You know what?   I’ve spent hours trying to write this review;  trying to figure out how I’m going to preserve my precious journalistic integrity while reviewing Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses.    I’ve been looking for ways to pan it, to do what all good critics do: critique... I can’t.  This is unequivocally the best book on game design I’ve ever read.

So why would I want to pan it?  Because I credit Jesse Schell with being the man who taught me everything I know about usability, and this is his book.  Mea culpa. 

I’m scrapping my staid and academic review and am just going to give it to you plain truth.

First off...

You know what I hate about most game design books?  They have no real vector for how to teach game design.  It’s not their fault:  game design is an enormous subject.  Moreover it’s a non-linear subject.  There is no beginning and no end to ‘game design’.  

A Book of Lenses just plain does it right.  Each chapter starts by explaining how it follows from the last and then repeatedly ties in to all of the other previous chapters.  Hell, every chapter even begins with a flowchart of how all the topics previously covered interrelate.   Really, what more can you ask than that?

Second, it’s not an academic text 

Many of you know I lugged Rules of Play around the country for years (and love that book), but it’s so dense.  It’s really an external, academic, dissection of game design.  It is, in the end, a text book.  A Book of Lenses on the other hand is a conversation, a conversation held directly with the reader.  The entire book addresses ‘you’.  This tact simply makes the book so much more approachable than many similar books I’ve read.  It also places much greater personal responsibility on the reader.  It asks you, the reader, to be an active participant in the conversation.

Third, it embraces the novice game designer without being written for the novice game designer.

In reading through A Book of Lenses it is easy to see Jesse carefully constructing the learning curve of his book.  From the beginning it has a great deal of value for the journeyman or veteran game designer, while still enabling the novice to participate just as fully.  I believe anyone could pick up A Book of Lenses and get a great deal from it if they were interested in game design.  Simply put, it has something for everyone.

For the novice it presents an accessible, well ordered introduction to game design.  It gives the reader a broad overview and sets them up with a series of practical tools that will speed them along their path as a game designer.    Does that mean that the true neophyte game designer will understand everything in the book?  Probably not (see the next paragraph).  Is it important?  Not really.  I think this is a book that a person can return to many times and, perhaps more importantly, I believe the conversational style of the book helps instill the single most important thing for anyone starting down a new path:  ‘the ghost voice of the teacher’, that nagging voice that reminds you of something that you previously didn’t understand at precisely the moment you need it.

For the journeyman game designer the book forces a deep examination of ones notions about game design.  There are many passages in A Book of Lenses which I as a novice game designer I would have taken as “a bunch of hippy bullshit”.  These were the passages which most profoundly affected me. 

Jesse draws from all arenas and walks of life to assemble the Book of Lenses.  He discuss the thoughts of everyone from Salvador Dali to Friedrich Von Kekule, bring in ideas from sources ‘completely outside’ the field of game design to subtly reinforce the multi-disciplinary nature of game design.  This forces the intermediate game designer to take a step back and remember that nothing is irrelevant; nothing is unrelated to the field of game design.

It is this that makes me believe I have finally entered the journeyman phase of my career...

For the wizened master it provides them with a deck of cards.  Yes, that’s right, I said, “A deck of cards.”  Perhaps the most important and powerful aspect of A Book of Lenses is that it comes with one of the most incredible game design tools I’ve seen.   Throughout the book are scattered one hundred “lenses”, sentence long thoughts on game design followed by a series of questions for the reader to ask about their game, these lenses have been attached to illustrated cards so that a game designer has easy access to them at all times.   Every time I’m struggling with a game design problem I shuffle up the deck and deal myself some questions until I find the one that gets me past my design hurtle. It hasn’t failed me yet. 

This deck of cards is, by itself, worth the price of the book.

Fourth, a practical book from an industry perspective

For all of its tangential interconnections and musings on philosophy, A Book of Lenses makes no secret of the fact that it is a book about practical game design.  This is where much of its strength comes from. 

Often books offering practical tips about game design fall into the trap of giving advice that is not universal.  They end up offering advice that is only applicable to certain types of games.  Worse still, this advice is often presented as a series of universal truths.  A Book of Lenses does a fantastic job establishing what is fundamental to all games and focuses on those aspects of game design.  Additionally, where it strays from the universal it makes this fact very explicit.

Are there things wrong with it?

Of course.

 It demands a lot from the reader.  Clocking in at 512 pages it is by no means a short book.  Jesse has clearly chosen cohesion over brevity.  I think this was absolutely the right choice in this case but A Book of Lenses is simply not a weekend’s read.  On the plus side it’s full of pretty pictures...

A Book of Lenses also demands that its reader be fully engaged when reading.  The book insists that you think about it.  Jesse makes this explicit in many places; often going so far as to say things like, “You might not agree with these definitions – if that’s the case, then good for you!  It means you are thinking.”  Of course there are many places where this isn’t made explicit.  If you are looking for a book that will just tell you answers this simply isn’t it but, if you are willing to actively engage and put in the effort to understand, this book will teach you not only about game design in general but about how you approach game design.

Concluding Thoughts
If you are this far in this article you should just go buy the book.  If you’re willing to put the effort in it will repay you tenfold.