The 2004 book parade

Although I've read some 150 books this year (over 60 on health, nutrition and fitness matters -- my new passion), less than a handful have dealt with the game industry.  Yet, in 2004 there's been a storm of books dealing with game design and development, and I've bought them all with the intent of speed reading through most, and going more slowly through the gems.  The stack I have is quite high:

o  Theory of Fun for Game Design -- Raph Koster has written the one I'm looking forward to the most.

o  Game Design (2nd Edition)

o  Digital Storytelling

o  Character Development and Storytelling for Games

o  Interactive Storytelling

o  Creating Emotion in Games -- 3D Realms has worked with the book's author, and I highly recommend his book, the first of its kind for our industry.

o  Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

o  The Encyclopedia of Arcade Video Games -- Beautiful full-color 238-page book that shows pictures of practically all of the arcade machines from the mid-70's through the 80's.

o  Difficult Questions about Video Games -- I was interviewed for this, and managed to answer one question:  "What is gameplay?"

o  Game Design: Theory and Practice (2nd Edition) -- I read the first edition a few years ago, and it was one of the better general game design books.

o  Got Game

o  First Person

o  Half-Life 2:  Raising the Bar -- Not really a game design book, but a look into much that goes into the making of a game, especially from the art and story side.

There's my homework for 2005!  Plus, without doubt there'll be another dozen books that I'll need to keep up with...I'm merely a mouse on a spinning wheel.  It's interesting, IMO, that there are so many books about storytelling.  Could it be that we've crossed a threshold and stories are finally getting the attention given to gameplay, graphics and the GUI?  I hope so.

As I plow through this stack, you'll see mini-reviews on the right side under Recent Reads.  The best of the bunch will get more fuller reviews as blog entries.  I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on the above list if you've read any of them, or if there's any I missed from this year.

Comments

[Alan]

Thanks for this! A lot of those look really great. "The Theory of Fun for Game Design" is one that I'm ordering soon. I'm really interested in it. I didn't even know about that one about Half Life 2, I'll have to check it out.

Thanks again, this is a good list with a few titles that I wasn't even aware of.

[Martin]

Rather off topic, are there any speed reading books you would recommend?

[Mike]

Also off topic: I'm also curious to know how you managed to read all those books. How much of it was skimming versus skipping versus reading?

I noticed Big Beyond Belief on your book list. How long have you been doing it? What do you think?

[Scott Miller]

When I say I "speed read," it means I skim past the stuff I already know, and thoroughly read material I do not know. With health/fitness books, for example, there's a lot of the same material that's repeated in most of the books, especially in the early chapters.

And as I've said before, I will knock out 40+ books a year as audio books that I listen to just driving to work, and running errands. If you haven't gotten into audio books then you have an easy way to increase your learning quotient just by making your drive time useful. Almost all of the fiction books I read, which isn't many per year, maybe 20, is via audio books.

I did Big Beyond Belief for two months, but it's too much of a high volume workout, while I prefer maximum intensity workouts. I'm currently using an "X-rep" workout, from the book, Ultimate Mass Workout. Another book on my list, The New High Intensity Training, will be the workout I start for next year. As you know, switching workouts is a way to prevent your body from adapting to routine. To stimulate muscle growth, you need to keep changing things up and shocking your muscles with new challenges. And while I'm no bodybuilder, muscle growth and maintenance is one of the best preventative measures a person can take for extending a non-feeble lifetime. Just look a Jack LaLanne. ;-)

[Michael Labbe]

Scott, thanks for the book recommendations last year. Specifically, Positioning and Patton on Leadership were both great titles. I mostly read technical books, but I was able to put both of these to great use and it has helped structure and find purpose for my small company.

