The story goes that in 1923 Marcel Duchamp finally abandoned his “hilarious picture” of psychosexually contorted glass and wire, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, to spend more time playing chess. He was certainly obsessed with the austere beauty of the game, famously pronouncing that “while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” For most of us, however, if we are minded to consider the aesthetic value of games at all, it is usually only in a derivative sense. We can appreciate the Art Deco elegance of Duchamp’s own custom-made chess set, for instance, without sharing his passion for obscure variations on opening d4. Or to take a more kinetic example, we might share David Foster Wallace’s glee at a world-class tennis player “carving out exemptions from physical laws” even though the ball sailed out. Yet in his new and delightful little book, Frank Lantz—the director of the nyu Game Center at the Tisch School of the Arts—argues that games have an aesthetic value all their own; he even goes so far as to suggest that they are the defining art form of the twenty-first century. And if that doesn’t tell us something interesting about games, it certainly tells us something interesting about contemporary culture.

The Beauty of Gamesforms part of a series of books with the somewhat quixotic task of beguiling a generation of video-gamers into thinking more deeply about art and philosophy, although Lantz himself rejects any meaningful distinction