Magnificent Utopian games

ABSTRACT

The Grasshopper’s game-playing Utopia collapses because, ideal though it might seem to some, ultimately most of us want more out of life than game-play. Building on both The Grasshopper and the published sequels in which Bernard Suits attempts to vindicate his Utopia, the current paper reconstructs Suits’s Utopia in a new way. I start from deeper reflection on Suits’s example of John Striver, a Utopian citizen who wants to work but whose profound boredom occasions Utopia’s collapse. Although the Grasshopper returns to Striver repeatedly and urges his interlocutors to bear him in mind, the case is underdeveloped and its implications undertheorized, both by Suits and his numerous commentators and critics. The Striver example reveals a picture of Utopian games as complex, dynamic, mutually responsive, and cooperative; such games are not only better for game-loving ‘Grasshoppers’ but make room in Utopia for work-loving ‘Ants’. This mutuality is the key to Utopia’s sustainability. The paper thus offers a new critique and reinterpretation of the central text in contemporary philosophy of sport and explicates the goods inherent in the ludic ideal.

KEYWORDS:

• Games
• utopia
• cooperation
• Bernard Suits
• The Grasshopper

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to two anonymous referees for The Journal of the Philosophy of Sport for their careful reading and insightful suggestions on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Hurka (2006); Kretchmar (2006) and sources discussed there; Vossen (2016, 2017) and sources cited there; Lopez Frías (2016, 2017, 2021); Yorke (2017, 2019).

2. It is possible that Suits never intended to unequivocally endorse the Grasshopper’s Utopia as described, either as an ideal or as a logical inevitability. In fact, this seems to be the most natural and charitable reading of an aporia. Similarly, the most natural reading of a dialogue is that the dialogue as a whole – and not any one character – speaks for the author. Nonetheless, the working assumption of virtually all Suits’s interpreters is that he embraced the Grasshopper’s Utopia and that the Grasshopper is Suits’s avatar. I accept these assumptions for the sake of argument and return to this issue at the end.

3. Lopez Frías (2021, 122–3) interprets Suits as a ‘pluralist’ about human nature, positing three or more types of character in respect of their relationship to the ludic ideal. However, his interpretation is still ‘essentialist’ in that all such types are subcategories of Grasshopper; game-play remains the ideal of existence for all.

4. See Kolers (2015). Ridge (2019a, 2019b) argues that Suits’s definition of gameplay is apt for one-player but not multiplayer games.

5. An anonymous referee doubts home-building must be collaborative. I think this is obvious for all but the most austere hut or lean-to. However, all I need is that carpentry is better and more interesting as a team sport than as three-dimensional solitaire.

6. To the referee’s concern from the previous note, all we need is that adding the customer’s finicky and fickle preferences as an element in the game makes it more challenging and hence interesting as a game.

7. On deliberation as process of discovery and mutual accommodation see Christiano (1996, 42). This point explains why, to recall Yorke (2017), it is impossible to conceive of Utopian games in detail now. They do not issue forth fully formed from an individual’s brain. They dynamically optimize the joint realization of a cooperative good in context.

8. In preparing this paper I discovered Lastowka’s (2014) use of this term. My usage differs importantly from his.

9. One might also see refereeing as necessary work in Utopia.