Lantz self-reflects on the feelings games give him that he likes, which is a beautiful bit of openness. I will rip these apart, but before I do, understand that I am mainly ripping myself apart. Of course I relate. How could I not? I'm human too. I'm a lover of games too.

QuoteComfort . . . a trickle of novelty regulated by repetition . . . a tame parade of known unknowns

QuoteChemicals . . . to experience these mental states but to enjoy the power of being able to turn them on and off at will

QuoteEgo . . . theatrical rituals of will in which my capacity to solve problems and pursue goals is put on a pedestal, a self-portrait of the choices and actions that define me as a human in this world.

This is bad! On top of overly prizing problem-solving capacity, and not only that but capacity in a false context, we have the boiled-away nature of game systems that we just touched on! I'm not even editing things out of context. You are not, cannot, be defined by these choices and actions in a context with everything "warm and wonderful" boiled away.  Sudoku does not make you smarter, it just makes you better at Sudoku.

QuoteCompanionship . . . elaborate excuses to spend time with other people. . . to speak and be heard. . .

Maybe I'm just an introvert. I used to like this, but I'd rather go and see a play with my friends, or go to a little house party and pay attention to each other without the need for an intermediary.

If you are having trouble making time to spend with other people, or to speak and be heard, or various other things said here not quoted, there are good ways to resolve this problem. The game does not solve the problem! It takes the attention in the room. Do something because you want to do the thing damn it!

QuoteBoredom . . . Sometimes a game is a device that accelerates time, transporting me to the far side of an empty stretch of my life.

noooooooooooooooo

p34?

QuoteEven if our goal is to develop a critical aesthetics, a progressive aesthetics that is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo and wants to push onward to discover games' greatest potential, this project needs to be grounded in an understanding of game experiences as they actually are.

Aha! Yes! The book is coming for me.

I am looking forward to this section. Let me say first that I am happy to be killing gameplay. I have tried to get at what it is that i want from inside games and IT HAS NOT SATISFIED ME. My goal is no longer to "discover games' greatest potential." How limiting that would be. How limiting that was, and is! I want to discover my own greatest potential. Games are a tool with which I am familiar, and I will always be touched by them.

I don't think adhering to games is good or healthy. Use them. Use them.

p32?

QuoteAll games, regardless of whether they utilize computers, have an essential relationship to computation.

Too focused on one type of game, here. Limiting, narrowing. Let's go with it, we're talking about "games like chess", games which do this thing with numbers. Not the only thing games do.

p33?

Quote. . . higher-level confusion is the beauty of Chess, and you don't get there without first letting go of the lower-level confusion about the position of the physical piece on the squares of the board.

Lantz attempts to defuse a potential argument against the evils of Chess' abstraction, but misses the mark for me... here is his identification of the position he attempts to satisfy:

p32?

Quote"Aha!" I hear some of you say, "this is precisely it! This is everything wrong with games, this desire to boil away the warm and wonderful ambiguity of the analog world and turn it into the steam of systems! . . "

Hmm.

This "boiling away" is not something that sounds good, to me, but it is the essential nature of capturing anything. My beef is, WHY has the boiling been done? We aren't putting a pot of water on the stovetop -- we've taken a thing and with precision removed what is not important, enhancing what is.

What is "the warm and wonderful ambiguity of the analog world" which this speaking character is so sad to see go?

Well, we don't know, and that's okay. He acknowledges that "Perhaps this is everything wrong with games", understanding at least that boiling has consequences. What do we get for our trouble?

p34?

Quote. . . a fascination with actions and numbers--with the relationship between the fuzzy, ambiguous objects and forces of the continuous world and the abstract logical systems of ideas, numbers, and rules we use to predict and understand it.

p30?

QuoteGames are not just systems we examine and contemplate; they are systems that we enter into and explore.

Lantz quotes Donella Meadows (author of Systems: A Primer, which is a book i love) as part of his argument that games represent systems and yes, this I agree with, I love systems and systems thinking. Games do not didactically "teach" systems thinking, but perhaps provoke it, by presenting players with systems that they want to know more about, and enabling them to play around with those systems in ways that facilitate such 'finding out'.

And yet, this does not require games' goals, their compulsions. We can very much design tools for exploring simulations of those inherently interesting systems which we have reason to want to understand. Games go a step further, creating incentives, "creating desire".
 

hi good morning! sorry that "zzzzz" reads like an "i am SO bored of this" dismissal, but no i literally went to sleep because it was late and i was tired.

p27?

"what looking is to painting, thinking and doing is for games"

im ready to fall asleep, into a deep and beautiful slumber. when we look at a painting... what is that experience of looking? would i make a painting to... hmm... the expressive engine, that is what interests me, and idon't see it in this theorywork.

i am not a painter bt when i produce art i think, what is the feeling of this place? not in words, not crudely. but i adjust and adjust and adjust, paying attention closely to the vibe of the whole. i may touch it, i may not

the act of looking, the act of thinking, of doing, these are the domain of the player, not the artist.

zzzzz

i am an avid reader of things i dislike and disagree with. i am still working out the best way to do that. i have relaxed and am flipping idly now through this book. will anything jump out at me to love, rather than to pick apart? i am looking for that thing that resonates.

p17?

"games are an aesthetic form. Which is to say they are something we do for their own sake" -> i really hate this phrase that keeps coming up in games discourse. "for their own sake" makes no sense at all. lantz follows up...

"they are something we do . . . in search of beauty, pleasure, and meaning" -> great! thank you for saying what you are actually doing the thing for! 'for their own sake' was just noise.

sorry, it's getting late and i'm only 17 pages in. i should chill out, but reading this stuff sets me on fire.

earlier i wrote, "i suspect lantz is kind of coming from the same place as me, and is trying to find the light. . . . [but] has he found it to my satisfaction, or does the book come from a place of beautiful denial?"

lantz writes, "Games are beautiful, and understanding the particular ways in which they are beautiful is the purpose of this book."

my reading is that he has taken as a precondition that games are beautiful, and this assumption is what raises questions for me. are games beautiful? this is also what i wanted to question in the Playful Thinking introduction. there was a sense that i got that 'why are games beautiful?' was beyond reproach, a question not to be questioned.

what if games are ugly?

p7?

"Why is play both so important and so powerful?"

what if it's not?

To recap. Here's what I want to see this book's answers to:

". . . why [do] some people find games deeply beautiful?"

Why is "the particular way in which [games] are beautiful . . .  historically and culturally important"?

Finally, Lantz loosely supposes he will, whether he likes it or not, to some degree "push games themselves in a certain direction. . . . describe a way they could work and suggest a way they should work." What is this 'certain direction'? What is this 'way' (or are these 'ways')?