International Game Developers Association

Ernest Adams' "50 Books For Everyone In the Game Industry"

Source: Ernest Adams, as posted at Next Generation's website.

• Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
• Rules of Play
• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
• Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
• Fundamentals of Game Design
• 21st Century Game Design
• Gender-Inclusive Game Design
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design
• Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game
• Digital Game-Based Learning
• Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
• Creating the Art of the Game
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Visual Explanations
• Envisioning Information
• Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative
• The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness
• Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide
• Designing Virtual Worlds
• Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
• The Oxford History of Board Games
• The Ultimate History of Video Games
• Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971 - 1984
• Joystick Nation
• Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence
• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
• Everything Bad Is Good for You
• From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games
• Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
• Postmortems from Game Developer
• Game Over, Press Start to Continue, by David Sheff, with new material
• Masters of Doom
• Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution
• The Xbox 360 Uncloaked
• Understanding Comics
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
• A Pattern Language
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Homo Ludens
• Man, Play, and Games
• The Ambiguity of Play
• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook
• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace