Seven Games by Oliver Roeder
By Oliver Roeder
Author: Oliver Roeder
Rating: ★★★★
I loved this book. The baseline narrative is what the cover suggests: here are 7 games, each with a subtle twist or wrinkle (e.g. chance, bluffing, etc.) that allows humans to discover something about themselves or society while playing it. If there were nothing else to the book, this would be a very abridged “According to Hoyle,” or it could have been the basis for a seven-part premier podcast on NPR.
Roeder, however, with his background in programming and game theory, adds to this preliminary angle a modern layer: how have programmers sought to find perfect games and optimal moves within these games? Some games can be perfected by powerful computers; other games cannot. What does that say about us? What does that say about the game? And who are these code-obsessives and how are they different (if at all) from the obsessives that master these games?
With these two layers in place, the means for driving a tension that drives the narrative is established:
- An anthropological study of gaming
- Describing the seven games themselves and their strategies
- The arch-nerds seeking to crack the games’ Platonic code with CPUs
Again, this would be a more satisfying podcast, but it would still be on familiar ground. I think Roeder opens the gateway to a deeper and an more interesting consideration of games when he brings in the observation that programming is like unto magic/divination is like unto playing games. And that made me sit up and read with deepened enthusiasm.
The Platonic Unity of Gaming
In doing some research on “why do we game” or “what is gaming” Roeder collects quotes from several philosophers of games with whom I was entirely unacquainted. Reading collected citations such as these:
The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. . . . It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. —JOHAN HUIZINGA, HOMO LUDENS
The real world may from time to time offer us a chance to solve an elegant problem, and the satisfaction that comes with it, but games offer this chance constantly."
might capture some visual aspect of the world, a game records a set of decisions and actions, packing them onto a small board, into a deck of cards, or onto a hard drive. In other words, games offer a space to enjoy agency.
Playing a game—entering what the cultural historian Johan Huizinga called the “magic circle,” or the space created when players sit down to play—is adopting a unique way of seeing and acting in the world.
(Many more highlights below in my notes file)
I realized Roeder had gathered a preliminary corpus to a “philosophy of gaming” but had also a corpus of “the philosophy of programming” and also “the philosophy of magic/divination.”
The vocabulary of the philosophy of games e.g. “entering the magic circle” or “attempt[ing] to overcome unnecessary obstacles” will ring incredibly true for any programmer or anyone who’s studied systems of divination or magic. This esoteric narrative, less obviously limned, was a hidden treasure in this book. The equivalence of games to divination to programming seems entirely natural when considering the utterances that practitioners make that hint to the unity of code, magic, and games.
How often do programmers consider themselves “wizards” or consider their
computer to be something like a cauldron that only responds to correct
incantations. How often to ride-hailing drivers claim that they were “blessed
by the algorithm” making them workaday worshippers of a divination system
that’s strikingly similar to the I-Ching, Nordic runes, or Tarot? And don’t
the shamans (programmers, seers, and games players) see a literal figure but
then somehow transform it into a synecdoche, a microcosm that reflects the
macrocosm? The Empress tarot card, the for singular of plural in
JavaScript, and the positions of Go checkers all participate in the same
Platonic form of magic.
I thought that motif was awesome.
Conclusions
For lovers of games or programmers (often a substantial overlap), the beautiful language and NPR-gonzo journalism of Roeder’s investigation will delight.
{
"title": "Seven Games: A Human History",
"author": "Oliver Roeder",
"highlightCount": 80,
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"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. . . . It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. —JOHAN HUIZINGA, HOMO LUDENS",
"location": 45,
"annotation": "Might be worth lookong into"
},
{
"highlight": "wherever humans settled, games became necessities of life.",
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"highlight": "The real world may from time to time offer us a chance to solve an elegant problem, and the satisfaction that comes with it, but games offer this chance constantly.",
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"annotation": "Why choose programming."
