Endless summer: What kinds of games will Suits’ utopians play?

Abstract

I argue that we have good reason to reject Bernard Suits’ assertion that game-playing is the ideal of human existence, in the absence of a suitably robust account of utopian games. The chief motivating force behind this rejection rests in the fact that Suits begs the question that there exists some possible set of games-by-design in his utopia, such that the playing of (a sufficient number of) its members would sustain an existentially meaningful existence for his utopians, in the event of a hypo-instrumental culture of material superabundance obtaining. But the set of utopian games is unknown and unknowable. Thus any implications of Suits’ vision for the utilization of our leisure time in the present are vitiated by the collapse of his normative ideal: his ‘metaphysics of leisure’ misses its mark.

Keywords:

• Bernard Suits
• Scott Kretchmar
• J. C. Davis
• utopia
• post-instrumentalism
• game design

Notes

1. I am deeply indebted to Jon Pike, Alex Barber, and several anonymous referees for their written comments on earlier drafts of this article. William Morgan, Thi Nguyen, and Brock Rough subsequently contributed key insights regarding its contents at the Philosophy of Games Workshop at the University of Utah in October 2016. Thanks for encouragement and support also go to the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, who honored this piece with their R. Scott Kretchmar Student Essay Award at their September 2016 meeting in Olympia, Greece.

2. However, claiming that there are epistemic conditions for determining philosophical ‘completion’ seems very odd indeed. How do we know, with an activity such as philosophy, when the game is over? What are the win conditions? Surely they are not as unambiguous or uncontroversial as those of fixing a sink or building a house. Perhaps ‘winning at philosophy’ means knowing all there is that can be known, including the knowledge that all that could be known is known in fact. The seeming impossibility of attaining such knowledge is a side issue for Suits which is not addressed here.

3. The closest Suits comes to committing to a description of utopian games-by-design is a vague claim in his ‘Games and Utopia: Posthumous Reflections’ to the effect that utopians will play ‘really magnificent games – games so subtle, complex, and challenging that their inventors will be seen as the ludic Einsteins of the future.’ (Suits 1984, 24) This hand-waving is, unfortunately, no more informative than its precursor passage in The Grasshopper wherein he invokes an image of ‘wonderful games’ … ‘games that will require for their exploitation – that is, for their mastery and enjoyment – as much energy as is expended today in serving the institutions of scarcity.’ (Suits 2014, 194)

4. Certain pre-utopian games-by-default, such as ‘plot a murder’ and ‘incite a riot’, presumably should not be ‘replayed’ in utopia for whatever intrinsic merits they might be seen to possess, as such entertainments would threaten the moral and political foundations of the enterprise.

5. It becomes more difficult to rule out boxing as a utopian sport if optimally protective gear, pain-negating drugs, and the guaranteed full medical restoration of participants to their pre-match levels of health are brought into play as possibilities (so that matches are largely decided on points, rather than knockouts). But other objections can be brought to bear if we take the line of making utopian sports completely anodyne. Keith Thompson, for example, attacks the desirability and intelligibility of Suits’ utopia precisely because ‘there would be no pain, suffering, or disappointment’ in it (Thompson 2004, 60), and thus no high-level competitive sport would be possible. Utopia is no country for losers, and thus no country for competition either. Although Suits did not specifically respond to Thompson’s criticism, one potential way to diffuse it would be to posit that utopian games are necessarily cooperative. That way, Suits could have kept the good of ‘striving’ against unnecessary obstacles without reintroducing the emotionally unbalancing extremes of the ‘joy of victory’ and ‘bitterness of defeat’ resultant from besting, to being bested, by others in competition (Suits 2014, 194), which ultimately threaten to overturn his utopian thesis that ‘the moral ideal of man does, after all, consist in game playing.’ (Suits 2014, 193)

6. William Morgan helpfully commented (after a presentation of an earlier draft of this paper) that the moral status of a feint in utopian sport should not differ from its status in contemporary sport: it should not be considered to be immoral or unsporting behavior, but rather lauded, even on the rarified pitch of utopia. I think that this position is interesting, though debatable, and that there is more on this subject that needs to be said. I am in the process of formulating a relatively elaborate response on this theme in another paper, so for the sake of brevity and relevance I am simply flagging this issue as a topic of interest.

7. Potentially, however, utopians could play complex games of pure skill with a handicap, by denying themselves reference to the sum total of all information contained in their supercomputers (assuming, for the moment, that the rote memorization of all optimal moves for all possible game states for such a game would be cognitively impossible), or perhaps by impairing themselves with performance-inhibiting substances. Thanks to Alex Barber for bringing this possibility to my attention.

8. It should be noted here that no utopian game can be played for any meaningful stakes. Because material superabundance is vouchsafed in Suits’ utopian schema by his telepathically controlled supercomputers, the prospect of material loss or material gain can add nothing to the interest or enjoyment of games. Utopian game mechanics must stand or fall on their own merits, without extrinsic sweetening.

9. Suits originally asserts that ‘in Utopia, there will simply be no demand there for the performance of good deeds. They will, in fact, be quite impossible … there is no room at all for morality in the ideal itself.’ (Suits 2014, 185) He later abandons this stance, without further comment, in favor of the position that ‘morality will also be present, possibly in the form of what we now call sportsmanship.’ (Suits 2014, 194) So the possibility of immoral behavior taking place in his utopia is left open (indeed, without that contrast, it would be difficult to characterize utopian behavior as moral), although the category of immoral utopian games-by-design must, presumably, remain empty (utopian states of affairs can be incidentally bad, but not systemically bad – otherwise, the purported utopia would instead count as a dystopia). But if people can play moral games in an immoral fashion in Suits’ utopia, then this clashes with his earlier stipulation that an unspecified admixture of utopian therapy and drugs have ‘made it possible to effect one hundred per cent cures for all psychic disturbances.’ (Suits 2014, 183) So unless Suits implicitly subscribes to a variant of the doctrine of original sin, it’s not at all clear where the utopian motivation for the explanandum of immoral play could originate from (in the absence of the causal explanans of ‘psychic disturbances’), leaving Suitsologists with a mass of contradictions and ambiguities to attempt to resolve on this topic. A possible response might be: since the only scarcity in Suits’ utopia is the artificial scarcity (re)introduced by games, some aspects of the vicious behavior inherent to our present culture of scarcity could only possibly reemerge when stimulated by the artificial scarcity of in-game goods (say, by a lack of Monopoly money in hand, or a dearth of consecutive wins). Whether this scarcity-motivated behavior is viewed as a harmless letting off of steam (cathartic play-acting), or as the root of all moral corruption (instances of genuine avarice) in utopia and the source of its ultimate downfall, is a matter for further speculation and debate. Either way, it has the happy outcome – for Suits at least – of providing the requisite contrast for rendering the virtue of sportsmanship intelligible in his utopia, as the golden mean between avarice and apathy.

10. This line might be misconstrued as running counter to Robert L. Simon’s popular notion of competitive games as a ‘mutual quest for excellence.’ (Simon 2015, Chapter 2). For Simon, competition itself is cooperative and not zero-sum, as it provides the precondition for achieving certain kinds of excellence, and thus redounds benefits to all contracting participants. My suggestion here, however, is simply that utopians from a ‘culture of plenitude’ might reasonably find games with overtly competitive themes or mechanics to be gauche or passé, and thus refuse to play them on aesthetic grounds (leaving aside, for the moment, the thornier issue of their potentially eschewing competition on moral grounds). This is an entirely different point than Simon’s concern.

11. With all due consideration to Shot Put enthusiasts: a caveman could not have intended to ‘design’ modern Shot Put for us, with its standardized equipment and rules governing bodily movements (although my hypothetical primitive sport of Throw-a-Rock – or something very like it – might indeed be its genuine historical ancestor and efficient cause of Shot Put). A caveman simply intends to play Throw-a-Rock; the tides of time and custom build up (or fail to build up, in the case of non-viable games) the institution from there.

12. I am compelled to assume that Suits’ utopian supercomputers are incapable of designing sufficiently entertaining games to guarantee the amusement of their operators: otherwise his exhortation for us to design games in the present for future generations of utopians to enjoy would be completely robbed of its force.

13. Lars Svendsen’s section on ‘Typologies of Boredom’ (Svendsen 2008, 41–45) is an excellent primer in conveying how subjective the phenomenon of boredom actually is.

14. Despite this fact, it may still be reasonably considered a misnomer to call a society wherein the framework for meeting human needs was conceptually optimized, but all its citizens were contingently miserable, ‘utopia.’

15. Utopia, qua cultural apparatus, is a moving target: its composition will change with the culture that generates it. Even assuming that the base set of essential human needs is static and objectively discernable, the optimal manner of meeting those needs in a meaningful way will differ according to time, place, and custom (ignoring, for the moment, the more subjective and difficult to discern higher-order needs that humans have). So the caveman’s utopia is not our own (as Nozick intones), and our utopia will not be identical with the utopias of future generations. Paradoxically, while the utopia of the worker often manifests itself as a land of idle and plenty, the utopia of Suits’ utopians, who live in a land of idle plenitude, may well be a romantic return to the heroism of labor (which they would presumably express via their playing of faux-instrumental games-by-default).