by Mike O’Brien
“Hilarius Bookbinder’s Scriptorium Philosophia” might sound like the working title of a sequel to Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus”. It is rather a very interesting and entertaining Substack written pseudonymously by an American philosophy professor. It first came to my attention last year, when it caused a bit of a stir with a post entitled “The average college student today”, which detailed the author’s bleak experience with the current cohort of average undergraduates. This was followed by the author’s response to critics of that post, wherein he attests that the overwhelming majority of informed respondents (i.e. students or teachers in contemporary Western post-secondary institutions) said that their own experiences mirrored those of Dr. Bookbinder. To wit, that literacy, critical thinking, academic integrity, and work ethic among this generation of students has collapsed to the point where teachers have to drastically lower their work demands and achievement standards, or else imperil their careers by assigning failing grades to an institutionally unacceptable proportion of their pupils/clients/customers. Having not been in a post-secondary institution myself for over a decade, I can’t personally testify to the accuracy of his assessment, but it seems to jive with everything I’ve heard from personal acquaintances in primary and secondary education (what miracle do we expect to happen in the months between the end of high school and the beginning of university?), and the various academic philosophy blogs I peruse have swelled with robust concurrence of his account. I am not entirely distraught that my dreams of being a post-secondary philosophy teacher never panned out.
But I’m not writing today to bemoan the death of the educated society. Instead, I’m reflecting on another of Hilarius’ posts, more fluffy and less depressing, but enriched with some edifying philosophical fibre. In “Collecting as an imperfect information game”, he sets out to argue that the activity of collecting (stamps, coins, historically significant snippets of barbed wire) is a sort of game. More precisely, a game fitting the definition of games proposed by American-Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits, in his book “The Grasshopper”, which is itself an attempt to refute a claim made in Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” that it is impossible to define “game” because there is no set of common features shared by all games. More precisely still, Hilarius argues that collecting is a game of imperfect information, following John von Neumann’s distinction between perfect (e.g. chess) vs imperfect (e.g. poker) information games.
To quote Liza Powel O’Brien, Conan’s wife and creator of the highly recommendable podcast “Significant Others” (about the long-suffering spouses of famous people… surely a coincidence), “there’s a lot to unpack here”. Wittgenstein made his claim about the indefinability of “game” in order to set up a discussion of “family resemblances”. Look at all these kinds of games, he argued, and you will see that they do not share a set of necessary and sufficient qualities that could be taken to clearly define the category “game”. Instead, they share “family resemblances”, overlapping subsets of qualities that are shared by some but not others, just as family members might each possess some subset of identifiable physical or psychological traits. He compares this to a rope, where the rope’s continuity lies not in any one fibre running its whole length, but in the train of partial overlappings. (A rope of Theseus, if you will).
Suits rebukes Wittgenstein’s claim about games as overly hasty, failing to heed his (Wittgenstein’s) own advice to “look and see” (as an alternative to fruitless fretting over language), and as a result “his look was fleeting, and he saw very little”. Tom Hurka, in his introduction to “The Grasshopper”, described the book as “a precisely placed boot in Wittgenstein’s balls”. Luckily for Suits, Wittgenstein was no longer alive to deliver a replique with his infamous poker, itself the subject of a book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. (A fireplace poker. Don’t be crass). Reading the relevant portion of “Philosophical Investigations”, it does seem that games were a convenient, throw-away example of the kind of family resemblance that Wittgenstein was keen to expound upon. Philosophers are fallible like everyone else, and are sometimes entrapped by the lure of the “obvious” when building a ladder to conclusions at which they themselves have already arrived. (“Wittgenstein’s ladder” is also a thing.) Suits attempts to discover the definition of games via a Platonic dialogue between Aesop’s industrious ant and recreational grasshopper. Suits’ conclusion is that a game can be defined as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”, and that games under this definition have (to simplify somewhat) three necessary elements: A “prelusory goal”, such as getting a ball into a net; a “lusory goal”, consisting in achieving the prelusory goal only within certain conditions, such as refraining from touching the ball with your hands; and a “lusory attitude”, by which players of the game voluntarily abide by the conditions defining the lusory goal.
Bookbinder applies this definition to collecting, specifying that collecting is “an imperfect information game of acquisition”. Just as a soccer player agrees not to simply pick up the ball and walk it to the net, perhaps at some hour when no other players are present to complicate this task, a stamp collector does not simply go to a post office and buy all of the stamps that they have on hand. The hedonic value of collecting as a game lies in overcoming self-imposed obstacles like ignorance (information scarcity) and rarity (material scarcity), in the needless pursuit of difficult-to-acquire objects.
Both Bookbinder’s post, and Suits’ book (and possibly its sequel, which I haven’t read) are worth reading, so I don’t want to summarize them too roundly here. Nor will I try to summarize von Neumann’s work on game theory, because I am intimidated by his genius, and also because studying analytic philosophy and economics in the early 2000s has left me forever bored to death by game theory. But I do have some thoughts of my own about this collecting-as-a-game idea, being a collector myself and consumer of some rather thoughtful collectors’ reflections on their own behaviour.
