Meier - - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 15 1 The Ethos of Games. Can Cheaters Play the Game? Craig K. Lehman - - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 8 1 What Is Sport? Steffen Borge - - Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 15 3 Murali Agastya - unknown. Linda Mealey - - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 4 Against Assertion.
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Sign in to use this feature. About us. Editorial team. No keywords specified fix it. Applied ethics. Suits explicitly acknowledges the different relations that players, triflers, cheats and spoilsports have both to the game understood only in terms of rules and goals and to the game-as-institution:. Echoing Huizinga's account of the difference between the cheat and the spoilsport -- that the cheat "collapses" the world, while the spoilsport "shatters" it and thereby creates the possibility of making "a new community with rules of its own" , pp.
Suits neither understands rules restrictively nor in isolation from their broader context. Tulloch does not provide enough evidence to demonstrate that Suits is a "liberal humanist" with a "restrictive" conception of rules and power. Based on the evidence presented here, I would suggest that it would be more accurate to characterize Suits's understanding of rules in the Foucauldian terms that Tulloch prefers.
If Tulloch's ultimate intention in insisting on Foucauldian terms for conceiving the relationship between games and power is "a new politics of gaming" Tulloch, , p. Boluk and Lemieux, whose work focuses solidly on this political register, conduct just such a reading of The Grasshopper in their Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames : concerned with the connection between the ludic and the social, their book offers a politically-minded critique of Suits that ranges beyond his definition of gameplay.
Before examining that critique, however, I want to describe a conference presentation given by Lemieux on behalf of both authors in memorably titled "Fuck Golf. Lemieux's juxtaposition was not arbitrary, since Suits uses golf as a key illustration in the development of his definition of gameplay: while it would be more efficient to pick up the ball and drop it in the hole, players voluntarily choose the less efficient means, chipping at the ball with clubs , p.
Suits's abstract view of golf seems to align with that of the hypothetical golf pro offering the President tips on his swing. Lemieux's point is well-taken: all games are established, played and policed in a broader context, and any attempt to define them can produce inclusions and exclusions, hierarchies and other forms of symbolic violence. The magic circle can operate anti-democratically. In his presentation, Lemieux demonstrated this point by quoting from an interview in which Golf Digest asked Trump what he would change if he "ran golf":.
For Trump, golf is played by rich people, usually white men, and it should be played by them. Golf is simultaneously an "aspirational game," intimately connected to social standing, and is something "honest," separated from the "dishonesty" of government Diaz, In this confusing logic, the swing itself has nothing to do with the money that brought the man to the course -- but only certain men should be on the course in the first place.
But can simply juxtaposing the two men transfer Trump's logic to Suits? Lemieux's presentation followed on the publication of Metagaming , in which Boluk and Lemieux argue for the inextricability of ludic text and societal context: "metagames" rupture "the logic of the game, escaping the formal autonomy of both ideal rules and utopian play via those practical and material factors not immediately enclosed within the game as we know it" , p.
Every game has its metagames, and each term affects the other. Given this understanding of metagames, it is no surprise that Boluk and Lemieux find the games of The Grasshopper to be frustratingly removed from any broader context: footraces proceed around an actual track without regard for the hypothetically optimal route over the infield; golfers never consider the possibility of simply dropping the ball in the hole.
Perhaps more importantly, there is no such thing as "a world without winters" Boluk and Lemieux, , 7. Boluk and Lemieux's second criticism concerns Suits's vision of Utopia, a futuristic technological paradise in which the ill-prepared metaphorical Grasshopper will not die due to the cold, and in which actual people will not have to work to enjoy life.
Utopia, for Suits, is free of instrumentalism, hardship and unrequited desire; its satiated inhabitants find themselves with nothing to do but play games -- "transcendental objects no longer constrained by time and space" Boluk and Lemieux, , p. Boluk and Lemieux find fault with these accounts of actual gameplay and an imaginary Utopia not only because they fail to accurately describe the world. By ignoring the "phenomenal, material, historical, economic, or political practices" that inform game design and play , p.
