Life is a Game: Flyfishing - Game and Metagame Part 1

When I interviewed the owner of The Fly Fisher’s place, Jeff Perin, a few months ago, just before his guide trip to Belize, he observed, a little jokingly, that fly fishing is life, and reconciling that idea with the life-is-a-game perspective, it would follow that fly fishing is, too.

How is fly fishing – or life – a game? What is the system we’re playing within? What is the objective, and how do we keep score? Where does the game start, and where does the game end? And maybe most importantly, what is the metagame?

As I discussed in a previous article, the activities that surround actual play define or redefine a game, and can elevate it to a hobby, or something more. In his address to the year 2000 Game Developers Conference, Richard Garfield defined these elements, or metagame, in terms of four prepositions: “to,” “from,” “between,” and “during.” If you play the fly-fishing game by casting line to catch a fish, then the metagame vastly overshadows it. Between trips you might be tying or buying flies, checking stream reports, selecting the equipment best suited to the day’s outing; you bring your gear to the water, along with all your skill and knowledge about how to place a fly, read water, and match an insect hatch. If you aim to impress clients with your guiding prowess, you might also bring a high reputation and the corresponding expectations - if not actually to catch fish, at least to demonstrate good procedures for trying. Maybe the whole outing is the game, or maybe it’s only the time when your line’s on the water and the activity of changing flies fits the metagame. What you take away from the game instance might be new information, new skill, and/or an emotionally satisfying experience.

The metagame is partly a state of mind, and no two people’s experience in the metagame perfectly align, but when they get close, the game encapsulates for me everything important in life: meaning, purpose, camaraderie, communication, connection, and transcendence.

When my father died in 2006, I lost my primary fishing buddy. However, he left me the relationship we’d cultivated with Mike Prange, his friend all the way back to second grade, who served as a medic in Vietnam, and returned with a Purple Heart but emotionally intact, armored by quiet resilience and a strong sense of humor. Mike told jokes better than anyone. The three of us had fished together all over the state since I was a young kid, but Central Oregon occupied our imaginations as a perfected fly-fishing refuge. Mike and Dad adventured here back to the fifties, when the fish were legendarily large and abundant, before the seasons of smoke, before the crowds. In September a year and a half after Dad died, I agreed to journey down from Seattle, park my car at Mike’s home in Portland, and travel with him over the mountains to the Cascade Lakes area, starting an annual tradition that lasted a decade.

The trips ended when Mike became ill; however, even several years before, we knew that our most rarified excursions had already passed. In 2014, I moved from Seattle to the area with my wife and daughter, so Mike and I no longer made our road trip together with its transition from the city into the increasingly wild, tranquil lands of shared memory and dreams.

And that, I just now understand, was the goal of the game — to realize a trip like the old days and join Dad’s contented ghost in that place he always referred to as “God’s country,” to find transcendence in the moment when mountains and forest, sunlit water, a lull in the wind, and a dancing hatch culminated in a well-earned strike.

We won this game several times. And like all particularly meaningful games, its fulfillment depended on preparation, ritual, and emotion. We brought our shared history and long apprenticeships in the fly-fishing art, our journey to shed the workday world, our anticipation, our joy, and also, very much, our grief.

Mike died July 5, 2021, just after five o’clock, and as I later placed the moment, I’d been fishing a mayfly hatch in our favorite Crooked River spot, and hooked a beautiful big red-side trout. I landed the fish, watched it shine gasping on the bank, and then with wetted hands gently slipped it back to the water, where it rushed to seek its old place.

And I thought of Dad and Mike.