Frank Lantz

It’s like you are learning a language, learning to associate the game’s visual iconography with the underlying properties of the objects that make up the game’s world.

Guns do damage, keys open doors, skeletons are weak to magic, cassette tapes contain story fragments.

Playing a game means learning this language, the game’s semiotic system, and then using it to assemble larger ideas and meanings.

you are made hyperaware of your attention as a precious resource which you must consciously manage.

is the way it explores the tension between skill and knowledge.

the vast codex of champions and items, every detail of which can have its own critical impact on the game

the ability to flexibly re-map your cognitive wiring, is a skill you can work to improve.

theory of games as culture,

At the same time, I would like this book to provide a theoretical framework that can be useful to those of us on the inside of the world of games. To designers, scholars, and players who want to understand this world more deeply. A world that is, after all, so big and complicated and diverse that all of us remain outsiders, no matter how long we live here.

There’s nobody left here. I’m running up a staircase toward a cathedral at vesper hour, the sky orange and filled with red dragons, whose shadows slide across the flagstone steps like sperm in war regalia. I have been running up these steps for the past five days.