The Grasshopper is a delightful read. Try it (here or here or here)! It’s pretty short, all things considered! But here’s something even shorter:
Contents:
- Background
- Outline of The Grasshopper
- Chapter-by-Chapter Details (if you care)
- Misconceptions about The Grasshopper
- Main Takeaways (according to me)
Background
The Fable
The Grasshopper is based on Aesop’s fable about ants and a grasshopper (or ants and a cicada). In the fable, the grasshopper has spent all summer playing (music), while the ants have been working to gather food. After winter arrives, the grasshopper comes begging and the ants refuse to help.
The moral of the story is that you ought to be prudent like the ants, rather than frivolous, like the grasshopper.
The Book
In The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, the Grasshopper is a philosopher akin to Socrates, willing to sacrifice his life for his principles. It’s his disciples — who are ants — that have something to learn, and what they have to learn is this: everything we do in life might be a game without our realizing it.
That’s the ultimate conclusion for which Suits is arguing. Everything else in the book is presented as evidence for that claim.
Because the book ends there, it doesn’t explore the political implications of its argument. But those implications are intriguing. See the Main Takeaways section for more.
This Post
In what follows, I’ll first provide an outline of the book. Keep in mind, however, that Suits just divided the book into 15 chapters and left it there. I think those chapters naturally fall into larger “divisions,” but the book does not label any such divisions.
After the outline, I’ll provide a brief summary of each chapter, if you want to “go deeper.” I’ll then list a few common misconceptions about The Grasshopper, followed by what I take to be the book’s main takeaways.
Please feel free to read only bits and pieces of what follows. I hope the table of contents, above, will help you jump to the section (or sections) you would like to focus on (and also help you skip the ones you would prefer to skip).
Outline of The Grasshopper
Part I: Present (Winter)
- Chapter 1: The Grasshopper says some strange things, and then dies. [jump to details]
- Chapter 2: Skepticus and Prudence are puzzled by the last thing the Grasshopper said. [details]
Part II: Flashback (Summer)
- A. Games seen in contrast with work
- 1. The basic theory
- Chapter 3: Skepticus recalls how the Grasshopper came to his definition of game playing. [details]
- 2. Defending and clarifying that theory
- a. Goals and means
- Chapter 4: Skepticus objects that the Grasshopper’s definition of game playing is too narrow, because of its focus on “prelusory goals.” [details]
- Chapter 5: Skepticus objects that the Grasshopper’s definition of game playing is too broad, because of its focus on “inefficient means” to those goals. [details]
- b. Rules
- Chapter 6: Skepticus objects that the Grasshopper’s definition of game playing is too narrow, because of its focus on means-limiting rules. [details]
- Chapter 7: The Grasshopper considers the possibility that competitive games are paradoxical, and thus indefinable. [details]
- Chapter 8: Skepticus objects that the Grasshopper’s definition of game playing is too narrow, because of its focus on means-limiting rules (again). [details]
- a. Goals and means
- 1. The basic theory
- B: Games seen in contrast with play
- 1. The challenge of child’s play
- a. Introduction
- Chapter 9: Skepticus argues the Grasshopper’s definition of game playing can’t handle make-believe games, and offers an alternative theory that defines games in terms of play. [details]
- b. Illustrative stories
- c. Conclusion
- Chapter 12: The Grasshopper argues that his definition can handle make-believe games after all. [details]
- a. Introduction
- 2. The challenge of professional play
- Chapter 13: The Grasshopper argues that you can play a game without playing. [details]
- 1. The challenge of child’s play
Part III: Present (Winter)
- Chapter 14: The Grasshopper is mysteriously resurrected and Skepticus tries to get him to clarify what he meant back in chapter 1. [details]
- Chapter 15: The Grasshopper explains and defends the strange things he said in chapter 1. [details]
Chapter-by-Chapter Details
Chapter 1
The Grasshopper is starving because he refuses to work. His calling is to preach play, and to practice what he preaches. Work is not an intrinsic good, he says. In fact, it derives what value it has from play (that is, the point of work is to enable play) and it would lose even that value if it weren’t for scarcity.
