where reasoning does not apply. Throughout our narrative a fictional character My|self appears in the payoff matrices but unlike Joyce’s ‘Man in the Mackintosh’ the identity is revealed. It could have been you the reader at T. A parallel reality opens up when the shadows and memories of waiting slipping in a time loop from ‘now’ to ‘beyond the future’ in non-Archimedean time.
In this magical world, My|self and My|self’s conscience can be the same fictional character as often described in the genre of literary fiction and video games where[14] ‘all play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not illusion, then an imaginary universe […] and of becoming an illusionary character’. Fantastical illusions create a reality that is more potent than reality itself. Isn’t it Baudrillard ‘s hyper-reality – an irreality? What this means is that for an IRL individual a lack of reality is supplanted by imagination and foresight. As a fictional player engaging with imagination, conscience infiltrates the game of waiting initially as a non-player actor entangled with the imagination of a real player. It progresses to become a fictional-to-real F2R© character affirming that the brain could be defined as a topological space[15] in the surreality and imagination of My|self.
Looking at one’s conscience as a F2R character ‘is trippy enough, but things get even weirder[16]’ when the game unfolds. For every topological space with a base point there is a ∞ category. In any game the payoffs follow a path in the payoff matrix. What if brain waves could be analogous to prosodic[17] manipulations that influence the interpretation of the payoffs. My|self is waiting but simultaneously looking in Lacan’s mirror and is confronted by a reflection of another self within, and like the central character Anna in Gaskell’s story[18], My|self trembles ‘in silence at the fantastic figures and shapes which my imagination called up’
The game continues nonetheless until an endgame solution is reached. That’s our hypothesis with proofs provided. Suffice to argue that by interpolating the payoffs their respective properties become intertwined. If waiting per se fractures any notion of time in reality, then we have to consider imaginative engagements at a non-Archimedean surreal moment in time. The narrative of the new book is less of a commentary on an existential crisis and more of a generalised storybook about time spent in an immersive reality of waiting, doing the same thing over and over again like Sisyphus, until an endgame is reached. In any existential crisis waiting is time spent in isolation. At T the social ontology of waiting changed. It was no longer a simple queue experience; we were all waiting in a no-exit endgame. The world changed and we all experienced the reality of being othered if you did not adhere to rules and regulations. One learns to attach the label ‘game’ to the crisis event. Whatever the answers provided by this fantastical in-game story, they too are[19] ‘meso data’ from the single event and may be germane to daily human life. The solutions provided reveal trust and hope. At a moment in time when our brain finds itself embedded in a complex game of waiting our imagination continues to add flyleaves to the end of yesterday’s diary. Unwittingly, we all became players in a surreal game. Absurd.
[1] The use of | in the spelling My|self borrows from a reference to a South African language N|uu featured in Financial Times Weekend edition supplement Collecting 11/12 October 2025 pp6 article by Cristina Ruiz ‘Can you succeed as an artist without a gallery?’.
[2] As Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses fund his mind during a lecture on applied physics.
[3] Citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealism_(the_arts)
[4] Influenced here by an article in the Financial Times by Nadia Beard ‘How to Listen to a Painting’ with a theme that ‘for Kandinsky music was a way to understand abstract art’, Weekend Edition 25/26 October 2025, pp15.
[5] Citing a phrase from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th century novel The Scarlet Letter about the heroine Hester Prynne from Marie Ellen LaFoy (1963): Hawthorne’s Magnetic Chain of Humanity University of Tulane Press, Abe Books.
[6] Janneke Weselling as quoted in Kruse (2022).
[7] Citing https://www.jetir.org/view?paper=JETIR1901I44
[8] For example, the Afterlife 1.1 gaming tool for the survival game ‘7 Days to Die’ and the challenges faced by Jon Snow and the many characters in the fantasy drama Game of Thrones.
[9] Citing Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths (2017): Algorithms to Live By published by Picador Press, NY: especially Chapter 6 on the famous 1970s ‘marshmallow test’ of waiting,
[10] This section relies heavily on Tom Chivers (2024): Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, circa pp210-213.
[11] Check out examples https://brilliant.org/wiki/minimax/
[12] Citing the research of Alfonso Ponce Navarro, Universidad de Cadiz, wherein the max is a computer https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353907084_Game_Theory_Minimax_Algorithm_-A_parallel_approach
[13] Selected Poems by Irish poet John McAuliffe published October 2022 by Wake Forest University, Press & The Gallery Press, Dublin, and citing the review on the dust jacket by Kate Kellaway The Observer.
[14] Citing Roger Caillois (2001): Man, Play and Games p19-21. Originally published in 1960s. University of Illinois translated edition pp19-21.
[15] Check out AI transubstantiation: https://www.patrickmcnutt.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-transubstantiation/
[16] The line from the Introduction by Daniel Yon (2025) in his fantastic book trying to make sense of the mind and brain: A Trick of the Mind published by Cornerstone Press, UK.
[17] Worth reading https://www.academia.edu/1701937/The_Prosody_of_Algebra_Meets_The_Algebra_of_Prosody_The_Use_of_Prosodic_Breaks_For_Mathematical_Disambiguation
[18] Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story ‘The Grey Woman’ in the anthology Tales of Mystery and the Macabre, originally published in the 1850s but available in paperback since 2008 by Wordsworth Edition Limited, London.
[19] Read https://www.patrickmcnutt.com/news/meso-data-omega-circles-origami-manifolds/