The Great Game

The Great Game is the spiritual path of games. It is the way that we ascend toward the Good through games. This path is ruled over by the God of Games. This is the way that we live life as a game to achieve union with the Good. This religion is called Ludoismus. It is important to note that there is a huge difference between being good at games and pursuing games as a spiritual path although they are not totally separate either.

Reading List

These are books that have something to do with the development of Ludoismus and the Great Game.

• Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure
• Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning
• Frank Lantz, The Beauty of Games
• C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
• Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi)
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
• Asa Hoffman, The Last Gamesman
• Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go
• Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
• C. Thi Nguyen, The Score
• Emmanuel Lasker, Struggle
• Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association
• John Sharp, Works of Game

Of course there are many other books about games and about the people who play them. But most of them are more concerned with analyzing specific games and not so much with games as a window into something deeper. But I would mention a few. Some of these are works that could fit above but that just didn't make as much impact on me personally.

• The works of John Fairbairn, all his books but particularly his books about Go Seigen.
• The works of Genna Sosonko, by this I mean his writings about chess players and about the culture of the game.
• The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, this is a book that enjoys itself much like Tal enjoyed life and chess.
• Vladamir Nabakov, The Defense, a novel based on the life of Akiva Rubinstein.
• Jonathan Rowson, The Moves that Matter
• The GURPS Basic Set 4th Edition, this is a roleplaying game but it is a universal system that invites one to think about it more as a meta-game than as any specific setting. It also tries to be very grounded in reality in lot of ways particularly in its historical campaigns (although of course it is totally open to science fiction and fantasy and all sorts of imaginary worlds as well.) The leap to thinking of one's own life in GURPS terms is very easy to make.