This is as close to death as we get. It is when we move from a conscious acknowledgement of the relative lack of lasting importance of games - to the pretension that they are important, that we make the transition from the personal to the social. 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.