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NOTE: UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Many links are to be added as I go through my and my friends' bookmarks and suggestions.
Here I provide my personal 'must read' list for anyone studying game design theory. Unlike the rest of the annotated links section, the order here is not arbitrary. Nothing that I would call a systematic theory of game design currently exists, in the way that systematic approaches to biology or even creative writing exist. But the closest would be the complete works of Chris Crawford, available here. He wrote the first computer game design book and operated the first game design journal (for nearly a decade). Reading all of these (and that's over 1,500 pages) -- even the ones that don't seem to be about game design -- is currently the best way to start your quest in understanding game design. Take a break from that with a short article: I Have No Words & I Must Design by Greg Costikyan. This was one of the first game designer articles I read (nearly 7 years ago now), and it's still one of the better ones. The rest of this segement is under construction.
Moby Games - A "game documantation and review project", this site has a lot of material of use to explore. A tad hard to navigate (hint: use the search box religiously), but rest assured the difficulty is worth it. Gameforms - This is the evolved form of the old Gaming Intelligence Agency site. They restrict themselves to rpg and adventure-style console games, but they cover those well. All-purpose site on that topic, including interviews, fan art, fan fiction, etc. Sort of like RPGamer (above). Classic Gaming - Lots of good content here as well, and more accessable. Includes articles on the history of electronic games, as well as your standard dose of interviews and miscellania. Excerpt: "Zelda II is widely considered to be the bastard child of the Zelda series (CDi games excepted -- a true evil which you dare not speak its name). Critics cite reasons ranging from "an aborted attempt at mixing game genres" to "(sigh) yet another side-scroller" as reasons for hating it. However, mixing game genres with gleeful abandon is the stuff that makes truly revolutionary titles, not to mention crazy Legos-slash-Construx space stations. The gameplay in Zelda II is as good if not BETTER than Metriod. Yes, that's right, I said BETTER; and if you wish to send me death threats, my e-mail address is gwbush@whitehouse.gov. And speaking of which, Samus's little fetal position trick of rolling up into a ball doesn't TOUCH the coolness of Link's downward (and upward) thrust. I never did figure out just who the hell "Error" is..." Xengames - Hard to classify this site, except to say that there's a little bit of everything, but not in the way most sites in this section do a little bit of everything. Joystick 101 - Description under construction. Game Culture - Description under construction. Ludology - Description under construction. Game Research - Description under construction. Video Game Research Papers - Description under construction. Games, Gamers, and Gaming Culture - Description under construction. Gaming People - Description under construction. Gamegirlz Articles and Features - Description under construction. Quarter to Three - I like this site: its name, its reviews, its interviews, and its articles. Above average all around. Excerpt: "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem -- When it's at its best, Eternal Darkness has a nice Alone in the Dark 1 vibe. But the bulk of this Resident Evilly game has a desultory 'meanwhile, in Medieval France...' feel. It's an interesting idea that just ends up robbing the game of any focus. "Where in Time is Chris Redfield?" would have been a much more appropriate subtitle. Then there's the bland visual style, bland characters, bland puzzles, and bland combat. ... Ico -- This short delicate combo of sweet and sinister is about holding hands with a girl and escaping from a vast castle. For an entirely non-verbal game, Ico has a lot to say: you don't need elaborate controls, sophisticated puzzles, detailed combat, and fullblown backstories to suck players in. This is videogaming at its most simple, elegant, and satisfying." GAMEOVER net - Good collection of interviews. Excerpt: "I remember when we wanted to put in such things as health coverage, health insurance when they did a quote for us they couldn't believe it because our average age was five years younger than the youngest company they had ever done. As a result we had fantastic rates!" ~Nolan Bushness [on Atari]. Gamespy - Reviews, Previews, Interviews, Articles, and a bit on game design. Excerpt: Will Wright: "The more creativity you can give to the player (both in setting up the world and in choosing which direction to take the simulation), the more they will empathize (care) about what happens in the game." ... [about The Sims:] "There is good evidence that the outer layer of our brain evolved almost exclusively to allow us to model, understand and interact with other humans (which made our elaborate social structures possible). So it kind of makes sense that a game specifically about people (and their lives) would have a strong resonance with us." ... "It's one thing for a player to be surprised by things the designers hid in the game. It's a whole different thing when the designers are seeing emergent dynamics that are natural results (though totally unconsidered) of the simulation rules."
