I read this book a few years back when I was interested in making games as a hobby.
I think it's a good one-stop source for game design. If you had to read one single book on game design, it should be this one, as it covers many topics far and wide. I particularly love the blend of academic focus and industry/professional experience that the authors instil into it.
On the other hand, the book is overly verbose and sometimes beats around the bush before making a point.
Finally the Commissioned games chapters are fantastic. The authors ask a professional game designer to create a game based on a set of restrictions, and then these write up the process that they went through.
For completeness I include a 1 sentence review of other game design books:
A Theory of Fun for Game Design: It probably won't blow away your world, but it is such a quick and fun book that you might as well give it a go.
Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers: The premise is simple, each chapter briefly explains a game design concept, and then offers a set of design challenges that the reader has to go through. I love the conciseness of each chapter, opposed to the verbosity of Rules of Play. Be warned though, if you don’t do the design challenges in the book, you are missing over 90% of the point.
Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design: This book is much more applied and specific that, say, Rules of Play. It gives concrete and actionable advise on specific design challenges. On the other hand some is lost with such a narrow focus. For instance, much of the advise is oriented towards very specific genres of games.
The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses: On this book Jesse Schell analyses game design from a different ‘lens’ on each chapter. The book contains a blend of theoretical analysis and practical experience. Maybe it’s biggest weakness is that it is still limited by the experiences of a single author. Overall a very round and well balanced book.
Game Design Workshop: Having read the other books I didn’t feel this one brings anything particular to the table. It is another all-in-one book whose content is covered to some extent by any other of the previous books. The Designer perspective sections on each chapter are quite interesting.
I've been seeking exactly one of these concepts to understand how people can interact with a limited system and yet still find it engaging: lusory attitude from Suit's 1978 book "The grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia". Thanks!
Does anyone have any insight into if there are some good tips to be pulled from game design into the more broad category of design? I'm a CS student, and while I don't have any interest in becoming a game developer, I have an interest in design in general. I'm currently attempting to adopt a more user-centric model of how I perceive development and I imagine there is some overlap between game design and other design.
>Does anyone have any insight into if there are some good tips to be pulled from game design into the more broad category of design? ... while I don't have any interest in becoming a game developer, I have an interest in design in general.
I recommend you learn the particulars of a specific sort of design first. Games would be a good starting point.
In general, learning something in general means you've learned a lot of the particulars. If you want to study X, the really hard bits of X, the interesting bits of X, you need other people to bring them to you. They need to know "you're the guy" to turn to when they have a problem in the field of X. In order to do that, you need to establish yourself as particularly skilled in some aspect of X, and preferably more than one aspect of X.
Let's take another particular, my specialty, pathology. I have a colleague who is really interested in skin diseases. She will never see all the skin diseases herself in her regular, 2000 cases/year practice. No one will. Some of these diseases are 1 in a million. The numbers aren't going to work out.
But she read all the books and she established a reputation within her department as being really interested in skin. So other pathologists brought her their interesting skin cases and their hard skin cases. Then she did a fellowship in dermatopathology. And then even more people sent her cases, people she met in training, at conferences, got her name in an article, whatever. FedEx overnight, "Dear Dr. Y, this 27 year old man is in our ICU, his immune system appears to be destroying all the skin around his new red tattoo, down to muscle. We obtained this biopsy. What do you think it is?"
Eventually, she'll get enough cases to write her own book on immune diseases of the skin. And maybe, maybe, if she's really good, and works for a very long time, and really likes writing, she'll write her own general textbook of dermatopathology.
To write her own general textbook of pathology, well, that happens once in a generation.
To write a widely accepted textbook of pathology that all physicians will read, well, that's essentially unheard of. The greatest minds in each subfield collaborate to write that book and struggle to get an update out every 3-5 years.
A field so broad as design ... my goodness, to be the recognized general expert in such a vsat field, it would seem to me, verges on impossible. Surely you will need to focus on something....
I'm still a CS student so I'm not quite yet ready to specialise. Late last year I went through the Gang of Four book on design patterns in software development. The patterns described in this text are widely applicable to most/all forms of software development. Reading this book was making me immediately see where I'd previously struggled and that there was already elegant solutions.
My question, in regard to game design, is what principles from this field could be widely adopted, or adapted in other subfields?
You have now a knowledge of a range of tools. What takes a long time, in any craft, is to know the canonical way to use each tool. Then, after an even longer time, you come to know when to use tools in surprising ways.
It just takes time, for all of us. Some are faster, but I bet for these people it still feels like a long time, just because they are sooo smart and see even more possibilities.
Thanks for writing this very insightful comment. Unfortunately, many people will never read it since it is not a “hot” submission. Many years ago, I met with a primary care doctor who explained to me how presenting at conferences is a signal (and perhaps driver) of the doctor’s reputation. He says that it goes: local then regional then national then international. He was working on his regional reputation in his speciality (not primary care, I believe he was a resident).
Game design allows for a rich exploration of design from a philosophical standpoint.
That is, while most games are utilitarian products first(just as most architecture is made to be inhabited and most software is made to be used) the premise of a "game world" or "magic circle" shares something in common with any fiction - that the contents can be decided in a pragmatic fashion, with arbitrary rules.
Most game designs use this power timidly, just reproducing an existing rule set with a new scenario and more product features, but the most engaging stuff aligns all elements towards a coherent concept[0].
And the real tension of game design comes from the negotiation of what the player thinks the game is about(e.g. "what do I do in this game") and what the resulting product actually enables or encourages. Where we recognize "progress" in games it's generally along the lines of shifts from completely symbolic ideas(e.g. lives, score, turn taking) towards fine-grained representations with fast feedback that corresponds to our expectation of reality(texture mapped 3D, immersive VR, physics sims, etc.), but there's a toolbox of symbolic ideas that tends to stick around regardless.
I think it's a good one-stop source for game design. If you had to read one single book on game design, it should be this one, as it covers many topics far and wide. I particularly love the blend of academic focus and industry/professional experience that the authors instil into it.
On the other hand, the book is overly verbose and sometimes beats around the bush before making a point.
Finally the Commissioned games chapters are fantastic. The authors ask a professional game designer to create a game based on a set of restrictions, and then these write up the process that they went through.
For completeness I include a 1 sentence review of other game design books:
A Theory of Fun for Game Design: It probably won't blow away your world, but it is such a quick and fun book that you might as well give it a go.
Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers: The premise is simple, each chapter briefly explains a game design concept, and then offers a set of design challenges that the reader has to go through. I love the conciseness of each chapter, opposed to the verbosity of Rules of Play. Be warned though, if you don’t do the design challenges in the book, you are missing over 90% of the point.
Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design: This book is much more applied and specific that, say, Rules of Play. It gives concrete and actionable advise on specific design challenges. On the other hand some is lost with such a narrow focus. For instance, much of the advise is oriented towards very specific genres of games.
The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses: On this book Jesse Schell analyses game design from a different ‘lens’ on each chapter. The book contains a blend of theoretical analysis and practical experience. Maybe it’s biggest weakness is that it is still limited by the experiences of a single author. Overall a very round and well balanced book.
Game Design Workshop: Having read the other books I didn’t feel this one brings anything particular to the table. It is another all-in-one book whose content is covered to some extent by any other of the previous books. The Designer perspective sections on each chapter are quite interesting.