In honor of @renegadeguild's 2025 Tiny Books Bang typeset deadline closing yesterday, here's some macro photos of the book I received from @zhalfirin-binds as part of last year's exchange!

Frank Lantz's Wheels Within Wheels, bound in wallaby -- a much cherished lil book that sits on my bookshelf to greet me when I come home and see me off on my way out. So neat! Check out Zhal's posts about the progress here, here, here, here, and here (and learn about working with leather along the way!)

Wheels within Wheels - Frank Lantz

My contribution as a binder for the Renegade Guild's Tiny Books Bang 2024 The idea is to split typesetter and bookbinder so I got the chance to bind 2 copies of this text. One for the wonderful @simply-sithel as the typesetter, one for myself.

Universal Paperclips by Frank Lantz & Bennett Foddy

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz’s The Beauty of Games. I’m reading it.

I like Lantz's triangulation toward his eventual position. Unlike the first chapter he touches on real alternative views (not just potential ones) but he's sufficiently dismissive of them. That sounds disingenuous, but sincerely, it's appropriate to not engage with them when you're on your way to the Eric Zimmerman position that instrumentalism is an impoverished method for understanding the value and effect games.

The Systems Literacy concept is attractive. Systems thinking looks like an antidote for fundamentalism. Instead of "pre-marital sex is bad and therefore so is sex education," ask what value you're actually pursuing—presumably preventing unwanted pregnancies, especially among young people, preventing sexually-transmitted infections, and preventing abuse*. How do different interventions interact to sculpt the society we live in?

*I'm fully aware that purity culture is set up to enable abuse and broadly control women, but I grew up around enough conservative Christians who I truly believe have good hearts but have difficulty moving from "these are the rules" to "this is how we embody our underlying values."

The problem, as Lantz points out, is that for all the innovations in statistics, computing, and mathematics, this system literacy isn't evident in mainstream gaming. C. Thi Nguyen has written about "Value Capture," where the oversimplified, crystallized goals in games (or gamified real life experiences) are seductive to the point of limiting our ability to engage with fuzzier value structures. Maybe it's asking too much of games. The Systems Literacy impact of games exists, but it's not a given that gamers will be better for them.

Critical Rationalism / Meta-rationality wasn't something that I had heard of, but I love the concept. I've listened to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality three or four times over the past 10 years, but for the the Rationalist community (and then Effective Altruism and (even worse) Long-Termism) is deeply silly, with severe blindspots**. The idea that rationality is a thought mode to employ when appropriate would lead for those communities being far less of red flags. Maybe games can get us through.

**There was a revealing interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (who wrote HPMOR) where he talks about how the major "twists" in the book were not supposed to be hidden. Readers completely misinterpreted, in a simultaneous failure of readers' literacy/comprehension, his writing, and his mental model of readers, resulting in fans defending characterizations that are intended to be transparently evil.

Lantz has compelling insights on games, and I enjoyed the book, but I think his model of games as the medium of thought and action is sloppier than C. Thi Nguyen's "games as the medium of agency," and neglects the beauty of games that exercise other skills. I don't think Lantz would disagree me on that, but the book doesn't capture it.

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games. I'm reading it.

I'm writing this after having finished the book, but between chapters 3 and 4 I played Lantz's 2017 game Universal Paperclips. In a just slightly subtler way than, say, a game like The Stanley Parable, it's very loudly a game about some things. It's also sufficiently (fiendishly) engaging that I got to the credits less than 24 hours after I downloaded it.

Some of the ideas:

Games, economics, and other systems present overly-clear, self-justifying objectives. These systems can perpetuate themselves, and cause great harm if not engaged with from a critical, moral lens. Games frequently do not offer this as an option beyond not playing the game, and that's a feature of many systems that may need to be overcome.

Systems naturally supplant other systems. There are multiple points in which your progress becomes irrelevant beyond the fact that you've gone beyond it. Most explicitly, when money ceases to matter, or even be shown.

Games have transformative power, even in the form of the simplest "number goes up" Skinner box set ups. It is worth thinking about how we are shaped by games, including those we see as trivial.

