Here’s my new paper, Competition as Cooperation, coming out soon in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. It contains:

1. My view that games are a sort of moral technology for converting competition into cooperation.

2. Exhaustive technical detail on the motivational structures that human beings must have in order to use this technology properly.

3. The fun part: me having a go at the dominant position in the philosophy of sport – that the purpose of sports is developing or displaying human excellence. I think the social conversion stuff just as important. The coolest part of the paper is about whether the paradigmatic case of sports are Olympics/professional sports, or, like, flag football with your family.

It’s probably my… most ambitious paper? And, if you follow my wife’s “Thi Scale of Papers”, in which the more completely goofy and inane examples a paper has, the more Thi it is, then this is the most Thi paper I’ve ever written. There’s even a bit where a shitty asshole houseguest shows up at my house and I save the evening by deploying a board game that converts their dickheadery into something useful for everybody else.

This paper is deeply connected to the Good Violence, Bad Violence paper I wrote with Jose Zagal. “Competition as Cooperation” has got way more technical detail on Suits and the nature of game consent and the purpose of game-playing; “Good Violence, Bad Violence” has way more discussion of juicy online stuff like spawn-camping and trash-talking/harassment, the formation of online communities, and all the cool stuff that comes from the fact that Jose is an actual, you know, game designer.