Game Design I. (2024)
*** BOOK RECOMMENDATION ***
| A Theory of Fun for Game Design | Raph Koster | 2013 (2nd edition) | A quick and very readible look at the core elements of games and why games capture (or do not capture) our attention. |
| Blood, Sweat, and Pixels | Jason Schreier | 2017 | This book by Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier follows the development of several popular commercial and independent video games to learn about the working conditions, personal struggles, and sometimes triumphs of working on games. For students especially, this book is a fantastic resource on learning about the day-to-day work of making games. |
| Challenges for Game Designers | Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber | 2008 | Presents a series of non-digital challenges with which game designers can use to address a number of concepts relevant to digital and non-digital game design. |
| Critical Play | Mary Flanagan | 2013 | This book analyzes and proposes the use of games as a means for subversive social commentary. It provides historical precedents for the use of play in social change contexts and describes how modern game design fits into that tradition. |
| Embed with Games | Cara Ellison | 2016 | This book and Jason Schreier's book, Blood Sweat and Pixels, form a wonderful duology of "looking into the stories behind games." In this book, reporter Cara Ellison stays with independent game developors for not only a look inside their work, but also inside their lives. This deeply personal and eye-opening book is a great way to explore the creative, personal, and economic factors of making independent games. |
| Fundamentals of Game Design | Ernest Adams | 2013 (3rd edition) | This classic book offers tried and true processes for designing games from idea to launch offered by a season industry veteran. |
| Game Design Vocabulary | Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark | 2014 | A lean and very readible book that effortlessly illuminates complex design concepts as easily understood and related methods. I use this in a lot of game design classes as a way to quickly teach design and prime students for future and more complex literature. It also approaches the topic of making games for social commentary or causes in a way that's neatly blended into general game design such that it feels like a more natural extension of it than it does in other books. |
| Game Design Workshop | Tracy Fullerton | 2018 (4th edition) | A comprehensive guidebook to game design ideation, prototyping, and other processes. For professionals, it highlights important elements of games and provides guidance on how to test your design as fast as you can. For students, it does all these things and gives them important insights into the often-mysterious game industry. |
| Game Feel | Steve Swink | 2008 | Beyond game mechanic making, this book outlines ways to design with the haptics of games in mind. This book focuses feedback, feel, and sensation as a way to create better games and enhance user agency. |
| Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar | David Hodgson | 2004 | I'm notoriously picky about my game art books. I actually hate most of them that just present concept art and eye candy with no context. This book, however (and others by Valve during the 00's) are treasure troves of design insight that show everything from finished models and screenshots to notes on napkins. Years later, this is a valuable resource for anyone learning about game design and seeing how industry developers think. |
| Hamlet on the Holodeck | Janet H. Murray | 2017 (updated edition) | In this book, Janet H. Murray peers into the (at the time) future of interactive narrative design to envision how stories will be told as digital technology matures. In the updated edition, Murray offers commentary on her original thoughts and annotations on how the field has progressed since the first edition was published. |
| How Games Move Us | Katherine Isbister | 2017 | Part of the MIT Playful Thinking Series. This book explores the ways that games create social connections and can build empathy by having players experience situations. It covers a variety of topics including physical play, social connections, flow states, and others that build emotional experiences in interactive works. |
| Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games | Matthew M. White | 2014 | Offers game designers a framework for designing engaging tutorials for their video games by studying how visual and audio content is processed by the brain and fed into the long-term memory. Includes real-world examples and a practical methodology for making tutorials "that don't suck." |
| Level Up! The Guide to Great Game Design | Scott Rogers | 2014 (2nd edition) | A "designer's notebook" of popular game concepts and mechanics presented with relatable stories. Readers of this can break down popular games and game styles according to tried and true components. |