By bracketing the real world in pursuit of pure definitions, Suits becomes complicit in the cultural politics that leads to the defense of Dickwolves Salter and Blodgett, , the call for "ethics in games journalism" Mortensen, , and the general appeal to "keep politics out of videogames" -- all of which of course are, at the very minimum, ways of defending the indefensible and highly political status quo. I argued earlier that there is evidence in The Grasshopper demonstrating that Suits does in fact consider the relationship between games and society.
If this is the case, then Boluk and Lemieux's politically-minded criticism may not hold water. To advance this argument, I turn now to a parable from The Grasshopper that extends from games into life. The Grasshopper is a daring text in both style and structure: indirect, playful, allusive and non-thetic as often as it is analytical, its arguments and observations are presented in the form of a Socratic dialogue.
The principal character is the Grasshopper, the benighted victim of Aesop's Fable who plays all summer long and then dies in the winter for lack of preparation. Suits retains the plot of the Fable but inverts the moral.
The Grasshopper perishes, succumbing to the cold; his human disciplines, Skepticus and Prudence, then puzzle through the meaning of his vision by recalling a prior dialogue in which the Grasshopper defended his definition of gameplay to Skepticus. The majority of the text takes place in this extended recollection, but it ultimately returns to the conversation between Skepticus, Prudence and a Grasshopper who has returned to life in order to recontextualize his vision not as something "ghastly" but as something utopian.
While the utopian frame is significant for contextualizing the rest of the book, I will bracket it for now in order to consider one of the densely layered parables that follows shortly after the definition of gameplay. Their armies made war on one another in the past, but their retirement sees them turn to the sporting life. In fairly short order, they find themselves frustrated by the "arbitrary restrictions" of sports and games Suits, , p.
A game of chess, for instance, turns from an attempt to win by checkmate to an attempt to win by fast-drying glue to an all-out conflict that Skepticus characterizes as "a truly mythic contest":. Here, Skepticus is quoting from a popular music hall song written in the late s, during the Russo-Turkish war, although doing so without attribution. The song, "Abdul Abulbul Ameer," was adapted to various media throughout the 20 th century; in , it was given the cartoon treatment by Robert Allen and Hugh Harman, who seemed attentive to the ludic character of the conflict: in their Abdul the Bulbul Ameer , an initial provocation leads Ivan to draw a line in the dirt with his sabre; a tussle turns the line into a Tic-Tac-Toe square, and Ivan manages to place three marks in a row, winning the first battle.
But he does not win the war: in the song, they both end up dead. Skepticus, however, tells a different story: "[t]he [chess] game did not end in a tie, but in a stalemate, when both fell to the floor in utter exhaustion, unable to move, and when it was discovered that one of the spectators had made off with the board and the pieces" Suits, , p. Ivan and Abdul, having turned the game of chess into an ornamental feature of a metagame governed less by rules than their immediate surroundings, find that their play cannot be separated from its context.
They begin to search for a different sort of game:. The problem standing in the way of "final mastery," in war as in competition, is the rule. Ivan and Abdul want to dispense with the "artificiality" of rules, and therefore decide to play the only sort of game that has none:. There is a curious connection here between games, war, violence and rationality that speaks to Suits's implicit politics and his assumptions regarding human agency.
One possible interpretation of this connection might be proffered by Huizinga -- that civilization is ultimately built on a set of artificially adopted rules that keep our animal instincts in check, that games offer one particularly visible form for these rules, and that we should therefore be attentive to the ways in which people play the different games that comprise society.
This would be the sort of argument built on liberal humanist assumptions about subjectivity that Tulloch finds frustrating. I would reject this interpretation, however, by assuming something different about the rationalities of the actors in this particular drama.
If Suits does not paint everyone with the same rationalistic brush, but rather attributes different motivations and mindsets to different people in different places and times, then we can take Ivan and Abdul to be the proponents of a particular kind of rationality that Suits finds problematic. There are at least three ways in which Suits expresses this problem. First, as former generals who imagine themselves to be elevated above the weaknesses of civilian life, Ivan and Abdul think that victory is only victory when it is "final" or "complete.
