Ottawa Socrates Café

Please arrive at 6:45pm to order your drinks/food so that we can start the event at 7pm with minimum interruption. Thank you.

Philosophical heavyweight Ludwig Wittgenstein tackled a comparatively small question: what makes a game, a game? In his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, he famously said there is no single unifying feature to what we call a game. From board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic Games, political games, mind games - there is nothing common to all of them.

But, Bernard Suits in the book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, first published in 1978, defines games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."

As a racquet sports player, I find the new game of pickleball a very unserious game even though I quite enjoy it. Of course, this is highly snobbish and ridiculous as I can imagine WWE or UFC fighters calling badminton or tennis players lame for playing a game where the opponents are safely across the courts, out of harm’s way.

I have often pondered at the absurdity of the game of basketball, throwing a ball into a basketball net hanging 10 feet high; the ridiculous idea that tall people would spend copious hours practicing the act, and the crazier notion that society, we, you and I, will pay billions of dollars a year to watch professional athletes play games most of us used to play as kids. And yet, here we are.

The huge majority of us play some types of games in our leisure time, for fun, to unwind, to exercise, to pass time, to be unserious in our serious lives.

So, are games we play and watch frivolous, unimportant or serious with life lessons or both? Do you play games? What games do you play? Why and what do you get from them, how do games add to your life? What’s really behind our fascination with sports, games? What are games to you?