You can extrapolate a lot about this book solely by its exciting title: "The Beauty of Games." Are games truly beautiful? I had never thought about it. I know some games are fun, some addictive, some instructive, but, to be frank, they rarely fill you with a sense of lingering awe (excepting the visuals or mechanics) and most of the time with a sense of wasted time. The author, Frank Lantz, is heavily biased on accounts of his being a game designer and all, and as I sifted through the book, the same idea kept popping---that the games are so glorious and intricate, they deserve their rightful plaque at the hall of arts that constitute modern life--- literature, cinema, music---vast and nuanced categories we simply consolidate as art. Yet, Lantz acknowledges that such a substantial claim would be futile and detract from what he is truly trying to convey, so he ingeniously does not call this whole ordeal the study of game as a form of art but as a form of "aesthetics."

Aesthetics

And he does explain what constitutes aesthetics, and what doesn't, really well. A utilitarian function cannot be seeked in aesthetic undertakings. Games are played in the same vein most of the time---not to achieve a goal but to play, and if the play also engenders achievement as a secondary consequence, voila! Lantz claims that paintings let you reflect on your mechanisms of vision and abstraction, music on your hearing, literature on your thought, and games on all your systems of thinking and understanding---a sort of rational meta-cognition. He calls this concept, what the games immanently let us ponder on, the instrument of reasoning. A claim extensively elaborated on pages and pages of convoluted paragraphs and verbose descriptions. A prolonged study that does not consequently justify "Why games have aesthetics," but rather "Why aesthetics are aesthetics?" I must admit that, with this narration, he convinced me in a new-found ability for discerning what aesthetic undertakings, beautiful notions would look like, but could not unfortunately nudge me in any direction whatsoever to do the same for games. His explanations on systems theory and how games make up a huge chunk of modern life are warranted and aptly traced from von Neumann's Game Theory to Conway's Game of Life. And he certainly has interesting insights, such as how von Neumann's obsession of Poker might have saved the world from nuclear demise by means of a sly interpretation of the non-zero-sum-game, deterring the Cold War powers from "Mutually Assured Destruction." Yet, the motive he seeks out to demonstrate almost always digresses before the finish line, sometimes even in the middle.