Links: Interviews with Richard Launius, Patrick Nickell and Michael Coe, Randomness Explained & Christopher Nolan: Game Designer?

Nolan's entertainments, the best ones, anyway, are games. I don't mean that they resemble puzzles or tricks (though they do that, too), I mean that they are most satisfying when understood as games, not as novelistic narratives. They are contests with rules and phases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor, usually a Pyrrhus type.

Take Inception. Many thrilled to this story about corporate spies who invade dreams, but smart critics tended to find it, like Slate's Dana Stevens, "mind-blowing but not heart-moving". On the whole, men like it more than women. I was confused by this until one female friend cut me off as I tried to explain my adoration for Inception, with, "Ugh, see, you have to explain it. It was all exposition." And she's right – the movie suffers from male-answer syndrome. When Inception isn't explaining the rules of inception, the trick of implanting ideas in minds that's at the center of its plot, it's explaining the rules of Inception.

A common complaint about many board games (especially games that shoot up on the popularity list right around launch time) is that they don't hold up to many plays before they get boring and repetitive...

Think about this: when you buy a new book, or a new movie, you excitedly read through it (or watch it). And then? It goes on your shelf. Probably for a few months at least, but maybe even years. Why do you keep it? Well, maybe you want to read it again someday. Maybe you want to have it available to lend it to friends and family. If it's a movie, it might come out when you have a group of friends over. But however often it is consumed, we never read our books or watch our movies ten times in one week and then complain about how it's the same experience every time.