| Nordic LARP | Jaako Stenros and Markus Montola | 2014 (digital edition) | This strikingly beautiful book documents several Nordic Live Action Role Playing (LARP) gatherings, a uniquely expressive form of role playing game. The experiences documented inside are playful and deeply immersive theater productions that give great insight into the intersections between games, art, and storytelling. |
| Persuasive Games | Ian Bogost | 2007 | This seminal book focuses on the concept of "procedural rhetoric" where interactive procedures are utilized to make arguements and have players experience ideas. It follows with deep dives into several applications of these procedural rhetorics in areas such as education, health, politics, and more. |
| Replay: A History of Video Games | Tristan Donovan | 2010 | My preferred history of video games book. This book offers not only a technological history of games, but one focused on societal and cultural contexts for video game history. It is also one of the few books I know of to offer an international exploration of game design history: not just focusing on American and Japanese markets, but also on Korea, the UK, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. |
| Rise of the Videogame Zinesters | Anna Anthropy | 2012 | In her manifesto on game design, designer Anna Anthropy describes her approach to design and takes you inside the thought process behind her projects. This is a book for people who dream of expressing themselves through games but feel put down by the needs of the corporate game industry. This inspiring book convincingly argues for more open and accessible development environments. |
| Rules of Play | Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman | 2004 | A foundational book in game design analysis and criticism. The book discusses games according to 3 schema - rules, play, and culture. Presented through evergreen design topics and theory, the book holds its place as a seminal work in the game design field. It coined and popularlized much of the critical language used for games today. |
| Situational Game Design | Brian Upton | 2017 | For a while, game design writing has been circling a certain number of core concepts that while valuable, appear in multiple texts. This book presents a user-centric approach to game design that adds a wealth of new considerations to the critical discourse of games. This book will put you in the player's brain and help you make better games for them. |
| Spelunky | Derek Yu | 2016 | While Boss Fight Books are typically about a personal narrative of a game by one of the game's players, this one offers a detailed account of the game Spelunky by the creator himself. Ever insightful, Yu offers a great look inside what it took to make and release his game. |
| The Art of Game Design | Jesse Schell | 2014 (2nd edition) | A deep but relatable book on designing games based in the practical and memorable methodology of "lenses." The best feature of this book is the list of lenses: considerations to observe your game with so that you can see if it fulfills needs of players and good gameplay design. |
| The Transformational Framework | Sabrina Culyba | 2018 | This book offers guiding principles for making transformational games (serious games, educational games, persuasive games, etc.) based on the methods used at Schell Games. It features a great and current breakdown of the different ways that games are utilized for purposes beyond entertainment. |
| Uncertainty in Games | Greg Costikyan | 2015 | Part of the MIT Playful Thinking Series. This book explores the elements of uncertainty in games. It looks at several popular examples and how they create the feeling of not quite knowing everything about the game to generate more interest in players. |
| Punk Playthings | Chris Lowthorpe and Sean Taylor | 2017 | Few books have made me think so much about the context of games in broader cultural and artistic history. It features essays that tear you from your comfort zone and make you look at gamedev work in all new ways. It has a bit of a slow introduction but once you're through that, it goes full-steam-ahead. |
| The Making of The Prince of Persia (hardcover edition) | Jordan Mechner | 2020 | Jordan Mechner's personal journals from when he was creating the original Prince of Persia and its sequel between 1985 and 1993. An absolutely astonishing personal account of a human being creating what became one of the standout works in its field. Every game designer should read it. |
| Pattern Language for Game Design | Chris Barney | 2021 | There are lots of efforts in the game design world to build a "pattern language" of reusable design combinations (based on the same effort in Architecture by Christopher Alexander.) This book takes a different approach by creating exercises that have readers and students identify design quandaries in their own projects or others, and through analyses of existing games, forming new systems of patterns. It's a kind of "teach a person to fish" approach which is really useful and refreshing. It also has a companion website at https://patternlanguageforgamedesign.com/, which features an ever-growing list of reader-submitted patterns and an interface for submitting new ones. |