An engaging look at the games we play and whatever freedom we might have as we do so.
A philosophical theory of games and what it means to win them.
Nguyen, a professor at the University of Utah, opens with a challenging question: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?” The question inspires two accounts of how scorekeeping enters into play. One involves rock climbing, which, a friend tells him, has a guiding ethos: “Man, you gotta just savor the movement.” The second is a very different kind of game, the publication of academic works and the scoring system that is used to indicate the prestige of the journals in which they appear, as well as the influence they exert on the field. That scoring system encourages scholars to keep their heads low and their work narrowly focused on “fairly arcane technical questions,” a game that Nguyen, by necessity, bought into, setting his big-picture, wild-haired philosophical concerns aside. We all have choices, of course, and when it comes to such scorekeeping, Nguyen holds: We can either subvert and modify the rules or be “captured” by them, either play the game in order to play the game or play it in order to win by criteria not of our own making, what Nguyen calls “striving play,” in which there’s a gulf between goal (victory) and purpose (fun). Scoring systems constrain us, while, by the author’s account, a game properly designed provides the liberatory scaffolding for players to create new selves: “Games are an art form that works in the medium of agency itself.” Though largely jargon-free, Nguyen’s narrative can sometimes be heady to the point of headachy, but he’s also delightfully irreverent, as when he lampoons “a certain kind of gamer asshole” who lives in a zero-sum world and has to win every time—and who, as a result, is “just evil.”
An engaging look at the games we play and whatever freedom we might have as we do so.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593655658
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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