Imagine a bowling ball rolling over the alley and then striking all the pins.

In bowling, a strike is the best score you can get with a single hit. So, a circumstance like that can be considered something important in a game, even crucial in some cases.

Was the ball thinking about that? Has the ball decided to hit the pins and lead to the victory? The ball wins? Clearly not. The well prepared bowling player aimed to the space between the 1 and 3 pin in order to perform a good shot.

So it was the player the one thinking about the outcome of his throw, not the ball - the ball was just its vessel. By the way, the action the player performed wasn't actually hitting the pins. It was a composition of well refined coordinated movements of the arms and the legs, mixed together with a precise and fast elaboration of the images coming from eyes, made by the brain in just few seconds.

I wonder. If the exact movement and processing leads to the very same outcome - a strike - why there are bowling courses and tournaments? Why bowling is fun in the first place?

When something starts losing its meaning it's probably because we're oversimplifying it. And this bowling case is likely one of them. Is bowling truly a game in which you have to hit as many pins as you can? Yeah, obviously. But... that's it?

What about evaluating the ball weight, estimating the oil placement on the alley, learning how to aim correctly and then move the arm accordingly, with the right angle and spin and even control your own mood, attention and temperature?

There are a lot of tiny variables pulling away the player to the strike. And setting in motion an astonishingly perfect Rube Goldberg machine in no time is the true key to the victory.

I'd like you to enlarge this vision now to the entire arc of your own life. I want you to see the stomach-turning number of these non-decisions you, some-other and some-thing made in order to bring you here and right now. And, if that's not enough, zoom out to the enitre existance.

Can you see it? Can you see the complex chain of both controlled and arbitrary cause-effects dominoes hitting each other and ending with you reading these lines? Even if there is someone or something that gave the first hit, are you sure that hit was intentional - and even in that case, we are living his/its perfect hit? Or just his/its miss?

But, more importantly, since everything you are is mostly a consequence of by your past life, are you a ball or a player? Is just the meaning of the words win and lose that makes them different?

Who knows. And, perhaps, who cares. Just roll the best way you can.

Plot!

Set the perfect Rube Goldberg in motion with Automate! Each level has a target to reach: make it happen placing unrelated objects around and seeing what happens!

Hit the objects on the bar in the right side of the screen for adding them to the scene. Then drag them with the pointer for moving around. Some elements can be rotated hitting them while on the scene. Select the trash can on the right bottom of the screen for entering in delete mode: you can now move the elements you added back to the right bar hitting them. You can toggle the delete mode hitting the trash can again. Hit the play button on the top right of the screen for running the scene and seeing how your composition works - if it reaches the scene goal, you won!

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