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
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
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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