Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

Getting to Yes: Negotiation Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury Much of real game design is about negotiation. Nobody cares how good your analysis is if you can’t constructively compromise with others to get it implemented. The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and in Life by Avinash K. Dixit an

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee Story is the best guide to basic story craft I’ve found. Ostensibly it’s about screenwriting, but the book’s lessons about story structure are broadly applicable. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell Schell’s an experienced game designer who

The Sims invented its own genre and sold a hundred million copies. Half-Life and Counter-Strike revolutionized first-person storytelling and combat. Dwarf Fortress procedurally builds fantasy worlds with politics, economics, and history. Braid threads poetry into game mechanics. Minecraft unlocked the joyful creativity of millions. And as you read

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At the same time, Langley and others were also deploying their resources, but in the wrong ways. Most of them focused on building more powerful engines. Engine design was a well-established field at the time, so money could easily be invested in making better engines. The Wrights, however, understood that the missing piece wasn’t engine power. It w

One strategy for harnessing unconscious rumination is to alternate work on different problems. While working on one task, our unconscious ruminates on the other. This is why Edison, Darwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and van Gogh all worked on multiple projects at the same time.

Match your ambition to your resources. Leading a large development team, you could attempt one unique value, two superior values, and a smattering of inferior values to round out the experience. On a smaller team, you might have to focus on just one value to the exclusion of all else. Because it’s better to be the best at one thing than it is to be

The purest example of minimalism-driven apophenia is the toy Rory’s Story Cubes. The Story Cubes are nine dice covered with cartoon pictures of sheep, lightning bolts, and other random images. Players roll the dice, look at the pictures, and make up a story that links them together. At first, it sounds absurd to try to link together pictures of a t