The Beauty of Games

Frank Lantz

$39.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

MIT Press
08 April 2025

Art & design styles: Arts & Crafts style; Philosophy: aesthetics; Indoor games; Board games

How games create beauty and meaning, and how we can use them to explore the aesthetics of thought.

Are games art? This question is a dominant mode of thinking about games and play in the twenty-first century, but it is fundamentally the wrong question. Instead, Frank Lantz proposes in his provocative new book, The Beauty of Games, that we think about games and how they create meaning through the lens of the aesthetic. We should think of games, he writes, the same way we think of literature, theater, or music as a form that ranges from deep and profound to easy and disposable, and everything in between. Games are the aesthetic form of interactive systems, a set of possibilities connected by rules of cause and effect.

In this book, Lantz analyzes games from chess to poker to tennis to understand how games create beauty and evoke a deeper meaning. He suggests that we think of games not only as hyper-modern objects but also as forms within the ancient context of artistic production, encompassing all of the nebulous and ephemeral qualities of the aesthetic experience.

By: Frank Lantz
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 133mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262552950
ISBN 10: 0262552957
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 08 April 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Frank Lantz has taught game design for over twenty years at New York University, where he helped create the NYU Game Center and served as the founding Chair of the Game Design department from its inception until 2021. Frank is a game designer who has shipped over fifty titles, including the 2017 viral hit Universal Paperclips. In 2020, Frank created the board game Hey Robot in collaboration with his wife and son. Hey Robot has since become a recurring feature on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Reviews for The Beauty of Games

“Lantz invites the reader to think about what games (and other mediums) do to us, whether it’s profound, pointless, or a bit of both. Forget whether or not games are art. What do they make you feel?” —Polygon “In The Beauty of Games, Frank Lantz at once avoids and aims for the heart of the 'Is it art?' debate by considering video games from within 'the aesthetic domain.'"" —The LA Review of Books