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Game Feel is an interesting look at the phenomenon of controls in video games having "feel," whether they feel "floaty", "heavy", etc. Swink discusses at length what each of these descriptors means and how they are achieved. By examining these phenomena and illustrating his points with several case studies of popular games, Swink is able to construct metrics for defining game feel and ideas for how game designers can best use it to create their desired user experience. The book is filled with insightful non-digital analogies of how we control objects and utilize proprioception, and how we might relate those experiences to the game world.

Despite very readable prose and colloquial examples, I was tempted to read this as an academic book. That's not how it was intended, so I caution any game theorists approaching the book from that position. If you read this as an academic book, you will find several "holes" in Swink's "argument," particularly his theories about the extension of self that connects the player with their avatar. Keep in mind that this is a book for designers, and as such it is extremely useful: "feel" is certainly an observable phenomenon in games, and Swink's examination is thoughtful and could indeed serve as the basis for more "academic" inquiries into the nature of feel and the extension of the self into the game world.

Jazz pianist David Sudnow didn't play video games until he went to retrieve his teenage son from an arcade in the early 80s, and he immediately dismissed them as a silly money-sink designed to keep teenagers occupied. When an Atari 2600 ruined a party of academics, however, he decided to give games another shot and try the Atari for himself. Thus began his decent into obsession.

Following in the style of Ways of the Hand, Sudnow's deeply detailed exploration of the phenomenology of playing jazz piano, Pilgrim in the Microworld provides an equally detailed account of Sudnow's quest to master Breakout on the Atari--from the physical feeling of the controls to the subtle changes in his strategy of where to look on the screen. The book follows his transition from bemused to curious to obsessed and back, all the while revealing the most subtle changes in outlook and strategy, changes that most of the rest of us would never consciously stop to think about.

Sudnow is clearly catering to a high brow audience. His descriptions are peppered with references to classical music, and never misses an opportunity to name drop Debussy, Lenny Bruce, Nietzsche; but his tone only serves to legitimize the deep study of games at a time when they were regarded as low brow entertainment. As you might expect from the title, the writing recalls Thoreau or Dillard in its tone and approach--carefully balancing obsessive detail with a narrative arc whose drama you only appreciate when you've finished the book. At times the depth of his analyses of the most trivial functions of the hand or the eye can become exhausting, as--no doubt--his frustrating play sessions were, and these sections toward the middle are best handled by giving the book a rest. While others might complain about the pace of the middle chapters, to me, these sections only further highlighted the experience of Sudnow's frustration, and as a whole the book is engaging, thought-provoking, and masterfully written.

As a game studies text, this is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in phenomenology or player experience. No other personal account of playing games has come close to this level of thought and analysis. At times his descriptions teeter on the edge of what might be considered obsessive mental illness, but Sudnow's perspective is entirely unique among the field, and this level of detail will be incredibly hard for most researchers to duplicate.

A must-read for game studies researchers, obsessive gamers, and gamers who also happen to be musicians.

Even 7 years after its publication Half-Real remains a landmark moment in the development of Game Studies as a field. Juul's approach to games bridges a formal analysis of their rules and systems with a nuanced approach to their fiction. Half-Real offers several useful, citable definitions and concepts and provides good outlines and approaches to exploring games, particularly through their formal qualities.

That said, the book is not without problems. As with any book in which the primarily goal is establishing definitions and boundaries, edge-cases are many, and the categories are sometime contradictory. Juul, a staunch ludologist, does not examine the fiction of games in anywhere near the depth that he explores their systems. Still, from the approach of both a researcher and a designer, having formal boundaries is useful for understanding where games still need exploration. There are a few places where his categorizations could have used a little more defense and insight into his methodology, which particularly stand out since many other arguments seem watertight. As a whole, however, his explanations are interesting and provocative.

The tone of the book is very academic, and as such I wouldn't recommend this book to a casual reader, or even to most (non-academic) designers. To a researcher, however, this book is an indispensable resource. It points to intersections with many disciplines and offers great references for further exploration. Juul's definition of what a game even is, a question that has been explored for centuries, remains one of the more convincing definitions in the field.

Like most people of my generation, I have been playing video games since I can remember. I've read bits and pieces of other game design books, but none have been as clear or as aligned with my own vision of games as this book. It helped me really make the transition from thinking like a consumer to thinking like a creator. It is indispensable for designers of paper and digital games alike.

Fullerton focuses on designing games with the constant goal of vigilantly keeping the player experience at the center of the design process. Everything should be prototyped iteratively. Repeatedly. The upbeat tone encourages experimentation, failure, and revision, reassuring budding designers that games are not some divine inspiration that happens perfectly the first time around. For someone with little experience, this was exactly what I needed to hear, and Fullerton is sure to repeat the message through examples and anecdotal interviews from some of the biggest names in the field.

I also found the exercises in the book extremely helpful for thinking about games, but more importantly for thinking about how I was thinking about games.

Fantastic and inspiring.

Interesting, well-formed characters carry the plot through some lulls in the beginning, but the pacing picks up as the novel progresses. A few conspicuous points date the novel, but overall its a quick and interesting read, the prototypical action/adventure that set the tone for the genre that emerged from it.

Malone, the young, lovesick narrator of the story, seeks a great adventure to win the heart of his beloved and advance his career as a journalist. His search for adventure leads him to the bombastic Professor Challenger, one of the most vivid and interesting characters in science fiction. In an effort to corroborate Challenger's claim of a lost prehistoric world hidden deep in the Amazon; Malone, Challenger, bold adventurer Lord Roxton, and contentious skeptic Professor Summerlee embark on an adventure into the unknown.

Like many novels of its period, many aspects are problematic when viewed through the lens of our current cultural sensibilities. Women seem to be largely absent from the novel, save Malone's object of desire--the motivator for the whole adventure--who is flighty and inconstant. The local Amazon guides ("Indians," "half-breeds" and the "faithful Negro") are given the expected treatment, and the warring red-skinned "savages" on the prehistoric plateau face supposedly equal opposition from the "ape-men," missing link figures that the expedition encounters. While it's important to maintain cultural relativity in understanding the period in which the book was written, a modern audience might find these points occasionally jarring.

Still, even if the cultural attitudes and scientific practices (and for that matter presumptions of how dinosaurs look and act) are questionable today, the vivid and timeless personalities written into the main characters make up for it. Each is, in his own way, larger than life such that they should all be unrelatable, but somehow it works in the context of this fantastic setting.

Once the action got going, I found it a hard book to put down.

During the reign of Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell rose from a common birth to become one of the most powerful men in England. As Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's right-hand man, Cromwell learns the intricacies of the court, and begins to successfully navigate its politics. When Wolsey fails to produce the divorce the King demands and falls from Henry's favor, Cromwell's talent as a diplomat allows him to eventually rise to succeed where his former master couldn't.

Wolf Hall is brings life and drama to the politics of Tudor England. Written in present-tense episodic sections, the prose is a little jarring at first, but settles into a rhythm quickly. The tense is not distracting, and the prose sparkles (as one would expect from the Booker winner). The cast is a little confusing, but family trees and an itemized cast at the beginning help things immensely. With a lack of dialogue tags, a shortage of nouns in favor of pronouns, and a propensity for stream-of-consciousness, this is not the easiest book to read, but it's not the hardest either. And it is entirely worth the effort.