Playing Towards Death: Suits’ ‘Game-Playing’ Utopia in Dialogue with Heidegger’s ‘Being-toward-Death’

346Philosophy and Literature many of whom turned out to be self-serving farceurs) to the concluding pipe dreams about an "Anarchist University," there is here more than a touch of what Marxists righdy deride as Utopian socialism. David Hume's sound remark on other-worldly men of his day speaks even more pointedly to this-worldly activist-Utopians of our own: "A delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of die world, and to make him consider the common course of human affairs with too much indignation." Rumson, New JerseyWill Morrisey The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, by Bernard Suits, with drawings by Frank Newfeld; 178 pp. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990, $10.95 paper. Philosophers are not generally known for fine writing, but once in a generation or two a book appears out ofnowhere, unclassifiable, inspired, amazing, mesmerizing, wonderful, classic. What books are these? Well, Alice in Wonderland and Through tL· Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and Either/Or and Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard, four of the greatest philosophy books of the nineteenth century. Before that there was Candide by Voltaire and Rameau's Nephew by Diderot, and in our own century there are Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Bachelard's TL· Poetics ofSpace. These are books that shock, entertain, instruct, and edify, that can be reread many times for profit (how do they do it?) and pleasure (they do it so well!). Do what? For one thing, in a book in this class the intensity of its author's vision is sustained at its highest peak throughout. You read it the way you watch a tightrope walker, with a great, contented sigh when the end is reached, as perfecdy balanced as the beginning. These are usually marginal books, in the French sense, if not wayward philosophically , at least out of the way, as is, for example, another tour de force, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass. Occasionally one, say Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, or the Tractatus, careens into the lead on philosophy's autobahn to be pursued madly by lesser vehicles for awhile. Many have trouble finding a publisher. In 1978, having been rejected by a dozen other publishers (including Oxford University Press, whose guardians "almost" took it but in the end found it unsuitable), TL· Grasshopper by Bernard Suits was released by the University of Reviews347 Toronto Press. It was received with a few rave reviews and mosdy silence, and soon went out of print. But though such books often die, they also rise again, and now that marginal if not wayward (but possessed of impeccable taste) independent publisher, David R. Godine, who prints always only what he likes, has resurrected TL· Grasshopper. Good. TL· Grasshopper is in the form of a Socratic dialogue, only more so. When Prudence asks near the end, "And do you really believe, Grasshopper, that there w some Agency which controls our destinies?," the Grasshopper replies, "More specifically, I believe that there is some Author who writes our dialogue." And when Skepticus suggests that this Author is playing the game ofPirandello with them, the Grasshopper responds drily, "I think he is writing a treatise on the philosophy ofgames." And so he is: "To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by rules (lusory means), where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where the rules are acceptedjustbecause they make possible such activity (lusory attitude) . . . playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" (p. 41). One need not be a philosopher to rise and cheer at the succinct elegance of that summation after 41 pages of feinting to get there. But then the counterexamples begin: the annoying triflers, cheats, and spoilsports; the batde to worse than death between Ivan and Abdul; the sexual act; the frustrations of Sir Edmund Hillary who would climb a mountain for sport; the adventures of Porphyryo Sneak, the greatest spy in the world, and of Bartholomew Drag, the greatest bore; the counsel of the therapist Dr. Heurschreck; and...

Gaines and abound in Sir Gawain and Green Knight, and by such amusements Gawain-poet investigates ways they reveal knight's understanding of his individual identity as a Christian. Through intersecting dynamics of Arthur's chivalric court of and Green Knight's gaming challenge to it, Green Knight brings a crisis of self-definition to Gawain: this forces Gawain to confront his personal limitations and to gain a better understanding of his place within a Christian world. The ample scholarship on poem covers this territory extensively. (1) This study expands on previous scholarship by providing a structural analysis of game's many levels, by locating romance within tradition of godgame, by analyzing critical juncture between and crucial to godgame, and by examining overlap between godgames of Green Knight and of Christianity. Thus, my goal is to reexamine Gawain and through a novel theoretical framework; from this perspective we see ways in which Christianity is figured merely as romance's default world view but as an active player in this fascinating game. The Green Knight's godgame of chivalry ultimately merges with Christianity's godgame of spirituality, forcing Gawain to confront his limitations in these two key aspects of his identity. Games, at their simplest, must involve a goal, rules, and participants willing to attempt to achieve goal while adhering to rules. Bernard Suits theorizes that all games incorporate objectives, rules, and attitudes into their structure: To a is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by (lusory means), where prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where are accepted just because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude) (41). The players accept and requirements of game, for whatever reason they have decided to enter into it. Robert Rawdon Wilson suggests that lusory attitude is incorporation of into players' mindset, the internalization of rules (Rules/Conventions 23). In addition to a goal and rules, most games also have stakes; although these stakes may be minimal (the joy of winning) or large (money, prestige, glory), their presence in a indicates that matters to players, that typically bears some personal significance to them. In many analyses of and play, two terms are treated interchangeably, as if game and were synonyms. A quick distinction between and play, however, is that most games have a structure of rules, goals, and stakes, but need have none of these. Johan Huizinga provides a concise (and oft-quoted) definition of play: Summing up formal characteristics of play[,] we might call a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at same time absorbing player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed and in an orderly manner. It promotes formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from common world by disguise or other means. (13) This definition, remarkable for its simplicity and apparent completeness, (2) underscores that incorporates a much looser structure than game, so much looser that may be more of an attitude than an activity. Brad Lowell Stone, for example, comments that play does indeed require a certain attitude to enter it (68). By distinguishing between as structure and as attitude, we see dynamics of Green Knight's much more clearly. …

