INSPIRATIONS
This last category includes books that aren’t about games, for the most part. Instead, these are works that have inspired us and whose influence can be felt in many games. They have helped to make the game industry what it is today – for good and, sometimes, for ill as well.

 

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Even if you can’t stand elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons and the whole swords-n-sorcery premise, you cannot fully understand gamers and the game industry without at least a passing acquaintance with this book. Tolkien borrowed from Nordic and Teutonic myth to create an adventure story, and in fact a whole universe, so rich that it founded a genre and set a standard for all time to come. I’ve long said that the purpose of video games is to take you away to wonderful places and let you do amazing things and that forms the basis for literally thousands of games. If any one book can be said to embody the adventurous spirit of video games, it’s this one.

Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors
Enthusiasts will argue endlessly about which edition of this book is the best one, but for our purposes it doesn’t much matter. The Lord of the Rings gave us our most popular fantasy worlds; Dungeons & Dragons turned us loose in those worlds and let us play there.  By creating a workable set of mechanics for tabletop role-playing games, D&D also laid the groundwork for a quarter-century of computerized RPGs. Although the computer now allows rapid and complex calculations that no tabletop RPG could afford most CRPGs still owe a great deal to D&D. Read and learn.

Star Trek, originated by Gene Roddenberry
I’m cheating: Star Trek isn’t a book but a television series. We now take Star Trek’s strengths for granted while making fun of its weaknesses, so it’s easy to forget how groundbreaking the show really was when it premiered 40 years ago. Star Trek had female astronauts long before NASA did. Aliens who were allies and even friends; an anti-war ethos in a military setting; even the shape of the spacecraft was revolutionary. The show inspired unlicensed games written on mainframes before the microprocessor was even invented, because what programmer didn’t want to take command of the Enterprise? Star Wars has arguably spawned more games, but Star Trek was seminal. What Tolkien did for fantasy games, Roddenberry did for science fiction games.

The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
This isn’t the first techno-thriller ever written, nor necessarily the best, but it’s the strongest of Tom Clancy’s works and epitomizes an attitude that underlies the military vehicle sim genre: cool hardware is fun, especially when yours is the most powerful! Whether in a plane, a tank, a submarine, or a fictional contraption like a battlemech, players love duking it out with the enemy in big machines loaded with weapons and other gadgets. The Hunt for Red October captures that spirit.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
On the surface, Watchmen is a typical comic-book tale of a mysterious super-powerful megalomaniac who threatens the Earth; but this has to be one of the most multilayered comics ever written. It’s a rich, complex work filled with three-dimensional people experiencing grown-up problems. It both celebrates and critiques its own form, asking questions such as, "What would it actually be like to be the lover of a super-hero? What happens when super-heroes are real people with human strengths and weaknesses? Might it not be true that they cause more trouble than they prevent?" Watchmen is inspiring because it does something that games are still striving to do: provide a brilliant counterexample to claims that its medium is only capable of triviality.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell was a folklorist who studied the structure of great myths and tales of adventure from all over the world. In this book he describes the elements of that structure and proposes theories for the psychological and social purposes that they might serve. He shot to prominence when George Lucas admitted that he used Campbell’s ideas to create the original Star Wars story, and writers ever since then have (unfortunately) been treating the Hero’s Journey as a template for creating new stories. Whether or not you agree with Campbell’s analysis, the Hero’s Journey is an enormously valuable structure for videogame stories because it concentrates on a single person meeting a series of challenges.

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray
Hamlet on the Holodeck is about the potential of interactive storytelling. As it’s eight years old, some of what she describes has already come to pass, but other ideas are still centuries off. Murray has written an enjoyable, lucid, and inspiring look at the possible future of videogames. Amid the endless moaning about development costs, murderous schedules, evil retailers and censorship, Hamlet on the Holodeck reminds us of why we’re here: to fulfill the promise of our medium.

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