David Peat

82 From Certainty to Uncertaintysolitaire? And if solitaire is a game in which there are no other participants,then is a crossword puzzle a game? And what about mathematicshomework? And are all those people on the floor of the stock exchangeplaying a game?I keep pointing to different games, as well as telling my visitor thata debate and a planning meeting are not games. “But,” the Martianargues, “there must be some essence of a game. There must be a yardstickagainst which to measure things and say ‘that is a game and this isnot.’ Otherwise why are you so confident that some things are gamesand others are not? How on earth do you know?”The notion of some sort of essence to a game goes back to Platoand his Ideas. Plato said there is an Idea of a chair, the perfect form of achair, and that real chairs are just copies of the Idea. If we didn’t havethis Idea in our minds how would we ever recognize a chair when wesaw one? Does this mean there is an Idea of a game, to which all gamesparticipate more or less?Nonsense and philosophical confusion, says Wittgenstein. Just becausewe give something a name does not mean that this correspondsto a single defining class. There is no great game in heaven to which allearthly games should conform in some way. Talking about games helpsto illustrate the way language works and the sorts of confusions it canengender if we are not careful.There is no blanket definition of a game, no well-defined class intowhich all games will neatly fit so that everything outside that class isclearly not a game. Nevertheless, we have no problems in talking aboutgames and in sorting them out from activities that are not games. Languagecan handle that with ease.Wittgenstein suggested that, in the case of games, things workthrough what he called “family resemblances.” Chess and checkers resembleeach other. Both are board games but they also have somethingin common with football—two teams advancing and attacking. Herethe family resemblance is shared with rugby and field hockey, all ofwhich use balls. Field hockey is also close to ice hockey, which is notplayed on grass and doesn’t use a ball. These field games have somethingin common with volleyball—two teams and a ball. And volleyballbears a family resemblance to tennis and badminton—they also