In addition to those two, here are books I've read this year that I enjoyed (technical books to the end):

- On Writing Well
- Persuasive Business Proposals
- Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things
- Data Structures and Algorithms with OO Design Patterns in C++
- Windows Sockets Network Programming
- TCP/IP Illustrated vol 1
- HTTP: The Definitive Guide

As far as fitness goes, I found The Body Sculpting Bible for Men to be a good reference check on my form for free weight exercises. (Yeah, I make games and I'm a health nut, glad I found your blog!).

[Anders Højsted]

I think the main reason why stories in games finally are getting some attention in gamelitterature, is because so many games look alike. Linear FPSs (or Multiplayer FPS in WW2) are in abundance and they can't really make graphics a distinguishing factor anymore. You have to be really into graphics to see the difference between Halflife 2, Doom 3, Farcry or any of the rest of the bunch. The levels also look the same (sewer, ventilation-shafts, caved-in with monsters, a level where you start without weapons etc.), so they have to look elsewhere. Alongside this someone has finally realized that storytelling is an artform and that a good story takes a helluva lot more then just an idea for a setting, a protagonist, an antagonist and a lot of baddies to kill. Most writers know this, but way too many developers lets everybody pitch in on the story. But why should the head of marketing be allowed to write parts of the story, when he's not allowed to code part of the game?

[Anon]

There aren't many books I can read in two days, which is your average. Were the fitness books all pictures and the remainder all aimed at people younger than fifteen?

[PaG]

[rant]

If games are all starting to feel the same (and they are), then designers shouldn't start to look elsewhere to correct this, they should try to make their games not feel the same. Adding a story to the same old game won't change the fact that's it's full of gameplay clichés. Trying to improve a game with bad gameplay by adding a story is like trying to improve a bad movie by adding bigger special effects -- in the end that's not where the problem is and nothing is solved.

Screenwriting has been battling clichés forever, it's time we do the same with our gameplay. A FPS set in WW2 with a sniper riffle, a machine gun and a rocket launcher in which you kill countless German soldiers in linear levels is a cliché. It's as much a cliché as a chinese movie about a martial artist avenging his master murdered by ninjas. Gameplay clichés are as bad as story clichés -- avoid them both.

[/rant]

[AdamW]

There's other ways to make your drive time (or public transport time, in my case) useful, of course...I fear your intake of music must be slight, Scott :). You'll find me on the train most mornings listening to something either painfully hip or hideously embarrassing (I'm sort of an *either* the Delgadoes *or* Patsy Cline person), while attempting to learn Japanese.

PaG - no, but writing a damn good story into the game from day 1 and making it really part of the game itself is an excellent way to make the gameplay better. The storyline being useless and tacked on three days before the master is pressed is part of the *reason* half the games on the market seem exactly the same.

anon - people read at different speeds. The more you read the faster you'll read, but there'll probably always be people who read faster than you. I can read an average-sized novel (350 hardback pages) in five or six hours, if I like it enough. If I hate it, it'll take a few days.

[Gabby Dizon]

I've gone through the 2nd edition if Game Design: Theory and Practice, and I recommend the book. Richard Rouse has a good grasp of the theories and enough development experience to put meat into the practice part. Plus, there are some really interesting interviews with designers such as Will Wright, Sid Meier, Doug Church and Jordan Mechner.

I'm interested in buying the Difficult Questions About Videogames. Has anyone else here read it?

[Torgo]

I'd recommend "Secrets of the Game Business" and from the year before, "Game Design Perspectives". Especially read the Quality Assurance chapters.

/plug /plug /plug

[Scott Miller]

Those are good books, Targo. There were a lot of good gaming books released in 2003, such as Rules of Play and Chris Crawford on Game Design. Rules of Play is the best yet I've read. It's quite academic in style, but digs deeper into the nature of fun and play than any other book. Possibly Raph's book will bump it from my top spot.

Anon, a lot of the fitness and martial arts books I read DO have a lot of pictures and can be very quickly consumed. Feel better now? But the real key, again, is the audio books, which adds 45-50 to my yearly total. I'm never frustrated by slow traffic anymore. I also loan these audio books out to co-workers and family members, who also love them. My wife is totally hooked on them now, and always has one going in her car.

