Bernard Suits is commonly thought to have defined games as challenges. This paper argues that Suits could not have done so without ruining his larger philosophical project. It then argues that he did not do so. Suits defined game playing in quantitative terms (i.e. being more or less efficient) not qualitative ones (e.g. difficulty, struggle). The paper concludes by exploring the consequences of this shift in perspective.

In The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, Suits maintains the following two theses: game-playing is defined as ‘activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity’ and ‘game playing is what makes Utopia intelligible.’ Observing that these two theses cannot be jointly maintained absent paradox, this essay explores the (...) logical possibility that if is true, then must be false. More specifically, in the tradition of conceptual analysis it is argued that Suits’ definition of game-playing is too narrow inasmuch as it excludes really magnificent Utopian games of significance. (shrink)

The relation between sport and a good life presents a fruitful philosophical challenge and it has been discussed extensively within the philosophy sport literature. This paper will investigate the role of sport in a good life in the philosophical conceptions of Aristotle and Suits. Both authors paid attention to sport and its significance in the context of living well. However, their approaches differ, partly because they emerge in a different historical and cultural context. My aim is to analyse relevant texts (...) of these two authors, presenting their major points, commonalities, and differences. The debate, to a certain extent, highlights instrumental (educational) and autotelic (intrinsic) value of sport. In order to conceptualize properly the role of sport in a good life, we need to take into account both of these aspects. The originality of this contribution can be found in presenting relevant implications of the contrasting positions of Suits and Aristotle to our thinking about modern sport. Finally, I point to the complementarity of their positions and demonstrate their impact on the broader debate concerning good sport and its role in a good life. (shrink)

In “The Virtual and the Real,” David Chalmers argues that there is an epistemic and ontological parity between VR and ordinary reality. My argument here is that, whatever the plausibility of these claims, they provide no basis for supposing that there is a similar parity of value. Careful reflection upon certain aspects of the transition that individuals make from interacting with real-world, physical environments to interacting with VR provides a basis for thinking that, to the extent that there are good (...) reasons to deny the reality of virtual objects, there are also reasons to place a correspondingly higher value upon the experience of interacting with a VR environment. Chalmers’ assumption to the contrary arises from a subtle misrepresentation of how the phenomenon of cognitive penetration works in the perception of virtual objects, and from an unwillingness to acknowledge how our attitudes toward virtual environments are conditioned by the values we adopt when engaged in gameplay. (shrink)

Since Sigmund Freud developed and popularized psychoanalysis, this psychological theory has significantly influenced contemporary thinking, particularly in philosophical disciplines focused on understanding human behavior and addressing social problems. Take the examples of political philosophy, race theory, and feminist thought, among many others. However, although sport philosophy qualifies as one such discipline, scholars in this field have given little to no attention to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theorists. Remarkably, psychoanalytical notions, especially those of Eric Berne and Norman O. Brown, significantly shaped Bernard (...) Suits’ pioneering thoughts on games. Nevertheless, sport philosophers have largely overlooked the importance of psychoanalysis in Suits’ examinations of games and, more broadly speaking, rarely attempted to apply psychoanalytical concepts to their analyses of sport. In this paper, I explain the psychoanalytical roots of Suits’ theory of games and explore how much of his theory of games is indebted to psychoanalysis. Specifically, I first compare Suits’ analysis of unconscious gameplay to psychoanalytic concepts of repression and neurosis. Subsequently, I explore the alignment between Suits’ views on gameplay and psychoanalytic accounts of play and pleasure. To conclude, I examine the therapeutic and emancipatory character of Suits’ proposal, drawing parallels between his philosophical corpus and critical theorists whose critical analyses of modern society are heavily indebted to Freud. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI argue that the apparently exclusive choice between Suits’ utopia of gameplay and death by suicide is a false dilemma, one which obscures a ‘third way’ of positive boredom. Further, I offe...

In The Grasshopper, Bernard Suits argues that the best life is the one whose essence is game-play. In fact, only through the concept of game-play can we understand how anything at all is worth doing. Yet this seems implausible: morality makes things worth doing independently of any game, and games are themselves subject to moral evaluation. So games must be logically posterior to morality. The current paper responds to these objections by developing the theory of Ludic Constructivism. Constructivist theories such (...) as Kant’s explain normativity in a way that is both objective and cognitivist but also mind-dependent. Roughly, constructivists ground normative structures in rational procedures. But rational agency is diverse: it is realized in different ways and to different degrees by different agents. Yet Kantian Constructivism requires a strong identity of rational procedures across rational agents. Ludic Constructivism avoids this challenge by rejecting this strong identity of agency, instead building a normative framework out of the ingredients of Suits’s definition of game-play. We want to play the best games we can. In order to do so we must play games with a certain structure: they must be nested multiplayer games in which everyone who is capable of self-originating activity is engaged as a fellow player rather than a plaything. Nested games – games that are constructed out of other games – go best when each game contributes to the value of each other game in the nest. Such game nests are “reciprocating value-maximization structures”. Our lives go best when we design, play, and revise the game of our Individual Life and we also embed that game within the highest-order nested game of Fate of Humankind. In this way, Ludic Constructivism delivers a normative system that expands Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and a life that meets Aristotle’s conception of pleasure. (shrink)

‘“That son of a bitch”, Skepticus muttered. With a snap he closed the book, he had been reading and glared at the title The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia’ (Suits 2021b, 1). These lines serve...

