Gaming Up Life: Considerations for Game Expansions

Abstract

Those of us who have been involved with sport philosophy for a number of years have learned much from Bernard Suits. For this, we owe him a debt of gratitude. His definition of games has been regarded as the gold standard against which other such efforts are judged. Even his occasional detractors did not so much attack his definition as question his broader project, one of discovering a phenomenon’s necessary and sufficient conditions. Suits, in a playful but pointed way, called these critics “terminal Wittgensteinians.” Much to his credit, Suits drew normative attention to games when much previous literature focused on the value of play. He saw gaming behavior not only as a logical outcome of human progress, but also as humankind’s most potent antidote for boredom and malaise. He expanded previous discussions on the juxtaposition of work and play to the more inclusive and complex interrelationships among work, games, and play. He did this, and so much more, in his own inimitable way—with his keen sense of humor fully at play. I remember asking myself as a young professor how unusual it was to read a serious philosophy text that provoked uncontrollable laughter . . . for the right reasons! However, for those who knew Suits in person, and for others who got to know him only through words spoken by the Grasshopper, he was a very funny person. In many ways he acted out what he preached. When life became a little tedious, he gamed it up. When the prospect of writing a dreary text on definitions seemed, well, a little dreary, he decided to game it up too. Thus, in The Grasshopper, he added a story line, paradoxes, scintillating dialogue, teases, false leads, old jokes, dozens of allusions to popular and classical literature, resurrections, mysteries, and bawdy metaphors to the core argument. One gets the sense that he put all of these additional literary hurdles in his way just to see if he could write a serious treatise under these more difficult conditions. He employed the lusory attitude, in short, when writing his own lusory text. I believe that Suits was right about the role of the so-called lusory attitude in promoting the good life. We seek and enjoy artificial challenges both formally and informally. Formal gaming tendencies produce free-standing, culturally recognized activities like baseball and soccer. Informal routes to gaming can be found