What are the Olympics for? Politicians argue that they are good for the economy and a country’s prestige. Purists retort that the value is to be found in the games themselves.  Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language as a kind of game can help us resolve the disagreement. As with language, the real purpose of games is only apparent to those inside the activity, argues Ian Ground.

Despite everything, it’s a spectacular summer of sport. But our world remains mired in the pandemic. Some 78% of Japanese citizens, fearful of the Covid risk, oppose the Olympics being held in their own country. Some of us will be asking whether it’s worth it. What, after all is the point of sport and games?

One idea is that the whole point of sport and games is that they are, precisely, pointless. Or rather whatever point they have is, as philosophers are wont to say, internal to them. If we try to cash that kind of internal value out into another currency - its benefits for the economy or for health or character - we end up, mostly, missing the point. Much the same is true of talk of the value of the arts. Artistic activity is good for the economy, but people also value it on other than economic grounds: for its own sake. There is something deep going on here, something that reflecting on what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about games might help us understand the difficulty of holding onto the crucially important distinction between the inside and the outside of human practices. For Wittgenstein, the point of games, like language, is only visible when we are engaged participants in the activity.

Some 78% of Japanese citizens, fearful of the Covid risk, oppose the Olympics being held in their own country. Some of us will be asking whether it’s worth it. What, after all is the point of sport and games?

Internal and external reasons for valuing sport

In most games and sports, winning really matters. It is pointless to play chess, Kabaddi, fight a Karate match or compete in a sprint without really wanting and trying to win. Sports and games professionals will devote most of their lives to doing so. Olympians will often have structured their entire childhood and teens laser-tracked on a medal (though not a few of us might wonder whether being so monomaniacally focussed on a single goal is psychologically prudent). We feel for athletes and players when they lose and more so when they are frustrated by injury, bad luck or pandemics. The audiences and fans share, vicariously, the pleasure and pain, joy and despair that goes with really wanting to win. It is right then the Greek goddess of Sport is not Truth, or even Beauty, but Victory.

Does that mean that the point of the game or sport is to win? For if that is the point of the activity, then that must surely tell us what we need to know about the value of sport and games. They matter just because they are activities we can win at. This just shows, we might think now, that wanting, above all, to win is what makes us human.