The paradox of the perfect game

Abstract

ABSTRACT The main aim of this article is to reconstruct and comment on Bernard Suits’ argument concerning the paradoxicality of the perfectly played game and explain how the argument might contribute to the game vs. performance distinction. The argument was mentioned by Suits in ‘Tricky Triad: Games, Play and Sport’ in the course of argumentation for the distinction between games and performances but it has not been presented in any of Suits’ works published during his lifetime. However, Suits’ fonds deposited in the Special Collections and Archive of the University of Waterloo contains two texts that were nevertheless meant for publication: ‘A Perfectly Played Game’ (recently published as Appendix III to Suits’ Return of the Grasshopper) and unpublished ‘The Search for a Perfectly Fair Game’. The latter is a modified version of the former; there is an overlapping core in both texts, but there are also some essential differences between them. To provide a formula capable of embracing Suits’ ideas from both texts and remove the tension between the ideas of a perfectly played and perfectly fair game, I introduce the concept of a perfect game.