A philosopher defined 'playing a game' — and it explains why golf is absurd

The goal of golf is to get a small ball into a distant hole. The easiest way to do that would be to walk over and drop it in by hand. Instead, players stand far away and swing a stick. Philosopher Bernard Suits used exactly this kind of oddity to crack a question nobody thought had an answer: what is a game?

In his 1978 book The Grasshopper, Suits proposed that playing a game is "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." Every game sets up a goal, then bans the most efficient way of reaching it. You could tackle the ball-carrier's route in a straight line, but the rules forbid it. The obstacles aren't in your way by accident — they exist so that there can be a game at all.

The key ingredient Suits called the lusory attitude: you accept the rules precisely because they make the activity possible, not because you're forced to. A worker digging a ditch with a spoon (because that's all they have) isn't playing — the obstacle is real. A person choosing the spoon for the fun of the challenge is. The same physical act is work or play depending on your attitude toward the rules.

This reframes games as a strange human luxury: we invent inefficiency on purpose. Suits even argued that in a perfect utopia where all needs were met, game-playing might be the only thing left worth doing.