I read Greg Costykian’s Uncertainty in Games. It felt padded and poorly organised though content-wise it wasn’t a total blank. The central idea is that by looking at the ways that games deploy uncertainty we might learn something about them. Not an unpromising premise but the book doesn’t really deliver 200 pages worth of interesting ideas around this.

TBH there was a lot about this book that irritated me but it comes down largely to Costikyan’s fixed and rather chauvinistic conception of what constitutes a game coupled with a tendency to make evidence free pronouncements about stuff that he doesn’t understand – his dismissal of loot box mechanism as unimportant/ icing on the cake is not borne out by the business models of major games companies or the behaviour of gamblers/ school children playing Fortnite.

As a lens through which to analyse games the ways in which they deploy uncertainty is not without merit, there’s a couple of interesting case studies in this book. But really, severing these uses of uncertainty from their thematic or broader mechanical context feels unhelpfully reductive.


A perfect example of how Costikyan doesn’t get things when they don’t conform to his notion of what constitutes a proper game is this review of Minecraft from 2010.