hey I seem to recall a thread about Books About Videogames on SB1, so I wannna champion the cause of starting a new one.
Especially because there’s this new trend of indie publishers authorizing writers to do some smaller print zines and novella type things about The Videogames and Gamer Nerd stuff so…
so…!!
john sketchpanic’s book on 80s japanese computer games is really good, despite the author being a well-reknowned bellend.
dess’ book, rise of the videogame zinesters (i think?) was really good too. if i weren’t such a useless pile of garbage, it totally would have inspired me to start making games.
there was a book i read a few years ago, about the history of infamous unlicensed nes pubisher color dreams/wisdom tree, but i can’t remember its name
I still recc Steve Swink’s Game Feel, perhaps especially for its bit on dildonics
fuck if I ever get around to reading all the books I buy but
I believe Zoya Street is a friend of a friend and supposedly their “Dreamcast Worlds” is good
SCROLL has been good, though if you read it on mobile you lose all the aesthetics and like half the articles
Jordan Mechner wrote some books on his experiences making Prince or Persia and Karateka
the site Storybundle has been good for amassing a bunch of game bookz overtime
someone fund me a patreon so I can write cute zines with a cute mascot. I’ll be the next mister raroo. but nonbinary, so mixter
I liked Rules of Play but I read it years ago and I don’t know how I’d feel about it now
Derek Yu’s behind-the-scenes type book on the development of Spelunky is pretty good.
Bredan Keogh’s Killing Is Harmless: A critical reading of Spec Ops The Line is an interesting attempt to break down a game piece by piece. In a similar vein, Game Design Companion: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4 by Daniel Johnson.
Seconding Spelunky
any attempt to break the line into pieces is a good one
This looks like a good deal if some of these books are good, but I am not familiar with any of them. I guess it takes a lot these days for a book about video games to take priority over other things I might read, but I also wouldn’t want to miss something particularly insightful or interesting.
The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity is a good one.
A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Games is like one of the hugest corrections academic game studies has ever received, advocating for a change in conversation about players or text to a text-which-can-only-be-played that necessarily implicates the player at the same time it is played (or “read”). It feels like something a lot of SBers would really get behind, I suspect Keogh was a reader of ABDN and what not. It also makes a super compelling argument why we should be writing ‘videogames’ instead of ‘video games.’
Half-Real is also really great. I find a lot of its theoretical ideas about narrative and abstraction in games to still be acceptable, despite it being so old. In fact I think it has remained closer to the truth of things even while other theories get more attention.
Also, if anyone buys this bundle… could someone share the epubs?
A non-SB friend highly recommended two other books in this deal. That and the replies in this thread were enough to bring me to critical mass and I have purchased them all.
I was initially hoping to see this book in the list. It’s one I’ve had my eye on for a long time but there appears to be no electronic version (other than a pirate PDF, which is useless to me) and the print version has a lot of negative reviews for having small, faint print and I don’t want to deal with that.
I read a really good book by a modern philosopher about agency which did all its work with that book. This was C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art and it was very good. Has made me consider reading The Grasshopper too.