In The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978), Bernard Suits has a clear objective, that of defining “play”, or rather “game-playing”, a concern that had been with him at least since the decade before his major publication. Until arriving at his summarized version – “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” – the author goes on to describe what he understands to be the “lusory elements” – “objectives”, “means” and “rules” –, considering that the unity of what it is to play a game, of its elements, is ensured by an attitude, the “lusory attitude”. Notwithstanding the merit of his theoretical endeavor – seen in the attempt to define a social component that is so complex and the target of the most diverse interpretations and misconceptions –, it seems to us that, with this unifying element, the author has summoned another problem (that of subjectivism) to the debate rather than a solution, even subjecting himself to comparisons with other conceptions that are also problematic. This is where the focus of this article will turn.

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

On Bernard Suits’s celebrated analysis, to play a game is to engage in a ‘voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’. Voluntariness is understood in terms of the players having the ‘lusory attitude’ of accepting the constitutive rules of the game just because they make possible playing it. In this paper I suggest that the players in Netflix’s hit show Squid Game play the ‘squid games’, but they do not do so voluntarily; they are forced to play. I argue that this means that we should rethink Suits’s analysis by claiming that all that is needed for players to play is that someone has put the rules in force for them for the reason that it makes playing the game possible. I then illustrate the virtues of the revised analysis by showing how it helps us to defuse Hurka’s recent counterexamples to Suits’s view.

In this essay, I revisit my claims about game structures and amend them by adding achievement-regulated games to previously analyzed time- and event-structured activities. In describing achievement formats, I discuss their heavy reliance on the world of work, their strong dependency on Suits’ lusory attitude, and their relative independence from constitutive rules. I argue that achievement-structured games carry disadvantages not shared by time- and event-regulated activities. I speculate that achievement gaming came first in our evolutionary history, but show that it still holds value for modern players and spectators.

In this paper, I am going to present a condensed version of my theory of what sport is from my book The Philosophy of Football. In that work, I took my starting point in Bernard Suits’ celebrated, though controversial view that a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ and a sport is a game that involves physical skills with a wide following and a wide level of stability. In the monograph, I carefully work through Suits’ theory showing which clauses of the analysis can be kept, which have to be amended and which should be rejected, while adding other elements to provide an adequate understanding of sport. Here I will not follow suit. Instead, on the scholarly issue of situating my view in the literature, I confer my reader to the book, and instead focus on presenting my own positive view of what sport is and my reasons for holding it. Sport is an extra-ordinary, unnecessary, rule-based, competitive, skill-based physical activity or practice where there is cooperation to fulfil the prelusory goal of having a competition, where mere sport participants endure or tolerate the implementation of a sport’s constitutive rules, whereas sport practitioners also aim at fulfilling sport’s lusory goal of winning, minimally not losing, whichever sport competition they partake in. I present the idea that sport is a social historical kind and how we should understand that before addressing my suggested analysis of sport and how it fits our concept of sport and sports as we find them practiced by us.

