But I do want to examine a common takeaway from both: the idea that games are primarily valuable due to the emotional responses they evoke and the experiences they engender in their players. Two of them, however, stand out especially to me: Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Designand Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken.Īny summary I offer here of either of these books is going to fall wildly short of the mark, so I'm not going to even attempt to generalize what either is about. There are several, obviously, and if you asked ten different people in R&D you'd probably get ten different answers. I'm often asked what are the best game design books I've ever read. And we in R&D do our best to keep our fingers on the pulse. In other words, the volume of information out there about game design is proliferating at an incredible rate. Nowadays, the principles of game design are being applied to fields as diverse as policy analysis, applied biochemistry, developmental psychology, and education. We've come a long way from sixteen-pixel spaceships and line-dancing aliens. Recently I spoke at a high school career fair? study hard, eat your vitamins, topdeck savagely?and was absolutely floored to see the results of the survey where the principal asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. In truth, though, the field of game design is exploding. But we don't really say very much about game design more broadly. Often here at, we talk about the process of making Magic. Occasionally, at some kind of conference or expo or gathering or what-have-you, somebody asks me to take off my goofy Magic-developer-dragon hat (you should check it out sometime?it's sorta like Mickey's in Fantasia, only 'edgier,' in accordance with our style guide) and speak in broader strokes about game design as an intellectual discipline.

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