Games as Pastimes in Suits’s Utopia

In M. Andrew Holowchak article, he discusses Suit's idea of Utopia. Suits believes the playing games is the ideal of human existence, that once technology has reached a point where there is no need to work since machines are capable of carrying out every tedious task and psychotherapy and the social sciences have made such advances that all possible interpersonal problems have been solved. People no longer need affection, approval, attention, and admiration. Things like Art and scientific research and even love, friendship, sex will disappear too.
Even such activities such as reading would be classified as a game since the technology would exist to simply instantaneously absorb the information contained in the book so reading the book would be attempting to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

Personally I agree with Kretchmar, if we reach a point where everything that can be done has already been done then we are left with two options either to play games or suffer the effects of immense boredom, giving the two options playing games would be the obvious choice but by doing this we are playing games for a very meaningful reason, to relieve boredom therefore playing games provides a vital function and cannot truly be classified as a game since it is not overcoming unnecessary obstacles, these obstacles are quite necessary if we wish to avoid the effects of boredom.

Games and Their Institutions

We had a dicussion in class recently about the rules of games , here is the link to the Bernard Suits article which covers the topic in depth. Suits argues that a game like chess cannot have a prelusory goal, i.e. that chess "can't be described before or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, or come to be, a part." i.e. it can't be achieved outside of a game of chess.

It is an intersesting topic as I like other people would of though that for a game like chess it would be pretty obvious that it had a prelusory goal and that all the rules of chess were easily defined. However there are other rules which need to be defined besides the obvious rules like
"the object of the game to immobilize an opponent's king" but according to Suits you cannot say in an effort to dissasociate checkmate from chess that checkmate consists of objects of a certain description pinning a king in accordance with the rules of chess because you could just place these pieces to pin the king to achieve checkmate so it isn't possible to define a prelusory goal for chess without introducing more means limiting rules, therefore the definition of a prelusory goal is too narrow for a game of chess as it is for many other games.

Talks

We had an interesting discussion with a couple of guys, Gary and John.
In the first class, John who works in a boardgame shop in town talked about how the attitude towards computer games has changed over the years, e.g. In 80's movie's it was only the geeky kid who played computer games whilst today it is no longer really considered something only geeks play and has even overtaken the movie industry in terms on annual profit.
He also talked about different ways of getting into the games industry such as roles for the artistically inclined or marketing.

In the second class we had John, a PhD student give us a talk about the future of computer games. This was also an interesting topic, he talked about how he believed that in the near future we won't need machines with physical memory to store the games we play instead all we will need to play them is an Internet connection. He also predicted consoles would be gone or on the way out in five years time which I think is pretty unlikely, if you walk into any game store it is obvious that far more shelve space is assigned to console games than PC games these days, maybe one day there will be no need for consoles but I can't see them going away within the next five years but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless.