On one of my walks through the gardens near my house, I noticed several couples strolling with their children. The light of the late afternoon made the scene even more interesting. And I began taking pictures of the various groups passing by me. But that wasn’t what really caught my attention.
One of the families was happily playing “peek-a-boo” with their young child.
A kid who was holding what looked like a game console was wearing augmented reality glasses. I’m not even sure if that’s what they’re called, because honestly, I don’t have much interest in escaping reality… Not that I see virtual entertainment as something that should be abolished—quite the opposite. But I don’t think I have a taste for that kind of activity.
Both situations seemed quite entertaining, each in its own way, to be sure. But they had something in common.
A famous phrase Newton uttered on his deathbed was:
“I’m not sure how I might appear in the eyes of the world. I would like the world to see me the same way I see myself: a simple boy playing by the sea.”
We all have our own particular way of playing. If by chance we play games with our minds, they can be classified in some way as science; if by chance the games are more of a sentimental nature, poets sometimes call them romance or love...
Our own life can, after all, be seen as a true game. A game not closed in on itself, where the goal of winning is established. For the goal of life ultimately is its own limit and its own boundary… It is death. But life is more of an open-ended game. Not with the intention of reaching death, for that is certain, and it is not always taken into account in many of the things we do.
The philosopher Bernard Suits, in his 1978 book titled The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, explores in a highly original and even unusually bold and intellectual way what life might consist of. Viewing life as a parable may be one way to approach it. As Suits observes, parables should only emerge at the end—not at the beginning—of careful observation. They should be considered at the point where arguments begin to fail to account for reality.
One of the most famous fables we know—and I think I’ve written about it here before—is Aesop’s fable, which deals with the cost of recklessness.
Using this fable, Suits subverts its premise to such an extent that the Grasshopper—who plays the role of a fool or a simpleton in the original story—comes to be seen as a utopian worker whose time has not yet come. Suits illustrates that life is so much more worth living.
The Grasshopper’s outlook on life ultimately serves as a powerful antidote to the cult and obsession with personal success. Life shouldn’t be a struggle; rather, it should be viewed as a game.
Workaholism, then, is nothing more than a strategy that prevents us from living up to our ideals.
The actions we normally consider the most prudent—such as work—end up, in Bernard’s view, becoming undesirable and counterproductive.
Prudence is seen as a disposition and willingness to sacrifice something—which is actually good at the moment, such as a game or a pastime—so that it may be repaid with something better, such as survival, and to reduce the number of good things that are necessary to have—ideally eliminating entirely those that require sacrifice in return.
We thus see something paradigmatic.
The ideal of prudence ultimately amounts to its own extinction!
Just as happens, for example, in the field of preventive medicine.
If there were a possibility that it would never be necessary to make sacrifices of goods, then prudent measures and actions would be, in their very nature and existence, completely useless and empty—and, in the final analysis, impossible to carry out.
The grasshopper realizes that work does not justify itself, and that its way of life is the ultimate and complete justification for any work one might undertake, whatever it may be.
An attempt to define games as an effort to discover and formulate a definition goes hand in hand with the surprising implications of that very discovery.
There is an attempt to define games as an illustration of the futility of defining anything.
To the definition of work—which is viewed as a technical activity in which an agent seeks to employ the appropriate, efficient, and available means and methods within their reach in order to achieve a desired goal—Suits contrasts the definition of play, which consists of an activity oriented toward a specific goal in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen or disregarded.
However, in a technical action, it may be possible to disregard a certain rule without, nevertheless, compromising the initial objective of the action; in the case of play, it seems that everything is exactly the opposite.
When the rules are enforced, the original objective becomes impossible to achieve, since the initial premise is that it is not possible to play the game unless one plays by the rules; and it is not possible to play it in a meaningful way unless its rules are obeyed.
The objective of a game cannot be separated from the game itself—which ultimately is victory—nor from the rules that define it, as these rules give the game its meaning.
When we decide to cheat in order to win the prize, the objective ends up being altered, even though the end result remains the same.
The rules of the game are accepted as part of the game itself, imposing limits on the players who choose to play it.
Playing is an activity aimed at achieving a specific goal, which is attained using the means permitted by the rules. However, the most efficient ways to achieve that goal may even be listed among the game’s own prohibitions.
Let’s imagine the game of hopscotch, in which players hop from square to square on one foot—which is not the most efficient way to move from one square to the next.
There are four fundamental elements of a game, namely: the objective, the means of achieving that objective, the rules, and the playful attitude (which is the psychological mindset that must exist for us to engage in the game, accepting the rules that are imposed and pre-established by it).
Something that is considered completely irrational—a player playing by certain rules that lead to the use of less-than-ideal means, and the gratuitous addition of obstacles to reach the goal—is, in games, a source of joy and an advanced challenge.
This attitude is necessary, because only in this way can we play the game, using the variables established for that purpose.
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary and artificially erected obstacles.
Victory can only be designated and defined within the terms in which the game exists and is situated—terms that define it with its ultimate recreational or educational purpose, among others.
The objective and purpose of participating in a game—that is, playing—is not, strictly speaking, an integral part of the game itself.
The author also lists three different types of pseudo-players who can ruin the game for the other participants.
There are the pranksters, who acknowledge the rules but not the objectives; the cheaters, who acknowledge the objectives but not the rules; and the pleasure-ruiners, who acknowledge neither the rules nor the objectives.
The committed and true player, however, is the one who, in addition to acknowledging the rules, also embraces the objectives; it is the one who enters the game with a playful attitude, and who neither aims to win nor seeks winning as a reward, but rather to play!
And we’re back at our starting point, and at the Grasshopper’s choice, which in Aesop’s fable takes on a dramatic and all-too-certain fate—yet which Suits observes and describes as triumphant and victorious: preferring fun to work as the path to the good life.
People don’t want to be entirely grasshoppers or entirely ants, but rather a combination of the two. Work is valuable when it allows us to play.
The only reasonable argument against the Grasshopper’s way of life stems from the fact that, in today’s world, those who don’t work die.
But the response to this argument is that death is always inevitable, regardless of the choices we make.
If I am reckless “in the summer” of life, I will eventually die “in the winter.” If I am prudent “in the summer,” I am, by definition, renouncing my own nature as a grasshopper.
Either I die, or I cease to be.
Now, since we can only be one thing, and if we are the Grasshopper, dying or ceasing to be what we are ultimately amounts to the same thing.
Everyone who is alive is, in truth, a grasshopper… And everyone who is alive is, in fact, engaged in elaborate games, even as the players believe they are merely going about their daily business.
Carpenters believe they are merely practicing their craft, but they are actually playing a game… and the same is true of philosophers, teachers, artists, farmers, and lovers… any occupation or activity we can think of or imagine is, at its most basic and essential level and reality, a game!
Image by Ivo Zahradníček from Pixabay
Original text written by 
