The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia is a philosophical investigation of games by Bernard Suits. It is a dense, and, at times, difficult read. So, it is more for the stout-hearted, philosophically inclined reader, than it is for the casual reader. Nonetheless, it does make some very important points. So, I will summarize it here, very briefly, and emphasize a couple of its most dramatic contributions.

The book is structured around a very different interpretation of Aesop's Fable The Grasshopper and the Ant. In the original Aesop's Fable the grasshopper plays when the weather is nice while the ant works putting food away for the winter. When winter comes, the ant has plenty of food but the foolhardy grasshopper has nothing because he played all summer. So, the ant survives while the grasshopper starves. In Suit's interpretation, the grasshopper argues that he is merely acting according to his nature and if he did differently he would no longer be the grasshopper.  This was a little difficult to follow and I probably should read it again and wrestle with the ideas a bit more. But, the re-interpretation is not relevant to this post. So, I will keep going.

Along the way in discussing the role of play and games, Suits makes two rather astonishing observations. First, he asks about a utopian world in which people had all their needs met what would people do with their time? He suggests that they would play games. This seems right, on the face of it, as games are entertaining and will fill time not being spent on surviving. He then goes on to suggest that because of this games are the highest good for people. That is, it is the thing they would do if they could do anything they wanted to do. This, then, leads to the observation I made in a previous post that games are the only activity that people do for its own sake. Thus, putting play on a par with happiness as a thing people pursue for no other reason than to achieve it.

The second rather astonishing contribution that Suits makes is that he provides a workable definition of games. You might recall how, in the previous post, Wittgenstein said that games defy definition. The concept of games, according to Wittgenstein is held together by Family Resemblances and there is nothing that all games have in common. However, Suits defines a game as a voluntary attempt to othercome unnecessary obstacles. That seems to be a pretty good definition and one has to ask why Wittgenstein got it wrong while Suits got it right.

The answer, I believe, is that Wittgenstein was looking for a definition based on attributes whereas Suits provided a teleological definition. That is to say that  Wittgenstein was looking for features common to all games whereas Suits defined games in terms of the purpose they serve in our lives. This might even be a part of a larger patterns as we progress from natural science to social science to sciences of the artificial. Categories in natural science tend to be defined by attributes. In social science we see more of a mixture of attribute and teleological definitions. In sciences of the artificial more categories are almost always teleological.

The Literature on (Video) Games

As I mentioned in the last post, I write book and article reviews for ACM's Computing Reviews. I have been doing this since 1986, almost three decades. For most of that time I have been reviewing items in Information Systems. About five years ago, I started reviewing items within the domain of video games. And I can attest to the fact that the literature in (video) games is so far superior to the literature in Information Systems that the field of Information System should be crimson red with embarrassment. If ever there were a poor cousin, it is the field of Information Systems.

I put the word (video) in parentheses here for a reason and should explain that reason. The literature on video games only dates back to the first video games which was sometime in the 1960's. There are at least two wonderful books on the history of video games, neither of which are handy at the moment. So, I will check that date later. But, the literature on games and play goes back much further and requires almost no adjustment in order for it to provide a solid philosophical, sociological and psychological foundation for video games. In upcoming posts, I will introduce as many of these foundation works as I can. This is not to say that all the good work happened before the invention of video games. There are many excellent works on video games as well.  I hope to get to all of them as well. But, for now, I am going to laying down some foundation.

We can think of the literature of video games in terms of the following categories: philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, empirical, and engineering or design. I have many books lying around and none of them have category stickers on them. So, I just made up those categories. But, I think they will work for the time being. And, in the next post, I will begin with some of the philosophical grounding. If philosophy gives you a headache, you may want to skip the next few posts. But, I encourage you to, at least, glance at them as the foundation work is important so you should, at least, be aware of it.

Back

It has been over three years since I posted to this blog. I guess if you are looking for a daily feed you are pretty disappointed. But, daily posts are clearly not my blogging style. There are several problems with daily posts. First, it is a major challenge to come up with something worthwhile to say every day. And if one is forced to write something every day they will become shallow in their observations. Second, I prefer to write when I feel like writing. This is because I like to think about things and hold off writing until I have something that I think is worth saying. And, third, if you write everyday, then the posts you wrote a year ago are probably no longer worth reading.

