Customer Reviews

Things We Think About Games

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This isn't the longest book - some pages are mostly white space - but it serves its purpose well. These are things the authors think about games, and they'll get you thinking, too.

Bite-sized and approachable, Things We Think About Games is well worth reading for both casual and hardcore game players, and especially for game designers. You won't agree with all of it, and that's part of its charm: one page may make you smile and nod, the next will have you curling your lip in a bitter sneer. Hopefully, it will help you avoid that sneer during the next game you play.

Things We Think delivers just what it promises to: quick thoughts on games from people who spend their waking hours designing them. It's offers dozens of small streams of conscious that run together to create a larger, sometimes conflicting, whole. This book won't teach you how to make games, but it will give you a glimpse into the headspace of designers.

Insightful quips and mini-essays on gaming of all kinds, many of which are relevant to writers of all kinds.

Two of my favorites, both applicable to writing:

#028: When playing a game, be aware that the other players are not necessarily playing for the same reason(s) that you are.

#068: A game, as a creative work, has no responsibility to historical or scientific accuracy.

At first glance, it may seem a bit pricey for such a slim volume, but judged on its content and design, it's a great and worthy addition to any writers' inspirational toolkit.

At 160 pages, this is a slim volume. But it is even slimmer in content.

Most of the pages consist of an aphorism and a paragraph or two. "Try playing that new board game in public," one urges. Another page only says: "Make sure you have two-player games in the house." Just who is the audience for this book? If you already play board games, these tips are superfluous. If you don't play board games yet, they're irrelevant. Some are about video games ("If a video game isn't fun early on, it probably isn't going to become fun later on"). Some are about card games ("Keep your eyes on the discard pile. Shuffle it just before it seems necessary to do so"--that's another full page, by the way). Some are about RPGs ("In a tabletop roleplaying game, the characters are all wearing pants. This is true even though none of the players informed the gamemaster that their characters were putting their pants on."). All of these should be obvious to anyone who's ever played these kinds of games. There are buying tips ("The more logos a game has, the worse it is"), which are superfluous at best in an age where game reviews are so readily available. There are hygiene tips ("Clip your goddamn fingernails"). A few tips are aimed at game designers, but these are mainly cribbed from more substantive books like A Theory of Fun for Game Design.

There are exactly three thoughtful pages in this entire book, in a short essay by S. John Ross that appears at the end. The piece is a reflection on what makes tabletop RPG campaigns fun. It's interesting, but not worth the price of admission for the other 157 pages of fluff. A slightly different version of the essay can be found on Ross' website; just Google "s. john ross elements rpg design."

If you want to design games, of any kind, the must-read book is Game Design Workshop (Second Edition). And if you're interested in reading intelligent reflections on tabletop games, I strongly recommend Hobby Games: The 100 Best, a collection of essays by 100 game designers, each of whom was asked to write a brief essay on a game they love (not their own). By and large, those essays are smart, original and surprising--everything "Things We Think About Games" fails to be.

I really like the concept behind this book and the way the authors have put it together. It contains roughly 140 ideas about games, the people who play them, and the way that the people and games interact with each other.

None of the ideas are very big and most aren't particularly new but putting them all in a single volume deliberately without order so the reader hits three or four ideas when searching for the idea they are looking for. I sincerely doubt that anybody will agree with all of the ideas in the book but suspect that they will have at least one ah-ha moment while reading it and that's what this book is all about.

Another great idea is keeping the comments surrounding each idea to a minimum. This makes the book go faster and helps people compare and contrast the ideas by presenting each one in a stark spotlight and then quickly moving on to the next.

As a final note, I'll say that my favorite idea was #38 and that you'll have to either buy the book to find out what I'm talking about or wonder what I thought was so interesting for the rest of your life.