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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
It’s okay. Lost my patience with these sorts of abstract, generalizing theoretical frameworks years ago.
This isn't a book about playing games. or even a taxonomy of games. It's a book of philosophy, that attempts to look at the world through a lens of defining game play into two parts - games with an end and winners, and games played to keep playing.
Like the small amount of philosophy I have read, a lot of the hard work is wrapping your head around the semantics - Carse redefines words to mean very precise things, but they don't always mean what the commonly held usage of the word is.
He repeatedly splits things into two types, and attempts to explain the world, humanity and our existence through this dichotomy - he talks about society vs. culture, drama vs. theatre and others. And it gets a little tiring at times; and there's some very definitive statements made with not much to back them up.
There's nuggets of good stuff in here - his understanding boundaries vs. horizons was a useful section for me. And as the book is divided into about 100 sections, it's quite easy to pick through and consider each part, and mull it over.
But it wasn't a game changer for me. And I especially found some definitions he used very unhelpful - such as all finite games needing a non-playing audience to be valid. That makes no sense in light of his other statements - the players can easily be the audience; and care about the result to get the reward/status he suggests is the purpose of play.
Will probably dip back into - it was good to try and stretch the brain into new modes of thinking.
Like the small amount of philosophy I have read, a lot of the hard work is wrapping your head around the semantics - Carse redefines words to mean very precise things, but they don't always mean what the commonly held usage of the word is.
He repeatedly splits things into two types, and attempts to explain the world, humanity and our existence through this dichotomy - he talks about society vs. culture, drama vs. theatre and others. And it gets a little tiring at times; and there's some very definitive statements made with not much to back them up.
There's nuggets of good stuff in here - his understanding boundaries vs. horizons was a useful section for me. And as the book is divided into about 100 sections, it's quite easy to pick through and consider each part, and mull it over.
But it wasn't a game changer for me. And I especially found some definitions he used very unhelpful - such as all finite games needing a non-playing audience to be valid. That makes no sense in light of his other statements - the players can easily be the audience; and care about the result to get the reward/status he suggests is the purpose of play.
Will probably dip back into - it was good to try and stretch the brain into new modes of thinking.
The gist of the book is that living your life, you can choose to play finite or infinite games. Mostly you should choose infinite games. This book is abstract and I think I'd need to re-read it to get anything more out of it.
The central idea (and the style of delivery) could have compelingly shared in an essay vs. this book. It's amazing to me that 150 pages can be made to feel overly long.
Interesting, but not as good as [b:The Infinite Game|38390751|The Infinite Game|Simon Sinek|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1571114448l/38390751._SY75_.jpg|60047666]. Still, had a couple good moments!
Such an interesting idea, but seemed to be forced into every context possible. The presentation of the thesis was repetitive and became predictable.
The second half had the most interesting points, I thought the overall analysis would be more complex but that was also part of the overall charm (if that can be used here) of the analysis. Definitely would’ve helped me open up to think more abstractly when studying for the Lsat, oh well.
informative
reflective
fast-paced