The Grasshopper recounts a dream in everything everyone does is a game. No one realizes that are playing games, however; they think they are raising children and healing patients and planting crops, etc. When the Grasshopper tells them that all of those things are actually games, they cease to exist. He dies without explaining the meaning of his dream.
Chapter 2
The Grasshopper’s disciples, Skepticus and Prudence, discuss what the Grasshopper was on about. The Grasshopper was using the words “work” and “play” to mean, “any extrinsically-valuable activity” and “any intrinsically-valuable activity,” respectively. (That is, “to work” was just the Grasshopper’s shorthand for, “to do something that you think derives its value from its relationship to something else.” And “to play” was the Grasshopper’s shorthand for, “to do something that you think has value in and of itself.”)
Skepticus and Prudence wonder why the Grasshopper’s dream should have focused on playing games specifically, rather than all sorts of play. Prudence asks Skepticus what he remembers of the Grasshopper’s theory of game playing. Skepticus agrees to read through his notes from their (his and the Grasshopper’s) conversations over the previous summer.
Chapter 3
The Grasshopper starts by contrasting games with work. While workers tend to value efficiency, games seem to require inefficiency. If you are trying to get a golf ball into a hole in the ground, for example, why not just walk the ball over to the hole and drop it in by hand? And while you might accept inefficiency in a work context if you get something good in return (say, safety), the inefficient methods required by golf seem to be what attracts golfers in the first place.
The idea that playing a game always involves being inefficient — and doing so on purpose — depends on distinguishing between two sorts of goal. A game’s “prelusory” goal is a state of affairs (e.g., the golf ball’s being in a hole in the ground or the soccer ball’s being in your opponent’s net) that you can achieve in various ways. The rules of a game will always limit you to using inefficient means to that end, the Grasshopper says, and playing a game will necessarily involve accepting those limitations.
A game’s “lusory” goal, in contrast, is to achieve its prelusory goal via precisely the methods the game allows. And winning a game usually requires you to use the most efficient methods that the game allows. When you play a game, furthermore, you are typically focused on this more inclusive “lusory” goal, and thus don’t think of what you are doing as “being inefficient.”
For more details on Suits’s definition of games, see this subsection (in the Misconceptions section), and this subsection and this subsection (in the Main Takeaways section), below.
Chapter 4
Skepticus objects that not all games have prelusory goals, if a game’s prelusory goal must preexist it. Some games might be built around achieving a state of affairs that exists independently of those games — that was “there first.” (Maybe before golf was invented, small balls sometimes ended up rolling into holes in the ground.) But in games like chess, the “state of affairs” you are trying to achieve (e.g., checkmate) didn’t exist before the game was invented.
The Grasshopper responds that he doesn’t think prelusory goals have to preexist their games. He simply believes that every game’s prelusory goal will be achievable in ways that wouldn’t count as playing the game. For example, I could set some chess pieces up in a “checkmate” formation without playing an entire game first.
Chapter 5
Skepticus objects that if the Grasshopper’s theory about games and inefficiency were correct, then just doing something you find annoying — just for the sake of annoying yourself — would count as playing a game. For example, deliberately taking a roundabout path to your destination for no good reason would be a game.
The Grasshopper responds that he defines efficiency and inefficiency only in relation to limited resources. He clarifies further that the resource in question has to be limited enough that it actually affects the choices the player makes. If you have so much time on your hands that it doesn’t matter which route you take to your destination, then choosing a roundabout path just for the sake of wasting time isn’t playing a game. But if you find a way to significantly limit the time available (e.g., by trying to get to your destination before someone else does) and yet you still deliberately take the more time-consuming path, you just might be playing a game.
Chapter 6
Skepticus objects that if a game always has to involve rules that limit the means available to players, then no-holds-barred death matches could not be games. And yet, it is possible to imagine two people who have grown so bored with other forms of competition that they voluntarily agree to fight to the death using whatever means they desire. Would such a rules-free contest not be a game?
The Grasshopper asks whether the death match in question would have a start time, before which the contestants would not allow themselves to attack. If so, then the event still has an efficiency-limiting rule. (And if not, the implication seems to be that the Grasshopper would conclude that the competitors were not, in fact, playing a game.)
Chapter 7
This chapter doesn’t really fit the rest of the book. It’s essentially a reprint of a previous article Suits had published about whether competitive games are paradoxical. In order to play a competitive game, you both have to try to defeat your opponent and yet also cooperate with them. After all, you’re helping your opponent get what they want — the chance to participate in the sort of game you are playing.
The justification for including the chapter at this point in the book is the following: if it turned out that competitive games were fundamentally paradoxical, it might be impossible to give them a clear definition. However, “the Grasshopper” (Suits) responds that there’s nothing paradoxical about trying to help someone achieve one goal while trying to keep them from achieving another (e.g., wanting to give someone the gift of playing a game while not wanting to give them the gift of winning that game).
Chapter 8
Skepticus objects that there can be non-competitive, single-player games that don’t involve means-limiting rules. For example, mountain climbing is a sport, and as such would seem to be a game. But what if there were no way of getting to the top of a given mountain except climbing it? The rules of the sport/game couldn’t limit participants to inefficient means in pursuit of the game’s prelusory goal if climbing were the only means to that goal.
The Grasshopper responds that what he means by “following efficiency-limiting rules” is a matter of disposition. Say there is no other way to get to the top of a given mountain except by climbing. Then, imagine that when a climber is halfway up the mountain, a new, more efficient method becomes available. If that climber were suddenly offered a lift to the top of the mountain, would they accept? If yes, then they are not playing the mountain climbing game. If no, then they are.
Chapter 9
Skepticus objects that the Grasshopper’s theory can’t account for the sort of make-believe games we associate with children. Those games aren’t defined by a set of rules that limit the means players are allowed to use in their pursuit of some goal. What’s important in make-believe games is just the chance to play a role — to be a superhero or a knight or a princess.
If we want a theory that can handle both rule-focused and role-focused games, Skepticus says we need to start over. To play a game, he suggests, is just to “reverse” the roles of means and ends in some non-game activity. Where we normally treat an activity’s “means” as valuable only insofar as they help us achieve the activity’s “end,” a game player treats the activity’s end as valuable only insofar as it gives them a reason for employing its means.
For example, a normal person only runs if they need to get to their destination fast and they can’t catch a ride. An Olympic runner only adopts getting to some destination (the finish line) as a goal so they have a justification for running to get there.
According to Skepticus, then, to play a game is to play in the sense the Grasshopper had been using back in chapter 1. It is to engage in an activity you find intrinsically valuable. Instead of defining games in contrast with work, why not define them in terms of play?
For more details, see chapters 10, 11, and 12, and also this subsection (of the Misconceptions section), below.
Chapter 10
To prove to the Grasshopper that his (Skepticus’s) theory works for games of make-believe (while the Grasshopper’s does not) Skepticus invents a character named “Sneak.” Sneak is a professional spy who eventually realizes that what he values is the chance to play roles — to pretend to be other people — not the intel that he acquires by way of playing those roles. In fact, he eventually finds a way to always be playing roles — always to be impersonating others — just for the joy of roleplaying.
And since Sneak’s life consists entirely in doing things he values intrinsically, nothing Sneak does is an “inefficient means” to his goal. His life is all goal-achievement, all the time. He is playing games, but not being inefficient, like the Grasshopper would require.
The Grasshopper responds that Sneak isn’t playing make-believe in the way we normally think of it, since his games involve deception. He would only really be playing what we think of as a make-believe game if he found himself playing multiple interacting roles at the same time. In that case, the person playing one role (Sneak) would not be deceived about the identity of the person playing the other role (also Sneak), and yet he would still be playing a game.
Skepticus admits that perhaps thinking of make-believe games as a modification of “serious” imposture isn’t correct. But he insists that make-believe games still involve pretending to be someone or something you aren’t.
