Games and Meaning

Games and Meaning

Imagine a philosopher, call him LW for short, with a lifelong interest in games. In his youth he writes a book called The Logical Structure of Games. As the name suggests, the book gives an analysis of the formal structure of games—a theory of the a priori essence of games which purports to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a game. He also writes a book in middle age that largely repudiates his earlier book called The Activity of Playing Games. This book focuses not so much on logical structure as on practical function—playing the game as a human activity. These books may be summarized as follows.

In the first book the author announces that human life is the totality of human activities not human possessions—deeds not things. He then tells us that some of these activities mirror other activities; they resemble them. These we call “games”. In fact, he claims, games picture non-games—stand for them, are isomorphic with them. They represent non-games by sharing their structure. A game is then defined as a kind of picture (ludic picture) of a non-game, a surrogate or substitute or model. For example, many games represent military actions: one team pits itself against another, striving to win in vigorous intelligent maneuvers. The team aims for victory and exerts force against the other in order to achieve this aim, as in football and rugby. People get hurt, but are seldom killed. This kind of rough and tumble is good preparation for actual military confrontation (“war games”). LW focuses on the structure of games and their formal likeness to the activities they represent: the multiplicity of elements, the formal arrangement, the temporal sequencing. His theorizing is geometrical in character. Anything that looks like a game but doesn’t fit the theory is declared a pseudo game, for it resembles no non-game activity we can think of. Further examples include board games like chess and card games like poker. These are said to picture non-game strategic planning and economic activity; and indeed, money may be lost or gained in playing them. Then too we have mating and courtship games, which are taken to model actual mating and courtship; these are said to include athletic and dancing games. The athlete advertises his physical prowess; the dancer succeeds in getting into an embrace with his desired partner (dancing itself is alleged to be isomorphic with sexual intercourse). Then there is boxing and tennis, resembling hand to hand physical combat, actual fighting. Monopoly obviously stands for property transactions and the like. In this way LW hopes to persuade his reader that the essence of games is picturing; and if that is not evident on the surface, it can be revealed by in-depth logical analysis.

In his second book LW adopts a very different approach. No longer does he defend a logical picture view of games; indeed, he denies that games have any unifying essence. Instead, he declares that what we call games are united by nothing more than a loose family resemblance. The concept of a game is indefinable. Games are connected to our “form of life” and are held to be examples of rule-following. Rule-following in games is a practice, a custom, an institution. We cannot understand rule-following in games as an inner mental process or a brain state or even a disposition to behavior; it is a community activity. This is LW’s skeptical solution to a skeptical paradox to the effect that there is nothing (no fact) in game rule-following that this alleged activity could consist in; therefore, games do not exist. Here there is some doubt about the correct interpretation of LW’s words, but it is clearly the opposite of the earlier work. Interestingly, he compares playing a game to speaking a language; he tells us that playing a game has all the irreducible variety of speaking a language. There are many kinds of speech act with nothing in common; and the same is true of games, he suggests. He thinks it is relatively easy to see that language has no essence; this provides a nice parallel to his theory of games—they too lack an essence. The concept of a game is as much a family resemblance concept as the concept of a language, he insists. In fact, other analogies can be found in the concepts of a hobby, a job, a work of art, an economy, furniture, and many things. Games are no different from these: all are bereft of necessary and sufficient conditions and are knit together only by loose resemblance. The concept of a game is not the strict monolithic concept he used to think. His meta-philosophy is now that the search for definitions is futile in philosophy, and especially where games are concerned. He used to be fooled (“bewitched”) by language into thinking that the concept of a game is a concept unified by a single essence, but now he realizes that it is use that constitutes the meaning of “game”, and we use that word very differently from case to case. He now has a different theory of games in which essence is replaced by varieties of action: chess and football, say, are linked only by a series of loose similarities of behavior at best. Since games are the most important topic in philosophy, so far as he is concerned, LW takes himself to have overthrown the traditional way that philosophy is conducted. He doesn’t take meaning to be so central, because it is narrower than game playing: young children and animals play games but they don’t speak, and speaking is not as important to human culture as game playing. Humans were playing games long before they invented speech, and some scholars have argued that it was games that propelled language into existence (both are rule-governed activities). Language use is really a type of game playing (“language games” he calls it) and so has its roots in that activity. In any case, that has been the trajectory of his thinking on the topic of games over the course of his intellectual life.[1]         

[1] It should be added that LW was wrong about games during both of his periods; the correct analysis was supplied only later by Bernard Suits in his classic The Grasshopper (1978). But we can see why LW came to the views he did—they are not absurd and it wasn’t till Suits stepped in that the concept was defined. What LW made of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein remains unrecorded; there is talk that he thought that philosopher had his priorities wrong, though his methodology was sound.