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{
"highlight": "might capture some visual aspect of the world, a game records a set of decisions and actions, packing them onto a small board, into a deck of cards, or onto a hard drive. In other words, games offer a space to enjoy agency.",
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"highlight": "When playing games, “we can take up goals temporarily, not because we actually care about achieving them in an enduring way, but because we want to have a certain kind of struggle,” writes C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah. “And we can do so for the sake of aesthetic experiences of striving—of our own gracefulness, of the delicious perfection of an intellectual epiphany, of the intensity of the struggle, or of the dramatic arc of the whole thing.”",
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{
"highlight": "Games also offer simplified models of a dauntingly complicated world,",
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"highlight": "Playing a game—entering what the cultural historian Johan Huizinga called the “magic circle,” or the space created when players sit down to play—is adopting a unique way of seeing and acting in the world.",
"location": 83,
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{
"highlight": "Huizinga writes. “The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play.",
"location": 87,
"annotation": "This is so Like programming in that the Mundane and rote becomes painful and engaging and then rote again"
},
{
"highlight": "hinges on what he called a lusory attitude, a state of mind required by a person playing a game. Derived from the Latin ludere, meaning “to play,” a lusory attitude is that of the grasshopper. “To play a game,” Suits wrote, “is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].”",
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{
"highlight": "Or, put more succinctly: a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”",
"location": 113,
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},
{
"highlight": "adding structure to play—that is, inventing and playing games—is central to our developmental intelligence.",
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{
"highlight": "Games attract AI researchers for the same reason they attract human players. They are fun, but they are also practice.",
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{
"highlight": "Games are potent distillations of narrow elements of the real world.",
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},
{
"highlight": "Perhaps a ludic attitude is a valuable resource.",
"location": 167,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Having acquired a dislike for losing and a love of books, this discovery set the stage for a lifelong fascination,”",
"location": 224,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Tinsley disappeared from the game. He’d recently completed a PhD and begun teaching abstract algebra and combinatorial analysis,",
"location": 236,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He’d also, through the competitive checkers world, found religion.",
"location": 237,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Tinsley, at least, upheld his end of the bargain. Having returned, he dominated checkers as perhaps no one has dominated any competitive pursuit in the history of humankind.",
"location": 261,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“It is a very rare woman who can be married to a real student of checkers,”",
"location": 269,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We climb trees—that is, we play games—through our intuition, experience, community, and literature.",
"location": 331,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Computers climb trees—that is, they play games—by searching and evaluating, searching and evaluating, searching and evaluating. Both search and evaluation present serious technical challenges.",
"location": 336,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Whatever checkers lacks in complexity compared to, say, chess, its top players make up for in depth.",
"location": 446,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "But the couple divorced—a human relationship lost to checkers and AI.",
"location": 650,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "for whatever deep psychological reasons that maybe only therapy can figure out, I chose to spend most of my time with my digital creation rather than with my biological creation.",
"location": 655,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“It’s easy to take family for granted, just because they’re always there,” he said. “But then one day maybe they’re not there. And you say, ‘Holy shit, what have I done?’ ”",
"location": 665,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A strong spine of chess runs through New York City:",
"location": 712,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Silver wrote, “It was like the moment when, exactly thirteen seconds into ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ the synthesizer overpowers the guitar riff, leaving rock and roll in its dust.”",
"location": 980,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It’s a sort of chess that has nothing to do with chess, a chess that we could never have imagined without computers. The moves are awesome, almost scary, because you know they are the truth, God’s algorithm—it’s like being revealed the Meaning of Life, but you don’t understand a word.",
"location": 1098,
"annotation": "I some ways it makes the HHG response of 42 intelligible, we aren’t smart enough to understand the parameters the question supposed."
},
{
"highlight": "the prevalence of superhuman chess machines in the world of professional chess is a glimpse into our own civilian future, when AI technologies will seep into our personal and professional lives, and where the only way to make a living in many fields will be to work side by side with an artificially intelligent machine. In chess, that future is here.",
"location": 1144,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "after famine and economic collapse, where on a long-abandoned server, as long as the power holds out, the highest expression of our human culture, our last art, is created in chess games played in silence with no one watching.",
"location": 1176,
"annotation": "Wait I fully Bradbury-esque"
},
{
"highlight": "no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art.”",
"location": 1226,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Go, too, is a game of emptiness but not of meaninglessness",
"location": 1247,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The Master of Go is a sparse book, though the account it contains is not.",
"location": 1248,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Each match represents the diameter of an imaginary circle. The probability that one of these circles crosses any of the lines between floorboards is a figure that contains π.¶ The more matchsticks you drop, and the",
"location": 1445,
"annotation": "This is not very clear. Should be rewritten."
},
{
"highlight": "Perhaps certain sorts of scientific research are games, as they’re conceived in Bernard Suits’s definition: the voluntary attempt (developing theories) to overcome unnecessary obstacles (concordance with some specific set of empirical observations). Perhaps the ludic attitude of a games player, and the creativity and ingenuity that comes with it, is a boon for a scientist. Nevertheless, this play-group ethos has started to be abandoned. “In the last three or four years, there has been this revolution where all these hand-engineered models are getting swept away by machine-learning models,” AlQuraishi said.",
"location": 1567,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "When a backgammon player makes a plan, God laughs.",
"location": 1763,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Successful players take what the dice provide, then make the best play and move on. This is also a valuable, if difficult, life lesson.",
"location": 1764,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We are often predisposed to optimism, or to certain risk-loving behaviors, or to thinking we have a chance to win. It’s why we play the lottery; it’s why Las Vegas exists. But to be successful at backgammon, one must shed this predisposition. Sometimes, you ought to drop the cube.",
"location": 1812,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Backgammon is one of only two things in life, I heard many times during my research, that one never tires of.",
"location": 1943,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In terms of the balance between luck and skill, backgammon lies somewhere between chess and poker, and as the ’80s rolled on, the popularity of backgammon began to fade.",
"location": 1951,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Chance, in other words, is a fertile garden in which human ego and delusion flourish.",
"location": 2083,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Cézanne card game looks more like a card game than a real card game does. When painting from nature, he once wrote in a letter, an artist should find “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” A modernist should, in other words, find the subject’s true constituent molecules, its elemental geometries.",
"location": 2158,
"annotation": "Beautiful call to Euclid. Elements. Geometry. Platonism."