Chapter 11
The Grasshopper invents another character, named “Drag,” whose life also seems to consist in a series of roleplaying games. However, Drag only ever plays himself. The social (familial, business, etc.) roles that life hands to him just so happen to be things he enjoys doing. He values the experience of playing those roles more than he cares about the goals one is normally expected to accomplish by way of playing those roles.
If (1) Sneak spent his life engaged in games where all the roles were stolen from others, while (2) Drag spent his life engaged in games where all the roles were already his own, then (3) Skepticus is wrong that playing a game means “reversing” the values of the means and ends in some activity from non-gaming life. In reality, it doesn’t particularly matter where the roles in a roleplaying game come from. You could invent new roles that previously belonged to no one, and yet still be playing a roleplaying game.
Chapter 12
At this point, it seems that neither the Grasshopper’s theory of games, nor Skepticus’s alternative theory, can explain what makes make-believe games games. But the Grasshopper hasn’t given up.
Make-believe games, he argues, have a prelusory goal, and you are limited to using inefficient means in pursuing that goal. It’s just that the prelusory goal of a make-believe game is an ongoing, dynamic state of affairs, not a one-time, conclusive achievement (like checkmate). A make-believer’s prelusory goal is that “dramatic action” be taking place — that fictional events be occurring, that roles be being played. However, instead of pursuing that goal in the way that stage actors do — by following a script — you employ own imagination to come up with things to do that would be consistent with your role.
Having to make up your own “moves” is less efficient, Suits says, than working from a script. There’s a greater chance that you’ll come up empty when you try to think of what to do next, and thus a greater risk that the dramatic action will end (before you are ready for it to end). But just like someone playing the sport of mountain climbing wouldn’t accept a lift to the top of the mountain, a make-believer wouldn’t accept a script even if it guaranteed they could make the roleplaying last longer. They are in it to make-believe, not to stage a play.
For more details, see chapters 9, 10, and 11, and also this subsection (of the Misconceptions section), below.
Chapter 13
Professional game players treat playing their games as a means to an end. If the Grasshopper uses the term “to play” to refer to intrinsically valuable activities, professional game players are working. But the Grasshopper started off (in chapter 3) by contrasting work and games. And he said (also in chapter 3) that to play a game, you have to accept the game’s rules “just because” those rules define what it means to play the game.
So, does he think professionals aren’t playing games, since they’re not playing? Does he think professional game players aren’t playing games since they have another reason — money — for accepting the limitations imposed by the game?
The Grasshopper says “no.” A professional might be working by way of playing a game, and yet still be playing a game. Even if they accept the rules of the game because ignoring those rules would mean they weren’t playing the game, and thus weren’t doing what they were being paid to do, they would still be playing a game. After all, you can do something for multiple reasons, and they are still putting up with the game’s limitations in part because that’s what it means to play the game.
(The second half of the chapter is a critique of Games People Play, by Eric Berne.)
Chapter 14
Back in the present, Prudence and Skepticus are surprised to find a resurrected Grasshopper at their door. After some time trying to figure out what is going on — they have begun to suspect that they are characters in some sort of philosophical book — they return to the question of what the Grasshopper’s dream (from back in chapter 1) had meant.
Chapter 15
The Grasshopper asks what people would do in a utopian society, defined as one in which everyone’s needs can be immediately met. Even though no one would need anyone to build them a house, or discover a cure for cancer, people might still enjoy building unnecessary houses and hunting for unneeded cures. And that would mean they were playing games, as the Grasshopper has defined them.
However, the Grasshopper suspects that most people couldn’t stand living in such a utopian situation. They would find a life in which everything is effectively a game to be completely meaningless. And thus they would try to impose actual limitations on themselves and others — not just temporary limitations for the sake of playing a game. And that means Utopia would self-destruct.
For more details, see this subsection and this subsection (of the Main Takeaways section), below.
Misconceptions about The Grasshopper
Suits’s definition of games
People say that Suits defined games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
He didn’t. That’s his cheeky paraphrase of his definition (see the last page of chapter 3 of The Grasshopper; p. 43 in the 3rd ed.). When he first introduced that paraphrase, he called it “only approximately accurate” (see p. 55 of this article).
