The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy

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: 9780262019170For 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 or thoughts about different play theories. De Koven does not mention Johan Huizinga's "magic circle," ludology, or even rule systems. He does not discuss affordances or play as human development, nor does he examine gam- ing culture and practice through the lens of French philosophers. None of that. I was put off at first. How could this book be so audacious, existing in a weird bubble where all these other works do not exist? How could this new edition not be revised to allow for digital games and all the new scholarship around them? And to top it off, it seems to be written as if you are just talking to the author. And yet . by the time I finished reading the first chapter, I knew The Well-Played Game is something extraordinary. The meanings found in this book are layered and deep and require multiple readings. This is a book to live with, live by, and live through for the rest of your life.The book is laid out as one long con- versation: each chapter extends the train of thought from previous chapters. First, De Koven takes time to explain precisely what a well-played game is: "Our success in the search for the well-played game can only be measured in terms of how well we have been able to play together," De Koven explains. "Either we achieve it together or we don't achieve it at all. It is not measured by the score, it is not measured by the game, it is measured by those of us who are playing it" (p. 5). For De Koven, to be "well-played" depends on so much more than just being a system of rules. And most of the responsibility for finding what it is rests with the players, not the game. …