My approach is to take a longer view of blogging. I write when I have something to say. And I write things that are, hopefully, as worthwhile to read years later as they are on the day I post them. I view a blog as a long term effort where I share my thinking about various topics. Sometimes you can see how my thinking evolves on specific topics. Sometimes I can see how my thinking evolves. Hopefully, the things I write will stimulate your thinking about the topics that I write about as much as they stimulate my thinking..

This particular blog captures my evolving thinking about video games. If you are interested in my thinking on more general topics, you can check out my main blog Ranting and Reflecting . I think about a lot more things than video games. And that blog captures a wider range of topics. I also contribute, on a regular basis to LinkedIn forums such as the American Philosophical Association forum and The Future Role of IT. You will notice a similar style on Ranting and Reflecting. I start thinking about something, post a few bits about it, and then disappear for a while. If you look at this from the perspective of daily blogging it makes no sense. But, if you look at it as a record of thinking that evolves over decades, it makes a lot more sense.

Now that I am back on this blog again I am going to do three things. First, I am going to review what I said before and see if it needs any reflection or commentary. Then, I am going start reviewing the foundation literature of video games. Along the way I will toss in some observations about where the field of video games has come from and where it is going. In the past five years or so I have reviewed over fifty scholarly books and articles for The Association for Computing Machinery's online review journal Computing Reviews  and I have played way too much World of Warcraft . So, it isn't like I haven't been doing anything. And since video games are only one of my many interests I have been involved in a lot of other things as well. But my style of work is to work on whatever I happen to be interested in until I am no longer interested and then drop it and come back when I am interested again. I think it is time to pay attention to video games again.

What Does It Mean to be Meaningful?

This sounds like a weird philosophical digression, and perhaps it is. I am not above getting distracted. But, if the ultimate goal of a video game is to be meaningful, then we need to decide what we mean by meaningful. I am going to work into this via analogies from other media. Do books and films have to be meaningful? And if they are, what does that mean?

I should mention, if it isn't already obvious, that I am thinking this think through as I go along. So, what I decide further down the line may look very different from my initial impressions. At the same time, my conclusions may look very much like my initial impressions. I just don't know at this stage.

First, I think there are varying degrees of meaningfulness. A thing is minimally meaningful if it adjusts your in some way so that you are better prepared to cope with your life. A thing is maximally meaningful if it helps you to make sense out of your life and your experiences, or if it brings your life and experiences into perspective. I am flirting with a connection with the transcendental here but am not going to go quite that far.

That's not too bad for a start. We will see where it goes. Next, I will apply the definition to books and films. I will see if tha exercise helps me to refine or solidify the definition. Then I will apply it to video games. This is not, I should hasten to mention, just a quixotic philosophical pursuit. If I am right about what I am thinking here the ultimate design goal for a video game should be that it be meaningful. We'll see how it goes.

Does a Video Game Have to be Meaningful?

Asking whether or not a video game should be meaningful sounds like a silly question. But it is a very serious question that I plan to explore. The short answer is - no. A video game does not have to be meaningful. Just being fun is enough. However, if a goal of the game is to be memorable and enduring, then, I would argue, it does have to be meaningful. One might say "the goal of a game is make money"", and there is some truth to that. But few game designers, as creative artistic people, are satisfied with just making money. They want their work to have larger meaning. And few players are satisfied, in the end, investing endless hours in a game unless they feel it has some larger significance. So, in order for a game to be memorable, significant and worthwhile, it must be meaningful.

This has only become a problem recently as experts in media studies have offered up the claim that video games should be studied as cultural artifacts just as films and novels are studied as cultural artifacts.  Asking if a video game has to be meaningful is like asking if a novel or a film has to be meaningful. Certainly, there are lots and lots of junk novels and junk films. So not every one has to be meaningful. But, it is the goal of writer's or film maker's craft to produce meaningful work even though it is a rare occurrence. Similarly, it is the goal of the game designer's craft to produce meaningful work. Hence, we need to figure out what we mean by 'meaningful'.

