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The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy Bernard De Koven Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Foreword, new preface, original preface, descriptions, appendix. 148 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780262019170
For a while now, my search for the per- fect reading to introduce new students to games involved defining games as objects, as constructed things. Games are created activities bound by rules that allow only particular actions by their players, who are all trying to get somewhere, to win or to score big, or otherwise to succeed. There are ways to define games, however, that do not focus on constraints and goals. Instead, they focus on the activity of play, the interaction between players and games and gaming communities, and all the stuff around games, not the stuff of games. Yet for some reason, I never let go of my ten- dency to categorize and label and objectify when first introducing games. And in fail- ing to let go of these formal definitions, I may have been introducing games to my students as decontextualized objects that stand apart as inert things, waiting to be explored and prodded. But no. That is not what games are. They do not exist except in the enactment.
And then I read the new edition of Bernie De Koven's The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy and saw this line: "The only thing that makes a game real is that there are people playing it" (p. 57). I had heard about the first edition of this book and DeKoven's work from several well-respected games scholars, so I was expecting to find a typically academic work. Instead, I found no citations, few references to other scholars, and no pre- sentation of research...