The only acceptable outcome is the complete, irrevocable destruction of the enemy. In highlighting the fact that Ivan and Abdul arrive at this conclusion "logically," while chatting over tea, Suits undermines the racism of the tale: it is not "the sons of the Prophet" or the "truculent" "Muscovites," as the music hall song puts it, who are so prone to violent overreaction -- it is anyone who participates in the "rationalism" according to which the enemy must be eradicated. Abdul makes this explicit: "The French are supposed to be the most logical thinkers in the world, but I think only you Russians, Ivan, are crazy enough to act on the basis of a cogent chain of reasoning no matter where it leads" Suits, , p.
The second way in which Suits criticizes the particular rationality of Ivan and Abdul concerns the arbitrary and decontextualized manner in which they divide friend from enemy. Despite their conflicted history, Ivan and Abdul have nothing against one another; indeed, they are "overjoyed" to "[go] over all of their old campaigns together" Suits, , p.
Motivated not by a nationalistic hatred of the other but by an intellectual interest in strategy, they nonetheless find themselves compelled to categorize the other as an enemy -- someone who threatens their survival, and who must therefore be defeated. The particularity of their relationship dissolves first in the ludic requirement for an opponent and second in the political requirement that the opponent be put down for good [7]. Retired, Ivan and Abdul lack the purpose that their station had granted them before.
Abdul's absence of purpose is so profound, in fact, that he feels that he has no reason to live: he idly contemplates suicide Suits, , p. The rationality that leads to warfare may well attach itself to fears of the other or concerns for security, but it may also be a simple expression of tedium.
In telling the tale of Ivan and Abdul, then, Suits seems to be offering a subtle critique of the absurdity inherent to apparently logical actions, of the unintended consequences of abstraction, and of the murderous attitude that so often accompanies securitization -- though this is not all.
The first section of the story is told by Skepticus, who intends to prove that it is possible to play a game without rules. It ends with Ivan and Abdul agreeing to a fight to the finish, to begin the next morning. The second section is told by the Grasshopper, performing his Socratic rebuttal.
Inserting himself as "the Voice of Logic," he demonstrates that Ivan and Abdul have in fact agreed to a rule: they will not begin their battle until the appointed time. Ivan laments their failure: "[a]nd I thought we had finally found a game without the artificiality of rules" Suits, , p.
Ultimately, the Voice of Logic arrests both generals: running to one another before the arbitrarily chosen starting time, they halt in indecision, uncertain whether the other is approaching to call off the fight or to trick them into vulnerability.
Reason turns them into statues [8]. There is an ambivalence to this criticism of rationality driven by the differing allegories offered by Skepticus and the Grasshopper: petrification may be preferable to mutual destruction, but not by much. Rather than resolving this ambivalence, I will note that some of the political force of the parable lies in the figure of the rule.
Before Ivan runs off, whether to kill Abdul before dawn or call off the fight we do not know, he laments the fact no game seems to lack the "artificiality of rules" Suits, , Ivan attempts to flee from this artificiality in order to find some sort of pure experience -- something approaching the intellectualism of their brand of warfare, or perhaps some primal scene predating the fall -- but no such thing exists.
If rules are "artificial," this does not imply that there is something "natural" from which they arose or to which players can return. This emphasis on the inevitable artifice of the rule relates to one of the Grasshopper's prior observations on the nature of another important figure, the line:. Games are built from rules, among other things, and rules work through delineation: inside or out, fair or foul, win or lose.
As lines, rules are artificial constructs that curtail, channel, direct and inform player agency. They perform exactly the sort of work that Tulloch suggests. And while they are artificial, this does not mean that they presume some natural state of full agency to which players might return or designers might refer.
In his observations on the inescapability of rules and lines, Suits suggests that the artificial and the natural cannot be separated from one another. Moreover, rules and lines may have effects, implications or resonances beyond the game. If "the very essence of the gamewright's craft" Suits, , 32 is the drawing of lines, the very essence of political sovereignty is the same. The sovereign draws lines dividing legal from illegal, normal from exceptional, and -- just like Ivan and Abdul, drawing ludic lines in the sand -- friend from enemy Schmitt, ; Schmitt, [9].
