The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

I generally don't put reviews of my college textbooks.  There are a couple of reasons for this but the primary on is that I rarely read them cover to cover.  This one was an exception, not because I read it out of choice but for class we literally had to read the entire thing.  The class that I read it for was Game Design, not my favorite class but I assume the goal of the class was to give us an overview of what it is like to make a game without going to far in depth.

The author is someone who has a lot of experience in the industry, having made several games including Toontown and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney.  With this real world experience, he takes a tour through the high level way that games are made.  Over the course of the book, he covers everything from level design to characters to even a working definition of fun.

The subtitle of the book, A Book of Lenses, comes from the sidenotes in the book which he calls lenses.  Each of these sidenotes contains some questions that are designed to make the reader think about the game that they are making.  Some of these are useful but a lot of them seem a little pedantic.

As someone who has taken a lot of Computer Science classes, a significant part of the book was lower level than I needed and could be basically brushed off.  In addition, as someone who has read quite a lot, most of the discussion of story was also pretty unnecessary. As someone who has taken several courses that talk about how to interact with people, the sections on interpersonal relations were also not super useful.

The way that this book is written makes it sound like the author is talking to the reader who is planning to make a game themselves.  I will admit that I am not really interested in making games for a career but I do play quite a few games.  The problem with this is that there is no way for the reader to make a game using anything close to only this book.  All of the discussions are at too high a level of abstraction to really be useful.

I think where this book might be nice is if, on a team building a game, the members read the sections about the parts that they were not working on to get a better understanding of the team as a whole.  This is not to say I did not find some useful gems in here, but in total, it was not particularly useful.

Overall, I would give this book a 76%.