Playground: A Novel

Throughout Todd and Rafi’s lives, games are a recurring motif. For Todd, board games represent the lessons about competitiveness he learned from his father, who introduced him to increasingly complex games; as soon as Todd could reliably beat his father at a game, they’d move on to something more complex. Once Todd could consistently beat his father at chess, they had little place else to expand. Todd was on the precipice of expanding into business (a game his father obsessed over), but Michael died in a car crash before Todd could realize this vision. Even before his father’s death, however, Todd had passed along his love of competitive games to his friend Rafi. Like Todd’s father, Rafi’s father imbued in him a relentlessly competitive spirit. Rafi learned many games from Todd and then introduced Todd to Go, an ancient and complex strategic game. Importantly, Rafi and Todd arrive at Go under their own volition. Go is their game, which they learn to play together. It represents their friendship, even if they inherited the competitiveness that drives them from their fathers. For these two young men, Go becomes a symbol of their friendship and of how they both feel the burden of their fathers’ influence.

Just as Todd’s father taught him increasingly complex games, Todd and Rafi search for increasingly complex games with which to test themselves. Though Go remains their game of choice, they dabble in board games and other ventures. Individually, Rafi obsesses over literature while Todd obsesses over computer programming. Each treats these pursuits as they treat their games: as a framework of rules in which they must operate in pursuit of victory. They learn to turn the world around them into a game, making everything from art to computer programming an expression of the same competitiveness that drove them toward complex games. Playground emerges as the ultimate manifestation of this pursuit. It represents Rafi and Todd’s turning society into a game by creating a social media network that exists to gamify human interaction. They pattern Playground with the same systems of reward and rules that attracted them to games. Playground is a game in which the players are infinite, and the stakes are possibly existential. For these two men, however, Playground is an expression of the shared love of games that first brought them together and has shaped their lives.

Playground is the ultimate expression of what games mean to Rafi and Todd, yet it’s also the pinnacle of their relationship. The meeting in which they plan out the gamification of Playground is their last real burst of togetherness. After this, everything falls apart. Both men are stubborn, so neither can directly apologize after their argument. Since they can only really communicate through the language of games, Rafi uses this language to try to rekindle their relationship. He elevates the game, issuing a possible legal demand to Todd. Unfortunately for Todd, he doesn’t grasp that Rafi is turning the legal system into a gameboard until it’s too late. They’re playing a different game now: Since Rafi is too proud to apologize and too alienated to articulate his desire to bring Todd back into his life, he tries to start another game. That Todd places all the money he won in the lawsuit into an account for Ina shows that the money wasn’t the point. He missed his competition with Rafi and with him gone, Todd has no more games to play. His memory is failing, so he shares all his memories with an AI device to make one last game. Like the grandmasters playing against chess computers, Todd wants to develop a computer program to give him one final game against his friend. However, as Rafi feared, the game (and AI in general) can’t replace the humanity at the heart of their game. Todd’s final game symbolizes the inhumanity of AI.