[Justin]

Pag beat me to it. I was going to say the same. There's a strong focus on game story telling. IMHO story telling is not a weak point in games. There are games with good stories, and people may disagree with my examples: shenmue I and II, Metal Gear Solid 2, San Andreas to an extent. But take away the story from these games, at least the latter, and you are left with good games that were already fun.

IMHO where games should be going is not better stories (although they won't hurt), but more characters on screen, better AI (I don't mean complex AI, I mean believable simple behaviour), and emergent gameplay.

By emergent gameplay I mean giving the player, and the AI, interesting toys that they can play with, and then let the player and the AI between them generate gameplay. This requires a solid game world, where the players expectations of what will happen, will match what they try and do.

I was somewhat dissapointed with HL2, which was a game that in demo form looked like it was going to do that at some level.

[Eric]

"I also loan these audio books out to co-workers and family members, who also love them."

Yes, Scott keeps me hooked up with audio books from time to time. Right now I'm reading Testosterone Inc: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild, something pretty different--The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, and of course Genome War on CD which Scott passed off to me.

Like Scott, I consume quite a few books per year. Here's a growing list, which I need to update soon. :-)

There's quite a few popular science titles. I actually find these to be more stimulating towards game development than game development books themselves. Many other industries have struggled throughout history with the problems currently facing the game industry. It is my hope that in our research we can stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Julien]

Scott, (or anyone else interested)

In you booklist I saw some books like "Guns, germs & steel", "don't know much about geography" and other books about evolution & history.

since I read these books also, i can say that anyone who is in to this should absolutely read

" A short history of nearly everything" from my favourite writer, Bill Bryson.

In this, he gives a extremely comic, though accurate eplanations on how earth and it's continents was formed, how dinosaurs were extincted, how atoms are built, where humans come from, how yellowstonepark was formed and how it can destroy the earth as we know it, how big the universe actually is, how we calculated how old the earth is, what trilobites are etc. etc.

The most comic AND interesting book I ever read.
Anyone who doesn't find it its money worth, will get his money from me :).

[Scott Miller]

Julien, I got the audio version of Bryson's book about a year ago. In fact, Eric above, a co-worker, recommended that one to me and it's absolutely one of the best history/science books I've encountered, and as you said, highly entertaining thanks to Bryson's unique style. I loved his book so much that I went on to listen to ALL of his other books, too, which mostly relate to his travels around the world. Having lived in Australia for five years (my high school years, in the 70's), I loved his tour down under in his book, A Sunburned Country. I also loved his book in which he tackled the Appalachian trail, A Walk Through the Woods. He narrates all of his audio books, and I think it's the best way to get the real flavor and interpretation of his thoughts.

Just finished another superb audio book, Ghost Divers. Totally riveting account of the discovery and exploration of a unknown German U-boat in dangerous deep waters, at the very limit of human dive depths. This is a must read for anyone into German WW2 history and/or scuba diving. This represents the kind of book I love most, in that it is all real life events, but packed with more drama and twists than most fictional stories.

[Anon]

Scott wrote: "I also loved his book in which he tackled the Appalachian trail, A Walk Through the Woods"

I know exactly what you mean. In particular his travelbooks are incredibly funny.
Perhaps some more titles to add to the list on the list over there? ->

no, I don't get a euro/dollar for each book he sells :)

[Gabby Dizon]

Wow, Scott. I just saw a Google ad for your blog. If I may ask, why are you advertising it?

[Scott Miller]

Gabby, I've tried to cancel that ad for six months, but Google won't let me. So I've been having to deny charges on my credit card each month!

I started the ad a week or so after starting the blog, just to build up awareness -- back when I started I was getting maybe 25 hits a day. Those ads are fairly cheap, something like $20 a month. But I'd love to cancel it but Google will not let me log on with my user name and password, and that's the only way to contact them. There appears to be no way to contact them if you cannot log onto your account. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. So, I keep getting free ads, and it just takes a phone call to my credit card month to deny the charge.

