ABSTRACT
Some time ago, an Innocent Bystander, after glancing through a copy of Mind, asked me, ‘Why do philosophers talk so much about games? Do they play them a lot or something?’
Well, why do they? Broadly, because they are often discussing situations where there are rules, but where we are not sure why the rules have to be obeyed. Treating them as Rules of a Game fends off this problem for the time. And should it turn out that the reasons for playing games are in fact perfectly simple, it might even solve it completely. This hope shines through numerous discussions. I shall deal here with one of the simplest; namely Hare’s on The Promising Game,1 which suggested that our duty to keep promises was simply part of the game or institution of promising, and that if we decided not to play that game, the duty would vanish. That suggestion is the starting-point of this paper. It has made me ask, all right, what sort of need is the need to obey the rules of games? Why start? Why not cheat? What is the sanction? And again, how would things go if we decided tomorrow not to play the Promising game, or the Marriage Game or the Property Game? What is gained by calling them games? What, in fact, is a game?
