Chess is Still a Game

Michael Hickson as argued for the provocative thesis that chess is not a game – his “Illusory Checkmates: Why Chess is Not a Game.” More specifically, he (a) argues that chess is not a game in the sense provided by Bernard Suits’ highly influential work in the philosophy of games, and (b) responds to what he considers some of the most important objections to this thesis. In this paper I argue that Hickson is wrong, and that chess is, in fact, a game. The dialectic teaches us something important about the nuances of Suits’ rightly influential definition of ‘play a game’.