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jmbossy

Reading about Games

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I've become increasingly interested in the academic theories on game design (from both developers and enthusiasts) but I'm having an incredibly difficult time finding sites/aggregates dedicated to such written work. As this fascination is almost 100% because of my increased listening to idle thumbs, I figured maybe some of you could make suggestions on websites or writers.

 

Maybe moving forward this topic could act as a place to turn other thumbs onto articles of note. 

 

The one writer I have been reading into is Tom Bissell (known for his appearance on Tone Control (hosted by Idle Thumbs)).

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8157257/ to get the ball rolling.

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ROUND TWO

Note that listing a blog does not mean I endorse all the thoughts written about on the blog. Read responsibly.

http://goodgameswriting.com/

http://www.hitselfdestruct.com/ (see the "video games" section in the bottom right)

http://exploringbelievability.blogspot.com/

http://gamesthatexist.com/

http://www.reactionzine.com/

http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/

http://thiscageisworms.com/

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Good list so far! I'm not sure I have much to add off the top of my head...

 

http://jonshaferondesign.com/page/7/ (This is Jon Shafer, the lead designer for Civ 5's blog. Note I linked to further back on his blog because these days it is mostly updates about his Kickstarter game - At the Gates, and updates with new episodes of his game design podcast. The link here takes you back to the time period when he was writing a lot more general game design articles although the At the Gates updates are always fascinating as well, and the podcast is a good listen if you want to get into how game designers consider making various kinds of trade-offs when developing game mechanics)

 

http://www.portfolio.debacle.us/ (Robert Yang's blog, I especially like his writing and criticism of the immersive sims genre)

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Neither of those are academic - do you actually want academic stuff, or just good games writing?

 

I think that my not knowing the difference says a lot :P sorry.

 

 

 

And thanks everyone (especially Tycho) for the reading material! Greatly appreciated.

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GDC vault is everything from GDC since 1996. It requires a membership to view it all though (quite pricy). But it's the largest "academic" database on game development.

 

There's also the Game Dev Magazine archive: http://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

They usually contain: postmortem, various tech articles, product info, and some generic (game) dev insights. It's usually an interesting read. I'm currently in the process of reading back from when I became a subscriber (2005)

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Here's talk about designing text-games from Jon Ingold one of the co-founders of Inkle (also the script writer for the Sorcery! app). Unless you are completely unfamiliar with what text-games are, I would recommend skipping to the 15 minute mark (you can do this easily by clicking on "Reading can be hard" in the chapter select on the left). I had never thought about the advantages of making text appear in chunks. I also really enjoyed his description of making choice more "analogue" by branching narratives with the results of many smaller decisions rather than branching them with epic, one-time decisions. I'm convinced.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019346/A-World-from-Words-Highly

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Funny you should mention The Psychology of Video Games - I just discovered (or maybe rediscovered) that site a few days ago and posted some comments on the latest article, but I'm not super impressed with it. Most of the articles boil down to "here is a thing in psychology. Here is that thing in a video game. The end!" I always come out the other end feeling like I got a portion of a psychology textbook that is easily explained with a video game example, but nothing more. Maybe that just says more about how much I enjoy psychology textbooks than about how good the site is...

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