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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for publication: ‘A Perfectly Played Game’ (recently published as Appendix III to Suits’ Return of the Grasshopper) and unpublished ‘The Search for a Perfectly Fair Game’.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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Although Suits’s distinction between games and performances has been criticized, it recurs at times in the discussions within the philosophy of sport; there is an interesting parallel between this distinction and David Best’s distinction between purposive and aesthetic sports, see Kobiela (Citation2017, 79–81).
2. An excerpt from The Return of the Grasshopper was published by T. Hurka (Citation2019).
3. Excellent information about Suits’ unpublished work is provided by Yorke (Citation2019, 8–9).
4. Perhaps the more precise name of this color should be ‘old gold’.
5. The chapter has been published as Suits (Citation1984).
6. In The Grasshopper … Suits also made use of characters from Alice’s adventures … e.g. Humpty dumpty plays an important role in Appendix III (Suits Citation2014, 219).
7. The term ‘caucus’ originated in the US and refers to a kind of political meeting; in England it was understood as ‘a system of highly disciplined party organization by committees’ and used abusively by the opposing party. The Caucus race might be thus understood as a political satire, cf. Carroll and Gardner Citation1960, 48.
8. Suits’ definition of playing games appeared in the 1967 article ‘What is a game’. Parts of this article, together with fragments of other published articles, were included in ‘The Grasshopper’, published in 1978. The article ‘Tricky triad: game, play and sport’, which contains the remark about the paradoxicality of games, was published in 1988. One can therefore conclude that the ‘Perfectly Played Game’, which is a part of the unpublished ‘Grasshopper Soup’, was written before 1988. Since ‘Grasshopper Soup’ itself is a kind of a sequel to ‘The Grasshopper’, one could assume that ‘Perfectly Played Game’ was written between 1978–1988. However, it is possible that it is older and was included in the ‘Grasshopper Soup’ later. Thus the place of ‘Perfectly Played Game’ in the timeline of Suits’s work remains a question to be determined by further historical research.
9. We might add here that random victories are possible due to differences too small to be under the control of the contestants, nevertheless having a decisive factor for the outcome. Such a causal mechanism is called chaos, for a discussion of chaos as a kind of chance in sport see Kobiela (Citation2014, 69–71).
10. Such a supplement is quite plausible and thus might be also added to the events of the kind of Cuacus VI – in the light of this supplement the race might as well ends in the ‘micro-victory’ of one of the contestants.
11. It is worth to note that some of these conditions are not universally accepted. e.g. Torres and McLaughlin (Citation2003) argue for validity of ties as a meaningful contest resolutions. It is also controversial whether the element of chance should be eliminated (and, ideally, totally absent in the perfect game), or rather should be welcomed as a factor that enhances the ludic element of games; see Kretchmar (Citation2012, 110–113).
12. A slightly different issue, but related to the larger paradox, are games that might be called ‘impossible’, i.e. games in which it is impossible to achieve their pre-lusory goal. Suits considers an example of such an impossible game in The Grasshopper (the finish line is located outside the track) (Suits Citation2014, 32). Consideration of such games might lead one to question Suits’ thesis that the impossibility applies only to interactive games (the conclusion of a larger paradox). It is also possible to think of an impossible performance (its postulated ideal would be impossible to achieve). However, the source of impossibility is different in the case of the greater paradox and ‘impossible’ games or ‘impossible’ performances. In the former, the source is the supposed contradiction, and this distinguishes at least interactive games from performances.