Gametek Book Review

Geoff Engelstein has made a name for himself in tabletop gaming spheres. He’s hosted a podcast discussing games that’s spanned several years, he’s lectured and taught, he helps to run advocacy groups, and he’s authored (or co-authored) a couple books. Gametek is one of them.

The Dice Tower is ubiquitous in hobby gaming; it’s the original media network for board gamers, more-or-less. Engelstein, I believe, got his start contributing for them, or at least built a sizable audience through that network. It’s also a network I tend to ignore, not because it doesn’t include passionate and intelligent creators (it does), but because the game tastes espoused by its most prominent contributors generally clash too much with mine to be of interest.

So I was coming in blind to this. What made Engelstein’s contributions worthy of a book? What separated his work from other content creators I’ve read and enjoyed in my years as a tabletop gamer?

Ignoring for a moment that a lot of excellent gaming bloggers have put together enough material to turn it into an interesting book, I was pleased to learn that the book more than justified itself, even among a lot of other material on gaming that exists online or in print. Reason being, Engelstein’s obvious love for the scholarship – mathematical, academic, or historical – surrounding gaming, and his ability to synthesize takeaways in interesting ways.

Below I’ll talk mostly about some insights I particularly enjoyed, but that paragraph above is the mini-review if you need a TL;DR version of this.

Endowment Theory: A Case Study in Cross-Application

I’d prefer if you purchase and read the book yourself, so I won’t be breaking down every essay in the book. But I want to do a dive on one particular one to illustrate what the book is at its best.

Endowment Theory is closely related to a term you probably already know: sunk-cost fallacy.

Most of us understand the fallacy on a surface level. But do we really understand the extent to which it affects our judgments? Likely not. I certainly didn’t before reading this chapter.

Endowment theory has things to say about game design. Catan is cited as an example on two fronts: both starting the player with some points toward victory (increasing our feeling of ownership and progress), and by making the last couple points the hardest to get. This affects our psychology and we imagine greater stakes than we might if late-game points were easier to come by. A win might feel more cathartic and earned than it would otherwise.

He turns the mirror on gamers as well, not just designers. Using studies that discuss statistical effects of the theory, he shows us just how much this mentality affects our behavior, causing us to undervalue some things while overvaluing others.

This has implications for our game purchases and play decisions. Also our life decisions in general.

So in fully elucidating a single idea, we have applications to game theory, game design, playing and purchasing games, and living our lives in general.

It’s quite a feat.

Are Gametek’s Essays All This Good?

No, though the example above is an admittedly high bar to clear, so it’s no knock to say they’re not all as brilliant.

But they’re all good in some way.

Many touch upon equally interesting subjects. And that’s kind of the point. What is most interesting to me won’t necessarily be to you, since the topics range quite widely. There are some throughlines, but the subjects he chooses are deliberately eclectic.

For instance, I found myself least interested during his (admittedly clever) mathematical shortcuts for determining things like probabilities in games. This stuff obviously excites Engelstein, so I can’t fault him for the enthusiasm.

But I don’t play games to eke out wins based on my ability to estimate probabilities better. I play for the social experience, and when I find myself in games that reward that sort of calculation, I take my best educated guess and play from the gut. This is what’s more fun to me, not learning shortcuts to mental math that will give me a better win percentage over time.

But for someone else, one who gets more out of mathematical optimization, this might just be the most interesting chapter in the book.

Conversely, no essay was without some conceptual hook that offered some promise. I also already knew about some of the academic studies referenced, and their implications for human psychology. A couple of these studies have entered the public consciousness in ways that make it likely you’ll have heard of them as well. But even here I was happy enough for the refresher, and a new set of eyes that applied their results to the world of gaming.

We often leave with the sound bite; rarely the actual insight. Yes, you know what sunk cost is. But have you truly reflected on its influence in your gaming? In your life? This is the type of extra layer asked of us in a handful of the best essays in the book.

Fascination, Tone and Fun

What might actually separate Engelstein from a lot of other talented pseudo-philosophers and critics writing about games is that so many of them take hard-line stances that seem to demand they be seen as critics or serious reviewers.

Engelstein’s book is more playful than most blogs. It’s simply interested in tabletop gaming, gleefully so at times. There’s no thesis statement, per se, the kind that might punctuate and glue together another book of essays.

It’s also not about individual games, though it uses them as examples. This, too, deviates from most writing on tabletop games. Yes, it can be fascinating to discuss the statement a particular game makes. But when’s the last time you found a wide-ranging historical musing on the depiction and use of dice in scientific or poetic texts? Or an academic look at the prisoner’s dilemma and how it manifests in both lab settings and gaming ones?

This is almost childlike fascination (meant as a compliment). Games are simply the medium through which that fascination is filtered.

In one his essays, Engelstein makes the distinction between reviews and analysis, the latter being a deeper dive after considerable time with a game to place it in more comprehensive context, and the former being more geared toward upcoming game releases and purchasing decisions. While in practice the term “review” can apply to a variety of both of these types of content, it’s a well-made observation and juxtaposition.

I also bring that anecdote up here to say that what this book is, is analysis, within Engelstein’s terminology. But it’s analysis of the broader modes of interaction in gaming and the underlying principles of them, rather than analysis of a specific game or designer. It’s a meandering discussion taking you – for instance – through a deck of cards to the atoms in the universe and how we are almost certainly underestimating how likely it was for life to have formed on our planet, all from the math we learned about shuffling a deck.

Or to show us how genre classification of games is nigh-impossible due to potential problems in Boolean Logic.

Or to make you think about a game of Tic-Tac-Toe played via quantum mechanics.

Or to explain why we as gamers (or your players, as a game designer) might remember an experience as better or worse than it was during the experience itself due to how our memories function. And several other interesting insights.

Engelstein isn’t the only person musing on such things intelligently; but this is one of the more fun collections of this type of oblique thinking I’ve read.

On that note, it’s also a book I nearly read in a single evening. I kept thinking I’d leave the rest for the next day, but I kept coming back to it, only finally setting it down for good when it was about 30 minutes past my normal bedtime (it was a “work night,” so no sleeping in the next morning).

If that’s not an endorsement, I’m not sure what is. Geoff Engelstein isn’t the only lucid analyzer of tabletop gaming’s fascinating undercurrents, but he’s a good one. Gametek is a breezy read for anyone interested in the hobby of gaming and in understanding it more deeply as it relates to math, psychology and human interaction.