The intelligibility and adequacy of late-stage utopian games

ABSTRACT

In Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper and Return of the Grasshopper, game-play is claimed to be the ‘ideal of existence’ and the only activity that could sustain us through the ‘endless and endlessly boring summer’ of utopia. Christopher Yorke has challenged these claims by way of a constructive dilemma. If these games are sufficiently akin to the games we play, then they are not adequate to the task of rendering immortality tolerable. If these games are importantly different than the games we play, then, in being ‘unknown and unknowable’, they would characterize a form of life that is importantly different from our own and, so, would be inappropriate objects of social and political aspiration. Against Yorke’s skepticism, I argue that the games that constitute the ideal of existence are intelligible to us because we already play what the Grasshopper calls ‘open games’. Steffen Borge concedes that utopian games are intelligible, but argues that such games would fail to ‘grab our minds and imagination’. In the second half of the paper, I contend, against Borge, that such open games are adequate to the task of sustaining the interest of an immortal community.

KEYWORDS:

• Games
• game-play
• play
• The Grasshopper
• immortality
• death
• utopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To my knowledge, the Grasshopper’s appeal to an ‘endless … summer’ is the only textual evidence that suggests the ideal of existence implicates the possibility of immortality and it should be noted that the Grasshopper also claims that ‘life can be conceived of, or made into, or discovered to be, a timed game’ that ends with one’s death (Suits 2023, 64). While these claims are in tension, if life can be ‘conceived of, or made into’ a timed game, they are not necessarily contradictory. I will revisit the tension between these two claims in below, where I argue that the Grasshopper’s conception of the good life consists in a closed game that ends with a good death, which would also be a chosen death.

2. Steffen Borge likewise resists Yorke’s implication to the effect that Suits’ utopia has an all-or-nothing quality – something that can be ‘be realized overnight’ (2019, 440).

3. Why is the Grasshopper so coy in connecting late-stage utopian game-play to his earlier discussion of open games, which would give positive content to the former? The book is written around several riddles that invite the reader to play an interpretive game. Perhaps this game-like structure explains why the Grasshopper is less than explicit in his characterization of late-stage utopia.

4. I borrow the term from Cornelius Castoriadis (1998, 112), who uses ‘productivity’ to describe social processes that are neither purely repetitive nor purely chaotic, but that carry the endogenous capacity to incrementally transform themselves over time. See (Rust 2023b).

5. I talk of ‘productivity’ because the phrase ‘constitutive rule principle’, as used by the Grasshopper, runs afoul of the process-product ambiguity. On the one hand, and as suggested by the quoted parenthetical remark, the phrase seems to refer to the secondary rules by which new constitutive rules are enacted. On the other hand, it would also seem to refer to a particular rule that is produced by this enactment process – for example, a rule that instructs one to ‘[e]rect obstacles to your prelusory goal of self-destruction such that skill, not chance, is required to overcome them’ (Suits, 2023, 59).

6. As noted by Kolers, the Grasshopper makes the related distinction between ‘goal-governed games’ and ‘rule-governed games’ (Kolers 2015, 731–732; Suits 1978, 91–93, 135–136).

7. How a narrative history functions like constitutive rules by roughly circumscribing the possibility space within which future performances can be executed finds some elaboration in Ronald Dworkin’s chain-novel analogy: ‘Each novelist aims to make a single novel of the material he has been given, what he adds to it, and (so far as he can control this) what his successors will want or be able to add’ (1986, 229). Dworkin adds that this ‘does not mean his interpretation must fit every bit of the text’ (1986, 230).

8. Note that such a meta-game has the effect of blurring the traditional distinction between developer (gamewright) and player (see Kolers 2015, 732, 743). This interpenetration of previously complementary social roles might be usefully compared to how the traditional distinction between bard and hero has, over thousands of years, been increasingly problematized, as when Homer makes a cameo in the Odyssey or, more profoundly, as when the bard gets cast as a way of being a hero (Carlyle 1846, Chap. 3).

9. Again, The Good Place proves illustrative. After thousands of years of playing closed, work-like games, the character, Tahini, becomes the first human to join the supernatural architects or gamewrights in designing game-like activities both for the inhabitants of the Good Place and those who are trying to morally improve themselves enough to secure entry. The open game of designing instead of simply playing closed games becomes the kind of challenge that could continue to counter the tedium of immortality: while said by a different character, Tahini comes to embrace the kind of open game-play implied by the fact that ‘the search for how to find those rules will go on forever’ (a gloss of Scanlon 2000, 361).

10. Thanks to Avery Kolers for drawing my attention to this problem. I’m also grateful to Anna Strasser, Ronald Hall, David DiQuattro, and the referee for their thoughtful feedback.