},
{
"highlight": "the elegant game-theoretic mathematics first formulated by a Nobel Prize–winning genius some seventy years ago. These are the game’s cylinders, its cones, its elemental geometries.",
"location": 2161,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The actual lived experience of the World Series of Poker, however, comprises five elemental modes: loneliness, boredom, waiting, folding, and, ultimately, devastation.",
"location": 2194,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Eventually, you get a good hand and you play, hoping to extract enough chips from your tablemates that you can afford to fold some more.",
"location": 2198,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "poker adds another element to vary the rewards for the player while also injecting a deeply human quality: hidden information.",
"location": 2203,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "An old poker adage, indeed one quoted in Rounders, is that “the key to the game is playing the man, not the cards.” This is the old-school attitude, the stance of exploitation. But computer poker, the unexploitable game, is not interested in the peculiarities of human players.",
"location": 2416,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I drove ten minutes northwest to a rental house, situated conveniently near a Ferrari dealership, a Popeyes chicken, and a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.",
"location": 2425,
"annotation": "Vegas"
},
{
"highlight": "There are external and internal sources of poker dread. On the one hand, you’re preying on weaker players. And on the other, this predation poses an opportunity cost: What else might you be doing with your time on earth? These factors combined can be dangerous.",
"location": 2474,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Even in the low-stakes cash games I entered in Vegas, there were always players wearing the big headphones and the sunglasses. Schmucks, in other words.",
"location": 2491,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Poker is bound together by risk, and that risk has to have bite.",
"location": 2499,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“It has to do with the exercise and development of our core human capacities, our characteristic capacities. There’s rational activity or thinking on the one hand, but also wielding on the other. Exerting effort, engaging in activity, that’s always good, because that’s just what it is to be a human being.”",
"location": 2721,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Scrabble, like life, is a trade-off between today and tomorrow—between spending and saving.",
"location": 2857,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "an economist would call a dynamic programming problem.",
"location": 2858,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Games provide clarified access to agency; they teach us real things.",
"location": 2864,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Freedom, time, utility, chance—such concepts coagulate around the game player,”",
"location": 2979,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must . . . present a certain order in its arrangement of parts.”",
"location": 3026,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Just as journalists write so that the public may understand a complex world, so bridge columnists write to make sense of the game.",
"location": 3090,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Humans become good at games through theory—through writing that seeks to explain important concepts and filter endless possibilities. Humans think in anecdote and narrative. Computers, on the other hand, become good at games through raw computation—through speedy search and evaluation of a game’s large decision tree.",
"location": 3123,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.",
"location": 3278,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "A sociological principle called Sayre’s law holds that disputes in academia are so bitter because the stakes are so low.",
"location": 3420,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In a hypothetical world of advanced AI, legitimate radical human improvement can look like subterfuge.",
"location": 3439,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Its deep theoretical insights are astonishing, but often beyond our animal grasp.",
"location": 3442,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“We’re going to have to make some profound societal changes to live in a world where many people are no longer capable of adding value,”",
"location": 3448,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“This is the fundamental problem with the world today: it is impossible for any individual to be as entertaining as the internet,”",
"location": 3474,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Bernard Suits has told us, is simply “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”",
"location": 3548,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“a central human good was activity that on the one side is necessarily directed to a goal but on the other derives its value entirely from aspects of the process of achieving it.”",
"location": 3554,
"annotation": "Hurka"
},
{
"highlight": "games’ values are modern values: “process rather than product, journey rather than destination.”",
"location": 3557,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“There are distinctive aesthetic qualities available primarily to the casually active game player,” Nguyen writes. “These are aesthetic qualities of acting, deciding, and solving.”",
"location": 3579,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Nguyen notes. “Painting lets us record sights, music lets us record sounds, stories let us record narrative, and games let us record agencies.",
"location": 3581,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Just as novels let us experience lives we have not lived, games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own.”",
"location": 3583,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Huizinga writes in Homo Ludens, “Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground.",
"location": 3588,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”",
"location": 3591,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The agencies we experience in these magic circles activate the good that lies within games.",
"location": 3592,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "games are medicine of a kind. By clarifying our vast, complex world, games can calm the existential worry caused by our muddy and unstable values.",
"location": 3593,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the pleasure comes from entering the magic circle and finding our footing.",
"location": 3595,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“We don’t care that a car is faster—it’s just a different kind of creature,” Bradford said. “Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe part of it is accepting that there are different kinds of creatures from us. These minds, they think totally differently.",
"location": 3604,
"annotation": "We seem to be defensive about the activity that defines our to be as cogito."
},
{
"highlight": "The value of a sculpted, beautiful struggle isn’t confined to traditional board or card games.",
"location": 3626,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "* Games became solace. We players did not arrive in droves seeking difficulty or complexity, or a sense of achievement, or a frivolous distraction. We arrived, I believe, in search of agency that had been temporarily denied by sensible public health measures. We arrived to flex muscles that were atrophying. We arrived to spend a bit of time in the magic circle, consuming the art of games.",
"location": 3646,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The games in this book are their own set of canonized art objects, each one a unique expression of agency.",
"location": 3656,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}