The pupils (Skepticus and Prudence) discuss the death of Grasshopper and try to interpret his dream. But when Grasshopper tells these players the truth, the player ceases to be. The politician is playing at being a politician, the carpenter playing at being carpenter. In this dream everyone in the world plays elaborate games which mirror real professions.

As Grasshopper dies, he describes a recurring dream. He offers that if there were no winters then he would be vindicated. The pupils offer to provide food and shelter for him over for the winter but Grasshopper maintains that he must live according to his philosophy – it is the nature of Grasshopper to be improvident in the summer. It is the end of summer and Grasshopper meets for the last time with his pupils. In the first part of the post I will summarize the chapters of the book, in the second part I will recontextualize the points made in the book in the light of more recent theoretical game studies. Grasshopper acts as Socrates to two pupils – Prudence and Skepticus. Explaining through Socratic dialog why he chose play and death. In the book, Grasshopper is a philosopher in the Helenistic tradition – he is well aware of the dangers of the coming winter but decides that playing is the philosophically sound choice, though it leads him knowingly to his death. The eponymous Grasshopper is the character from Aesop’s fables, specifically the story where the ant gathers food all summer while the grasshopper plays and when winter comes the ant eats and the grasshopper dies. The two most notable and seminal concepts from the book are 1) its definition of Games and 2) its coining of the Lusory Attitude. But the text itself has, in the near 40 years that passed, become an academic classic among game theorists – noted for its charming format and cited for its rigor and sophistication. Suits other than that he was a philosopher and I know very little about the context of the book’s original writing (other than that which is discussed in the book).

Little is know (by me, after a google search) about Dr. Written by Bernard Herbert Suits, published by University of Toronto Press in 1978, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia is a 178 page treatise on a philosophical definition of games written in the form of Socratic dialog/Hegelian dialectic.

The grasshopper suits