Ants, grasshoppers, asshoppers, and crickets cohabit in Utopia: the anthropological foundations of Bernard Suits’ analyses of gameplay and good living

ABSTRACT

In this article, I consider Alkis Kontos’ and Allan Bäck’s critiques to Suits that his theory of games and good living lack ontological grounds or rests on the wrong foundations. Taking these critics as my point of departure (not as my critical target), I provide an analysis of the main tenets of Suits’ anthropology. This anthropology partly lays the grounds that Kontos and Bäck claim Suits’ theory lacks. I proceed as follows, I examine Suits’ early works, to which Kontos and Bäck had access, to argue that they contain an anthropology, albeit in an embryonic state. Subsequently, I examine Suits’ latter works, which remained inaccessible to Kontos and Bäck when they formulated their critiques, to identify and explain the key elements of Suits’ anthropology.

KEYWORDS:

• Suits
• anthropology
• autonomy
• gameplay
• meaning

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. I capitalize ‘Utopia’ when I refer to the specific place or future society that Suits describes in his works. Likewise, I capitalize “Utopian” when I allude to individuals or elements pertaining to Suits’ Utopia. I don’t capitalize ‘utopia’ and ‘utopian’ when I do not refer to Suits’ future society. For a detailed analysis of Suits’ Utopia, see Lopez Frias & Monfort, 2019.

2. This article centers on the former. For an analysis of the latter see Lopez Frias, 2020

3. As one of the anonymous reviewers pointed out, R. Scott Kretchmar’s (2006) and Douglas W. McLaughlin’s (2008) works on Suits and Utopia help understand the anthropological assumptions of Suits’ work. I left these works out of my main analysis because their authors do not cite the unpublised manuscripts by Suits that I center on to identify the main traits of his anthropology. Still, Kretchmar’s and McLaughlin’s works are extremely valuable to understand Suits’ ideas on human nature. Indeed, despite not citing (and most plausibly not having read) Suits’ later works, they identify several of the anthropological aspects that Suits further develops in such works.

4. Steffen Borge’s (2019) critique of Suits’ Utopia rests on a similar claim. He argues that Utopian games fail to shed light on the nature of current games and sports because these activities would have a radically different configuration in Utopia due to the Utopians’ different nature.

5. Yorke suggests that Suits’ silence may be the result of his having taken Wittgenstein’s (1953, paragraph 7) advice of ‘pass[ing] over in silence … what we cannot speak about’ (Yorke 2019a, 150).

6. See also Yorke 2017, 2018

7. Yorke (2019a) also explains that Utopians would be capable to display moral effort, exercise autonomy, experience desire, and behave morally (see ch. 3-5).

8. These aspects are more easily identifiable after reading Suits’ unpublished later works. Thus, I’m taking advantage of a privileged epistemic position inaccessible to Kontos and Back.

9. Indeed, Suits’ kept a copy of the book review in his files, which now can be consulted in the Suits Fonds at the University of Waterloo Special Collections Library.

10. Cheryl Ballantyne, Suits’ widow, donated Suits’ unpublished manuscripts to the University of Waterloo Special Collection in 2013. https://archives.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/bernard-suits-fonds-2

11. The years when Suits finished the manuscripts of his two intended sequels to The Grasshopper are unknown. However, as per his widow (see previous footnote), he wrote Grasshopper Soup in the mid-80s and Return of the Grasshopper in the mid-90s. These dates align with comments that Suits makes about the sequels in the manuscripts and other written documents.

12. In later works, Suits refers to these Utopians as ‘Luddites.’

13. Suits also uses this term to refer to Utopian life. See Suits 1978, 178; Suits 1984, 15; Suits ca. 1995, 14.

14. See Lopez Frias (2020) for an explanation of the social forces that explain this failure

15. This help to understand Suits’ analysis of the nature of the main characters in The Grasshopper. There, he uses the notion of ‘logic’ to explain why Grasshopper must die instead of surviving with the help of his ant disciples: ‘But since I am just the Grasshopper, no more and no less, dying and ceasing to be the Grasshopper are one and the same thing for me. I cannot escape that logic or that fate. Still, since I am the Grasshopper and you are not, it would seem to follow that you are not compelled by this logic … I have the oddest notion that both of you are Grasshoppers in disguise; in fact, that everyone alive is really a Grasshopper.’ (Suits 1978, 9) Even though, in the quotation above, Grasshopper refers to his logic as something inherited, he also posits that all individuals are grasshoppers in disguise; they all have grasshopper inborn traits in them.

16. According to Suits, ‘no Divine Improvidence shapes [humans’] ends [people] turn life into a game by a sheer act of will.’ (Suits ca 1995, 104)

17. For an in-depth analysis of capacities in Suits, see Yorke 2018

18. The different stages in Utopian life are vital stages pertaining to individuals’ lives, not temporal phases resulting from the evolution of Utopia as a society. The different types of Utopians cohabite one and the same utopia at all times.

19. As Thi Nguyen (2019) explains, Suitsian games are agency-based activities; agency is a medium to achieve all sorts of striving-related experiences. By adopting the lusory attitude, people enter a game to derive satisfaction from the effort to overcome the obstacles that the game poses. To put it differently, to overcome the obstacles that they have set themselves by choosing to enter the game. The adoption of the lusory attitude produces a ‘motivational inversion of ordinary life.’ (Nguyen 2020, 1) In everyday life, individuals have to rely on and adjust their capacities to respond to the challenges the world throws at them. In the ludic world of gameplay, players give themselves designed (artificial) challenges that match their abilities. Paraphrasing Nguyen (2020, 4), in ordinary life individuals fit their capacities to the demands the world poses; in gameplay, they fit the demands they must confront to their capacities.