ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a different avenue, which focuses on a unique capacity of games. It argues that games can be morally useful not simply as communicative vessels for moral ideas but as engines of moral conversion. The chapter focuses on the morality of actual actions performed by players toward other players—the moral status of attempts to beat, vanquish, or utterly humiliate competition. The motivational stance of striving play makes the moral transformation possible; it is details of game design and player fit that actualizes that possibility. In Suitsian game-playing, players have a very peculiar motivational relationship to a game's goals. So all oppositional games, including interference games, can satisfy the desire to truncate another's actual will and do weak violence to the player. There is, however, a peculiar, bracketed sense in which strong violence and strong harm occur in games. The achievement player cares disposably about the prelusory goal, but cares enduringly about winning.
