On the Concept of a Game

In an essay for Brian Leiter's turn‐of‐the‐millennium The Future for Philosophy , Thomas Hurka writes: [A]n anti‐theoretical position is properly open only to those who have made a serious effort to theorize a given domain and found that it cannot succeed. Anti‐theorists who do not make this effort are simply being lazy, like Wittgenstein himself. . . . [I]n one of the great underappreciated books of the twentieth century Bernard Suits gives perfectly persuasive necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being a game. In this note, it is shown that the conditions Suits and Hurka celebrate are neither necessary nor sufficient for something's being a game.