Philosophy has a schizophrenic relationship with games. On the one hand, philosophers love using games as model, arguing that phenomena as diverse as linguistic meaning, meta‐ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, law, and aesthetics can be illuminated via an analogy with games. On the other hand, there is scant focused discussion of the concept of a game as such. This is problematic; the appeal to games as a model to clarify philosophically puzzling questions has limited utility if games themselves (and the (...) concept of a game) are poorly understood. Moreover, playing games plausibly is an important element in a good life; anyone interested in the theory of welfare, a traditional philosophical topic, should be interested in games. We play games, but if anything, play itself has been more neglected by philosophers than games. This neglect is unwarranted. Historically, philosophy has investigated foundational questions about human nature, and a disposition to play plausibly is a deep part of human nature. Moreover, play is an important concept in evolutionary biology and psychology, yet those working in those fields struggle to define the concept to their own satisfaction. E.O. Wilson went so far as to remark that “no behavioural concept has proved more ill‐defined, elusive, controversial, and even unfashionable than play.” One might have hoped philosophers could help here. In this paper, I provide an opinionated introduction to the philosophy of play and games. (shrink)

Distinguished for the game-parabling expressed in The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, Bernard Suits is revered as the author of the unorthodox claim that Utopia is intelligible and game playing is what makes Utopia intelligible. Reasonably embraced as a game in itself, the purpose of this metaphysical brainteaser is to present the reader with an enigma, with the challenge of its resolution serving as the very means by which one is to be brought into line with the logic of the (...) Grasshopper’s Utopian thesis. Appreciating the fine intricacies of this challenge, the purpose of this essay is to advance the quest for resolution via a consideration of play as a necessary element of the Grasshopper’s game playing Utopia. As foundational to the enigma, I begin with a portrayal of the Grasshopper’s tangle of riddles about play, games and the good life. Converging upon the insights of the Grasshopper and/or his disciples in respect to the nature, meaning and significance of play in its conceptual relati... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we contextualize and introduce the papers that comprise the special issue, “Bernard Suits’ Legacy: New Inspirations and Interpretations.” The articles discuss the work of S...

I here defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game—specifically, a ‘Suitsian’ game that meets the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one from Thomas Hurka (2006) and another from within The Grasshopper (...) itself. In the process, I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book. (shrink)

In this article, I consider Alkis Kontos’ and Allan Bäck’s critiques to Suits that his theory of games and good living lack ontological grounds or rests on the wrong foundations. Taking these criti...

En este artículo se analiza el concepto de imperativo metanoético que Peter Sloterdijk presenta en ¡Has de cambiar tu vida! Nuestro objetivo es iluminar la naturaleza de lo que, en trabajos anteriores, hemos denominado -a raíz de la obra de Bernard Suits-: razón lúdica. Para ello, primero, expondremos y analizaremos el sentido del imperativo metanoético en Sloterdijk, así como los elementos principales de su razón ascética. Segundo, mostraremos cómo ambos son consecuencia del análisis ontológico de corte heideggeriano en la que (...) Sloterdijk basa su propuesta de filosofía moral. Tercero, presentaremos en términos sloterdijkianos tanto el análisis ontológico de Suits, como el posible imperativo metanoético que se desprendería de su razón lúdica. Por último, centrándonos en el papel que Sloterdijk otorga a la figura del «ocioso», mostraremos las posibles conexiones entre Suits y Sloterdijk. Mostraremos la relación que existe entre los imperativos lúdicos y ascéticos donde, además, el acto «jugar» recibe un papel central en la «respuesta a la pregunta por el ser». In this article, we analyze Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of “metanoethical imperative” in You Must Change Your Life. Our goal is to shed light on what, by drawing on Bernard Suits, we call “ludic reason.” To do so, we will present and examine in depth the meaning of Sloterdijk’s metanoethical imperative, as well as the main features of his concept of “askesis.” Second, we will argue that both concepts are the result of the Heideggerian ontological principles underlying Sloterdijk’s moral philosophy. Third, we will provide a “Sloterdijkean” interpretation of Suits’ account of games by focusing on the metanoethical imperative that could be derived from the notion of the ludic reason. To conclude, we will focus on the role that the figure of the “Good-for-Nothing” plays in Sloterdijk’s account, showing connections between Suits’ and Sloterdijk’s approaches. We will argue that, in the philosophical approaches of both philosophers, the idea of game playing is closely tied to the “question on Being.”. (shrink)