Books about Games

But the moves could become a language, and Gurgeh thought he could speak the language now, well enough (tellingly) to lie in it… so he made his moves, and at one moment, with one move, seemed to be suggesting that he had given up… then with his next move he appeared to indicate he was determined to take one of several players down with him… or two of them… or a different one… the lies went on. There was no single message, but rather a succession of contradictory signals, pulling the syntax of the game to and fro and to and fro until the common understanding the other players had reached began to fatigue and tear and split.

In the midst of this, Gurgeh made some at first sight inconsequential, purposeless moves which - seemingly suddenly, apparently without any warning - threatened first a few, then several, then most of the troop pieces of one player, but at the cost of making Gurgeh’s own forces more vulnerable. While that player panicked, the priest did what Gurgeh was relying on him doing, rushing into the attack.

— Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette.

I don't know whether my life has been useless and merely a misunderstanding, or whether it has a meaning.

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united ... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.

— Terry Pratchett, Thud!

I soon found myself caught up in the play of the stones. It was strangely soothing: the stones themselves were red, black and white, smoothly polished and pleasant to hold. The game involved each player randomly drawing stones from the pouch and then placing them on the intersections of lines on a patterned cloth. It was a game at once simple and complex.

Five games later, I grasped the brilliant simplicity of Nighteyes’ noose tactic. It had lain before me all that time, but suddenly it was as if I saw the stones in motion rather than resting on the vertices of the cloth’s pattern. In my next move, I employed it to win easily. I won the next three games handily, for I saw how it could be employed in a reverse situation as well.

— Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Quest

What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.

— Gabrielle Zevin - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice...

— Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle like a game of go. I will take hold of all the pain and snuff it out.

— Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go

Yet I am not a historian, anthropologist, or psychologist, but a mathematician, and I think one of the reasons that games so resonate with how I see the world is that a good game shares so much in common with the great mathematics that I have fallen in love over the years . The rules of the game are like the axioms of mathematics. Playing a game is like exploring the consequences of those axioms. Games for me are a way of playing mathematics. Time and again a game works because it embodies an abstract mathematical idea. A matching game like Dobble is successful because it exploits strange geometries in high dimensional space. A board game like Ticket to Ride works because of the scoring system that balances risk with reward.

— Marcus de Sautoy, Around the World in 80 Games

While most people seem to think that game development is about ‘having great ideas,’ it’s really more about the skill of taking great ideas from paper to product,

— Jason Schreier - Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Games that are too hard kind of bore me, and games that are too easy also kind of bore me. As I ages, games move from one to the other, just as tic-tac-toe did for our children. Sometimes I play games with people who crush me and afterwards explain kindly, "Well, you see, this is a game about vertices." And I say, "Vertices? I'm putting down pieces on a board!" And they shrug, as if to say I'll never get it.

— Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design