CARDS

from like June 2026. Just remembered it and decided it was complete enough to post Sep 12 2026

I love playing cards. Specifically, I love the standard 52-card french-suited deck of playing cards.

Inside Each Game, There Is A Game

Normally, we think of games as objects. Monopoly is a box containing quaint metal pieces, colorful illegal tender, and a suitably purgatorial game board. Chess is a checkered box quartering abstract, monochrome troops with which to skirmish upon said box's adornment of tiles. Uno is a set of 108 varicolored cards that, if dealt, exchanged, and played in the intended way, alternatingly elicits grimace and glee in equal amounts from opposite sides of a table for a stochastic 15 minutes. Point is, while a game is, of course, an experience, it is also a physical object, an object designed to produce that experience. The game Uno does not exist apart from a deck of Uno Cards. In theory, one could paint an Impressionist version of each Uno card onto 108 sheets of papyrus (or, I suppose, simply photocopy, print, and cut out an Uno deck). You would then have something resembling an Uno deck, and with it, you could play something resembling (identical to?) an Uno game. In practice, however, this effort would be tedious, cumbersome, and most likely not worth the market price of an Uno Product. We are normally quite content to consider the game Uno inseparable from, and even identical to, a deck of Uno Cards. We would never think to "play Uno" unless we have an Uno Deck. Thus, International Games Inc. (or Mattel, since 1992) has succeeded in that great persuasion of good business: that one's own product is, to some degree, the only way to have a certain experience.

Poker Cards

Sometimes at work, a kid sees me with my playing cards and refers to them as "slap cards" or "poker cards" or something. Understandable, of course. They saw them being used for poker once and assumed it was simply what a Poker Deck looked like. But how odd! Imagine seeing only a single game in a deck of playing cards! It's like they never knew that a ball could be used for more than just "catch." It tickles me. I must explain the good news! "No, no," I say, "These are standard playing cards. There's a whole bunch of different games you can play with them!" Then I go on to teach them the one game I always play. ::giggle::

Capitalization As Anchor

Capitals stand above. They assert uniqueness, an innate specialness that marks things as different from the rest. We capitalize names to show respect for those inner lights within each of us. It is the dye we inject into our language that presents human beings as more than mere sticks and stones. Capitalization zeroes in, collapsing the domain of discourse to a specific instance, anchoring description to a tangible point. Adam and Eve might have seen a hundred dogs before they had reason to name one Dog. At once, it was different. This is not longer just another dog-shaped impression on my retina. This is no longer just a fleeting shadow of a being that disappears back into the universe when it exits my vicinity. This is Dog. My Dog! By naming, we have decided there is something, yes, something real out there in the world named Dog. It bestows a kind of tentative permanence; we name something, presumably, so that when we encounter it again in the future we may use its name. It might still run away from us, yes, but when a named thing runs away, there is mourning. A dog runs away, and all is well. But when Dog runs away, Man weeps.

The Common People Love Lowercase

Lowercase is the baseline. It is simpler to scribe. It dominates the paragraph, providing the ground for capitals to rise above. Lowercase is humble, making no claims to power. It is relaxed. Capitals almost feel like richly dressed intruders in the casual atmosphere of a text conversation. We are bad at naming things, because who dares to claim there is something deserving of Capitals in what they have created?

Standard playing cards are a "lowercase" physical object. The "standard" is key. It is a collection of cards with a certain labelling scheme that, while having no inherent rules of their own, invites rules to be projected onto them. A deck of cards, by itself, is asleep. Looking through the cards, you see nothing but random numbers and symbols. But the moment you step into the magic circle of a game, the cards you are holding start to pull themselves in one direction or another as you turn over the rules in your mind and think of how you want to sort your hand. The cards of proprietary games are rigid beings that know what they are. You cannot extract the game from the cards. But nobody owns Go Fish, or Egyptian Slap, or Shithead. Unlike proprietary games, which are trapped in their physical object, the souls of playing card games roam free as an oral tradition, diffusing across the landscape of the collective unconscious, landing delicately whenever a bored group gets out their standard deck.

Because of this standardness, the playing card deck transcends individual ownership. You can be in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people, yet if there is a deck of playing cards, you have access to your whole mental collection. It is a home away from home. I love when, as I take out my deck of cards, someone pipes up with a game they know, and before I know it we're all playing something new. I love to see my familiar deck take on new faces that I hadn't witnessed yet. Playing cards bring us together. They practically glow with meaning slowly bestowed upon them by generations of working people trying to pass the time.