[Review] The Grasshopper

The Grasshopper; Games, Life and Utopia — Bernard Suits

You probably know Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant: the Grasshopper spends the whole summer fooling around, while the Ant works hard to gather food for the winter, and when winter strikes, the Ant is well prepared, but the Grasshopper dies of famine.

In this delightful book, the Grasshopper is cast in the role of a philosopher, a sort of entomological Socrates — and indeed, the whole book is written as a pastiche of the Socratic dialogs. The Grasshopper, bon vivant, wisest of bugs, faces winter and death, and he has gathered his disciples around him to bid them farewell. The disciples, desperate with sorrow, implore the Grasshopper to accept a share of their food, but he declines. He has devoted his life to play and fun, and now he is prepared to take the consequences. With his dying breath, he leaves his pupils with a riddle. The students have always taken the Grasshopper's concept of the ideal life to amount to never doing anything for the sake of necessity, but always only doing what one wishes to do. However, his last words seem to indicate that being a Grasshopper is not about playing in general, but about playing games.

To solve this riddle, one of the Grasshopper's students, Skepticus, famous for never taking anything for granted, sets out on a flashback where he reminisces the conversations he has had with the master over the last few months, on the topic of games. The Grasshopper has found what he believes to be a definition of 'game', and he wishes Skepticus to summon all his skeptical might to try and find counterexamples. This is the definition:

[T]o play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such an activity.

The larger part of the book is preoccupied with discussing this definition and all its niceties. As such, it is a kind of direct response to Wittgenstein, who used games as a kind of archetypal example of a non-definable concept. But it is also a positive contribution to the field of game inquiry. Chapters nine through twelve are especially interesting for a role-player such as myself, since they deal precisely with role-playing (not specifically the D&D-kind, of which Suits seems to be unaware, but the kind where people affect roles, not for theatrical purposes but for their own enjoyment). To account for them in terms of his definition, he introduces a, in my view potentially fruitful, distinction between open and closed games, where the latter has a specific endpoint, whereas the former has as its goal (qua games) the very continuation of the game.

In the last chapter, Suits becomes profound when the Grasshopper suddenly returns to life (after a fortnight) and starts to talk about Utopia. Suits' idea is that if we define Utopia as a state where all the needs of people are immediately satisfied, then all there is left for people to do is to play games — in effect, artificially circumscribing the allowed means to reach their goals, as per his definition of a game.

All in all, this is a nice book, well argued, with an enjoyable style and some bids at true profundity.