During the entire time I was reading the book, I found myself playing the metaphor game: Room is the world of childhood; Room is the modern world; Room is the known world; Room is Eden; Room is a prison; Room is a safe room; Room is the mind; Room is an idea for a book.
Indeed, the Wager is permeated with gambling metaphors: "game", "stake", "heads or tails", "cards" and, of course, "wager".
Like World of Warcraft, when you peel back the metaphor, the game offers a bleak (if unintended) critique of consumerism: once you reach the endgame, you become a character that has everything in world.
The "wall of impossibility" is a metaphor for game design if you haven't figured that out by now.
Cheng (2014) studied proposal writing through the metaphor of "game-playing" – namely that academic writing involves the learning of rules and conventions, as well as repeated participation.
For these reasons, our course embraces all figures of speech, including simile, and all metaphorical representations, including visual metaphor, as "fair game" for analysis (to use an animal metaphor of our own).
The addition of journeyman Daniel Currie for ruck depth seems like an unfortunate metaphor; four AFL games in 10 years.
The not-really-libertarian idea, if I may pursue the games metaphor, is that certain clear and simple rules can produce unpredictably complex and rewarding patterns of play.
Critics of the war-as-game metaphor point out that the real world is, if a game at all, a stochastic and messy one.
Still, Mr. Klima is hardly original in applying the game metaphor to a geopolitical hot spot.