First, many collecting behaviours, like many other kinds of game-playing, may or may not qualify as games in any particular instance. Suits gives the example of a farmer who is working the land by hand not because it is a psychologically rewarding, freely chosen engagement in meaningful labour, but because he cannot afford machinery that would make the work easier. The farmer has no “lusory goal” or “lusory attitude”, just a “prelusory goal” that he would willingly pursue by more efficient means if he could. Hunting and fishing, pursued as “sports”, are like this. They are not aimed at satisfying hunger, and they are not governed by necessity. Where these activities are primarily regulated as games, taking a shortcut to the “prelusory goal” of acquiring meat is called poaching, a crime in the eyes of the rule-setters and cheating in the eyes of the game-players. So too with cheaters in other games with extrinsic rewards, like athletes who violate rules to increase their odds of gaining wealth or social status by winning (or even just by appearing to be very good game-players). They are participating in a game, but they are not, strictly speaking, “playing a game”.
This gets a bit messy, though, when we consider the role of motivations (Suits’ “lusory attitude”) and the ability of persons to do the same thing for different reasons all at once. Many collectors are at least conscious of the material costs and rewards afforded by their collecting. Consider a stamp collector who gives themselves an allowance to buy stamps and related items (guide books, display cases, etc.), to travel to philatelist conventions, to excise productive time from their lives to pursue this “acquisition game”. It may be possible, though mental discipline, to maintain a strict division between general funds and a collecting budget, such that the market value of one’s collection does not interfere with assessing its “collector value”. If one is unwilling to part with a particular item because of the achievement it represents in the collector’s pursuits, should the fact that its resale value has tripled since its acquisition be a valid “in-game” consideration for the collector? If the resulting windfall is dedicated to more stamps, then it seems easy to agree that such market considerations are internal to the game, just like trading with another collector without use of money for exchange (but nonetheless using money-denominated amounts to mark the relative values of the items being traded).
Collectors can impose on themselves all kinds of rules to maintain an artificial barrier between their collecting game and the economic logic of the world in which they play. In online communities, collectors will say that they can’t buy any more items until they sell/trade some of their existing collection, or until the next calendar year starts, or until they reach some milestone in their life outside of collecting. Such rules are necessary in a saturated consumer market for collectible items, such as my preferred collectibles of mechanical baubles like pocket knives and pens. Producers in this market space have identified a vast appetite for consumption-via-acquisition, and have responded by pumping out an overwhelming volume of slightly novel items. At the same time, collectors and especially obsessive enthusiasts/nerds of particular collectibles (referred to by one of my favourite YouTubers as “enthusiautists”, very much including himself in that class) have achieved an explosion of information about their objects of special interest. For instance, knife-collectors-cum-consumer-testers have assembled collaborative databases on the hardness and sharpness-holding performance of various steels from various makers, as well as on other relevant features such handle dimensions, allowing other collectors to judge not just objective qualities (like “company A’s blade will likely stay sharp 20% longer than company B’s blade), but also user-dependent qualities like ergonomics (“A’s handle is more comfortable than B’s handle for users with medium-large hands and longer-than-average fingers”.)
These developments in the market and in the collecting community greatly reduce the barriers of informational and material scarcity, to the point where collectors complain of a certain “fatigue”. What is this fatigue, exactly? I would say it is a kind of decision-fatigue, a mental exhaustion from the greatly increased task of inventing and elaborating self-chosen rules for excluding candidates from their collection. The fact that this is all a bit silly adds to the burden, because one cannot simply default to common sense or objectively valid reasons to settle the matter. The collector exists in a liminal space between logic and madness, and exterior conditions may compress this space to make it impracticably narrow, or expand it to be unmanageably broad.
My own strategy (insofar as it was conscious) to manage this problem was to find more extrinsic reasons to say no, and assent to them as collector reasons (very Nietzschean, yay-saying to created rules of nay-saying). Country of origin is a helpfully broad criterion; the hostility of the Trump administration to my country made it easy to strike American products from my wish-list. Ditto Japan and its disingenuous continuation of whaling for “scientific” reasons. China’s a tough one, because it is both politically repressive and the most promising major-power leader on climate action (also because they dominate the market for competitively priced, impeccably made gadgets). There are some fine Canadian knives, but I already own most of the interesting and available ones to be had at a reasonable price (“reasonable” here not meaning “a fair reflection of the use-value” but something more like “within some vibes-determined number of standard deviations from my hitherto largest expenditure”). It also helps that I inherited a sizable lot from one of my uncles, who had been collecting since the 1970s, which has given my collector brain quite enough to contemplate for the time being, though it would be indecent to treat these heirlooms strictly within the logic of the collector’s game.
