others on the game of life

Johnny Von Neumann (from The Ascent of Man by J. Bronowski):

Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is that other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.

Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams:

What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth century? Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding the cards as he held, and suspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor any one else back to the beginning of time knew the rules or the risks or the stakes?...As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players… (read more here, page 10.)

And we must not forget I.B. Singer (previously mentioned here):

The answer is for the game itself. We all play chess with Fate as a partner. He makes a move; we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves; we try to prevent it. We know we can’t win, but we’re driven to give him a good fight.

Well, if there is a G-d, He will reward you. And if there isn’t, who is playing all these games with Jacques Kohn?