The Metaphysics of Games

If you really dislike philosophy you should skip this post. It is not necessary for understanding subsequent posts and may just confuse you if you do no have philosophical leanings. But, for those who may be interested, I thought I would write a few words about the metaphysics of games.

Perhaps one of the most enduring and perplexing problems in metaphysics arises from the seemingly simple question - how do you know a tree is a tree? The problem here is that we have a specific thing that we assign to a group or category. We use the word "tree" for both the category and the individual instances that populate that category. In metaphysical terms the individual instance is referred to as a particular, and the category is referred to as a universal. In normal conversation we do not distinguish between particulars and universals, as that would just make conversation awkward. But, if we were being precise, the above question would be qualified - how do we know a tree (particular instance) is a tree (member of the universal category).

But, where do these universals come from? And how do we know a particular instance belongs to a category? Are categories defined bottom up based on common attributes? If so how do we select the attributes? Or are categories defined top down based on essences? If so, how do we determine the proper essences? These questions make up one of the most vexing problems in metaphysics known as The Problem of Universals.

Philosophers as far back as Plato and Aristotle have attempted to tackle this problem. In the last century, Ludwig Wittgenstein offered an interesting perspective using a family resemblances analogy and used games as an example category. If you go to a family reunion, you can see that the members of the family share some facial features. But, not everyone has the same set of common features. For example, a few people may have the family nose. Others have the family chin. Perhaps others have the family brow. The family is held together visually by a collection of interlocking facial features but no family member has the full set of common features. According to Wittgenstein, many concepts are held together in the same way.

In the case of games, we see a category held together by family resemblances. Some games have a strategy. Some games have winners and losers. Some games involve competition. And so on. But no game has a full set of common attributes. This assertion that 'games' is a poorly defined category would hold for nearly a century, until Bernard Suits would offer a precise definition of games. We will get to Suits in the next post. But for now we will leave it off by saying that the intellectual foundations of games is anchored deeply in the heart of metaphysics.

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't even try to pronounce it) has brought these ideas together in a coherent model of optimal experience which he calls Flow. Flow is the experience that one has when engaging in an actvitiy that produces happiness in the moment and enduring happiness. A short introduction to Flow can be found in the Flow article in Wikipedia.

I won't replicate the book or the article here, but will say that a Flow activity has clear and worthy goals, it is challenging but achievable, it provides feedback reflecting progress, it is intrinsically satisfying, and one tends to loose a sense of external things when pursuing a flow activity.

Flow activities take your mind off of what Russell called 'detractors' and allow you to engage in meaningful contributors. They also support Wittgenstein's requirement that you have a sense of purpose in that they contain clear and worthy goals. The notion that they are challenging but achievable while being intrinsically satisfying seems to support Aristotle's view of virtues.

Different activities might produce flow experiences in different people. Some people, for example, find that playing music is a flow experience. I, who am tone deaf, do not find it to be so. However, I do find other things to be flow experiences.

Bringing the conversation back to video games, it is easy to see why video games are so addicting. For many people, they are flow experiences. The have clear goals that are worthy in the mind of the players. More sophisticated games such as World of Warcraft actually have quite complicated goal structures with short and long term goals, conflicting goals, and both implicit and explicit goals. The goals are challenging but achievable. There is feedback in the form of leveling and the accumulation of resources and achievement awards. Players tend to find video games intrinsically satisfying. And they tend to loose a sense of external things when engaged in playing them.

People are often critical of video games for precisely this reason. They feel that gamers are much to involved in there games. However, I would turn it around and ask why are the other activities in life so much less compelling. Why are work and education more like video games? Is work, somehow, supposed to be unpleasant? Is education inherently difficult. What if work and education could be designed using the same principles as video games? Instead of being disdainful and suspicious, maybe there is something here that we can take advantage of.

Developing Your Virtues

In the last post, I mentioned Aristotle's claim that happiness is the only goal that we seek as an end in itself. In this post, I will take that a step further and discuss Aristotle's view on how happiness is actually achieved.

