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A game development log where I share the hardest game design problems, and share thoughts on the games I'm playing. My name is John Rudolph Drexler and you can find my games at catacombian.com
John (00:01.102)
I got a book report for you. The Beauty of Games by Frank Lance. a short book, like 150 pages.
It is so good. it is I think my favorite book I've ever read about games. I haven't read that many, but this one really knocked my socks off and it gives this kind of like grand unifying theory idea of what games are that really got me and it really like hit the nail on the head in a way that I haven't had this experience before and I was just like I was really moved by it. I I can't stop thinking about it. And so I'm just gonna talk about some of the ideas that I found so interesting.
So there's this old kind of boring debate about whether games are art. and I've never really found this to be a particularly interesting conversation. It's like pretty thorny 'cause like people have like a really specific idea of what art is, or maybe they have an incredibly vague idea of what art is. And it has always felt to me like it was just sort of a proxy conversation for really saying like, should we take games seriously? because like if they're art we take them seriously and if they're not art, we don't take them seriously. and so we
use this as this like weird proxy for talking about whether or not games matter. And if you have this like really big and inclusive idea of what art is, like Duchamp bringing a a toilet into a art gallery, that's a that's art and a beautiful website, that's art. Then like of course games are art. There's not really much of a conversation to be had there. and then there's this other kind of
John (02:00.096)
and work and and you know, I think he said basically like I don't rule out the idea that a game could eventually be art, but all the ones that I've seen are effectively kitsch. They're not that. you know, it's a thorny and frustrating argument that a lot of people get really mad about. I think it's like kind of interesting to think about. I don't really feel too strongly about it, but the point is that whole conversation is like not the most interesting to me.
What is interesting is what Lance does, which is that in this first chapter of this book, he basically says, I want to sidestep that entire conversation and not get into that that thorny conversation. And instead I'll talk about something much less controversial, which is that whether or not they're art, they are clearly aesthetic.
And there's a way to interpret them aesthetically. And all aesthetic forms, whether it's music or film or books or games, go f they they range from like shallow to deep to from silly to serious, from kitsch to transcendent, right? All aesthetic forms have an extremely broad range and that's completely okay. We have no problem with that. the culinary arts go from, you know, junk food to five star cuisine and that's okay, right? So the question
John (03:54.976)
The thought itself because you have to come up with a mental model and then you have to test it and implement it and see how well you did, and then you need to update it. And it draws your attention back to your own thinking. And there's not a lot of parts of life that do this for us in such a safe and interesting and fun environment. And this is where the beauty of games really comes to life. He keeps on using this phrase, it's that games are like thought made visible to itself, which is a really interesting.
Interesting idea. And so a lot of times when we talk about the aesthetics of games, we're drawn to talking about sound and visuals and technology and video games, or you know, the actual art, what it looked like if it's a board game, like the tactile feel of it. All valid, but I think that they are ultimately sort of like secondary or tertiary to the main thing, which is that it's an aesthetics of thinking. He goes into this really long and super
interesting example where he talks about Go and he talks about poker two games that basically don't have a strong visual style. They are not games about visual art, certainly not about technology or sound. They are tactile, yes, but again it's kind of secondary to the main thing, which is that you're thinking and there's no story present in these games really at all. They're almost completely abstract. And so like what poker does for example is
it it gives you these mechanisms, it gives you probabilities and it gives you these kind of s really simple rules to go understand without much of a sort of like obvious aesthetic flair to it. And if you don't know the rules of poker and you're watching it, you're thinking this is the most boring thing in the world. But of course we know poker makes great TV. It's a massive enterprise of like professional poker. So what makes it so fun and interesting to watch? And his answer is that it's it's really about deep thinking and thinking about thought
Like when you play poker, you have to come up with a mental model. You have to do a lot of like calculations and you have to come in with a strategy. There's meta strategies that evolve over time, but you are also trying to not be too predictable. And so you need to jump between strategies, between mental models to remain a little bit unpredictable. Because people are trying to read you just as you're trying to read them and trying to understand what is the strategy that they're playing with or the strategies that they are back.
John (06:24.495)
Bouncing between and you get like layers and layers up into this very like dense forest of thought that is incredibly complicated and incredibly rich. This is the aesthetics of poker is thinking about poker and thinking about thinking about poker and thinking about what your opponents are doing. It's very, very interesting, and most other aesthetic forms don't give this to us, and it's part of what makes games so interesting and weird. Another thing
That makes it so interesting and weird is he talks about this concept of instrumental reasoning, which is a term I had never heard before, but it's kind of the idea of like using your reasoning to achieve a specific purpose. This has like mixed bags because it's not sort of like a pure reasoning like you might try to do in philosophy, it's like a motivated reasoning. That's another kind of nasty term in the behavioral psychology world, but it's like this motivated reasoning to go like do something to like maximize.
John (07:54.208)
instrumental reasoning. But at the same time, games are really not for profit. They don't matter. They have almost no consequence on the outside world. And so in a way it's almost like we're like cosplaying instrumental reason, right? We get to go play Monopoly and act monopolistically. We get to play a war game and fight each other and kill and use our reasoning to like
John (08:48.269)
So why does any of this matter? I'll start to start with what he says is one of the reasons that it matters that I thought was most interesting and then what it's making me think about as a game designer. He goes into the the end of the book, he talks a lot about
John (09:32.114)
test mental models, update our mental models, understand what other people are doing, respond, and that is a skill that we learn from game playing. We don't play games simply because we gain skills, but that is one thing that is really interesting about games that we do get is that th then this is not just a a a sort of like vague notion either there's really interesting historical examples of this like von Neumann was a very serious poker player before he started developing these ideas.
in game theory, and game theory ended up massively influencing the Cold War and arguably kept us from nuclear annihilation. You know, that the development of the computer was really driven by a lot of people who were game players, people who played chess and go and thought about dynamic interconnected systems. John Nash, also a big Go player. So it seems like increasingly now we are f the the problems we
John (11:52.188)
And I had a ton of fun reading this. You should go out and buy it. if any of those ideas were interesting to you, they were explained much, much better in The Beauty of Games by Frank Lance. But check it out.