Our societies attach considerable value to excellence in sports. In Canada hockey players are named to the highest level of the Order of Canada; in Britain footballers and cricketers are made MBE and even knighted. And this attitude extends more widely. Sports are a subclass of the wider category of games, and we similarly admire those who excel in non-athletic games such as chess, bridge, and even Scrabble. I take this admiration to rest on the judgement that excellence in games is good in itself, apart from any pleasure it may give the player or other people but just for the properties that make it excellent. The admiration, in other words, rests on the perfectionist judgement that skill in games is worth pursuing for its own sake and can add value to one’s life. This skill is not the only thing we value in this way; we give similar honours to achievements in the arts, science, and business. But one thing we admire, and to a significant degree, is excellence in athletic and nonathletic games. Unless we dismiss this view, one task for philosophy is to explain why such excellence is good. But few philosophers have attempted this, for a well-known reason. A unified explanation of why excellence in games is good requires a unified account of what games are, and many doubt that this is possible. After all, Wittgenstein famously gave the concept of a game as his primary example of one for which necessary and sufficient conditions cannot be given but whose instances are linked only by looser “family resemblances.”2 If Wittgenstein was right about this, 1 there can be no single explanation of why skill in games is good, just a series of distinct explanations of the value of skill in hockey, skill in chess, and so on. But Wittgenstein was not right, as is shown in a little-known book that is nonetheless a classic of twentieth-century philosophy, Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Suits gives a perfectly persuasive analysis of playing a game as, to quote his summary statement, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”3 And in this paper I will use his analysis to explain the value of playing games...