(1.5) Found it vapid

So at least one reviewer said you needed to be 'intellectual' enough to really get this book. Well, I guess I'm unintellectual cause I really didn't. It was a sequence of unconnected quotable paragraphs usually of the form:

1. Something sounding like a topic sentence that might be interesting and you expect explication/justification to follow
2. It doesn't.
3. A tidy little wrap-up sentence of the form: It's not that A Bs the C; rather C Bs the A (e.g. "we not only operate with each other like machines, we operate each other like machines"--okay, doesn't exactly follow the pattern above, but the goal seems to have been to write as many sentences with two parts in which the second part is minimally different but carries a very different meaning). It reminds me so much of cute little snippets from political speeches (which I find eye-rolly at best, as they appear to carry meaning but typically do not at all). Here's another: "if you must play, then you cannot play" though I guess there is a bit of meaning there.

What I took away: Don't sweat the small stuff (finite games). All the goals, aims, achievements, letdowns in life are just a part of the overall game of life (THE infinite game, go play). Enjoy it. But I didn't need to read this to come to that realization.

I agree with another reviewer who pointed out that he likes to choose concepts/words, define them (usually in two opposing pairs) and then divide the world according to the two concepts. This was unenlightening to me in pretty much every example he goes into (war, birth, sex, society etc.).

I also found myself frequently disagreeing with his examples/analogies/points.

I'm not going to tell anyone not to read it, but I think you have to come into it expecting it to enlighten you and to find your own meaning in what you read. I guess it's a decent Rorschach test in that regard. It certainly didn't do it for me.

Heh, and some petty criticism: some of his evidence is now technologically dated. For example, parents now can choose the time and place of birth (C-sections, induction), we can talk on the phone without talking with someone on the phone (voice recognition menus). Though I don't think this weakens his arguments as I found them pretty weak to begin with...or rather, I couldn't actually determine what his argument was.