Aristotle saw each person as possessing unique talents. These talents are your virtues. This comes from the fact that Aristotle used the term "arete" which is translated some times as excellence and some times as virtue. I prefer the word excellence rather than virtue because virtue has a connotation of moral goodness where as excellence is more suggestive of something that you are good at. The key to happiness, according to Aristotle is to develop your virtues or, in simpler terms, become better at things that you are good at.

This is almost common sense if you think about it. People who are good at music enjoy playing music. People who are good at sports enjoy playing sports. People who are good at academics enjoy studying and learning. Similarly, people who are not good at sports, for example, do not enjoy them.

This can also be understood from an evolutionary perspective. If a person is good at something and they develop that talent, then they are more likely to survive as long as that talent has some survival value. This mechanism was discussed earlier. If people are rewarded by pleasurable experience for pursuing things they are good at, they are more likely to pursue those things. If the pursuit of those things has evolutionary advantage, then the pleasurable reward also has evolutionary advantage.

So, over eons of evolution, the enjoyment of pursuing one's virtues has evolutionary value. The enjoyment also has evolutionary value. And hence we enjoy doing things we are good at and becoming better at things we are good at makes us happy.

Psychological Quality of Life

Pyschological quality of life occurs when one has an enduring feeling of well being. That is, quality of life is a subjective experience rather than a response to external factors. This is a problem for those measuring quality of life because there is no test you can perform to assess one's subjective experiences. None the less, if you wish to improve your quality of life you have to work on your subjective experience. So, it is important to look at it from this perspective. We can also think of subjective quality of life as happiness. One is happy if their life has quality. We are assuming 'good' quality, of course. And if one's life has quality they will be happy.

Before we dismiss the objecitve external factors (such as those used for an objective or sociological determination of quality of life), it is fair to say that external factors can diminish one's subjective experience. A happy person who is being hit with a stick will be less happy than a similarly happy person who is not being hit with a stick. However, not hitting someone with a stick does not make them happy. It merely makes them less unhappy. I will come back to this issue later. But for now, we need to focus on the question of what makes people happy.

In an earlier post, I mentioned Aristotle's claim that happiness is the only goal which we seek for its own sake. We seek money, fame, and worldly posessions because we believe they will make us happy. But we pursue happiness as an end in itself. We want to be happy because we want to be happy. So, how do we do this? Aristotle had an answer, and it was quite a good answer. We will turn to it next time.

Games and the Ideal Life

Suits asserts that "in Utopia the only thing left to do would be to play games, so game playing turns out to be the whole of the ideal of existence." [pg.154] Most activities that we engage in, we engage in for the sake of something else. We work to earn money to eat. We form social structures for protection and survival. And so on. But, if we lived in a Utopian Society where all our needs were taken care of, the only activity we would engage in, according to Suits, is game playing. That is to say that game playing is the only activity that we pursue as an end in itself. I am not sure if it is, indeed, the only activity that we pursue as an end in it self. But, it does seem fair to say that is an activity that we view as an end in itself. And a reasonable question is - Why?

Aristotle claimed, as I mentioned before, that happiness is the only goal that we pursue as an end in itself. So, if game playing is the only activity that is an end in itself, is there a connection between happiness and game playing? Assume for a moment, (I will argue this point later) that one is happy if they have a high quality of life and unhappy if they have a low quality of life. Then do games contribute to our quality of life? If so, is this why playing games is an important element if not the very definition of the ideal life?

Next in our discussion of games, we will turn to happiness and qualify of life. We will attempt to understand the connection between game playing and quality of life. I will argue that game playing contributes in a significant and positive way to our quality of life and that is why we find game playing to be inherently satisfying. Further, we can use this insight to see how the nature of games can be applied to other activities such as work and education to make them more satisfying.

Reflecting and Refocusing

Many years ago, when I worked in a government office, there was sign that circulated which many people would pin to the walls of their cubicle. The sign began with an articulation of the ideal expectations for employee behavior and ended with the observation "but when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is easy to forget that your goal was to drain the swamp." This seems to have broader applicability as we get into any number of situations where dealing with the dynamics of the situation distracts us from the very reason that brought us into the situation.

As we explore the philosophical foundations of games and the various analytical and linguistic subtitles, we are vulnerable to the same phenomenon. So, let us pause for a moment to reflect on what we have done and where we would like to go with it.

