A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in artificial intelligence, computer games, aesthetics, and related subjects.

The Beauty of Games is by Frank Lantz, who teaches game design at New York University, New York, the United States of America.

The TU Library collection also includes other books about different aspects of computer games.

His book attempts to see games as an aesthetic form by analyzing how games connect people, express ideas, generate meaning, and create beauty.

The author notes that games are not often discussed as one of the significant art forms, but they should be:

Despite occupying an enormous amount of our time, attention, and economic interactions, games don’t seem to participate much in our collective conversations about the things that matter—our ongoing project of defining ourselves, our world, and our shared future. Literature, cinema, painting, music; each of these things has its own way of contributing to this conversation.

Games have struggled to join in, partly because of how awesome they are. Games can be so complex, absorbing, and enthralling, so rich and strange and entrancing that they often seem to create their own separate domain, one into which all of the energy and attention we can muster is swallowed up and disappears completely. But this is an illusion. Games are more than colorful, complicated pop culture. Games, like those other art forms, are a source of ideas, concepts, insights, and perspectives. They have things to tell us about the world, and this book is an attempt to listen.

In terms of comparative art forms, games are closer to music than to film.

Even though many games are on a screen, including video games, computer games, iPhone games, and handheld electronics, they should not always be categorized as screen culture.

Instead, they should be compared to music:

When games are invoked as aesthetic works with something to tell us about life and the world, it is often through the conceptual lens of cinema and story. Because video games are visually spectacular, we tend to treat them as a form of screen culture. But this framing, this focus on the representational aspects of games—on characters, plots, narratives, and scenes—is impoverished and misleading.

Music is a much better analogy. Music, like games, has a lighter, more complementary relationship to representation, mimesis, and story. Music is about participation, entrainment, the songs we learn, the instruments we struggle to master, the rhythms that organize and give pattern to our perception, the mathematics of emotion, and the ways in which the separate strands of our individual attention are woven together in shared rituals of coordinated activity. Like music, the beauty of games can be hard to see. Sometimes, you have to shut your eyes and listen.

Games allow players to step out of the real world and into a game of competition, learning, teamwork, or strategy.

This helps people escape the stress of real life and gain perspective on the world.

To play a game means to learn something.

These new skills give players new points of view:

Games are a kind of homebrew neuroscience. When you play a game, you are learning, and you are observing yourself learning. In games, the fundamental essence of what it means to be a human—to be a particular kind of cognitive process, to be an agent in the world, taking action, solving problems, pursuing goals—is given a stylized, ritualized, performative treatment. Through games, we can temporarily step outside of life, see it, and appreciate it, or simultaneously, so that we can temporarily disappear into it, give ourselves over to it, and escape it. It is a curious, sometimes awkward, dance move by which we spin around to catch ourselves in the act of thinking and doing. We are stepping out of, and disappearing into, instrumental reason.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform toys, games, and play in general in the near future.

Mr. Lantz suggests:

Games have not only the opportunity but also the responsibility to help humanity navigate the historical moment in which we find ourselves, poised on the edge of what might be the strangest and most important transition in the history of civilization. What are computers? What is thought? What is knowledge, problem-solving, and creativity? What do computers mean? What do we want from them? What is beautiful about them?

These are the kinds of conversations we have in the realm of aesthetics, when we seek out cultural works that speak to us, that give us joy or sweet sadness, that startle us with shocking novelty, or steady us with the stable truths of established tradition. When we make a conscious effort to improve our literacy and expand our taste, we relax and let our hearts remind us of who we really are. We need to make and play and think and talk about games with these questions in mind. We need to bring our experiences with games to bear on the problems and promise of AI in a way that helps us shape the future in the best possible way.

In 2022, the author informed a podcast interviewer how he became interested in games:

I didn’t grow up—I mean, I grew up playing games like an ordinary person. I wasn’t super drawn to games. I would say I had more of a kind of average relationship to games as a kid. I played games and I liked them. But I wanted to be a cartoonist. You know, I was really into drawing and art and I studied art in college, but when I was making art I was really interested in the process, and I was interested in kinda rules-based art, I was interested in conceptual art, the ideas—I was really drawn to art that explored the sort of systems of meaning. Semiotics and representation and iconography and—and I started making art that was really rules-based and trying to get outside of my own head and outside of my own taste by exploring procedures, you know, kind of process-based art and things like that.

And around, I think around that time, I also really was getting inspired and influenced by things like the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, this really important, you know, kinda early philosophical exploration of computers and artificial intelligence and—So those were a lot of the things that by the time I really started working with computers professionally as kind of a graphics guy—I was doing, you know, computer graphics and things like that—it really became obvious to me that the thing I was really interested in was software in general. Not just using software to make graphics into images, but like the process and ideas of computers and software. And that was right around the time that, yeah, I started to really decide, okay, this is—Games are what I wanna devote my life to.

The TU Library owns a copy of the influential book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

https://library.tu.ac.th/search/detail/CATLAZ000000969611

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)