Gamasutra - Most formidable game design site online, mostly geared toward the progessionals. GameDev.net - Huge collection of articles here, probably the largest on the web. Go here and read what seems interesting. Google's Game Studies Links - Most of these I've not even heard of before, but intend to check out and link to as this section of Septaweekly develops. Game Design X: The Future of Game Design - Nice site design and what content it has is above the average. Includes a section on famous game designers. Excerpt: Top 10 thoughts on game design by Shigeru Miyamoto -- "1. Start with a simple concept; 2. Aim to create raw emotions; not specific scenes; 3. Design around the system's limitations; 4. Carefully balance form & function; 5. Minimize player confusion; focus on their comfort with game controls, navigation, story, etc.; 6. Incorporate a smooth learning curve: accommodate all skill levels leaving room for the novice; 7. Graphics are relative to game play; 8. Lure the player off the beaten path; 9. Place a great deal of importance on play testing well before completing the game; 10. Place gamers desires before your own." Sloperama's Game Biz Advice - A good collection of advice articles on beginning game designers, arranged in 'lessons' format. Excerpt: "THINGS YOU CAN DO ON YOUR OWN TO PREPARE FOR A GAME CAREER: Play a lot of games. Why not keep a list while you're at it? Discuss their strengths and weaknesses with other gamers on bulletin boards and newsgroups.Build levels for games that come with level-building tools. Volunteer for beta testing as opportunities present themselves. Create your own pencil puzzles, brainteasers, crosswords. Design card games, board games, parlor games, riding-in-the-car games. Follow your interests! Read, write, research on the internet and at the library. Get out there and do, participate. Write about whatever interests you. Anything that inspires you to work and create. You need to develop habits of working on projects, and finishing them. Draw whatever interests you so you can polish art skills. You can draw using markers, paints, pixels, or polygons. However you want to create your own graphics is fine. Animation would be great too. Write your own game designs. Write game reviews and submit them to fan publications and websites. If they're rejected, that's okay. Every creative person ought to have some reject letters in their files!" The Giant List of Classic Game
Programmers - Simply incredible. Ever wonder how many games your favorite
game designer made? Or ever wonder just who was responsible for Pac-Man?
This is a complete list list of every classic game designer, what games
they made, when they made them, and other such history. Excerpt:
Game Developer's Converence - Check out the archives section for past preceedings of papers at these conferences to get to the design information. A lot of these are in powerpoint format, so make sure you can read those. GIG News Game Developers Section - List of some more game design articles. I've not yet read these, but the titles look interesting. The Forge - The Internet Home for Independent Role-Playing Games - Not about computerized games per se, this site deals with dice and pen and paper rpgs of the d&d variety. However, the game design articles there are worth checking out, especially the multi-chapter one.
Chris Crawford - The best game design writer I'm familiar with, and also one of the most prolific. To have not read him is to garden ignorance. Greg Costikyan - A fairly famous and respected game designer and game design writer. Some of his articles are worth reading. Geoff Howland - A good collection of game design articles to be found here. Excerpt: "I recently heard a figure that only 1 in every 50 games started is completed. The difference between successful game developers and unsuccessful game developers is not that one group of people is more talented, intelligent or skilled than another group of people. The difference is that one group of people finishes their games. ... Progressive style games are often based on elements that need to be used as part of the player’s experience and strategy. The environments are often set up to be visually themed or repetitive, which allows the player to abstract what they are looking at. ... Experience style games focus on giving the player a powerful and unique experience as they play through the game. Experience games are often based on playing through a story or event as opposed to being in a short, repeated event." The Great Games of Sid Sackson - An interesting and little-known game designer, who has designed over 500 games, and owns the world's largest collection of games (over 15,000). Excerpt from an interview: "When I was in kindergarten, or first grade, my teacher gave us each a page ripped from a magazine and told us to circle all the words we knew. What I did was to circle those words and then try to connect them with lines from one end of the page to the other. I made a very simple game out of that." Les jeux de Bruno Faidutti / Bruno Faidutti's Games - A rather bizzare site that written in bilingual French and English. Bruno Faidutti is one of the few French game developers. An interesting aspect of the site (besides its linguistic style) is the author's reviews of hundreds of games, especially board games, most of which are rare and unknown. Kikuta, Hiroki - The personal website of the director/designer of the original Romancing Saga, Secret of Mana, Secret of Mana 2, and Koudelka. Beware, most of it is in Japanese. Not much on game design here, but it's interesting to me that a philosophy major became a game designer. Jason McIntosh's Silence Between Words - A collection of game design articles. Excerpt: "Do you like stories which mean more than what the plot tells? I certainly enjoy a story with some philosophical and intellectual depth, especially if it can stand alone as pure entertainment. So why shouldn't we see such depth and meaning in games? ... Balance is composed of at least three elements: learning curve, pacing, and character evolution. Learning to combine these facets into a singular whole is one part of the art of game design, and it does take practice."
