Games Quote by Bernard Suits

Games, Suits insists, are self-inflicted problems we choose to take seriously. The line lands because it flips the usual logic of leisure: play isn’t the absence of constraint, it’s the embrace of it. A golf hole is “unnecessary” in any practical sense; you could just walk to the flag. What makes golf golf is agreeing not to. The obstacle isn’t a bug in the system, it is the system.

The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical work. “Voluntary attempt” foregrounds consent and effort: you opt in, and then you commit. That commitment is the hidden engine of stakes. Games feel meaningful precisely because they are meaningless in a utilitarian register; the meaning is manufactured by rules you accept as binding. Suits’ insight also exposes why cheating feels like more than breaking a rule. If the obstacle is the point, bypassing it isn’t clever, it’s a category error - you’ve opted out of the activity while pretending you’re still in it.

Context matters: Suits was a philosopher of sport, writing against fuzzy definitions that equated games with fun or competition. His definition is spare enough to cover solitaire, hide-and-seek, speedrunning, even masochistic endurance events, while excluding work tasks where obstacles are imposed for external ends. The subtext is a small provocation aimed at modern life: we crave friction when everything else pushes toward optimization. Play becomes a rehearsal for meaning-making itself - choosing limits, then finding freedom inside them.