Insofar as collecting is an external manifestation of values (not necessarily so, but I think this is true of many veteran collectors whose self-imposed strictures have evolved over time), it is both expedient (because it manages a surplus of collection candidates) and rewarding (because it gives the feeling of putting one’s values into action) to adopt such value tests as constraints. I’ve also taken shelter in obscurity and obsolescence, creating scarcity by narrowing and hardening my tastes, taking particular interest in discontinued and out-of-stock products that cannot reliably be imported into Canada from the vast American second-hand market. There is something vaguely manipulative and de-centering about the production of new goods aimed explicitly at collectors as consumers, especially within an all-pervading market system that deploys so many resources to discern and to shape the desires of consumers. The collector is potentially deprived not only of the challenge of hunting for collectible items, as these are made as readily available as any commodity, but also of the authorial role as the rule-setter of their own collecting, as they cannot be sure that their preferences are not simply the result of successfully targeted marketing.
The intuition that collecting should adhere to some personal set of restraints sometimes manifests as disapproval in community spaces. On Reddit, rookie knife collectors will sometimes post their newly acquired collections of trendy and expensive goods, amassed in under a year, sometimes totalling tens of thousands of dollars in value. There is often no unifying logic to these collections other than “the most expensive versions of the most conspicuously celebrated items featured over the last year”, and veteran collectors will signal that something is wrong about this. In Suits’ terms, it is a rush to the “pre-lusory goal” of acquiring readily identifiable high-desirability items, unconditioned by “lusory goals” like personal tastes and collection complementarity, and symptomatic of a lack of the proper “lusory attitude”. These new collectors, replying to the (mostly well-intentioned and good-natured) interrogation by their elders, will sometimes confess that they recently quit some very expensive addiction (usually gambling or stimulant drugs) and that they are now spending that money on knife collecting, or admit that they are predisposed to addictive and manic behaviours and this is probably just the latest manifestation of that tendency. The concern of the collectors’ elder council is not just that these new arrivals are unwell (even by the standards of people who own multiple versions of kilo-dollar pocket knives) but that they are playing the game wrongly, a cardinal sin among nerds. They are, arguably, not playing a game at all, but compulsively engaging in a socially modelled behaviour, without understanding the hidden mechanisms that afford lusory value.
It occurs to me that there is something particular about the kind of items I like to collect, like pocket knives, flashlights, pens and such. They are all, in the original logic of their production, items defined by use-value. They are not just collectibles but “gear”, in the sense explored by the spoof enthusiast show “Jon Glaser Loves Gear”. Some collectible items, like figurines or miniature teacups, would seem to only have value as collectibles, or at most as decoration. The use-value of “gear” gestures at some kind of self-perception as being, or intending to become, the kind of person whose lifestyle requires such equipment. The weekend cyclist whose bicycle costs more than their car, the knife aficionado with the perfect blade to thrive in any wilderness survival ordeal, the pen collector with enough nibs, inks and boutique stationery to single-handedly fill a library. The joy of pursuing and acquiring unnecessarily specific items, as Bookbinder’s idea of collecting-as-a-game would have it, seems to be only part of this picture. In addition to playing the collecting game, gear collectors are “playing at” performing some role, whether consciously or not. The hobbyist farmer tilling the soil with their own hands is “playing at” being a self-sufficient, and subsistence-driven, agrarian labourer. To accessorize this play acting, they might collect vintage farm tools, or bespoke period-correct hats, chosen carefully to reflect the humble, fashion-agnostic, necessity-driven habits of historical subsistence farmers, who almost certainly never possessed the level of disposable income required to engage in such play, and if they did wouldn’t spend it on hats.
Maybe the having of gear has more to do with the role playing, a kind of totemic connection to some valued life-world, quite apart from the acquisition game of determining what gear to get and how to get it. There is perhaps another kind of enjoyment, a satisfaction at a collector’s life well spent, that comes from simply beholding a collection that one can be proud of. This would require a shift in values and perspective that cannot simply be conjured up from within the mindset of the active collector (or maybe it can be, but only specifically for one kind of collecting, as a completed task). Bookbinder touches on this matter in distinguishing “telic” (having an endpoint) activities from “atelic” ones. Collecting e.g. stamps from a country that no longer issues stamps could be considered telic because there is a finite (and in principle knowable) number of stamp types to be collected. Although, Bookbinder notes, one could collect examples of such a finite class of objects without intending to amass a complete set, and such collecting could be atelic. The collection of gear, such items being originally intended to adequately serve some defined need, seems to been an atelic relation to a class of telic objects, with the telos displaced onto the achievement of perfect potential, rather than the practice of adequate actuality. The Buddha moment comes when the collector realizes that this is what they are doing, laughs, and continues to do it with even more pleasure than before. As a wise collector on the internet once said, “recognizing the problem is the first step towards refusing to fix the problem”.
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