Here is Suits’s actual definition of game playing:
[T]o play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity. (The Grasshopper, 3rd ed., p. 36)
Or:
To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. (The Grasshopper, 3rd ed., 43)
See this subsection and this subsection (in the Main Takeaways section), below, for more.
Challenge and difficulty
Closely related to the previous point, people often say that Suits defined games in terms of challenge.
He didn’t. He defined them in terms of inefficiency. Also, he argued that everything we do in life might be a game without our realizing it. How could even the easy things in life be a game if games have to be challenging? I wrote a whole article about this.
What it’s like to play a game
Closely related to the previous point, people often object that Suits’s description of games does not fit what it is like to play a game. Suits, so it is claimed, thinks that you have to be consciously following a set of rules, or have to be consciously choosing to overcome obstacles, or have to be consciously choosing less efficient means rather than more efficient means.
All of this is incorrect. Suits’s theory is not a theory of what it is like to play a game. He is not trying to describe the experience of game playing. (Remember: he thinks everything we do in life might be a game without our realizing it.)
Instead, Suits is trying to describe the underlying structure of means, ends, and dispositions that have to be present for someone to be playing a game. I wrote a whole article about this topic. And then I wrote another article about it. And then I wrote a third article about it.
Make-believe games
Closely related to the previous point, people have been known to claim either that Suits’s theory of games cannot account for make-believe games — that it can only handle the sort of explicit, formalized games played by “typical” adults. In fact, there is at least one game designer out there who seems to think Suits doesn’t even have a theory of make-believe games at all.
Suits wrote four entire chapters on make-believe games. (See the outline, above.) Then I wrote an entire article about it.
The future utopia
Not so closely related to the previous point, people often think of Suits’s philosophy of games as a weird pie-in-the-sky theory about a future utopia. It is. Sort of. But it’s actually quite pessimistic. Suits seems to believe that the utopia he describes could not last. And, in fact, he seems to believe that it has not lasted. See chapter 2 of Return of the Grasshopper, and the main takeaways, below.
Main Takeaways from The Grasshopper
The Possibility Space of Games
The Suitsian idea that every game is structured around a “prelusory goal,” that there will be a variety of “means” by which one could achieve that goal, that the “rules” of a game consist in dividing those means into two groups (the means that count as playing the game, and the means that don’t), and that at least one of the means in the “out” group will always turn out to be more efficient than all the means in the “in” group, lead me to think of games as located in a vast possibility space.
It leads me to think about “nearby” games in that space where different means are allowed, or excluded. It leads me to think about the choices (implicit or explicit) that were made in the design of the game, in the selection or crafting of its prelusory goal, in the selection or crafting of the means to that goal. And, since means are meaningless without an environment (telling players, “You’re allowed to swim,” but then giving them no water to swim in, would be absurd), it leads me to think about the ways in which game design inherently involves the crafting of environments.
Resource Management
Adopting the Suitsian approach to game analysis leads — in my experience — to seeing resource management at the core of every game. It leads one — or, rather, it leads me — to ask: “What (familiar, novel, creative, surprising) resources are players given in this game?” “In what (familiar, novel, creative, surprising) ways are those resources limited, or are players limited in using those resources?” “Could those limitations be adjusted in interesting ways?” “Could new resources be made available that would make the game more, or perhaps less, interesting?”
I want to reiterate that Suits is not claiming that every game is a resource management game (using that term in its typical sense), nor is he claiming that players experience themselves as managing resources. (See the Misconceptions section, above, for details.) I just mean that if you look at games through the Suitsian lens, you will end up thinking a lot about resources.
Game Playing vs. Economic “Rationality”
According to Suits, game playing will inevitably look like an irrational activity to economists who define “rationality” in terms of efficiency. After all, he believes that playing a game will always involve limiting yourself (whether consciously or not) to using inefficient means in your pursuit of some goal.