We have defined the concept of a game. We have constructed a universal. Ideally, this universal includes all things that are games and no things that are not games. The Aristotelian approach of defining games did not work because games do not have attributes like rocks, plant and trees that were developed over years of evolution. We have taken a more Platonic approach in attempting to discover the essence of "gameness", not in the World of Forms but in the world of abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are ideal when they are intellectually economical.

We needn't worry about Hume and Wittgenstein because we are not trying to account for all conversational uses of the word "game". Bacon steered us away from that in his warning about Idols of the Marketplace. Our goal was to find a definition of games that reflected the essence of games not the variety of uses of the word. We did this because we want the particulars within our universal to be the 'same' thing. We want this because the extent to which they are the same the more we can learn about them. So, if we have to toss out some particulars as not really being games, this is the cost of gathering more knowledge about those that are games.

As we proceed with out analysis, we may wish to refine the definition. However, unlike the philosopher who would refine the definition to give it greater coverage, the researcher would refine the definition so that it works better for research purposes. That is, we would refine the definition if that refined definition would help us to learn more about the particulars contained in the universal.

The Grasshopper

In a delightful book entitled The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Bernard Suits explores the concept of a game. This book is a stunning piece of work for three reasons. First, he achieves what Wittgenstein failed to do. He manages to define the concept of a game. Second, it is an excellent example of the process of concept analysis as the grasshopper attempts to define the concept of game and then defend it against challenges. Third, it provides some profound insights about both life and games.

On the first point, Wittgenstein not only failed to come up with an adequate definition of the concept of games, he proved (or thought he had proved) that such a definition was not possible. Yet Suits defines playing a game as a "voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." [pg. 55] This is not the formal definition and one would have to read the book to understand Suits' definition more fully. But, it does capture the essence of playing a game. How did Suits get this right where Wittgenstein got it wrong? I believe that the answer lies in the fact that Wittgenstein was looking for attributes - rules, players, strategies, and so forth. Suits' definition is teleological. It defines games in terms of the purpose they serve. Aristotle's final cause was the purpose for which a thing exists. And, according to Aristotle, you must understand the final cause in order to understand a thing. Sadly, teleology has fallen out of favor. And, yet, it is clear that you cannot define the concept of game without reference to the purpose for which they are played.

On the second point, Suits provides us with an excellent example of concept analysis, a technique that is often woefully missing from social science research and almost unheard of in business research. Using commonplace understandings of concepts in research is as destructive to good research as is replacing statistical analysis with 'gut feel' or replacing methodology with mere curiosity. This was, in fact, the essence of Bacon's Idols of the Marketplace. Bacon saw, way back in the 17th century, that using commonplace understandings of concepts was destructive to the project of science. And yet, today, we do it all the time. Sadly, there are far too few examples of good concept analysis and Suits provides us with an exemplar.

On the third point, games are one of the few activities that we pursue for their own sake. This means that they have intrinsic rather than instrumental value. Aristotle pointed out that happiness is the only goal we pursue for its own sake. Now, Suits is pointing out that playing games is an activity that we pursue for its own sake. Is there a connection between happiness, games and the ideal life? I think so, but it would be way too premature to suggest that. Let's see how things unfold.

Universals Crash and Burn

As we observed in the last post, John Locke attempted to update Aristotle's view of universals by saying that we select key attributes for defining categories based upon our objectives. So, we can look at games, decide what salient features they all have in common and define the concept of game based upon those features. It looks like the project might be gaining altitude again. But, instead it will take a nosedive.

David Hume would observe that we form categories based on a subconscious cognitive process that cannot be made explicit. That is, we go about our business in the world, experience games, and form a visceral concept of what a game is. Any attempt to explicitly define characteristics would be artificial and doomed to failure. The Supreme court justice who admitted that he could not define pornography but claimed - "I know it when I see it", was embodying Hume's view of universals.

