In his 'Philosophical Investigations,' Ludwig Wittgenstein developed his later philosophy around them. Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for a particular one of them. John Forbes Nash won a Nobel Prize for Economics for his theories about them. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson invented many of them. Yasunari Kawabata, also a Nobel Prize winner, wrote a...
more »In his 'Philosophical Investigations,' Ludwig Wittgenstein developed his later philosophy around them. Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for a particular one of them. John Forbes Nash won a Nobel Prize for Economics for his theories about them. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson invented many of them. Yasunari Kawabata, also a Nobel Prize winner, wrote a novel structured around one of the most ancient of them.
They are games.
The literature of games crosses many genres. From science fiction, 'Ender's Game,' by Orson Scott Card, and 'The Player of Games,' by Iain M. Banks; from modern literature, 'Schachnovelle (The Royal Game),' by Stefan Zweig, and 'The Natural,' by Bernard Malamud; and from economics, ' Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, are all but a few examples. Chess books, computer game development books, role playing game books, contract bridge books, Scrabble® books, sports books - the list goes on and on and on.
What is a game? Well according to the Wikipedia article on 'Game,' "Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game. In his 'Philosophical Investigations,' Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. He subsequently argued that the concept 'game' could not be contained by any single definition, but that games must be looked at as a series of definitions that share a 'family resemblance' to one another."
AND SO, with that wide-ranging definition in mind, welcome to the Shelfari Game Books group.
Your play.
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