Your Fall Bookshelf: Must-Reads for Industry Pros

Electronic Gaming Business, July 28, 2004

You've finally made your way through The Da Vinci Code, and you took a noble stab at Bill Clinton's My Life (it just got too wonkish after Oxford), so now it is time to put together that fall reading list of job-related books and articles you should have read last spring. Here is the short list to buy for the company library. What do you mean you don't have a company library?

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game; Noah Wardrip-Rfuin and Pat Harrigan, eds. (MIT Press, $39.95)

At the top of the must-read list this season is a genuine discussion among industry pros and academics about key issues in game design and interactive storytelling. Constructed in a call and response manner, the book includes major essays on the role of story in gaming by Janet Murray and Ken Perlin, on the need for game studies by Markku Eskelinen, and theory by Henry Jenkins and Eric Zimmerman, among many others. Each essay has two responses from the likes of Chris Crawford, Will Wright and Mizuko Ito. The end result is one of the most compact and thorough looks at the state of current thinking across academic and design worlds. Will Wright on "agency": "I think that placing character design and development in the player's hand rather than the designers will lead to a much richer future for this medium." For professionals who really want to think about the next stages of game design, First Person is indispensable.

Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative; Mark Stephen Meadows (Peachpit Press, $45.00)

The former creative director at Stanford's Research Institute, Meadows offers perhaps the most erudite and eclectic approach to visual narrative, pulling in classic art as well as graphic novels and architecture to understand narrative as a way of shaping and distributing information to the user. It is peppered with real world examples from games, comics, art, and Web site design. The latter half of the book has a detailed look at the systematic way Ion Storm went about solving design problems in Deus Ex 2.

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives; Brenda Laurel, ed. (MIT Press, $39.95)

Compiled by Purple Moon co-founder and girl-game innovator Brenda Laurel, this practical guide tries to lay out techniques for researching design. In both theoretical articles and case studies from companies like gamelab, it covers everything from building libraries of games and toys in-house to stimulate creativity among staff, to learning how to research through play and extract design concepts from everyday objects. The book is a trove of real-world practical ideas and resources that will give game development houses loads of shortcuts for solving design issues.

The Video Game Theory Reader; Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds. (Routledge, $24.95)

Between Wolf and Perron's intro and the many references within this baker's dozen of articles, the book is the quickest way to come up to speed on the state of video game studies: who is doing it, what they are thinking, and perhaps how it might apply to design. Henry Jenkins is here, of course, and while Will Wright is absent, Chris Crawford seems to be standing as the industry's representative deep thinker. Of particular interest here are Miroslaw Filiciak's piece on post-modern identities in MMOGs and Crawford's article on how he is trying to create an interactive storytelling model.

Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames, Third Edition; Leonard Herman (Rolenta Press, $24.95)

The third edition of this labor of love brings the history of video gaming up to the year 2000 only. Nevertheless, for the developer or publishers interested in riding the retro-gaming movement, there is no better guide through every console, every magazine and book in the industry's history. From the Odyssey console to the Mattel Power Glove to the Sega 32X, they are all cataloged and pictured. This is critical to every publisher's bookshelf.

Game Art: The Graphic Art of Computer Games; Dave Morris and Leo Hartas (Watson Guptill, $29.95)

While it has been out for nearly a year, Game Art is a rara avis, a book about gaming that actually makes liberal use of game material. From Max Payne to Lara Croft, ICO to sports titles, the book plasters art from a host of recent titles across its pages and then has their designers discuss the decisions that went into the characters and environments. Simple as it may seem, we need to see much more of this in writing about games - the makers discussing what they did and why they did it. Rather than theorize about game making, good authors and academics should be helping the people who make the games become more articulate so that they can be better, more direct conduits of their decision points. This is what moves art forms forward. Look for Morris's new book in a similar vein in October (see sidebar).

Upcoming Video Game Books

* The Art of Game Worlds; Dave Morris and Leo Hartas (Harper Design International, October 2004)

* The Art of Halo: Creating a Visual Masterpiece: Eric Trautmann (Del Rey, Nov. 2004)