About book The Art Of Game Design: A Book Of Lenses (2008)
Overall I found this book quite informative and useful. I think the author tried to cover a bit too much ground, and I found his breadth of experience made some of the examples far fetched, contrived, or misinformed. The concept of the book is great, and I like that I can go back and look at the Lenses and recall the larger portions of the book easily. They are good in and of themselves when evaluating design decisions. This is a fantastic intro to the field of game design. It chooses to be comprehensive instead of detailed, so towards the end, you get some very breezy chapters about working in a team and with clients, for example, and mentions enough biz talk so that you've at least heard the terminology but don't totally get it. I didn't fault the book for glossing over these topics. I was happy that it mentioned them, in a getting-to-know-the-lay-of-the-land way, and I also appreciated that the author clearly wasn't trying to stretch his own knowledge, or lay down rules that wouldn't work in real life. The book spends the most time on the bare essentials of game design from a mostly theoretical point of view, which felt very helpful. I feel that having read this book, I now have the beginnings of a rigorous way of thinking about games, which is really valuable.The gimmick of the book -- here are a set of 100 lenses you can use to think about game design! -- fell a little flat for me, on the other hand. To me they seemed pretty much the same thing as the usual summary you'd find at the end of a chapter in a textbook, which is fine, but not especially amazing.To close: this book, more than anything I have read so far, made me proud to be exploring this field myself, and that is priceless.
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excelent book about game design. If you are into design you need this book.
—Alfateam
One of the few books about game design worth reading, in my opinion.
—dakkota22