RPG's as a Social contract

I need an overarching theory for evaluating the design of a MMORPG video game. I have chosen the Role Playing Game as my unit of analysis. I don't think the size of the game is a major factor. Hence, I have ignore the MM or massively multi-player part. I do think that size will be a factor further down the line. But, initially I am going to ignore it. I also believe that the statements I am going to make will apply to role playing games that are not implemented on computers. The great thing about a blog is that I don't have to get it exactly right the first time. I can express my current thinking and change it later as I learn more or gain more insight.

The overarching theory will be that of the social contract. The game master enters into a social contract with the players. Usually, this contract is implied although I am going to try to make it more explicit. The game master agrees to do certain things in providing the game environment. And the player pledge certain things as well. The design of the game can then be evaluated in terms of the obligations of the game master and how well those obligations are met. At the level of the game design, a game that is way too hard or way too easy; way to simple or way  to complicated; would be a poorly designed game. But, even if the game were well designed it may be implemented poorly. On the other side of the contract, players who play merely to interfere with the enjoyment of others (commonly known as greifers) are not good players. Player who do not wish to spend the time to learn the game and constantly complain are not good players either.  Those are broad brush extremes that I will flesh out later.

Further, the contract is hierarchical. A well designed game could have a poorly design quest, for example, or vice versa. The ideal game would have all elements contributing to and consistent with the overall game design.

Well, those are my thoughts for now. I will add and/or modify as I think this through.

If it's Tuesday, This Must Be Azeroth

There was a TV show, many years ago, about Americans traveling to Europe on multi country package tours. The show was called "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium." The point of the show, as one can almost infer from the title, was that racing through European countries is not the way to appreciate the experience of Europe. The point of a European tour is not, of course, to be able to say "I was in this country and that country and so on". The point of the tour is to experience each country.

The title of this post plays off of this observation because we see this same sort of behavior in World of Warcraft - people want to level up as fast as they possibly can. In some accounts, I have heard claims that you can level up to 80 in less than two weeks. The question I would ask is - why would anybody want to do that? If you recorded a football game, would you fast forward through the whole game just so you can say that you saw it? Of course not! The point of watching the game is, well, watching the game. And the point of World of Warcraft is playing the game not just racing through it so you can say that you played it.

There is one exception that I can think of. Let's say you have a high level character with a lot of gold on a server that does not provide the challenges that you are looking for. So, you do a character transfer to a more desirable server. On the new server you may want additional characters for any number of reasons but don't want to spend a year leveling them up to the point where they can raid and do heroics. In that case, you may be interested in fast forwarding.

To go back to the travel analogy, this would be like spending months in Belgium and then popping in for a day to do some shopping. You have already had the Belgium experience and popping in for a day doesn't detract from that.

World of Warcraft Progess

I have been playing World of Warcraft for just over two years. If you subtract the time when I had no idea what I was doing, it is just under two years. In that time, I have created and deleted many, many characters, and tried most races, classes and professions. I tried a few guilds and became somewhat more adept at the Auction House than at the Battlegrounds. I thought it might be a good idea to document where I am at the moment and some of what I have learned.

I currently have around 20+ characters on three servers. My alliance server is Maiev and my horde server is Vashj. I have a few characters on Dalvengyr in the event that I need to do some demos or training. Not counting the spare parts on Dalvengyr, I have five hunters, three warlocks, two mages, two death knights, a rogue, a warrior, a paladin, a shaman and a priest. There are two level 70, six between 60 and 70, six between 50 and 60, and the rest below. The lowest one is 23.

My prefered class, as you can probably tell from from the above counts is the hunter. Second is the warlock. Both the hunter and warlock are ranged classes which means they stand back and shoot rather than run into the thick of things hacking (which is called melee). Both have pets as well. I suspect that there is some sort of psychological statement in one's preferred class. I prefer strategy to raw power. So rather than run in hacking, I prefer to stand back and pick the mobs off one by one. I have a warrior who specializes in melee and is now 60+. But I find leveling that character to be tedious in the extreme.

