I must say The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell

http://artofgamedesign.com/bio/

If you think this talk http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Bo...

is good you should really read the book. Great stuff.

Too bad this comment is too down, but The Art Of Game Design is a fantastic book about design and user experience, even if you're not into games, there's some interesting psychology to learn and to apply in whatever you're doing.

The art of game design: Even if you're not aspiring to be a game dev, this book teaches you a lot about project scope, management, psychology, mechanics, balance and user experience.

Flight of the buffalo: An excellent book about leadership.

Moneyball: I'm not into novels, so this might be the closest thing to it. It's a fantastic book about thinking creatively and working with what you have. It's about baseball, but even if you don't like it, it's quite entertaining and insightful.

Might be a bit advanced or too academic, but The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell is a great resource that really goes into the art and science of designing "fun" experiences.

A bit of a classic, I found Jesse Schell's book, The Art of Game Design very helpful. The paradigm he constructs for how all the elements of game design fit together helped me approach game design from angles (or lenses as he calls them) I hadn't considered before.

I'd add:
- Rules of Play http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rules-play
- Challenges for Game Designers http://books.google.com/books/about/Challenges_for_Game_Desi...
- The Art of Game Design http://artofgamedesign.com/

For me, I had a few that I really liked:

* The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. Probably one of the best books I've read, even for people who don't want to make games, it was really good.

* Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. One of the better business books I've read through. Also one of the most creative.

And I finally read:

* The C Programming Language by K&R. 'nuff said.

Jesse Schell's "the art of game design". It will give you a solid understanding of what game design is and how you can do it. Also, it's a very good read, which doesn't hurt when you're trying to learn something.

I disagree strongly with the advice consisting of: "start hacking and see what happens". For any kind of product design, starting something without any kind of direction is the surest way to go nowhere.

Your analysis of the last paragraph of the article seems pretty spot on. Kudos!

But I'm nitpicky; the distinguishing feature of games isn't interactivity, otherwise every fun activity with interactivity would be a game, and I'm not sure conversations are normally included when we speak of "games" in this way. Games have rules, and often some kind of goal, and other things. The Art of Game Design (a book by Jesse Schell) kind of roughly approximates it by describing games as a kind of activity involving problem-solving and fun. If I'm not taking actions specifically chosen towards achieving a result ("problem-solving"), then I don't feel like I'm playing a game, even if there's some interactivity.

So I'd say that the key towards quality game experiences lies more in the region of providing options to the player (actions they can take) that have an effect on the game world (resulting conversation, successful quicktime scene, dead goblin, shiny new sword, whatever!) where which option is taken lands the player in a different distance from various desirable goals ("solution" being what the player did to get there).

But there's still a lot of fuzzyness, and it's still very hard to even judge what parts of what games are quality experiences for who and when, and especially why. You have it completely right that we can't just say it's "real sandbox simulation, autonomous agents and language-capable AI", and that lasting choices aren't the One True Way.

There is a thing that engineers do in all disciplines, not just game programming, where they wallow in how complex and difficult everything is. Yes, it's complex and difficult, but you need to look for ways to simplify and succeed.

The author should remember his insightful caption under Phil Collins' picture:

> Step One is a positive attitude. You have to believe you can escape!

I'm not denying that making games is complex. The things I've written for games are indeed complex and challenging. But once you start writing essays about how difficult and impossible everything is, you're not headed to a happy place.

Boiling things down to their essence, and eliminating the fancy alien hats in the articles example is crucial. Developing a mastery for how to succeed takes time and experience, but it can happen.

If you're interested in game design, here is something that will inspire you and fill you with ideas of how you can succeed. The book below took me forever to read the first time. That's because every few pages I couldn't resist putting it down and working on my designs because I was so overwhelmed with inspiration from its amazing wisdom. The book is the Art of Game Design, and it's one of my most prized books.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Lenses-Second/dp/1466...

Another vitally important book about chasing your dream without getting bogged down in complexity and unhappy places is The Alchemist. It's a short parable, full of life changing wisdom, a little like The Old Man and the Sea.

https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0061122416

The alchemist is available on audible too, but you'll want it in text as well.

Doesn’t hurt to jump start that loop iteration by taking in some principles and interrogations.

Two little books that can help:

1. From A Theory of Fun book blurb:

“A Theory of Fun for Game Design is not your typical how-to book. It features a novel way of teaching interactive designers how to create and improve their designs to incorporate the highest degree of fun. As the book shows, designing for fun is all about making interactive products like games highly entertaining, engaging, and addictive.”

