Return of the Grasshopper

Abstract

Suits ended The Grasshopper with a doubt about his main normative thesis; he worried that if people in his utopia knew they were only playing games, they’d find their lives not worth living. This abridgement of a previously unpublished sequel withdraws the doubt and gives a more robust defence of the value of playing games. The contrary view says a valuable activity must have an independently valuable goal, as game-playing doesn’t—you need to be curing real diseases or discovering otherwise unknown truths. Suits now replies that to want there to be real disease or ignorance in the world is to want there to be real obstacles, so the activity of overcoming them can be possible. But that’s precisely to have the lusory attitude to the obstacles and so to be playing a game whether or not you realize you’re doing so.