The grasshopper

Part one.

What is a game? In the 1970s, the philosopher Bernard Suits wrote a book called The Grasshopper that was his attempt to define the concept of games.

The Grasshopper is a delightful book.

It's based around the Aesop fable where there's an ant and a grasshopper.

The grasshopper just plays and goofs around all summer.

The ant is hard at work.

And then when fall comes, the grasshopper dies because he did not adequately prepare for the winter.

What Suits does in The Grasshopper, though, is he takes that character and turns him into a Socratic figure.

So what do you do when there's nothing left to do? The whole premise of this book is that, well, the answer to that is that you would play games.

And so there's this ant-like behavior that even in Suits' book, Skepticus calls out the grasshopper, for engaging in ant-like behavior because he wants to store up those games for a utopian post-scarcity future to come.

The Grasshopper kind of wiggles out of this, though, because...

Yeah,

strange response

that I still don't

quite understand here.

Because I think for the Grasshopper...

Suits is very explicit about it.

So at the end of the book, The Grasshopper, he has this unbelievable argument.

The argument is, imagine utopia where technology has solved all our practical problems.

What would we do with our time? We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds.