DESIGN PRACTICE
Practical considerations of designing games for sale.

Fundamentals of Game Design, by Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings
MOSIMAGE Full disclosure: I’m one of the authors of this book, so I’m not unbiased. I’ve included it because, so far as I know, it’s the only comprehensive and practical book on pure videogame design for the commercial market. A lot of game design books try to combine design with coding or 3D modeling, which can’t do full justice to either subject. This is a university-level textbook intended for use in undergraduate game design courses. It teaches an approach called player-centric game design, which is related to Donald Norman’s user-centered design discussed in his book The Design of Everyday Things (farther down).

21st Century Game Design, by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon
In contrast to the player-centric approach of Fundamentals, Bateman and Boon introduce a new and valuable way of looking at audience models, which they call demographic game design. The first half of the book applies the famous Meyers-Briggs personality typology to gamers and identifies their preferred styles of play, enabling designers to plan around them. The second half applies these principles to several design issues such as user interface design, game world abstraction, the role of the avatar, and different game structures. This isn’t a competitor to Fundamentals, but a valuable complementary work, which is why I wrote the introduction for it.

Gender-Inclusive Game Design, by Sheri Graner Ray
Seven or eight years ago there was a burst of enthusiasm for 'games for girls.' Publishers turned out a variety of low-budget games in pink boxes which sensible girls, quite rightly, wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Graner Ray suggests a better approach. Women are not a genre but a market, she argues – a large and diverse market more easily characterized by what it doesn’t like (e.g. violence without context) than what it does. This book offers a number of useful suggestions about how to make games that don’t turn women off. Not 'games for girls,' but 'games for everybody, women included.' Essential reading.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
This is the first time someone has specifically addressed the question of what fun is and how we create it. I don’t agree with everything Koster says, but A Theory of Fun is an important and valuable book. His thesis is that much of fun comes from learning and mastery and creating opportunities for players to achieve them. There’s much more than that here, too, about brains, and ethics, and children, and the discomfort older people feel with younger people’s preferred forms of fun. Written in a light, personal style, Koster takes us easily into complex issues, but never becomes prescriptive or dogmatic.

Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, by Chris Crawford
This is simply the best book ever written about core mechanics—the data and equations that make a game work. Balance of Power was a game in which you took the side of the United States or the Soviet Union and tried, through various international machinations, to increase your country’s prestige at the expense of the other guys. The game was a hit twenty years before the current vogue for serious games, and Crawford wrote this book to explain how it works. Concisely and readably, with lots of great examples from history, he discusses the theory of geopolitics and how he turned that theory into the mathematics behind the game. The book is out of print, but copies are still available on the Internet. Don’t confuse it with the game itself, which was sold in a book-like cover. The book’s ISBN is 0914845977.

Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky
Edutainment got a bad name a few years ago, but this book has helped to restore it to credibility. Concentrating more on corporate training rather than children’s classrooms, Prensky offers practical advice on replacing the dreaded three-ring-binder with games that will stimulate and engage people, making them want to learn – which is the key to all successful teaching. A Harvard MBA, he’s got the data to back up his points, offering examples from companies such as H&R Block, Eli Lilly, General Motors, and Pepsico.

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