Over the next few posts I will provide some of my observations about the game, game strategies and the people who play the game. I have really learned quite a lot and if I don't write some of it down I will begin forgetting it.

Some Distinctions

Before this all starts getting too far out of hand, I think I'd better start making some distinctions. An objective within a game and the game itself are not the same thing. A game and a game world are not the same thing. A virtual game world is different from a non virtual game world. A virtual (game) world can be entirely fantasy or have connections of some kind with the real world. And products, such as football jerseys that exist and have value because of the game, are not part of the game but are clearly dependent on it.

Let's take the first of these distinctions. I will use foot ball in these examples because more people are familiar with football than are familiar with, say, World of Warcraft. In football, there are any number of objectives within the game itself. An objective, in football, may be to advance the ball ten yards to get a first down or to prevent the other team from doing so. Another objective may be to score a touchdown. Clearly, the first of those is a a sub-objective to the second one. One could see the touchdown as a sub-objective to winning the game; winning the game as a sub-objective to making the play-offs; and making the play-offs as a sub-objective to winning the Superbowl. So analysis of objectives can get quite complicated. However, my unit of analysis is the game and I can't see (at least at the moment) how developing a structure for objectives within or beyond the game itself advances my understanding of games. It may advance my understanding of football, but not of games.

In football, we have a clear unit of analysis that we call 'the game'. At the risk of being simplistic, it is four fifteen minute play intervals at the end of which there is a score indicating a winner or a tie. I understand all that business about overtime, elapsed time and so on. But, as I said, we are not analyzing football here and I think most people understand what a 'game' of football entails.

In World of Warcraft this is not nearly as clear. Exactly what is 'the game' in WoW? This could get complicated; but I will keep chipping away at it.

Video Games as Social Interaction Technology

I came across an article about a Professor in Indiana using World of Warcraft as a means of communicating with his students.I found this interesting from two perspectives. First, thinking of a video game as a social interaction technology has potentially profound implications.

As we spend more an more time in virtual worlds and video games, people know where they can find us. Certainly, if someone carries a cell phone you always know where to find them as well. But there is a cultural difference. A cell phone call is an interruption where as an IM in a virtual world is not. When you call someone, you have no idea what you might be interrupting. However, if you find someone in a virtual world, they are most likely just hanging out. They may be building something, or writing a script, or slaying a monster, or talking to friends. But the culture of virtual worlds has evolved very differently from the culture of cell phones. And it seem to facilitate informal communications.

This is significant because an earlier technology, email, had a tendency to flatten out organizations. Whereas before you might have to make an appointment to see someone a level or two above you, with email you could just shoot them a note. Video games provide a common gaming experience that may flatten things out even more.

On the other hand, it further dilutes the meaning of "video game" and makes the possibility of studying video games in their entirety even more remote.

Conceptual Bleeding

I started this blog attempting to provide some philosophical grounding for video game research. I discussed concept analysis and how it applied to the concept of games. I explored the notion of play and how it is one of the few, if not the only, activity that we pursue for its own sake. I took that a step further and introduced the concept of flow and explained how video games are a quintessential flow activity. So far so good. But then my focus began to drift. This is not a lament, only an observation. You can't ignore all the other things that are going on. At the same time you cannot be too distracted by them. Video games can be seen as art. They can be used for education. The can provide channels for advertising. They can provide critical commentary. In fact, video games are useful for a whole lot of things.

I mention this because it is a good example of the kind of conceptual bleeding that plagues researchers. We begin by trying to develop a crisp essential concept of the phenomenon that we are trying to study. Over time that phenomenon begins to bleed into other areas. If we stick to our essential definition then, over time, we begin to appear irrelevant. If we expand the scope of our phenomenon to include new uses or applications the concept begins to appear somewhat fuzzy over time which ultimately threatens our rigor.

