This book was not about game design, it was a 188 page treatise that went through a bunch of games and talked about how bad they are. The tone was so negative I actually felt tense reading it.

The only design points made in the book were:

- story gets in the way of the game
- mechanics should be as simple as possible
- balance is important

Were it not for the title, I would have told you that this book was about why the author doesn’t like video games. I wouldn’t in a million years guess it was supposed to be about design.

Beyond the lack of any substantive design theory, the writing is very bad, it isn’t well researched, the author has clearly never taken a single design class, and the author seems to have forgotten the MOST important thing about games. They need to be fun.

They also state over and over that storylines are bad, because it reduces the number of meaningful decisions the player can make. Making video games are an art form. Some great games have no real story, and a deep story would really ruin them (e.g. Ikaruga). Other games are about being on an emotional roller-coaster, and the story sets a wonderful tone and atmosphere (Wing Commander 3&4 are good examples of this). This book seems to suggest that if you do anything that they (the author) doesn’t like, that it’s an inherently bad game.

They poo-poo some of the greatest games of all time, like Ocarina of Time, because it doesn’t fit into the tiny box that the author has constructed around what a game needs to be. A real design theory book would have reimagined the game, pointing out ways that the gameplay could have been strengthened. Instead they just give a nasty review of it, providing no insight whatever, and suggesting that anyone who loves that game is wrong.

If you don’t like country music, then don’t listen to it. It doesn’t mean country music is bad, it just isn’t to your taste. That’s fine, but you wouldn’t write a music theory book and suggest if you make music that uses too many twangy instruments that it isn’t really music, or that it is inherently bad music.

I want to end this on a positive note, so I will say that one suggestion that I wouldn’t have thought of that the author made was to study and research the design theory behind board games, because board games are a more mature medium with many similarities.