The Grasshopper - Third Edition: Games, Life and Utopia

Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press (2014)
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Abstract

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” said the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Through the jocular voice of Aesop's Grasshopper, a “shiftless but thoughtful practitioner of applied entomology,” Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, and so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. This new edition of _The Grasshopper_ includes illustrations from Frank Newfeld created for the book’s original publication, as well as an introduction by Thomas Hurka and a new appendix on the meaning of ‘play.’

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Author's Profile

Thomas Hurka
University of Toronto, St. George Campus

Citations of this work

Playfulness versus epistemic traps.C. Thi Nguyen - 2022 - In Mark Alfano, Colin Klein & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
Roleplaying Game–Based Engineering Ethics Education: Lessons from the Agency of Art.Trystan S. Goetze - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education St. Lawrence Section Annual Conference.

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