And while the sovereign's lines are the most visible manifestation of this mode of decision making, they are an exemplary form of politics rather than an exceptional one: we can see "the very essence" of the political expressed whenever lines are drawn, which is to say whenever decisions on the rules that bound behaviour are made, in settings that are bureaucratic, algorithmic, economic or even ludic.
Lines and rules, then, are inescapable -- "artificial" but utterly unavoidable. They are techniques for conditioning the conduct of human agents. This means that, in both games and "reality," political actions that do anything other than comply with that conditioning need to reckon with its inescapability.
Whether in books, games or politics, we need to discern the lines before we can read between them, and we need to read between them in order to act differently. This brings me, briefly, to the final word of The Grasshopper 's subtitle, which was also Suits's very first word on games a -- "Utopia," or the relationship between "Games" and "Life.
In the Grasshopper's Utopia, some miraculous future technology provides for everyone's needs, leaving people free to occupy themselves in whatever way they choose.
Once they tire of travelling and talking and lounging on beaches and so on, the Grasshopper imagines, they will inevitably turn to games, voluntarily attempting to overcome unnecessary obstacles. In fact, they will make games of their ancestors' vocations, deciding, for instance, to build houses manually and unnecessarily for the sheer challenge of doing so, or to conduct scientific research entirely for its own sake.
This scenario could not be more detached from the "phenomenal, material, historical, economic, or political" phenomena with which Boluk and Lemieux are legitimately concerned , p. But utopian literature has never been divorced from its cultural context. Utopianism tells us about the here and now. In the case of The Grasshopper , the Utopia of gameplay drives home what I take to be among Suits's elemental claims: while the lines dividing work from play, the trivial from the serious, the instrumental from the intrinsic, and text from context are effective in the ways in which they guide human and player agency, they are also thin, arbitrary and changeable.
When we allow them to shift or to blur, bringing the subjects that they separate closer together, we can see the contingent character of what we take to be "universal, necessary, obligatory" Foucault, , p. By understanding lines like these, to say nothing of the lines that demarcate sovereignties, as artificial, which is to say as artifices that make no claim to origins or returns, we can highlight the processes by which they are constructed.
We can, in other words, give the lie to the ostensible ahistoricism of definitions, insisting that they be situated in a continually changing social field. And we can do this with rather than against Suits.
He presents his vision of Utopia as something simultaneously inevitable and impossible -- a future we will one day achieve, but one that will self-destruct as soon as we achieve it. For, he argues, the residents of Utopia will begin to think.
As soon as it is realized, even in the abstract, Suits's Utopia collapses back into the vulgarity of contemporary society. The present and the future are, in this view, both inextricably connected and equally fictitious -- equally artificial.
The Grasshopper's Utopia is, then, less a vision of an impossible future for which we should strive than an invitation to consider the values that we attribute to activities like work and play, the ways that those values have been constructed, and the ways that they might be changed.
It is, in this interpretation, a commentary on the inextricable and political relationship between games and society. These words on Suits's Utopia, however, are only my own brief reading of an ambiguous section of a complicated text. I do not intend them to illuminate much beyond the political character of the acts of definition, line drawing or rule making, both because I lack the room to sufficiently engage with Suits's various writings on Utopia ; ; ; and because I have a tendency to read charming writers too generously and perhaps too politically.
Others treat Suits's utopianism differently, and in far greater detail: in addition to Tulloch's and Boluk and Lemieux's interpretations of it as problematically detached, consider, for instance, R. Scott Kretchmar's characterization of it as an example of an "anthropological philosophy" that "ended up addressing our concrete existence" , p.
Each author brings their own interpretive framework to the parable, and derives their own meaning from it. Which is a good thing. This is a feature of the text -- not a defect.
The Grasshopper deserves to be read, and read well, not for the clarity of its definitions nor the rigor of its dialogue but for the ambiguity of its parables. While I think that there are good reasons to read some of these parables, like the story of Ivan and Abdul, in the political framework where I am personally most comfortable, I cannot force that framework onto others. Although I have puzzled over the chapter on Utopia a dozen times, I am still not sure what the Grasshopper means when he says that games "are clues to the future," and that "their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation" Suits, , p.
