2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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C HESS, GAMES, AND FLIES
for a very similar intellectual pastime, the game of go. 14 Kawabata—at the time a journal-
ist—provides what anthropologists would call a “thick” description of the Japanese go
championship that encompasses the whole gamut of experiences evoked by and enshrined
into the event, from a technical analysis of the game itself (with go scores, diagrams, and
all), to the generational clash between the defendant and the young challenger, to the dif-
ferent styles of play throughout the centuries, to the role of go in Japan’s social and eco-
nomic life. It is fair to say that one of the goals of the book is to describe, through the
magnifying lenses of a single event, the game of go.
The point here is not to decide which of the two meanings of “game” is more adequate,
since both, of course, are. The point is that von Neumann and Morgenstern’s definition does
not fall anywhere in the continuum spanned by the common uses of “game.”
Instead, they chose the narrow construal and went up one logical level. To say that
“game” is the “totality of the rules which describe it” means that a game is a set of abstract
possibilities describing the possible ways, in fact all the possible ways, in which the game
can be played, if the attention is focused on the rules only. To put it differently, game, as
they define it, is an abstraction from a concretely given event, that cannot correspond to any
possible concrete event because it belongs to a different logical level. 15 This is a very im-
portant step that has to be kept in mind, especially because it will have some important re-
percussion on the following evolution of game-related concepts with their roots in game
theory, like AI’s and Structuralism’s.
stern,
A second related point concerns the concept of rule. For von Neumann and Morgen-
the rules of game […] are absolute commands. If they are ever infringed
then the whole transaction by definition ceases to be the game described by
those rules. (ib., my emphasis.)
As a first approximation, this is obviously true: any willful violation of the rules puts the
14. Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go (New York: Knopf, 1972).
15. Of course, it is not the concept itself that belongs to a higher level but the very object that the concept
denotes.