Schell, Jesse, The Art of Game Design: a Book of Lenses, Elsevier Inc, 2008 

 

     If I was limited to recommending one book on game design, this would be it. Aside from being a video game designer, Jesse worked for seven years with Walt Disney Imagineering designing projects for them, and brings a wealth of experience to the book. The book is divided up into thirty-two chapters, and each chapter represents a 'lens' through which to view game design. It's a great introduction into all the different aspects of game design, and the broad array of issues you need to be aware of when designing games. This is also one of the few books in this bibliography that I've read more than once. Also fascinating is a thirty-two node concept diagram containing each of these lenses that he fills out, one node at a time, at the start of each of his chapters.

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Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press 2014

 

   This book studies what makes engaging play in a game; however, I think there are also a lot of lessons to be learned about engaging class design for educators. Essentially, engagement comes from meaningful interaction with the systems of the game. 'Interaction' means the players are doing things and getting feedback on their actions, and 'meaningful' means that the results of their actions have a significant impact on the overall game whose meaning is established by the context of the system. Ugh, this is a bad thumbnail description of what the authors explore in a detailed, fascinating, and actionable way. Perhaps a better description is that this book outlines how to turn a game (class) from a series of tasks (assignments) into a lived, meaningful experience people share. 

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Juul, Jesper,  The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, MIT Press 2013

 

   Juul quotes game emotion theorist Nicole Lazzaro as saying "It's easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams 'I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.' then I know he will finish the game and buy version two. If he doesn't say this, he'll put it down in an hour." How can games have this effect on us? What is it in our psychology and in game design that failure draws us in instead of pushing us away? This book is an exploration into that question. Given that the richest learning can come from trial and error (failure), this is an important thing to know for the classroom.

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Koster, Ralph, A Theory of Fun for Game Design 2nd Edition, O'Riley Media 2013

 

     People play games for a variety of reasons, but you might not get that out of Koster's book. He sees the fun of a game as pattern recognition in order to master skills. This is a 'skill mastery' version of fun which, while appealing to a selection of people, might not describe everyone (other sources of fun: exploration, social interaction, sheer exertion of power). However, this aspect of the fun in games is particularly useful in informing playful learning. When viewing this book as an investigation into 'one style of fun that is particularly helpful to educators' instead of a broad 'investigation into what makes games fun' the reader can get a lot out of this book. How do we make the mastery of a skill 'fun'?