I’ve been on the hunt for good, prescriptive game design books — I know many of the current big name texts (Crawford’s, Fullerton’s, Salen & Zimmerman, etc.), and was happy to recently hear about Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. My interest was recently piqued thanks to an interesting rave review of the book by Daniel Cook on Gamasutra. Here’s a snippet of the review:

In my library of game design books, I see The Art of Game Design as the common designer’s pragmatic companion to a theoretical tome like Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals.

Both uncover the vast hidden anthill that is game design. Both describe dozens of ideas and tools a game designer should master. Both seek to provide a roof for all perspectives, no matter how divergent. Of the two, The Art of Game Design is considerably more approachable, with the trade off of being a lighter, and slightly less thought provoking read.

I tend to like Salen and Zimmerman’s book quite a bit, but would never teach game design with it, nor would I use it for much other than a reference — in my opinion, their Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology works much better for a college course on game design or game studies (which Kurt Squire’s done in several of his courses in the past few years).

But, back to Schell’s text, I poked around and found a review by James Portnow on Edge online, as well. After a number of high-profile gaming magazines have folded in the past few years, it’s the last standing glossy gaming magazine I find of any value (well, other than collecting the cute posters that come in Nintendo Power, but that’s another story). Edge is really not a magazine where you find authors waxing hyperbolic too much, so I was a bit surprised to see their review of this book titled “The Best Book On Game Design Ever.” Here’s a snippet from their review:

You know what? I’ve spent hours trying to write this review; trying to figure out how I’m going to preserve my precious journalistic integrity while reviewing Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. I’ve been looking for ways to pan it, to do what all good critics do: critique… I can’t. This is unequivocally the best book on game design I’ve ever read.

It’s not every day that this poor graduate student shells out $50+ for a book, but I think I’ll be ordering Schell’s book soon. Have any of the readers of this blog read it? Any opinions would be welcome.