Reviews347 Toronto Press. It was received with a few rave reviews and mosdy silence, and soon went out of print. But though such books often die, they also rise again, and now that marginal if not wayward (but possessed of impeccable taste) independent publisher, David R. Godine, who prints always only what he likes, has resurrected TL· Grasshopper. Good. TL· Grasshopper is in the form of a Socratic dialogue, only more so. When Prudence asks near the end, "And do you really believe, Grasshopper, that there w some Agency which controls our destinies?," the Grasshopper replies, "More specifically, I believe that there is some Author who writes our dialogue." And when Skepticus suggests that this Author is playing the game ofPirandello with them, the Grasshopper responds drily, "I think he is writing a treatise on the philosophy ofgames." And so he is: "To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goal), using only means permitted by rules (lusory means), where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where the rules are acceptedjustbecause they make possible such activity (lusory attitude) . . . playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" (p. 41). One need not be a philosopher to rise and cheer at the succinct elegance of that summation after 41 pages of feinting to get there. But then the counterexamples begin: the annoying triflers, cheats, and spoilsports; the batde to worse than death between Ivan and Abdul; the sexual act; the frustrations of Sir Edmund Hillary who would climb a mountain for sport; the adventures of Porphyryo Sneak, the greatest spy in the world, and of Bartholomew Drag, the greatest bore; the counsel of the therapist Dr. Heurschreck; and the final resolution of the puzzle as to why, in Utopia, no one would ever do anything but play games. Watson: Grasshopper, you obsessive monomaniac, I love you, but you're wrong to think that in Utopia we would only play games. My idea of Utopia is eternally to read books like this. Grasshopper: If you think that undercuts my case, you'd better reread Chapter 15. Washington UniversityRichard A. Watson Signatures ofthe Visible, by FredricJameson; 254 pp. New York: Roudedge, Chapman & Hall, 1990, $25.00. "The visual is essentially pornographic," FredricJameson begins his new book: films "ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body" (p. 1). In 348Philosophy and Literature the pages that follow, the tension which generates the text of Signatures of the Visible emerges from what Jameson will call an "ontology of the visual"—the existential struggle between "mastery of the gaze" and the "illimitable richness of the visual object." True to the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic, Jameson approaches film as a medium which simultaneously fascinates and disgusts him: the sheer physicality ofthe cinematic experience, the intensely intimate manner in which film comes to be inscribed into the very being of the viewer, provokes Jameson to conclude that "film is an addiction that leaves its traces in the body itself" (p. 2). Readers who have struggled withJameson's prose in the past will be pleased to learn that his latest book constitutes his most personal and accessible study to date: in the opening pages, a parallel is drawn between what is attempted here and the analytic writings of Freud, a therapeutic "exorcism" ofsorts which tries to extract the filmic image from the very body ofthe writer. Though never entirely at ease with the inevitably "self-indulgent" character of film analysis itself, Jameson maintains that we must not neglect the uniquely ontological dimensions of the cinematic experience which necessitate such personal film readings. However, as we would expect, the "historicity of perception," for Jameson, must also be understood as saturated through and through with the social and historical. Since the early eighties, Jameson has increasingly shifted his attention away from theory towards a more practical application of the principles first established in Marxism and Form (1971), TL· Prison-House of Language (1972), and TL· Political Unconscious (1981). Not surprisingly, in Signatures of the Visible, Jameson's readings of film all gravitate within the arena of the hermeneutic procedures...

PurposeGames and learning research has diverged into “games for learning” and “games as learning” research. This paper aims to provide a third framing, “games with learning”, that can help address the lived experiences learners have with these media outside of formal, instructional contexts.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a critical analysis of the current games and learning field, considering what has been missed by recent research in the field and how we might benefit from further consideration of what Bernard Suits calls the “lusory attitude” or voluntary choice to accept inefficiencies in achieving goals. The paper analyzes dominant rhetoric of educational game research, with the intent of revealing the implicit assumptions about play and choice that much recent “games for learning” and “games as learning” work may have ignored.FindingsThe paper reveals that the further consideration of learning through extant play with games (characterized here as “games with learning”) can be a means of shifting the direction of educational games research toward investigations of how games are played “in the wilds” of out-of-school contexts. The paper advocates for a shifting of focus from compulsory contexts to the study of voluntary game play.Social implicationsThe paper argues for the complex value of games and gameplay in non-institutional settings, and advocates for further research to understand games in non-institutional spaces.Originality/valueThe key argument is that games and learning to date has focused inordinately on how games can further educational design, rather than how the use of games can reveal important new contexts for learning.

En este texto analizamos el estudio que Bernard Suits hace del uso instrumental de la razón en The Grasshopper a través de su utopía. Para ello, analizamos el papel que juega la razón instrumental en la teoría del juego y en la utopía de Suits. Luego, comparamos el uso instrumental de la razón con lo que denominamos «actitud lúdica». Esta última encarna la racionalidad lúdica que los jugadores han de adoptar para jugar al juego y vivir en el mundo utópico de Suits. Para concluir, defendemos que la actitud lúdica ofrece una alternativa a la predominancia del uso instrumental de la razón en nuestra sociedad.

