How permissive is Suits’s notion of the lusory attitude?

One of the distinctive features of Suits’s definitional account of games is that it counts the attitude players must have in engaging them, what he calls the ‘lusory’ attitude, as one of the necessary conditions for an activity to be an instance of game playing. However, several philosophers have pointed out that Suits’s conception of the lusory attitude can be interpreted in different ways according to what kinds of motives they permit. One of those philosophers, Thomas Hurka, argued that the lusory attitude can be understood in three different ways. The author’s aim in this paper, however, is to focus on the first of what Hurka calls the most permissive interpretation that he suggests places no restrictions on players’ motives for playing a game. The author argues, contrarily, that Suits never entertained, much less endorsed, such an open-ended interpretation on the grounds that it would elide a crucial distinction Suits drew between quasi-game players and genuine game-players. This is no minor quibble, the author argues further, because without such a distinction in hand, Suits’s definition of games would be subject to damaging counterexamples and counterarguments.