For example, what sense does it make to try to get soccer balls into nets using only your feet? Surely there are more efficient ways of achieving that goal. What sense does it make to play a video game where you start with 0 resources, and have to wait, or click, or talk to characters, or punch trees, to get resources? Surely it would be more efficient to only play games where all the resources are available in infinite supply from the very beginning.
Unlike in the rest of life (where inefficiencies might be justified as a tradeoff for greater safety), the inefficiencies seem to be the point in games. That is, the whole point of soccer is to use your feet, rather than your hands, to get the ball into the goal. That “inefficient” means is what makes the game interesting. Inefficiencies, we might say, provide texture — in fact, I suspect that “texture” and “inefficiency” are just two different names for the same thing — and textures can be quite engaging.
Life in the Age to Come
Suits argues that game playing would be the central activity in utopia. If everyone’s needs were met, there would be no need to work. Anyone who continued working would be doing so not because they were filling some need, but because they enjoyed the process. They would be building houses and discovering medical cures for the pure joy of building houses and discovering cures.
The same goes for artists. In a world where you could instantaneously acquire anything you desired, you wouldn’t need someone to laboriously write a symphony for you, or painstakingly paint a portrait for you. You could just snap your fingers and what you wanted would appear — perhaps because some machine would instantly generate it for you.
But people would still laboriously and painstakingly do art, just for the joy of making art, exactly like people would still build houses (that could be 3D printed much faster) and hunt for cures for diseases (that no longer exist).
In so doing, people would be like game players who decide to work out the solution to a puzzle for themselves, rather than looking it up. They would be limiting themselves to the use of inefficient means simply because those means define the very activity in which it is their goal to engage.
In utopia, all the progress and drama and adventure would come from making and playing games. (And making games would itself be a game.) I find this picture of life in utopia deeply attractive. Moreover, I think it supplies a better image of what “eternal life” in “the new heavens and new earth” would be like than we normally get from popular conceptions of heaven.
The Suitsian Critique of Capitalism
Consider the socio-political implications of Suits’s argument that everything we do in life might be a game without our realizing it. If it is correct, then our entire social order — based as it is on work, efficiency, struggle, and profit — is a game pretending to be something it is not.
Suits believes that many — perhaps most — people would find utopia (a life in which the only thing left to do was play games) revolting. People tend to derive their meaning in life from their useful labor, from the idea that there are needs they can meet, that there is hardship (and perhaps even evil) to overcome. But what if the scarcity with which we live, and which we must strive to overcome, were an illusion? What if it were akin to the resource limitations you adopt when you play a game?
What if we had all been tricked into playing along with our world’s current economic and political systems? Instead of being inevitable, necessary, important, what if they were arbitrary, contingent, and replaceable? What if it were effectively all a game, and what if we could be playing a different game (perhaps a better game)?
This, it seems to me, is the line of thinking that follows from Suits’s ultimate argument in The Grasshopper. I don’t know what Suits’s politics were, but I think The Grasshopper makes the questions above unavoidable.
How you react to all of this, however, will depend on your answers to four questions:
- Do you agree with Suits’s theory about what it means to play a game?
- Do you agree with Suits’s argument that game playing would be the central activity in a utopian society?
- Do you share Suits’s concern that humans would be unwilling to accept such a utopian life as meaningful? (Recall what Agent Smith says to Neo about the original version of the Matrix, which humanity rejected.)
- Do you take Suits’s argument to be historical, speculative, or hypothetical?
- That is, do you read him as arguing that our current society is one in which all scarcity is artificial — that we are living in the aftermath of a utopian state that humanity rejected by artificially re-imposing scarcity upon themselves? That would be the historical reading.
- Or do you read him as arguing that while the scarcity with which we deal now is real, if humans ever achieved a utopian state they would artificially re-impose scarcity upon themselves in order to derive meaning from overcoming that scarcity? That would be the speculative reading.
- Or do you read him as arguing that there would be nothing logically contradictory in claiming both that (a) everything a person did in their life had been a game and yet (b) they had never understood themselves to be playing games? This would be the hypothetical reading.
