‘The Alexandrian Condition’: Suits on Boredom, Death, and Utopian Games

ABSTRACT

I argue that the apparently exclusive choice between Suits’ utopia of gameplay and death by suicide is a false dilemma, one which obscures a ‘third way’ of positive boredom. Further, I offer a deeper reading of the internal logic of Suits’ utopian vision, identifying two different temporal phases of his utopia. At time U₁, just after the founding of Suits’ techno-Cockaygne, the Alexandrian condition affects ‘freshmen’ utopians by producing a state of existential meaninglessness and thereby conceivably motivating utopian suicide. At time U₂, however, sufficient time will have passed for the surviving ‘sophomore’ utopians to adopt marvelous, meaning-generative utopian games as a tool for defeating the Alexandrian condition and thus realizing Suits ‘ideal of existence’ in a utopia of gameplay.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernard Suits
• philosophy of games
• utopia
• leisure studies
• existentialism

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jon Pike, Alex Barber, Mike McNamee, Sophie-Grace Chappell, and several anonymous referees at Sports, Ethics, and Philosophy for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Suits actually magnifies all of these contemporary trends in his utopia: (1) his utopians have the fewest possible working hours per week [0 hours]; (2) live the longest possible lifespans [they are in perfect health, and conceivably have access to life-extending technologies]; (3) have the greatest possible percentage of leisure time available to them [100%]; and (4) have access to limitless recreational technologies, including utopian ‘games so subtle, complex, and challenging that their inventors will be seen as the ludic Einsteins of the future’ (Suits 1984b, 24).

2. This partially motivates the duty to design, Suits’ exhortation that ‘It behoves us… to begin the immense work of devising these wonderful games now, for if we solve all of our problems of scarcity very soon, we may very well find ourselves with nothing to do when Utopia arrives’ (Suits 2014 [1978], 194). For if we fail in this duty, the projected consequence for Suits is the annihilation of his utopia as soon as it obtains at U₁.

3. Suits claim that ‘nothing in my account of Utopia requires individual omniscience’, though he permits us to ‘suppose that the Utopians have the kind of omniscience that includes mental telepathy, which could indeed make impossible the playing of most games’ (Suits 19–b, p24–25, emphases mine). If Suits’ utopians are truly omniscient—having ‘acquired all the knowledge there is’ (Suits 2014 [1978], 186)—then, paradoxically, utopians cannot enjoy games as games, for ‘all knowledge’ presumably includes knowledge of the future; which includes the outcome of all future games. Games of chance can be parsed as deterministic if one precisely understands how the laws of physics decide what face a die will fall on, or exactly how the mathematics behind a computer algorithm will generate supposedly ‘random’ digits. Games of skill can also be parsed as predetermined if the exact skill levels of all competitors, and the particular moves they will make are accurately known in advance of a contest. It is a distinctive feature of a game for Suits that ‘the outcome is not known beforehand’—this is, for Suits, what separates a game from a performance or scripted undertaking (Suits 2014 [1978], p97–98)—he would hold that a game with a known outcome is no game at all. The only way out of this conclusion is either to (somehow) argue that knowledge of the future is not perfectly inferable from having perfect knowledge of everything in the present and the past, or to impose some limitation on utopian powers. Suits attempts to achieve this latter aim via the following injunction: ‘all the telepathic players need do is refrain from exercising that particular talent (that is, they, like any game player, will confine themselves to lusory means) in order to play games which require concealment or deception’ (Suits 19–b, 25). I am indebted to Uku Tooming for initially bringing this point to my attention during my 2018 presentation to the Canadian Philosophical Association.

4. Suits’ 100% efficient, telepathically controlled supercomputers would be the most effective suicide machines ever invented, if indeed the perfect programme of psychological conditioning outlined for his utopians (Suits 2014 [1978], 183) would actually allow them enough latitude of desire to crave death in the face of unremitting existential boredom.

5. Thomas Hurka criticizes Suits on precisely this point: that Suits ‘argues for the strong thesis that playing games is not just an intrinsic good but the supreme such good, since in the ideal conditions of utopia, where all instrumental goods are provided, it would be everyone’s primary pursuit.’ Hurka, by contrast, favors ‘the weaker thesis that playing games is one intrinsic good’ among many (Hurka 2006, 220).

6. Achievements are in this sense temporally transcendent, and on this ground, intralusory achievements constitute Suits’ best bet at salvaging his thesis of utopian gameplay as being the ideal of existence.

7. It is very odd, if not a contradiction in terms, to speak of ‘immortal human beings’, or indeed ‘post-instrumental human beings’. This may give us some grounds for us to suspect that it may be a successor species, and not our own, which would be able to successfully inhabit a Suitsian utopia. Indeed, there may be insufficient overlap between the experiences of such hypothetical entities and our own for us to relate to the contents of their consciousnesses, or adequately assess the biological gap which must obtain in order for utopians to achieve immortality.

8. While I harbour theoretical reservations as to whether Kolers’ game ‘nesting’ relationship is value-conferring in precisely the manner he claims it is, or whether existential malaise in Individual Life can be successfully defeated by a reorientation of attention toward Fate of Humankind (or whether philosophical doubts about FH can be ameliorated by a retreat into IL), I can cast only a Parthian shot toward these concerns in the current article.

9. By comparison, ‘our own culture is based on scarcity’ (Suits 2014 [1978], 194) and is thus ‘more inclined to emphasize closed games’ (Suits 2014 [1978], 149) which are typically competitive.

10. As Scott Kretchmar notes, more generally: ‘The Grasshopper is fundamentally about boredom and how we might best cope with it’ (Kretchmar 2008, 152). Kretchmar correctly identifies the concept of ‘occupational methadone’ or ‘games-by-default’ when he writes that Suit is primarily interested in ‘a particular species of games—one that, in effect, provides a substitute for work’ (Kretchmar 2008, 152). My schema builds on his, however, in that I posit that Suits’ ultimate aim is to replace these play-working games-by-default, needed at time U₁ to help overcome the Alexandrian condition, with games-by-design—truly utopian games that go beyond mere labor-surrogates and express the ideal of human existence—at time U₂.