Reading Recommendations for Game Designers
I’m a hobbyist game developer, and originally enrolled at Rochester Institute of Technology for Game Development. While I’m not currently in the games industry, I’m deeply invested in it as an artistic medium, and love studying game design. In addition to everything I’ve written about games, here’s some of the most insightful discussions I’ve seen. I don’t necessarily agree with every opinion expressed here, but they’re worth considering.
(Currently, this article is much more of a YouTube playlist than anything else; my apologies.)
General
What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games
Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism
Ludonarrative Dissonance
Context Sensitivity
Aesthetic Deception
Protagony Three: Gordon Freeman
Mini-Maps are Stupid
I Hate Fast Travel
Technology
Level Design
Non-Euclidean Worlds Engine
Inside the Making of Dishonored 2’s Best Level: A Crack in the Slab
Artificial Intelligence
What Makes Good AI?
Performance
I Created A Game Engine Just to Optimize This
“This” being hitching because of inefficiencies in the game’s render pipeline, which the author solves with fences.
Procedural Generation
Post-Mortems and Reviews
Bioshock Infinite
Call of Duty
Darkest Dungeon
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Disco Elysium
Dishonored
Fallout
The Last of Us
The Legend of Zelda
Metal Gear Solid
Matthewmatosis’s Metal Gear Solid Review Series — a superb long-form video essay on the whole series.