Toru Iwatani (on Pac-Man) - Excerpt: INTERVIEWER: What kind of skills or philosophy must a game designer have to be successful? IWATANI: You must understand people's souls (kokoro) and be creative enough to imagine things that can't be thought or imagined by others. You must he compelled to do something a little bit different than the rest of the crowd and enjoy being different. You must also be able to visualise the images that will make up the game, and you shouldn't compromise with the first easy idea that comes to mind. In the last analysis, you must enjoy making people happy. That's the basis of being a good game designer, and leads to great game design. Profile Interviews - A collection of interviews with mostly 3D game designers. Halcyon Days: Interviews with Game Programmers - Contains more than two-dozen interviews with top American game designers. Excerpt: Warren Robinett worked for Atari in the early days of the 2600, [and] is most remembered for hiding his name--the first easter egg--in 1979's 2600 classic, "Adventure." ... Robinett: I believe that Atari in the early days succeeded because the games were labors of love by the programmers who worked on them. At least that was the case with my games for me. In those old far-off days, each game for the 2600 was done entirely by one person, the programmer, who conceived the game concept, wrote the program, did the graphics--drawn first on graph paper and converted by hand to hexadecimal--and did the sounds.... Robinett: Each 2600 game was designed entirely by one person. But on the package it said basically "Adventure, by Atari." And we were only getting salaries, no cut of the huge profits. It was a signature, like at the bottom of a painting. But to make it happen, I had to hide my signature in the code, in a really obscure place, and not tell anybody. Keeping a secret like that is not easy. I decided that if I could not keep the secret myself--I was very tempted to tell my two main friends at Atari, Tom Reuterdahl and Jim Huether--how could I expect anyone else to keep the secret? So I didn't tell anyone, handed over the final version of the program, Atari manufactured and distributed several hundred thousand cartridges of "Adventure," and then it was too late for them to undo it.
Nintendo - Nintendo's site is also Nintendo Power's site, so it has some good content there. Konami - Konami's site has a good Metal Gear section, or so Dr. Shizuma tells me. Blizzard - Shizuma also heartily recommends this one. Working Designs - My personal favorite American game development (well, translation and localization) group. Not just info on their own games, there is a vast slew of content here, including a large collection of game reviews.
Hamster Republic (Ohrrpgce) - Good for 2-D DOS rpgs similar to Final Fantasy. VGA graphics. Very easy to use and a huge community of game designers. This is the one I use the most, and have had the best results with. Game Maker - Good for making windows games which require fast reactions, not good for games that require a lot of text. I've used it a bit, for small games. Lucidity - This one is just starting out, and we'll have more information for you on it as it develops. Being created by a friend of mine, and therefore it will be a good engine. RPGToolkit - Similar to the Ohrrpgce, but perhaps a bit harder to use. Allows higher graphics modes however. I've not used it, but many do.
Zantetsuken Forums - I moderate here, and visit it almost every day. A good forum to talk about game design, videogames in general, the ohrrpgce, etc., even has a philosophy and theology subsection. RPG Creations Forum - Forums for RPG Creations, several members of which I know, and who have asked me to link to their forums. It's dead there, but if it picks up some life it may be a good forum. Developer's Corner - Just found this one, it appears to be useful.
the-underdogs.com - Games dating back to the 70s can be downloaded here. happypuppy.com - Tremendous number of game downloads to be found here. download.com - Has a good amount of game shareware for download. Operation: Ohr - Most Ohrrpgce games can be found here. demonews.com - News on game demos. dexterity.com - Shizuma says this one is good. |
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