Source: Wikipedia, ' Lusory attitude', available under the CC-BY-SA License. His recent book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia is well. Professor Suits is an active and well known scholar and writer. He now serves also as associate dean for graduate affairs in the Faculty of Arts. 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. To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity. Bernard Suits has been teaching in the Department of Philosophy since 1966, and has held the rank of professor since 1972. The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Bernard Suits: The Grasshopper In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein said ‘Don’t say there must be something common or they would not be called ‘games'- but look and see whether there is anything common to all.’ This is excellent advice, but Wittgenstein himself did not follow it. That book presents an argument that game playing is the supreme human good - one that will invite you to think more deeply about games and what it means to live a good life, even if the argument doesn't convince you.īernard Suits termed the term lusory attitude in the book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, first published in 1978, in which Suits defines the playing of a game as 'the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles'.

In his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia he masterfully took up Wittgenstein's challenge to supply necessary and sufficient conditions for what it means to be a game.

Professor Bernard Suits, of the University of Waterloo, is one of the only philosophers of games and gaming. But it combines humor and profundity like no other book I know. Article Edit | History | Editors Action Page

The grasshopper by bernard suits