It is playful and perplexing, and, unlike the definition of gameplay, not at all "portable": it cannot be dropped into a text and then forgotten. This is where its value lies. Koster , responding to a tweet from Leigh Alexander about objectives and empathy, suggested that certain videogames -- That Dragon, Cancer Numinous Games, , Howling Dogs Porpentine, , Train Brenda Romero, -- achieve their emotional impact not through "game-like moves" but through " narrative moves," asked "whether the work is trying to exclude itself from 'gameyness,'" and noted that he was "interested in definitions.
The emotional leap is that these people can't really fit a formal definition of people. Adding, 'it's okay if it's not a game' comes off as sounding like, 'it's okay if you're not a person,' which doesn't really help you seem apolitical.
Suits himself sometimes addresses his predecessors and interlocutors by name in The Grasshopper , notably offering a single direct rejoinder to Wittgenstein on the question of whether games can be defined, but he often keeps things allusive, as when he apparently deploys Searle's notion of constitutive rules without attribution. And while McKenzie Wark, to take a second example, mobilizes Suits's distinction between players, triflers, cheats and spoilsports to comment on the relationship between games and society or "gamespace" , she references The Grasshopper directly only in a footnote: "[t]his is not just a classic work but a work of art in its own right" , p.
They adopt the tactic of slaughtering any opposing team that appears on the field, and so are finally free to make touchdowns or field goals at will, whenever they want to. But of course that is not to play football at all. Their Utopia has finally arrived and has instantly self-destructed" , p. Suits seemed to be particularly interested in Utopia and rationality in the s, as evidenced by a book review in which he notes that "[d]ystopias do not arise from irrationality but rather from rational immorality" , p.
Ivan's attitude contrasts directly with that of another famous fictional Russian: for Tolstoy's Prince Andrew, any discussion of "rules of war and magnanimity to foes" serves only to render the worst violence palatable and thereby to enable it to continue Tolstoy, , p.
Incidentally, Prince Andrew notes the facile comparison of war to chess in the same section of War and Peace , decrying the comparison both for its inaccuracy and for its inhumanity: "[a]s it is we have played at war -- that's what's vile! The situation of Ivan and Abdul resembles that of Buridan's ass: hungry, thirsty, and positioned exactly between a pile of hay and a trough of water, it perishes thanks to rationalistic indecision.
Given the philosophical pedigree of Buridan's paradox, it would be surprising if Suits had not intended the allusion. His dissertation, On Tilt: The Inheritance and Inheritors of Digital Games , prompted me to read The Grasshopper and gave me a nudge into the field of game studies, so I owe him thanks twice over. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the editors and anonymous reviewers at Game Studies for their excellent guidance and suggestions.
Aarseth, Espen. Just Games. The Paper World of Bernard Suits. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport , 35 2 , Boluk, Stephanie and Patrick Lemieux. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Caillois, Roger. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Diaz, Jaime. Golf Digest , Retrieved June 18, Dor, Simon. Fordyce, Robbie. Dwarf Fortress: Laboratory and Homestead. Games and Culture , 13 1 , Foucault, Michel. New York: Vintage. What Is Enlightenment? Catherine Porter, Trans. Guanio-Uluru, Lykke.
War, Games, and the Ethics of Fiction. Harviainen, J. Tuomas, Ashley M. Brown, and Jaakko Suominen. Games and Culture , 13 6 , Tuomas and Katherine Frank. Games and Culture , 13 3 , Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan , ed. Abdul the Bulbul Ameer. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Huizinga, Johan. Boston: The Beacon Press. Juul, Jesper. Cambridge: MIT Press. Karhulahti, Veli-Matti. Defining the Videogame.
Koster, Raph. A Letter to Leigh. Raph Koster's Website. Retrieved June 15, Kretchmar, R. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport , 33 1 , Leipert, Jeremy. A Kantian View of Suits' Utopia: "a kingdom of autotelically-motivated game players. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy , 13 ,
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