In an interview on Introductions to Philosophy

Your last book is a bit of a curveball. I can't say I've ever heard of The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits before.

I hadn't heard of it myself until GA Cohen recommended it to me a few years ago. And then, independently, Simon Blackburn recommended it. So I thought given these recommendations from eminent philosophers, there must be something to it. It's a slim book, first published in 1978. It's all about playing games. Not only is that an interesting subject for a book, but it's also written in a light-hearted way. It actually exemplifies some of what it's arguing for.

What does it argue?

One way of reading the book is as a critique of Wittgenstein's “family resemblance argument” about games. Wittgenstein says that there is no one thing in common that is shared by all games. Instead, there's just a pattern of overlapping resemblances between the things we happen to call games. There's no single, essential aspect of all games. Well, Bernard Suits thinks you can actually give a definition of games according to necessary and sufficient conditions. That makes it sound dry but it's not a book about definition.

Why is the book called The Grasshopper?

It's called The Grasshopper because the central character is, in fact, a grasshopper! It's inspired by Aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The industrious ant works all summer and survives the winter, whereas the grasshopper spends his time dancing and singing, so he has nothing to eat and starves to death. But at the same time, it's a parody of a Socratic dialogue with the grasshopper in the role of Socrates, dying of starvation but choosing to die rather than give up his belief that the thing which has intrinsic value in life is play. He'd rather die of starvation than give that up.

Is the book for children as well as adults?

Oh no, it's a book written for philosophers primarily. That's what makes it so clever. It actually puts forward a whole theory about the nature of game playing. Suits argues that playing a game is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Basically there are three features to all games, and for something to be a game it has to meet all these features. Games must have the "pre-lusory goal", constitutive rules and the "lusory attitude".

The pre-lusory goal is the purpose of a game. Take mountaineering. The pre-lusory goal is getting to the top of the mountain. Now you could get to the top of the mountain by parachuting in from a helicopter. But for something to be a game it needs to have rules, which might exclude certain ways of achieving the pre-lusory goal. And then there is the third part, the lusory attitude – namely that you accept the rules not just because you have to. It's all about participating in the spirit of the game. You're following those rules because you want to.

This book is written in dialogue form, which is very unusual in modern philosophy. How does it work?

A few of the classic works of philosophy have been written as dialogues – Plato's works of course, and also one of my favourite books, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But it's amazing how few successful dialogues there are in philosophy, given those great exemplars. The Grasshopper is Suits's serious attempt to do it in a lighthearted way. Without being po-faced, Suits has found a way to make serious philosophical points.

And why is Suits so interested in games in the first place?

He believes that game-playing is the highest good, because in a utopian world where all our other needs are met, he believes human beings would just play games. They'd set themselves obstacles and willingly try to achieve these pre-lusory goals. They wouldn't need to worry about anything else. If heaven were real, that's how we would survive in eternity. Suits thinks games are the highest intrinsic good. That might be going a bit far, but he's found a light-hearted way of getting to that conclusion – by using arguments and considering counter-examples.

He builds in lots of jokes and he's a skillful writer. Unlike the other writers on my list, he draws attention to his style. You can't read this without noticing he’s playing with form. It's a nice short book that deserves to be better known. It's mysterious that it's been so neglected, particularly given all the interest in Wittgenstein's theories about games.