The Wishing Game

Terry Pratchett’s novel, Eric, is, like all Discworld novels, a mash-up parody of innumerable other things. In this case, the primary objects of mockery are Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Homer, the Aztecs, and Dante.  As with all Discworld novels, it is marvelous fun.

In the novel Eric tries to summon a demon so he can get his three wishes.  He makes his wishes and in every case, while he technically gets his wish, it isn’t what he really meant.  That idea has been done many times in other stories.

Here is the twist.  It turns out there is a demon who has the job of figuring out how to subvert wishes.  You make a wish, and this demon then thinks about your wish and figures out how to simultaneously grant you your wish in the technical sense that you have to admit your wish was granted, but making sure it is not what you really wanted.

I hereby invent a new parlor game.  (Wait.  Does anyone else call these things parlor games anymore?)

I hereby invent a new Card game which for $24.99 you will be able to buy on Amazon.  Each card comes with a wish on it.  Players then compete to come up with ways to grant the wish, but do so in a way that it is very unappealing to have the wish fulfilled.  Something like Apples to Apples or, even more accurately, that Dictionary game where you come up with fake definitions. 

Good times for all. 

Anyone who wants to actually develop and sell this game, let me know.

Here is the first challenge:  I wish someone would come along, take this idea, sign a contract with me, causing me to get fabulously rich off of the royalties from this game. 

Your job:  figure out how to both technically grant that wish, but make sure that I will not be happy that my wish was granted.  You can use the comments section below for your ideas.

Reversing the question, though, is where this gets philosophically interesting.  Can you think of a wish which could not be subverted?  When I try to do that, I realize that the wish starts sounding like a legal document.  Does the genie who grants wishes accept 50 page legal documents for each wish?

Why is it so hard to simply state a wish?  Why are our wishes so complicated?

Eliot wrote (in East Coker):

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing

Is that the same idea?  Is the problem that when I think about wishes for the future, I actually do not know what I want?

I wish to be happy.  So, like Job, I am happy right before my world crashes down. 

I wish to be permanently happy.  So I spend my life consuming lotus plants or some other narcotic. 

I wish to be happy because I have cultivated virtue.  Does that work?  

The problem with wishes of that last type is that they are wishes for a state of internal thought.  To the best of my understanding of the three wishes game, you only get to wish for external things, things of the sort a genie can create.  Wishing for happiness is cheating.

So, if I am limited to external things, do I have any idea what it is I actually want?  Do you?