Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

When I first picked up the physical copy of this book, I was hoping Sylvester would be telling us about designing virtual worlds. Then the opening chapter informed me that fun in games is derived from emotionally manipulating the players. That's not the kind of game I want to play or make, so I rejected the book. Years later, I finally made the time to skim the rest of it in digital form, and found a long lecture about many general concepts of game design. It's not a bad rundown, there is a surprising amount of breadth here based on perfectly reasonable conclusions. But, as he says at the end of the book, "This is a book of models and hypotheses, not realities and truths." Much like typecasting games as emotional manipulation apparatus was technically accurate but not fully representative of all games, everything Sylvester lays out here is just one way of looking at it. Its authorative tone works against it somewhat, sounding like the realities and truths he warns us this isn't.

I'm trying to formulate my lifetime passion as a player into a career developing games and this is the single most important resource I've found. Tynan, you're a gamedev hero dude.

This is a great overview of what it takes to design a game. It covers a lot of ground and is very well thought-out. I think the perspective it game me will be useful while I read about specialized topics such as story development and game mechanics.