The Beauty of Games

My book is coming out!

In less than a month, this bad boy will exist in the physical world. You can, and should, pre-order it now.

What is this book about? I’m glad you asked. Here are five of the main themes:

1. Bringing Games into Conversation with the World

Despite occupying an enormous amount of our time, attention, and economic interactions, games don’t seem to participate much in our collective conversations about the things that matter - our ongoing project of defining ourselves, our world, and our shared future. Literature, cinema, painting, music; each of these things has its own way of contributing to this conversation. Games have struggled to join in, partly because of how awesome they are. Games can be so complex, so absorbing, so enthralling, so rich and strange and entrancing, that they often seem to create their own separate domain, one into which all of the energy and attention we can muster is swallowed up and disappears completely. But this is an illusion. Games are more than colorful, complicated, pop culture. Games, like those other artforms, are a source of ideas, concepts, insights, and perspectives. They have things to tell us about the world, and this book is an attempt to listen.

2. Games are the Artform of Software

Games have always been deeply entangled with computers. Long before computers existed, games were out there dreaming them up. Then, once games had conjured computers into the world, they immediately set about asking the questions what are computers for?, what do they mean?, what do we want from them? Now that it’s too late for the world to escape being consumed by the voracious maw of computation, these questions are more important than ever. What does it mean to see the world as system, as a possibility space defined by constraints, affordances, and goals? How does simple determinism spiral into irreducible complexity? Where do the laws of matter meet the experience of minds? What does this button do? Games are the artform that connects the logical machinery of cause and effect to the diaphanous wonders of desire and dream.

3. Music, not Film

When games are invoked as aesthetic works with something to tell us about life and the world, it is often through the conceptual lens of cinema and story. Because videogames are visually spectacular, we tend to treat them as a form of screen culture. But this framing, this focus on the representational aspects of games - on characters, plots, narratives, and scenes - is impoverished and misleading. Music is a much better analogy. Music, like games, has a lighter, more complementary relationship to representation, to mimesis, and story. Music is about participation, entrainment, the songs we learn, the instruments we struggle to master, the rhythms that organize and give pattern to our perception, the mathematics of emotion, and the ways in which the separate strands of our individual attention are woven together in shared rituals of coordinated activity. Like music, the beauty of games can be hard to see. Sometimes you have to shut your eyes and listen.

4. Thought Made Visible to Itself

Perhaps the central theme of this book is that games are a kind of homebrew neuroscience. When you play a game you are learning, and you are observing yourself learning. In games, the fundamental essence of what it means to be a human - to be a particular kind of cognitive process, to be an agent in the world, taking action, solving problems, pursuing goals - is given a stylized, ritualized, performative treatment, so that we can temporarily step outside of it, see it, and appreciate it, or, simultaneously, so that we can temporarily disappear into it, give ourselves over to it, and escape it. This curious, sometimes awkward, dance move by which we spin around to catch ourselves in the act of thinking and doing, this way of stepping out of, and disappearing into, instrumental reason, is the thread that ties all of the ideas in the book together.

5. Games and AI

As Donkeyspace readers know, I think games have, not only the opportunity, but the responsibility to help humanity navigate the historical moment in which we find ourselves, poised on the edge of what might be the strangest and most important transition in the history of civilization. What are computers? What is thought? What is knowledge, problem-solving, and creativity? And not just what are they technically, not just how do they work, not just can we make them, but what do they mean? What do we want from them? What is beautiful about them? These are the kinds of conversations we have in the realm of aesthetics, when we seek out cultural works that speak to us, that give us joy or sweet sadness, that startle us with shocking novelty or steady us with the stable truths of established tradition, when we make a conscious effort to improve our literacy and expand our taste, or relax and let our hearts remind us of who we really are. I want this book to inspire us to make and play and think and talk about games with these questions in mind, and to bring our experiences with games to bear on the problems and promise of AI in a way that helps us shape the future in the best possible way.

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So there you have it. There’s a lot more going on in the book beyond these 5 ideas, but I think this will give you a good sense of the overall goals. I’m really happy and proud of how it turned out. I’m grateful to my editor Noah Springer and the rest of the hardworking folks at MIT Press, and to Jesper Juul, who, years ago, suggested I write it.

I think you’re going to like it, and I’m excited to share it with you. I’m going to be doing an AMA on reddit in a few weeks, but in the meantime let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the book and I’ll be happy to answer them.