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Game is not a topos

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Answer

The category Game\mathbf{Game} is not cartesian closed and therefore is neither an elementary nor a Grothendieck topos. This is Remark B.27 of Games as recursive coalgebras.

The obstruction is failure of a product functor to preserve colimits. For the game S2\mathbb S_2 used in the paper, the quotient of its canonical Z/2Z\mathbb Z/2\mathbb Z-action is S1\mathbb S_1, whereas the corresponding quotient after multiplying by S2\mathbb S_2 has six elements and is not S2×S1\mathbb S_2\times\mathbb S_1. Hence S2×(−)\mathbb S_2\times(-) has no right adjoint.

This does not contradict the existence of a subobject classifier or local finite presentability. It also does not contradict closedness for Conway addition: the categorical product and Conway addition are different operations.

Separate question

A suitable completion might be a topos even though Game\mathbf{Game} itself is not. Note 42 concerns such a completion. Any claim about it must specify the completion and embedding and provide its own proof; it does not reopen the answered question above.

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