[Gabby Dizon]

Interesting!

[Robert Howarth]

Scott,

What are your personal fitness goals?

[Scott Miller]

Robert, that's not quite the right question. The truth is I've already achieved my "fitness" goals, which includes 8% bodyfat, relative high cardio endurance, and substantial muscle for my age (I can squat 340 x 8 reps).

More important to me are my life long health goals. Since the late 90's I've researched all I can regarding supplements and longevity oriented health matters. I take over 150 pills a day, from vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, essential fatty acids, phyto-nutrients, amino acids, and many others that are nearly impossible to get through daily foods.

Of course, this will sound wacky insane to anyone who's not into health and who doesn't understand the importance of supplements. Years ago, too, I thought all you needed was a good multi-vitamin.

But the proof is in the results, and I have a check-up twice a year with a longevity specialist, who measures over 140 vital stats, from hormone production, to inflammatory markers, metal toxicities, cholesterol, vitamin levels, liver function, blood pH level, cellular hydration, diabetes, several cancer markers, and a whole lot more. It's called the Kronos test (http://www.kronoscompany.com), and any doctor can get your blood sample and send it off to this lab if you want. My levels are all at an optimum level, of that of a 32 year old (I'm 43 years old). Another test you can do for yourself is www.RealAge.com. (I scored 33 years old on this.)

People wonder if all of this effort will all pay off. Well, I feel as healthy as I did in my 20's, and I'm as fit as I've ever been in my life. I never get colds, and I'm always complimented for looking younger than I am. Jack Lalanne is something of a role model, as he began exercise and supplements in the 1930's, and at 90 years old he's still very active and as fit as most people in their 50's.

The primary goal is to live a healthy, non-feeble life. Longevity is entirely secondary, though I expect to reach 100 without any problem if I keep this up. My primary concern to to stay active and independent for as long as possible.

I've gotten several of my friends and family members on a similar program, and my father, for example, who used to be on statin drugs for cholesterol after having a mild heart attack a few years ago (he's 68), is off those drugs and his doctor is shocked at my dad's improved heart condition, with a reversal of plaque and a cholesterol level well below 200. His heart doctor doesn't understand the value of the supplements I put my dad on, but he says it worked a miracle and to keep on doing whatever it is he's doing. Nowadays, my dad hikes and climbs the tallest mountains in the USA.

It's just more fun being fit and healthy.

[:)]

150 books a year :O, I kan only read about 1,5 a year. :( I'm never getting in the games industry :(

[Robert Howarth]

Scott,

I didn't know you were that_into it. :)

I was a amateur body builder for around twelve years; now I just hit the gym a few times a week to do cardio, stretch and casually lift. I gave up on the whole extreme diet/lifestyle part of it, but I still eat 'relatively' well and take suppliments. I'm not 8% bodyfat anymore (grin), but after a couple years break I might get back into it again.

The Joe Wieder books are really good if you're into the whole getting pumped up lifestyle.

As far as longevity goes, a lot of that has to do with genetics. Although living well seems to work well for you. :)

[AdamW]

"But the proof is in the results, and I have a check-up twice a year with a longevity specialist, who measures over 140 vital stats, from hormone production, to inflammatory markers, metal toxicities, cholesterol, vitamin levels, liver function, blood pH level, cellular hydration, diabetes, several cancer markers, and a whole lot more. It's called the Kronos test (http://www.kronoscompany.com), and any doctor can get your blood sample and send it off to this lab if you want. My levels are all at an optimum level, of that of a 32 year old (I'm 43 years old). Another test you can do for yourself is www.RealAge.com. (I scored 33 years old on this.)"

Scott, I hate to sound like a cynic, but do your longevity specialist and the Kronos company by any chance sell any of these wonderful pills whose results they measure and validate? :)