GameTek by GEOFFREY ENGELSTEIN

Harper Collins Publishers RRP $34.99

GEOFFREY ENGELSTEIN HAS shaped his life around games, as an academic and regular podcast host and contributor, but this is his first book. And like a good game, it takes you to some interesting places.

Clearly the adjunct professor of Board Game Design at the NYU Game Centre sees games as more than just recreation. Through references to anything from ancient Greek taxation systems to the last US presidential election, he embeds the concept of games as part of society. Sometimes these anecdotes take you off on a tangent before looping back to the original point.

The book is structured so chapters can be read as your interests dictate, rather than from cover to cover. However, unless you have a deeper understanding of certain theories, it can be hard to follow in a random manner.

GameTek covers interesting topics – how to win at rock-paper-scissors, for example – while delving into basic human behaviour and the psychology behind game design: for example, he suggests that “people think they want lots of choices, but they don’t”.

There’s an ambitious, overwhelming number of logical, philosophical, and – unsurprisingly – mathematical concepts throughout the book. These

include mentally “chunking” things together to improve your gameplay, and physically changing your perspective to enhance your game.

Engelstein often asks the reader to stop and think. It’s a book that ultimately challenges the reader, whether they’re a gaming novice or the most experienced board game player. Taking on board (pun intended) some of the concepts, one could truly improve their gaming capabilities from reading GameTek.

Unless you are a keen follower of board games, some of the references to particular games can lose their meaning, but Engelstein does his best to explain them, albeit in a hit-or-miss way.

While some of the concepts make for heavy going, Engelstein’s conversational tone is almost like reading a transcript of his podcasts. It’s this light-handed treatment, which brings out his very clear love for the intricacies of gaming, that really makes you want to keep reading.

Engelstein waxes lyrical about his genuine wish to understand life, the universe and ourselves – and that’s what he believes games can teach us about. And to purposely, awfully misquote Lewis Carroll, but what is life, but a game?