If Hume steered the project into a nose dive, Wittgenstein let it crash and burn. According to him, the only thing the elements of some categories have in common is that they are members of the same category. He used a, now famous, analogy to family resemblances. If you go to a family reunion and look at the members of the family you will see common elements. Some will have the family eyes. Some will have the family nose or mouth. Some the family brow. And so on. There are overlapping features held by subsets of the family but no set of features common to all. For example, not everyone has the nose. Or not everyone has eyes. Universals, according to Wittgenstein, are made the same way. You cannot define a core set of attributes because there is no core set of attributes that all instances have in common. And the concept he used to illustrate this was - you guessed it - games!

Should we despair at this point and give up our attempt to define what constitutes a game? Should we despair that if this is true knowledge is not really possible? No, that would be a little overly dramatic. Instead we will back up and see where these great minds went wrong. We will go back to some road signs provided by Bacon and Aristotle and try to get back on the right path. And that will be the topic of the next post.

The Decline of Universals

Aristotle saw universals as constructs based in reality. A tree is a tree because it shares key attributes with other trees. Anybody can look at a tree and a squirrel and see that they are not the same thing. Initially this seems to solve the problem. But in the long run it only makes it worse. It answers the question - where do universals come from? - by saying that they are constructed based upon common attributes. However, it then leads to the question - where do attributes come from? If the squirrel happened to be brown, we could create a universal "brown things" to which the tree and the squirrel would belong. Aristotle might balk at this by citing that "brown" is not an essential attribute and universals should be formed based on common essential attributes. This sounds good and it seems like we are making progress. But, we are not. How do we know that an attribute is essential? Is an attribute essential because it is in the definition of kind? Or is an attribute in the definition of kind because it is essential? That whirring sound in the background is our cognitive wheels spinning in the philosophical mud.

Locke made some progress by saying that the creation of universals involves a cognitive process of abstraction whereby we we select attributes based on some set of objectives. I am going to jump in and help Locke out here by saying that our objective is usually intellectual economy. We create categories because they are efficient ways to organize our knowledge. Otherwise, we get into huge trouble with Locke. We get into trouble because it raises questions such as 1) how do we select objectives?, and 2) how do we know that a particular category is better than another category at meeting those objectives?

Locke has both helped and hindered the pursuit of universals. He has helped in that his claim is intuitively appealing. It does seem to be the case that we look at a collection of particulars and though some cognitive process extract a group based on similarities. In fact, it feels so built in that one has to wonder if it is just a function of the brain. He has hurt in that it has made our understanding even more unclear. How does this process work? Can it be made explicit? How are objectives defined? How are categories evaluated with respect to objectives?

All we were trying to do was to figure out what a game is? How did life get to be so complicated. Any six year old can tell you whether or not something is a game. And, yet, a philosophical adult has to admit defeat. Why is that? Well, David Hume will come to the rescue on this question and, in doing so, take a stab at the larger question. However, as we will see, Hume will jump into the muddied waters and stir up even more mud. Following that, Wittgenstein will show that once you are into muddied waters you can't get out. And that is what we will take up next.

Aristotle Points the Way to Destruction

Aristotle's view of universals was quite different from Plato's. Instead of relying on an immaterial World of the Forms, the ever practical Aristotle said that universals are formed simply by grouping things with the same attributes. Initially this seems to solve the problem of universals. Categories may not exist in the world, but things and their attributes do. So, if we just create categories from things with common attributes we are out of the woods as far as the problem of universals goes. Or, so it may seem.

If we try to define the attributes that all games have in common we begin to see how naive this position really is. In fact, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein will carry this perspective to the point where it seems like knowledge is impossible. And Wittgenstein will use the case of game in particular to show this. Aristotle's approach seems to work pretty well on natural objects like plants and animals. And this makes sense, when you think about it, because, presumably, these things evolved from common ancestors by developing new attributes that distinguished them. Organizing them into categories and even taxonomies is largely an exercise in mapping out their evolutionary changes.

But, not all categories involve natural objects. In fact, most categories involve artificial objects (like games). And artificial objects do not have the benefit of natural evolution to sort them into categories. Unfortunately, Aristotle is leading us down the path to destruction with this view. And the aforementioned great minds will escort us the rest of the way.

But, before we dismiss Aristotle and his wayward ways, we need to consider the fact that he offered a different perspective which will put us back on the path to understanding. This is he notion of teleology which give us great purchase in understanding artificial objects. And that we will take up next.