On Pool Nation

I've never been a "pool person." I've played it a few times, for sure, and recently I probably played a dozen games of it over the course of a three day period. Pool has the same mystery for me that bowling does. Like the ability to make a quarter disappear, a person's ability to excel at these games seems to hide inside of them.

If you see a professional runner, or a tennis player, or a football player, you can tell. Those sports run rough shod over the human body, and they change their players on a physical level for everyone to see. Those activities warp people around them.

I don't mean that there isn't a physical element to pool. There is a certain form, a certain discipline of the body, that the game requires. You have to learn how to lean. You need to know to shoot through the ball, and with what kind of energy, and with how much spin. You need to know what will put that ball in the pocket and what will make it bounce on the rim, infuriating the player, destroying the entire world as far as they are concerned.

But skill at pool can hide inside of a person. You don't have to change your eating habits. You don't have to run a mile in a certain amount of time. You can just practice, refining the eye and a certain cluster of arm muscles, until you become good enough to run a table in front of someone.

Of course, it's the ultimate game of the leisure class for this reason. Nobility played a modernity marched into the industrial era. Europeans carved up Africa with discussions held around the pool table. The postwar rec room was made complete with the billiards table.

It has the allure of meritocratic majesty to it. You're attached to a longform legacy of play, and better yet, you can play the game with the skills you have. All you have to do is work on your soul, not your body, not your game. The labor you do is intellectual, not physical, and your hands stay clean while your brain reacts. It is, in the classic phrasing, a hell of a drug.

Pool Nation renders this aspect of the game down to its very bones. You are no longer doing any of the physical labor of the game. There's no navigation of the room. No one has to learn to shoot behind their back. It's just the smooth space of looking at the balls and the angles they create. It's just about lining the world up in a very particular shape. Then you nudge the first little piece, and it all starts falling in the direction that you want it to.

In this way, the video game version of the game of pool is the kind of game that the mechanics-based critics have always desired. It is a game that can be stripped of all of its qualities and be played in an almost metaphysical way.

There is a game called Mental Magic where two people with sufficient mastery of the game of Magic: The Gathering can play that game without cards. It has some shortcutting and some simplification around where decks and cards come from, but the basic idea is that if you have memorized enough cards then you can actually play a fairly robust version of maybe one of the most complicated games ever made. Like Pool Nation, Mental Magic offers the fantasy of a played game without any of the trappings that we associate with the game proper. It is merely a ruleset, and if we agree that that ruleset no longer needs a particular kind of substrate, then things can proceed without that substrate.

It is critical that Pool Nation can do this, because Pool Nation is at least a physical game. It requires one to move around in a bodily fashion, but it is singular in that it is always my body that gets in the way of the game. In a Madden title, I'm coordinating a set of smooth strategies between many different football players. The fantasy here is one of a team that can all agree to do one thing in perfect unison as long as I, the player, can properly think things through.

Pool Nation is more insidious, maybe, because it's a fantasy about myself and what I could do if properly drained of everything that makes me not-as-good as pool.