Game Design – Theory & Practice (2/e), Richard Rouse III. Wordware, 2005.
This book is a somewhat sprawling look at game design. Its focus is on electronic games. It covers “what players want,” gameplay, artificial intelligence, story-telling, and game documentation (with what I found surprisingly heavy emphasis on the latter). Rouse intermingles these chapters with analyses of significant games and interviews with established game designers.
The interviews were the most interesting part. The game theory chapters were OK, but Chris Crawford’s books covers the same ground more thoroughly. The material on design documents could have been greatly compressed – it takes about a third of the book, and I didn’t find it particularly revealing. (Reviewed Dec., ’05)