This came up at the conference last week as there were people asking in the game related sessions about where to point their students or children who are interested in video game design to. Before I list off the books and schools, I would suggest that they should also understand that game design now is not unlike movie production, there are many more cogs in the wheel than just the actors. From AI engineers to digital set painters (maybe they could meet their future spouse there… bonus points for catching that reference).
Books (Courtesy of the Guardian and Next-Generation.biz):
- Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
- Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
- Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
- Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
- Fundamentals of Game Design, by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings
- 21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon
- Gender-Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
- Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, by Chris Crawford
- Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky
- Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris Bateman
- Creating the Art of the Game, by Matthew Omernick
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information, all by Edward Tufte
- Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, by Mark Stephen Meadows
- The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, by George Alastair ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger
- Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide, by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Petrovsky
- Designing Virtual Worlds, by Richard Bartle
- Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, by Amy Jo Kim
- The Oxford History of Board Games, by David Parlett
- The Ultimate History of Video Games, by Steven L. Kent
- Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971 – 1984, by Van Burnham
- Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
- Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones
- What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
- Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
- From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
- Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brook
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd edition by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
- Postmortems from Game Developer, edited by Austin Grossman
- Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material by Andy Eddy
- Masters of Doom, by David Kushner
- Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby
- The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi
- Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
- Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee
- A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
- The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman
- Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
- Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
- The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
- Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
- The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
- Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
- The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
- Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
- Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray
Schools (there are hundreds out there now and these are just two that I keep hearing about even when I’m not listening for their names):
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