Daniel Reid Smyth

Athletes often report that training and competition, especially under acute fatigue, cease to feel like play and begin to resemble work. Yet discussions in the philosophy of sport have rarely examined how fatigue transforms gameplay from the player’s own perspective. This paper offers a phenomenological account of fatigue’s normative significance for play. Drawing on Bernard Suits and C. Thi Nguyen, the author argues that gameplay depends on what he calls a readiness-to-play: a horizon of immediate possibilities that organizes autotelic action. Acute fatigue, he argues, progressively contracts this horizon through the negative actuality of non-actuality and the constrained anticipation of the dichotomous alternatives of continuing or stopping. Ultimately, fatigue reveals how gameplay may persist formally even as the experiential conditions of play recede.