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1932111972/

2. See also The Art of Game Design:

”Over 100 sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design. Written by one of the world's top game designers, this book describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design, demonstrating how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in video games. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.“

https://smile.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Lenses-Third/dp/113...

This is a nice article, but I don't really like the ending. "Everything is really complicated, so don't try to predict it or think about it too hard" isn't a particularly uplifting message, and there's not even much reason to think that it's true. Perhaps it's a mistake to generalise too much from the success of a few companies, but if we're not trying to generalise at all, what hope do we have of improvement?

I'd like to quote from a really fantastic book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, a section called "Waiting for Mendeleev":

Unfortunately, at present, there is no “unified theory of game design,” no simple formula that shows us how to make good games. So what can we do?

We are in a position something like the ancient alchemists. In the time before Mendeleev discovered the periodic table, showing how all the fundamental elements were interrelated, alchemists relied on a patchwork quilt of rules of thumb about how different chemicals could combine. These were necessarily incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and often semi-mystical, but by using these rules, the alchemists were able to accomplish surprising things, and their pursuit of the truth eventually led to modern chemistry. [...]

I wish we had one all-seeing lens. We don’t. So, instead of discarding the many imperfect ones we do have, it is wisest to collect and use as wide a variety of them as possible, for as we will see, game design is more art than science, more like cooking than chemistry, and we must admit the possibility that our Mendeleev will never come.

Game design wise, the best are:

- The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell: http://amzn.to/zFOiEk

It's pretty comprehensive, but I found it a bit "heads in the cloud" and not very hands on. The lenses give you some hands-on approach if you apply them though. If you are looking for a book with very specific "how-to-do-this-or-that" then it may not be your thing.

I like to pair this book with David Perry on Game Design: http://amzn.to/ytXF7G

That monster tomb is all hands-on and You can use it more like a cheatsheet:"OK I need a villain. Let me turn to the 'villain archetypes' section and pick one at random. OK he needs a weapon. Let me turn to the 'rifles' section and pick one at random" and so on.

I also really liked "Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design" by Scott Rogers: http://amzn.to/xuVjWU

It is the book I recommend to budding game developers because it is sort of like "Art of Game Design" lite. It covers most of the same topics but don't go into such an intellectual depth which is a GOOD thing for people just wrapping their heads around what game design is. Once they finish that, I move them to Schell's book.

Cheers

Frankly it made me feel like I'm not smart enough much of the time. But trying not to let that bother me, I plowed ahead anyway. I found quite a few things actually quite mind expanding. His exposition about infinite recursion was worth the price of admission alone. A small segment of that is here: http://amberbaldet.com/uploads/little-harmonic-labrynth.html

Another book which I did find truly transformative include "The Art of Game Design" by Jessie Schell. Also Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, is also a very worthwhile mind-broadening scientific read. A New Kind of Science by Wolfram is also quite a bit of fun.

But by far my most prized techie book is Genetic Programming, by the legendary John Koza (if you're not a Lisp person like I wasn't when I read this, then you really need to read it!). Braid and all of the books I mentioned have something in common: They are all fat, heavy, meaty, thought-provoking tomes.

I would put "The Art of Game Design" at the front of the bookshelf of anyone that does game design work: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Game-Design-lenses/dp/01236949.... To me, this is the most valuable book I have on my bookshelf. Every time I pick it up, I scarcely read more than a few pages before I'm setting the book down to make a bunch of notes for new ideas I've had. The book is truly outstanding and practical, and will help give you a framework for figuring out what you want our game to be.

I've been developing games independently now for several years. Easily the most difficult part is the design. Merely implementing the game-- if only that was my biggest challenge!

An alternative approach to creating a game is to ask yourself a series of questions (paraphrased from [1]):
* Who are the likely players?
* What are their motivations for playing?
* What are their objectives in the game?
* What does the game world look like?
* What are the mechanics by which the player interacts with the world to achieve those objectives?
* What makes the objectives, world and mechanics compelling to the player?

Not to start with the development stack…

[1] The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Schell

There was a similar article a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128216), where I defended the cinematic approach as well. The argument mostly isn't against cinematic narrative, but against badly executed cinematic narrative. In the book "The Art of Game Design", the author explains that a game should be an experience designed for the player. And as you say, the form in which this experience is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the experience.