Episode · Freakonomics Radio · 2026-05-15
Books mentioned on 675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?
Not exactly. But their runaway success with games like Wordle says something bigger about the way we live now.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The grasshopper : games, life, and Utopia
The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Herbert Suits is a philosophical text that explores the nature of gameplay, defining it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Discussed“In 1978, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits published a sly and influential little book called The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, in which he defined game playing as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”
Where to get it
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Interaction of Color
Discussed“He wrote this amazing book called Interaction of Color. Imagine that you have two little tall rectangles of color. Let's say that they were both kind of like a pinkish yellow or something like that.”
Where to get it
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Rules of Play
Discussed“On the one hand, a lot of my career as a game designer and then later as a writer working with Katie Salen to write Rules of Play, starting to teach game design with Frank Lantz at NYU and now I've been teaching for 30 years, I really was interested in, okay, what would be the line, color, and composition”
Where to get it
