Tide's Horizon

Game Design & Development Books

Since Dec. is usually when most people regardless of timezone or culture have some private time, I thought I'd post some lists of books I've enjoyed reading on games creation. Awhile ago someone asked on F13 for a good bibliography on game design. Here's my tiny take on it, FWIW. Books I've read on game design (not exclusively about video games) and production. This is *not* meant to be an exhaustive, academic or professional, blogroll-like list of all available resources. These are instead books I actually own and can recommend for anyone interested. For any other amateurs or students who just want a realistic list of good reads.

Now that I'm through Q4 and awaiting fun in the new year on the mothership, I'm flipping through some of them again for relaxation. Several are actually very good for any IT professional, since the lessons of video game pipelines can be translated to any kind of consumer software project (not just entertainment).I'm hosting an xls for anyone who wants the list, without the personal commentary.

Game Design Books

Title	Author	URL	Comments
Designing Virtual Worlds	Bartle, Richard	Link	First published in 2003, this is a very relevant and well written overview of the history, design and implementation issues of virtual worlds, along with some now classic analytic models for their creation, and user expectations and behavior. This is must read for anyone who likes or cares about online gaming and VW's.
Game Design	Bates, Bob	Link	(2004) I haven't finished this yet, but it has a good overview of team dynamics and some excellent resources for students of new game design programs.
Chris Crawford on Game Design	Crawford, Chris	Link	(2003) A book by an another industry pioneer that I need to finish. It's a much more personal book, but has some amazing history (pre-TCP/IP) and I particularly like the war stories.
Game Design Workshop	Fullerton, Tracy; Swain, Christopher; Hoffman, Steven	Link	(2004) This is a terrific book that is very well written and impressively arranged for topics and issues. It presents a lot of the same concepts as other books, but it does so with a logic that allows you to appreciate how simple games can be extremely complex. In other words, it shows how game design (not computer based) is complex and needs to be approached simply and rationally. And yet also enables the novel creation of products that are immediate and satisfactory to play. It gave me the feeling that there's a lot going on that needs to be considered at the micro level of a game before worrying about large scale implementation problems. Also, it has an excellent, superb, set of anecdotes by a range of current and relevant design professionals. I loved those. They could've been a book on their own. Fantastic introduction to the business of being a professional games designer.
Massively Multiplayer Games for Dummies	Jennings, Scott	Link	(2006) By player veteran AKA 'Lum the Mad', Jennings has been a notable figure for online gaming for a decade and change, and provides in this book a really useful overview of MMO's and probably more importantly, a great summary of player culture and user issues. Jennings himself has gone from player to actual designer, and the stories and resources he provides in this book are a great orientation for players as a roadmap of common concepts, presumptions and metaphors of MMO usability.
A Grammar of Gameplay	Koster, Raph	Link	(2005) This is not a book, but a copy of a presentation Koster intends to turn into a larger work. Game Theory is a formalistic discipline, but this work is more about creating a common vocabularly and an analytics (models, measures, descriptors) for the atomic elements of a game. I think it's less about judging games than it is about providing a shorthand for designing and describing them. And thereby to allow those atomic descriptions to be sharred between people.
A Theory of Fun	Koster, Raph	Link	(2005) This is a personal work that introduces a lot of the common concepts of game design and creation, and is more about reflecting on the purpose of games and their value than it is arguing for any theorectical construct. It is more about the praxis of fun and its origins in games and how important they are for pedagogy.
Daedelus Project	Yee, Nick	Link	This is a portal and a series of articles and observations by Standford graduate student Nick Yee. It's useful because it's the most publically available source of data on several player behaviors by scenario and MMO feature. There is trending and discrete analysis. It's worthwhile because the portal is cited so often, and is still current via PlayOn at PARC.
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals	Salen, Katie; Zimmerman, Eric	Link	(2004) I haven't gotten too far into this, but it's a large work that approaches games from a user behavior model. It seems more readable from a cognitive psych or socio background, but this may make it more relevant since so many other books are principally from an implementation point of view.
Character Development and Storytelling for Games	Sheldon, Lee	Link	(2004)This is another work I've also not been able to finish, but might go through this Winter break. It introduces probably well known issues of entertainment writing, or narrative creation for visual media, along with good instructions on common plot and character arc developments. There's an interesting comparison of game genres vs. narrative genres (e.g. shooter, mystery, romance, horror, etc.). This is less about design than development, but surely every game is a narrative in the mind of its designer and this book has some helpful instructions for how to make those stories enjoyable for players.
MUD Dev	various contributors	Link phpBB	I'm not sure if the MUD archives are available anymore, but this is the only URL I could find after asking and looking around for awhile. They are useful to grab because they capture a lot of the early VW discussions by people like Bartle. Most importantly, a lot of the issues that still remain today like economies and RMT, were first discussed and well reviewed on this list. So, I'd like to find them as a good reference. [Feb. 1 Update: new link, with full archives available.  MUD-Dev2 is still alive BTW. Feb.7 Update: now in phpBB]
Terranova	various contributors	Link	This is another portal that is strictly VW focused, and maybe is effectively the successor of MUD-Dev. It's extremely well known and circulated, and while they are not all gems, some of the posts and comments there are very insightful and topical by academics and professional designers. It is more academic, but it's an excellent source for materials and worth monitoring.
The 400 Project Rule List	Barwood, Hal; Falstein, Noah	Link	This last entry is also a portal. It's a list of issues originally from the 2001 GDC that aims to provide "a list of practical rules that can be applied to help create better games, not just abstract observations of similarities among designs, or academic theories with no basis in the craft of game design." It's a great summary and a great insight into current concerns and topics amongst professional designers.
21st Century Game Design	Bateman,Chris;Boon, Richard	Link	[Update Feb.5: I have not read this yet or own a copy, but it's on my list of future reads.]

