It seems to me Galloway has some interesting ideas, but he has an almost dyslexic difficulty trying to express them simply.  As the wise Bill Watterson once said, “verbing weirds language”.

With most of the first chapter, I could read slowly and sort of squint my way through what he was trying to get at through context, but my biggest problem was the cosmic “Why?”.  Diegetic?  Nondiegetic?  Operator?  Machine?  I think I understand the concepts, I think I see the spectrum, but I don’t see where he’s going with it or even a potential practical use for it.  In class we’ve already discussed some, in my opinion, fairly useful ways to categorize and analyze games, but this guy’s gone to a whole new level of abstract inaccessibility.

This hasn’t put me off the book, far from it, in fact.  Now I’m curious to see what he can accomplish with all this verbose babble.