Gaming

Imagine a world where we don’t need to work, we don’t have disease or scarcity. If there are no challenges to overcome, what would give life its value? One idea is that playing games would be a source of value – that games are a uniquely resilient source of value. This is what Bernard Suits argues in his masterpiece, The Grasshopper. Suits defines games as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. In a perfect world, you could use telepathy and robots to build a house, but you could choose to make a house using your bare hands and just rustic tools, like a hammer and a nail. Making a house, in this sense, is to play a game. But are games enough to give value to life? In Utopia, there are no stakes; there is no risk. So someone could say nothing really matters in Utopia. Ok, but imagine you were offered the option to stay in this imperfect world or to teleport to Utopia. If you choose to move to Utopia, playing games will give value to your life. However, maybe you think life only has value when