Video Game Development Books

Title	Author	URL	Comments
The Game Asset Pipeline	Carter, Ben	Link	(2004) I haven't read this yet, but I bought it because I know nothing about art work and other media creation. I do know something about versioning and release management systems. But this seems to be a good overview of the actual technical management involved in creating media and their build/release/test cycles. This is not about creating art works for video games.
The Game Production Handbook	Chandler, Heather	Link	(2006) This is a business-facing book, that provides a good overview of the business lifecycle of a game project and the roles and responsibilities of team members. It's a good overview of the non-technical details of building and releasing a software game. I haven't finished this, but I got it for the sections on voice talent and other parts that are relevant to my daily grind.
Introduction to Game Development	Editor Steve Rabin	Link	(2005) This is large work, a student text book that introduces the common architecture of games and online worlds, along with the team structures and methods of creation for a lot of common tasks in game production. It's more useful as a one-stop resource for learning about video game development than it is learning about implementation details. I've only read parts of it, but I keep it because it's so comprehensive.
The Game Producer's Handbook	Irish, Dan	Link	(2005) This is by far one of the best books on project management I have ever read. I can strongly recommend this book for anyone who works in consumer software. I was a professional project manager for several years, a former PMP back in the day (2001), and frankly most of the resources that exist even now are not adequate or representative of the kinds of businesses, issues and cultures PjM's face with consumer software projects. Too many project management resources are either about "tying-rebar/pouring-concrete" types of problems, or as unrealistically, missile-defense/healthcare/NASA build issues. None of that helps a PjM facing really rapid release cycles and large product launches that go from design/develop/test/releas/support in less than 9 months. This book is a terrific overview of the multiple roles and large responsibility set Game Producers take on. For me, it really resonated with how I have to work in the Mothership, and it gave me some great insights. If I ever run a PMO again, I will have everyone read it.
What Does it Take to Make a Successful Persistent Online World	Koster, Raph; Vogel, Rich	Link	I've added this because although it's a short presentation from the 2001 GDC, it's a nice review of some lessons-learned, but also a useful summary of the features an online service has to have. It's important to note that online video games are first and foremost online services, and thereby have to include unseen processes and infrastructure needed to provide any of the complicated features users expect (e.g. persistent stats or inventories, good connectivity).
Business & Legal Primer for Game Development	Ed.s S. Gregory Boyd, Brian Green	Link	Haven't read this, but CmdrSlack whom I know from Grimwell wrote chapter 4 on IP Law.

Labels: Game Design, MMO, MMORPG

posted by Tide @ Wednesday, December 20, 2006