The way from madness to social rituals traverses games. In this sense, the transition is from game to myth. Other questions are forbidden because they cannot be answered without resorting to another mythology altogether. Observation is an act, which is the anathema of the myth. A game looks very strange, unnecessary and ridiculous from the vantage-point of an outside observer.
Introspection replaces observation and becomes a mechanism of social coercion.
The game, in its new guise, becomes a transcendental, postulated, axiomatic and doctrinaire entity. It spins off a caste of interpreters and mediators. And the game loses its power to confront us with death. As a myth it assumes the function of repression of this fact and of the fact that we are all prisoners. Today's telecommunications, transportation, international computer networks and the unification of the cultural offering only serve to exacerbate and accentuate this claustrophobia.