Having studied five years of philosophy it was a real find to be able to pick up a book about games written in the Socratic style.
The Grasshopper is a character from Aesop’s fables, where the ant gathers food all summer while the grasshopper plays. When winter comes the ant eats and the grasshopper dies. In the book, Grasshopper is a philosopher in the Helenistic tradition – he is well aware of the dangers of the coming winter but decides that playing is the philosophically sound choice, though it leads him knowingly to his death. Grasshopper acts as Socrates to two pupils – Prudence and Skepticus.
In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. Bernard Suits: disagrees with this and argues that “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Suits goes on to argue that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia.
Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. If you are purchasing it make sure you get the later edition with Hurka as co-author.
Why is this book useful for gamers and game designers? Well, it works, not because it establishes universal truths, but because it situates these truths in a social context. As games are a social activity the text is therefore useful for anyone concerned with the social or political dimensions of games.
The book is essential for those interested in the philosophy of game design.
I have included a Bibliography below of books/articles on the topic for those who may be interested:
Aarseth, Espen. (2017). Just Games. Game Studies, 17(1), http://gamestudies.org/1701/articles/justgames.
Bäck, Allen. (2008). The Paper World of Bernard Suits. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 35(2), 156-174.
Bateman, Chris. (2015). Implicit Game Aesthetics. Games and Culture, 10(4), 389-411.
Boluk, Stephanie and Patrick Lemieux. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Caillois, Roger. (1961). Man, Play, and Games (Meyer Barash, Trans.). New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Dor, Simon. (2018). Strategy in Games or Strategy Games: Dictionary and Encyclopaedic Definitions for Game Studies. Game Studies, 18(1), http://gamestudies.org/1801/articles/simon_dor.
Guanio-Uluru, Lykke. (2016). War, Games, and the Ethics of Fiction. Game Studies, 16(2), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/guanio.
Järvinen, Aki. (2004). A Meaningful Read: Rules of Play Reviewed. Game Studies, 4(1), http://www.gamestudies.org/0401/jarvinen/.
Juul, Jesper. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kretchmar, R. Scott. (2006). The Intelligibility of Suits’s Utopia: The View from Anthropological Philosophy. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 33(1), 67-77.
Lastowska, Greg. (2009). Rules of Play. Games and Culture, 4(4), 379-395.
López Frías, Francisco Javier. (2017). A Kantian View of Suits’ Utopia: “a kingdom of autotelically-motivated game players.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 44(1), 138-151.
López Frías, Francisco Javier. (2019). Bernard Suits’ Response to the Question on the Meaning of Life as a Critique of Modernity. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 13(3-4), 406-418.
McBride, Frank. (1979). A Critique of Mr. Suits’ Definition of Game Playing. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 6(1), 59-65.
Paddick, Robert J. (1979). Review of The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 6(1), 73-78.
Rockwell, Geoffrey and Kevin Kee. (2011). The Leisure of Serious Games: A Dialogue. Game Studies, 11(2), http://gamestudies.org/1102/articles/geoffrey_rockwell_kevin_kee.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. (2004). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Suits, Bernard. (1967a). Is Life a Game We Are Playing? Ethics 77(3), 209-213.
Suits, Bernard. (1967b). What Is a Game? Philosophy of Science 34(2), 148-156.
Suits, Bernard. (1984). Games and Utopia: Posthumous Reflections. Simulation and Games, 15(1), 5-23.
Suits, Bernard. (1988). Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18(2), 265-270.
Suits, Bernard. (2014). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
Suits, Bernard. (2019). Return of the Grasshopper: Games and the End of the Future (Abridged). In Thomas Hurka (Ed.), Games, Sports and Play: Philosophical Essays (pp. 193-230).
Tulloch, Rowan. (2014). The Construction of Play: Rules, Restrictions, and the Repressive Hypothesis. Games and Culture, 9(5), 335-350.
Wark, McKenzie. (2007). Gamer Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
I have a lot of sympathy for grasshopper. If preparing for winter is taken as a metaphor for an individual’s approach to death, then it is a valid (I argue the only valid) response.
Defining a game would seem a difficult task unless the players agree on some sort of category-theory along the lines of a set theory that tries to eliminate paradoxes like the set of all sets that do not contain themselves.
If you can agree on that, then I like the whimsy of Bernard Suit’s definition you share in the OP.
Great comment Dave which gets to the heart of the very problem. If you have a list of lists that do not list themselves, then that list must list itself, because it doesn’t contain itself. However, if it lists itself, it then contains itself, meaning it cannot list itself.
This is Bertrand Russell”s paradox.
As you mentioned the paradox can indeed be overcome by Zermelo, Franekel, and Skolem’s Axiomatic Set Theory and Russell’s own Type Theory where entities of a given type are built exclusively from entities of those types that are lower in their hierarchy, thus preventing an entity from being defined using itself.
Zermelo’s and Russell’s approaches differ in that Zermelo modified the axioms of set theory whereas Russell modified the logical language.
On the other hand the introduction of set theory to overcome Russell’s paradox may not be required as it could be argued that Suits explanation of playing a game: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” is not really a definition at all, and is more of an explanation of game theory itself. However this is a discussion we should have over several bottles of Heathcote Shiraz!!
I think all of this is best summed up by Mal Brooks’ character Comicus:
agreed, but I think agreeing to the rules is in itself a game, hence the paradox. But what do I know? I’m more BS artist than stand-up philosopher.
Agreeing or pretending to agree on the rules is indeed a game.
I am not sure if I have told you this true story, but when I was in my final year of philosophy the faculty professor was retiring. We all attended the great hall with everyone in their academic regalia when he rose to give his final address.
He was always a bit of a character, and his opening words went something like this: “Philosophers, Sociologists and Psychologists think they are all using scientific method but they are just a pack of wankers. The only difference is that Philosophers do their wanking with discipline. I will now spend the next ten minutes proving my point”.
So providing you BS with discipline it is OK!
sounds like a proponent of continental philosophy.
Despite being a proponent of Analytical philosophy he lectured in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche so I guess you are right!