As I said, this is not a lament. Only an observation. It is a good example of a conceptual problem that many researchers encounter. So, what am I going to do about it? Well, probably nothing. I intend to keep looking at new uses of video games and I intend to keep trying to nail down the essential concepts. And I intend to keep reflecting on what I am doing. I am probably not going to write the book on video games nor am I going to have the last word. This is a blog and the best I can hope for is to make a few interesting observations along the way.

Some Thoughts on Casual Play

I finished reading and reviewing the book on Casual Play that I mentioned last week. The author argues his point well that casual players outnumber hard core gamers and that this may represent a revolution of sorts in video game design. However, despite the increasing use of casual games, I don't think hard core games are going anywhere. That is to say that I think this segment of the industry will continue to thrive and continue to grow. At the same time I would also acknowledge that the casual segment may well thrive more and grow faster. I think a couple of analogies are in order to explain this.

The first analogy which I used in the review said that you cannot judge the audience for performing art simply by considering those who attend Broadway plays. There is also an audience for shows like Everybody Loves Raymond and while the later audience may not be as lofty as the former it dwarfs the former in terms of numbers and revenue generation. One end of the market is where the art is advanced. The other end of the market is where it is exploited. Both ends are important to a vital industry. So designers who serve the hard core audience will continue to advance the state of the art while casual game designers will continue to broaden the audience.

The second analog which I mentioned in the review but did not explore was the comparison between hard core gamers versus casual players on one hand and command line users versus those who prefer graphical user interfaces. There is still a use for command line interfaces and there is stil a hard core audience who prefers them. However, graphical user interfaces expands the audience and makes computers available to a large number of people who would never use them if they had to learn how to use the command line. I think this comparison is apt because, overwhelmingly, most potential video game players will not invest the time and intellectual energy required to play hard core games. They will, however, play games that are effortless to play and represent diversion and entertainment.

On one hand it is exciting to see the field of video games grow and expand and become more complex. However, from a research perspective, it becomes increasing more difficult to make any statements that are true for all video games. We may get back to Wittgenstein's family resemblances and see video games as collection of overlapping concepts that do not have any attributes in common across all categories.

Video Games as Transformative Art

I reviewed a book recently for ACM Computing Reviews entitled Critical Play: Radical Game Design, by Mary Flanagan. It was a fascinating book that brought forth two important points about video games. First, video games can be through of as a form of artistic expression. And, second, as a form of artistic expression, video games can, potentially, be seen as transformative.

Seeing video games as a form of art is not that controversial. The background scenery and characters have graced posters and drawn the attention of graphics artists for years. But, it is much more than that. Consider the following progression... Imagine standing in your favorite art gallery viewing an oil painting of a landscape scene. Next imagine putting characters in that scene and having them work through some sort of archetypal human conflict. Now you have a movie. Next, imagine having that movie be interactive where the viewers actually interact with the characters in the story. Now you have a video game.

Returning to the landscape painting, it can be viewed on several levels. It can just be something nice to look at. It can inspire deeper reflection and aesthetic appreciation. Or, if it touches us deeply enough, it can be transformative. Similarly, a video game can simply be fun to play. If it is more engaging we may learn from it. For example, we might learn how to work in groups, solve problems, develop strategies, or manage resources. If it touches us deeply enough, it may be transformative.

These are compelling ideas and also somewhat problematic. I have been thinking of video games as play, serious play. I was starting to get a net over my ideas in this area. Now, having to consider the role of video games as transformative play has torn a big hole in my net.

Sigh!

Video Games and Flow

This digression into World of Warcraft was intended to show how a video game in general and World of Warcraft in particular can be seen as a flow experience. This connection explains why there are so many video game addicts, why the video game industry is growing so fast, and why we should think about using video game models in the design of work and education. I would like to elaborate more on this idea but I took a break from World of Warcraft to write this entry and I really would like to get back to it.

World of Warcraft: The Teleology of Resource Acquisition

World of Warcraft isn't just a series of quests where you slay monsters. A large part of play is the acquisition of resources. This happens in a variety of ways. First, each time you slay a monster you get to 'loot the corpse'. This grizzly phrase really means nothing more than right clicking on the corpse and copying the items to your inventory. The items could be money, thngs that are useful to your character, or things that are not useful to your character but that you can sell back to a vendor.