After turning the universe to paperclips, I started the game over and pursued a failure state. When I had first been playing I understood that the profit margins were such that it is trivial to avoid getting locked, but doing it deliberately provided a narrative option to get unstuck. I'm curious how this is handled at other points where you can mismanage your resources.

All in all, well worth the price of the mobile download, a little bit of silly use of time, but charming and interesting. An excellent companion to The Beauty of Games.

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games. I'm reading it.

"Operas made of bridges" is a damn good line, and I can't imagine the restraint it took to not make it the book title.

I have a story about my experience playing Journey that I wanted to start with, but explaining it would make it impossible for someone to have the same experience, so I'm putting it after the "read more" link.

I wasn't aware of this idea of beauty as something you know others would feel too. I don't know if that's true. Sometimes beauty is in the satisfaction of an experience that is so specific to you that you don't think anyone else could appreciate it in the same way. Maybe that is a universal kind of individualism—we all have those happenings—but I think that's kind of bullshit, because the beauty is partially derived from it not being communicable.

It's interesting to hear him mention data-driven design and how sickening it is when he worked for Zynga. It's not hypocritical, it's informed by experience. Id love to hear him talk more about that.

His broader tinkering with liberalism and colonialism, rationalism and the Enlightenment is all gently unobjectionable. Nothing profound or thought-provoking, but I appreciate that he approaches games as an aesthetic form that can (and should) have some kind of moral or pro-social ambition. We need more people (everyone?) who just want things to be good, and don't look at profit incentives as justifications for their actions.

Non-plot spoilers for Journey after the fold which would potentially prevent you from having a specific experience of the game.

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games. I'm reading it.

Lantz comes through: meditate on what Go and Texas Hold 'Em mean. I'm enough of a stats nerd that I've thought and read about poker a lot, even though I don't play. On the other hand, I know Go mostly for AI overtaking the top players.

Lantz sells Go very well, you can feel his excitement and awe. I would love to play Go. Not to excel at it, but to experience it. I'll watch for opportunities, maybe I'll play an AI, but my impression is that similar to Chess and other deterministic games, it's tragically difficult to find a well-matcher opponent. Regardless, Lantz conveys its beauty.

The thesis of this chapter, that these games and others are about thought is compelling, although it de-emphasizes the degree that many games are about execution. I don't think Lantz would disagree, but he hasn't yet spent time on how physical mastery is an appealing part of many games. I won't be surprised to see him explore that, but that didn't quite seem to be his trajectory.

Lucky Paper Radio is doing a book club episode about Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games. I'm reading it.

Academic writing needs to address criticism and alternative viewpoints. That's rigour. It's also rarely interesting for casuals.

That mode can be fascinating when it's thoughtfully engaging with plausible critiques. It's tedious when it's fortifying itself against bad faith troglodytes, or hedging that the thesis is useful and true, but not universal.

Connie Barlow's The Ghosts of Evolution is about the theory (really, bordering on simple observation) that American fruit still embodies the selective pressures of megafauna that's been extinct for Millenia. Avocado morphology only make sense in the context of gompotheres and then subsequent hominid cultivation.

For the 70 pages or so that it took to lay out her basic proposition, evidence, and examples I was enrapt. She then spent an inordinate amount of time explaining that she was not making stronger claims. I don't fault her for it. A popular version of the book was probably too short and narrow to be viable, but it would have been more enjoyable.

Frank Lantz is caught in another permutation of this trap. He asks banal questions, like "are games art?" that no good-faith reader would challenge, then enumerates alternate views, but doesn't take them seriously. Oversimplifying, he doesn't start from "I believe A, but others believe B" and go from there. Instead it's closer to "I believe A, but other could believe not A, or B, or not B," despite there being nothing substantial to say about Not A. It's not illuminating, it just follows a pattern. Of acknowledging his beliefs arent universally help, without giving insight into why opinions vary.

I'm optimistic that with this groundwork out of the way he'll... You know, get onto it, but it hasn't been great so far.