There’s an interesting saying, attributed to Bion of Borysthenes:

Though boys throw rocks at frogs in jest, the frogs die in earnest.

There is an interesting phenomenon in life that people can play entirely serious games. This is an oxymoron, of course, but the nature of a fallen world is that it will contradict itself without blushing.

There is a sense in which all sin is this sort of serious game. Fornication makes as good an example as any. The fornicator generally pretends at marriage when he engages in the marital act. He may even make children by doing it. He meant none of this; to him it was just a game.

It is a strange thing that we human beings can think that we can play at real life and it will obligingly not be real merely because we didn’t really mean it.

This is, I think, a key to understanding more than a few perplexing behaviors.