You can recieve 'loot' in a variety of ways other than looting corpses. You can recieve items of value as a reward for completing a quest. Some items you 'find' as treasure. And you can trade items with other players. If you have multiple characters on the same server, you can mail items that one character does not need to another character who does need it.

Professions are another way to acquire resources. This can get quite complicated and I will just give a simple example so as not to get off on a tangent. Let's say your character is a tailor. You normally receive cloth for free from looting corpses. Instead of selling that cloth back to a vendor you can use that cloth to make bag. You can then sell that bag back to a vendor, auction it off at the auction house, use it yourself, give it or trade it to another player, or mail it to another one of your characters.

The resources that you acquire are either of value to your character such as better armor or better weapons, or they can be sold for money which in turn can be used to purchase things of value to your character. The acquisition of resources can be just as important as leveling. As your character increases in level, it needs better weapons and better armor in order to succeed against more difficult enemies.

Ostensibly, the player in World of Warcraft is attempting to level up by slaying monsters. However, there are numerous goals being pursued simultaneously. The player is also trying to acquire resources and advance in his or her profession. This complex goal structure often requires difficult decisions regard how to most effectively spend one's time. And, if it isn't complicated enough, there are also social goals that we will turn to next.

World of Warcraft as a Flow Experience

World of Warcraft (WoW) is, as of this writing, the most successful MMORPG ever with well over ten million subscribers paying a monthly fee to play. It is a well thought out, cleverly designed, game with great graphics, good performance and good reliability. It is also a flow experience. In order to support this claim, I will take the criteria provided for flow experiences in the Wikipedia article and, over the next few posts, explain them in terms of WoW.

As a reminder, the Wikipedia article provides the following criteria:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.^[2]
2. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

For purposes of explaination, I will divide these criteria in two categories: structural and experiential. The structural elements 1, 5, 6, and 7 can be explained in terms of the game design. The experiential elements 2,3,4,7,8 and 9 can only be explained in reference to subjective play experience. Demonstration of the structural elements is fairly straightforward. The experiential elements will be verified largely from self reporting. That is, I have played the game and I had certain experiences. In order to really nail this down from a research perspective a great deal more work would have to done. So, I will also discuss how such research might proceed. This is a lot to do. So, in the next post, we will get started on the structural elements.

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.

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 Search for the Arché

Early pre Socratic philosophers were engaged in a quest to find the fundamental unchanging essence of which all things were made. They are sometimes referred to as the earth, air, fire and water philosophers as they, in turn, posited each of these as the most fundamental element. Their quest is sometimes referred to as The Search for the Arché from the ancient Greek word, Arché , meaning the beginning or first principle. We see this word in modern words such as archeology (study of the beginnings), archaic (belonging to the beginning), and monarchy (one first). We can take the word to mean the essence or underlying principle. And while the pre Socratics were looking for the underlying essence of all reality, we usually limit ourselves to the underlying essence of the particulars that make up a concept.

So, what does this have to do with games? We saw in the previous post that normal conversational usage of a word or concept (such as game) is inadequate for serious rigorous research. Included in the conversational usage of the term games are such disparate particulars such as sports games, games people play (social roles), and the game of life. If we wish to study games, we need to come up with a crisper definition. We want the concept of games to include only things that are essentially the same.

The reason for this is simple. If the particulars that we include in the concept of games are essentially the same then we should be able to describe attributes or properties that they all have in common and we should be able to identify regular relationships that these particulars have with particulars in another concept.

In order to do this we need to make sure that all of the particulars are essentially the same; that they have the same essence. Or, in simple terms, that the instances are all instances of the same thing. We need to find the arché of games in order to be sure they are all the same. But, what exactly do we mean when we say they are the 'same'. This question, which seems to be far to simple and obvious to even comment on, actually opens up one of the most perplexing ideas in metaphysics - the concept of identity. What do we mean when we say to things are the same? We will turn to that in the next post.