THEORY
Background reading for people interested in what games are and what they do.

Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
What this book lacks in length it makes up for in insights; there’s wisdom on every page. Steven Poole is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who understands not only how games work but what they mean, culturally, psychologically, and technically. Poole looks back over our achievements (though this is not a history book) and tells us not only how they came about but what they did for our games and our players. Best of all, he does it with wit and clarity. If you have a smart but unenlightened relative who doesn’t understand why you make games, give Trigger Happy to him or her. And read it yourself, too – it might just tell you why you make games.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi’s work was a milestone in psychological research and speaks directly to the game-playing experience. He was the first to really study the feeling of being “in the groove,” whether at physical or mental tasks—the exhilarating feeling of high productivity. That feeling is exactly what the best games create in their players. The book is unnecessarily wordy and has a tendency to say the same thing three times; aside from that, it’s an important contribution to our understanding of how challenges create pleasure.

Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
This huge hardback tome from MIT Press examines games – all kinds, not just videogames – from many perspectives: as systems of rules, as sources of play, as cultural artifacts. Comprehensive and scholarly in the traditions of Huizinga and Caillois (mentioned later), this is serious reading for advanced students of games.

 

Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
Jesper Juul is one of the more prolific and readable young academics to have come on the scene in recent years. His latest book examines the complex relationship between rules, which create gameplay, and fiction, which creates fantasy worlds. Computers give us the power, unavailable in most other game forms, to weave them together to create a unified experience. This is for people interested in interactive stories; it’s not for modders or designers of casual, arcade-like Web games.

Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
Videogames suffer badly from the cultural divide between the sciences and the humanities. As an entertainment medium, we belong with the humanities, but our roots are in technology and too often we judge the quality of a game on the basis of its technological rather than its aesthetic merits. Bogost seeks to bridge this gap by providing a method of analysis that marries literary theory to information theory. To achieve their rightful place as an art form, games require a body of criticism, and this book is an important step in that direction.

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