Mans Search for Games

March 2026

Now is the slave a free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between man and man, are broken down. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member of a higher community, he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The era of labor is behind us and receding further into the past. Labor peaked in the mid-nineteenth century, when the average worker logged 3,000 labor hours a year. After 175 years of steady decline, that number fell by half — to 1,500 hours today. Still, this figure understates the decline, for the nature of work itself has transformed, from the Dickensian labor of shipyards and factory floors to the tame office tasks of the information economy.

We are on the verge of another technological transformation in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, that threatens the 300 millenia-long practice of human labor entirely. These technologies, uniquely suited for the total automation of human labor, could finally liberate mankind from work. If this is the case, what will man do?

Without work, there is play. This slogan, familiar to any college graduate, forms the basis of the utopia imagined by Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper.¹ In a world where instrumental actions are unnecessary, the activities that remain are done for their own sake—they become play. The activities that we play are games.

Games take many forms, from the subtle social contest of flirting amongst friends— considered an open game—to good old American Football—a closed game.² Games are what solve the problem of idleness, the only and depressing alternative to play, by giving us uneccessary obstacles to overcome. We already play games, though fewer than we did in youth when leisure was abundant and responsibilities few. If liberation from work marks a return to the state of youth, then perhaps Suits is right: we didn't grow out of games, but were forced to give them up.

But this raises a deeper question: what games should man play? Or more precisely, what games are good for man?

Let's start with some examples of bad games.

Consider roulette. A game of pure chance, where players bet on where a spinning ball will land. Its fast pace and pure chance make it uniquely corrosive to losing money, eroding self-control, and feeding addictions.

Now, Beer Pong. A game where players throw ping pong balls into beer-filled cups, forcing opponents to binge drink. may be a formative game for the new adult. But its close association with binge drinking and poor sleep makes it detrimental to health.

Here we see a pattern. In roulette, gambling damages self-control; in beer pong, excessive alcohol consumption deteriorates physical health. In each case, we relate the game's operations to the natural capacities of the players, and in both, the operations harm the natural capacities of the players. Bad games undermine the natural capacities of man. Good games cultivate them.

The goodness of a game therefore relates to the life-form of the creature playing it. This framework follows the account of goodness developed by Philippa Foot in Natural Goodness.³ What is good for a living thing is determined by the kind of thing it is. The evaluation of plants, animals, and human beings alike depends on their characteristic life-form: we judge them according to how well their natural capacities are realized.

To know what games are good for man, then, we must first know what goodness in man consists in.

For Aristotle, the answer is eudaimonia. Human flourishing arises from fulfilling our function, our ergon, which he defines as rational activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.⁴ This, at first, seems to favor intellectual games: chess, Go, or competitive trivia. These kinds of games are valuable, yet incomplete. Some Virtues, Aristotle mentions courage and temperance, are not intellectual dispositions but physically trained and practiced. You become courageous by facing real fear in the body, repeatedly, until the disposition is inscribed, and temperance by training the body. Aristotle grants virtue an embodied role, but does not go far enough.

The rational mind is not the seat of the self but its epiphenomenon, that is, downstream of bodily, prereflective, processes that are already intelligent. The body is the great reason and the mind is its instrument. Bodily excellence is therefore not supplementary to Eudaimonia but inseparable from it.

Talk of bodily excellence can conjure images of steroidal body builders, or the violent collisions of the punt returner. These are naturally defective in Foot's sense, as they lead to the destruction of essential capacities, the heart, and the head.

What more accurately captures bodily excellence is health. Not just the absence of illness but something like what Nietzsche calls the Great Health, große Gesundheit: overflowing energy and vitality.⁵ He describes an overflowing energy that can't help but seek out obstacles to overcome. In Suit's sense, the man of Great Heath is the spirit of games.

Nietzsche described two forms of spirited energy. The Dionysian — unbridled, explosive energy and ecstasy of full exertion. The Apollonian — the measured, disciplined, that shapes force into excellence and beauty.⁶ Bodily excellence requires both, the raw vitality and the excellence that shapes it. Good games are those that demand exactly this.

Merleau-Ponty shows what this cultivation produces at its peak. The body trained over time, facing resistance, forced to adapt, develops what Merleau-Ponty calls motor intentionality: an intelligence that operates prior to reflection.⁷ The body no longer executes commands from the mind but understands situations directly. At its fullest development, the body is in flow state where virtuous action is simply second nature. There are no longer inhibitions. No longer the gap between intention and execution, or the self watching itself perform. There is just action. The rational soul is in harmony with virtues, as they are one with the body.

This is what Aristotle means when he writes that the person of excellent character acts well without struggle. Character has become so fully formed that excellent action is simply what the body does.

We can now see what good games must be. They are fundamentally physical practices that cultivate Great Health while balancing Dionysian vitality with Apollonian discipline. They train the embodied intelligence that culminates in flow.

Their operations are not merely compatible with human flourishing, they are acts of flourishing themselves.

In a post-labor world, the highest games will not merely fill our time. They will become the very practice of human flourishing.

Notes

1. Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). ↩
2. Closed games are those with fixed rules, while open games are flexible, sometimes even including others who do not know they are playing. Also explored in James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (1986). ↩
3. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). ↩
4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I. ↩
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. ↩
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. ↩
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). ↩