In his work, Bernard Suits presents and pursues a stated objective: to define ‘game’ or, more precisely, ‘game-playing’. In The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, the author seeks a definition not as a ‘commitment to the universal fruitfulness of definition construction’, but rather with the idea ‘that some things are definable, and some are not’. This is something he believed could resolve many of the issues surrounding the debate on ‘game’ and ‘play’, such as those with Huizinga (in Homo Ludens) or proposed by the anti-definitionism of Wittgenstein, a philosopher who did not accept that it was possible to define ‘game’. In this article, we will trace Suits’ definitional steps and aim to critique his resolution as a kind of ‘formalism’, as it tended to prioritize rules. Furthermore, notwithstanding the merit of his theoretical endeavor – seen in the attempt to define a social component that is so complex and the target of the most diverse interpretations and misconceptions –, it seems to us that, with his theoretical unifying element (lusory attitude), the author has summoned another problem to the debate, that of ‘subjectivism’, rather than a solution (especially to his formalism), even subjecting himself to comparisons with other conceptions (e.g. Fichte) that are also problematic. This aspect will also be criticized. The attention of this article will shift to these two lines of critique, drawing on an insightful analysis of Malaby’s work at a specific juncture, aiming to delve further into the subject and taking an additional step.

ABSTRACTAn essential and yet often neglected motivation of Bernard Suits’ elevation of gameplay to the ideal of human existence is his account of capacities along perfectionist lines and the function of games in eliciting them. In his work Suits treats the expression of these capacities as implicitly good and the purest expression of the human telos. Although it is a possible interpretation to take Suits’ utopian vision to mean that gameplay in his future utopia must consist of the logically inevitable replaying of activities we conduct in the present for instrumental reasons (playing games-by-default), because gameplay for Suits is identical with the expression of sets of capacities specifically elicited by game rules, it is much more likely that he intends utopian gameplay to be an endless series of carefully crafted opportunities for the elicitation of special capacities (playing games-by-design), and thus embody his ideal of existence. This article therefore provides a new lens for understanding both Suits’ definitional work on gameplay and its connection to his utopian vision in the last chapter of The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia.1

ABSTRACTGiven Bernard Suits’ stature in the philosophy of sport, his take on strategic fouling, surprisingly, hasn’t been given much attention in the literature. Rather than relying on a purely empirical or ‘ethos’ approach to justify the Strategic Foul he provides a mixed justification. Suits’ account combines a priori and a posteriori elements. He introduces a third kind of rule, which appears to be unlike rules of skill or constitutive rules, into his conceptual scheme. Suits claims that it is sometimes tactically correct to break such a rule to gain an advantage. I will argue that the a priori element in his justification of strategic fouling is unconvincing because there is nothing special about ‘third type’ rule-violations, which incur a ‘fixed penalty’. Furthermore, the a posteriori element ultimately reduces to a rule of skill, and it is doubtful whether it has sufficient normative force to warrant breaking a rule. But, most importantly, the a posteriori element degrades the power of the a priori element.

To understand the phenomenon experienced by nursing students in their academic practices in view of death and dying. This was a qualitative study, based on Martin Heidegger' existential phenomenology, undertaken at a public University in Alagoas, Brazil, between August and October 2013. Seven senior students of nursing were interviewed. The phenomenological analysis yielded the following existential themes: Facing death and dying in academic practice; Acknowledging impotence in the face of death; Glimpsing the possibility of solicitude; Interacting with the family in view of the loss; Experiencing spirituality in the face of dying. It is deduced that, during the academic education, the theme involving death and dying has been addressed insufficiently, without precisely attending to all the demands of the nursing students during care in the dying process.

This article aims to indicate the metaphysical ontology underlying American Humanistic Psychology in order to correct a misunderstanding present in the published literature that the Third Force in Psychology in existential phenomenological. To do so, it rebuilds the historical context in which the Humanistic Psychology appears in the USA and the questions it tries to answer, emphasizing its position relative to scientific knowledge. Next, it shows the confusion between humanistic and existential-phenomenological psychologies in the scientific literature. The third step is to expose in Martin Heidegger's oeuvre, Being and Time, the requirements of existential phenomenology, in order to evaluate the Rogerian ontology according to them. Carl Roger's psychology is indicated as paradigmatic Third Force Psychology. It concludes that Humanistic Psychology is not existential phenomenological because it substantivizes human existence.