Deeper Than Pixels: A Reading List on Video Games | Hacker News Reader

Deeper Than Pixels: A Reading List on Video Games

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66 pointshomarp23 comments

I was hoping it would be a list about game design, game programming, history or anything substantive. Unfortunately nothing really of substance there.

Recently I read Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom. Written in a really conversational tone but still includes pseudo code outlining each pattern. Really enjoyed it.

Master's of Doom is a little over-reccomended in this category but for good reason. Feels like you're right there with Carmack and Romero as they build id. Another one I love.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I also strongly recommend Game Programming Patterns. I have recently bought it and it has been very helpful for me.

As an experienced developer, but new hobbyist game developer, the book has perfect content density - not too introductory nor too mind-numbingly academic.

I recommend this book to my students, Bob writes so well. His crafting interpreters book https://craftinginterpreters.com/ is also brilliant, I wish I could write so well.

May i recommend Mike Acton? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc&t=1s

https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-oriented_design

I'd recommend Richard Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds" if you have any interest in the history and design of MMO's.

For game design, any or all of these will easily be in most top lists:

- Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop

- Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design A Book of Lenses

- Steve Swink's Game Feel

- Scott Rogers' Level Up

- Skaff & others' Characteristics of Games

- Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun

- Joris Dormans & Ernest Adams' Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

This one was just published but I'll happily bet on it:

- Richard LeMarchand's A Playful Production Process

I thought they were ok.

But I used to like to read gamastura post-Mortems. And should add it back to my list (site renamed to the more generic : https://www.gamedeveloper.com/) Although their “pac man dossier” is still on the old site

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossi...

I picked up and “edge” magazine annual at microcenter. Decent read and backstories on some games.

For podcast of old time development stories the “-Apple time warp” is very infrequently updates but can be oddly very good. https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/

You have a very twisted idea of what the words "of substance" mean.

These articles are mostly a hollywoodization of the gaming industry. You can see that each of them could just as well have been written about movies and actors as about games. This seems to be extremely common among journalists in California, but I haven't seen it much elsewhere, I wonder if the problem is cross pollination between them and the movie industry there. Most people who play games doesn't care about games in this way, so to them these articles aren't substantive.

Not at all. Most of this is (IMO) dross and has no practical value.

Regarding the last article on Pokimane and streaming, IMO as soon as you reach a certain celebrity the deliberate trolls and haters will inevitably come along. It is admirable how most of the streamers handle this well, but as the article states being in such a position is bound to leave some scars. I wonder if that is more or less true for streamers than other forms of celebrity.

I don't think it's the fault of the streamers' fame as much as it is the broader gaming community's tolerance of people with absolutely no empathy, social skills or basic human decency[1].

My wife and I make most of our income sell used games online, and regularly receive tirades of abuse from our customers when their expectations are not met. We have been deliberately pivoting our marketing away from core gamers and towards the casual crowds, in fact, partly for this reason.

My old manager, who moved from being an indie game dev to a "regular" programmer, had similar stories - most notably an angry customer who personally messaged his wife with a string of nasty accusations because they disagreed with some particular design choice.

I understand that there is some kind of funnel effect that contributes to this, in the sense that people who are hated by their peers will spend more time engaging in solitary activity. I still don't understand why the community tolerates and even encourages toxic behaviour, though.

[1] I am not talking about the nervous aspie who struggles to make smalltalk; I am talking about the people who sent obscene messages to Neil Druckmann because they didn't agree with some of the choices he made when designing The Last of Us 2.

I don't think that there is any meaningful gaming community, same way as there is no overarching communities for movie watchers or music listeners. At this point it's just a type of content we consume, art we appreciate, etc. But despising Neil Druckmann and his storytelling is a cultural touchstone and something people can connect and form community around.

I was a Lead Dev for EA Sports for a while. The obsessed gamers will locate your email and/or phone and harass you, accusing of some personal conspiracy to ruin the game for them, or some other convoluted nonsense. It was surprising at first, and then a deluge of harassment. One of the many, many reasons I left that corrupt to the core shit show of an industry.

> I don't think it's the fault of the streamers' fame as much as it is the broader gaming community's tolerance of people with absolutely no empathy, social skills or basic human decency[1].

What would you suggest they do? As long as you play games and post about them online you are a part of the gaming community, it doesn't have the power to exclude anyone.

The problem is just that you have a lot of very opinionated customers in gaming. Customer support hates opinionated customers in every field, not just games, they just have more of them in gaming, and even more the more "hardcore" gaming you get. There is nothing you can do about that, gaming as a medium has potential to create way stronger emotional connections than any other medium and the customer support woes scales directly with that. Games that creates less emotional connections has fewer issues as you say, but people who makes games people connect stronger with will always face issues. The Last of Us was one such game, people really connected with it and then when the sequel didn't turn out as they wanted a lot of people reacted extremely strongly. But the rest of the gaming community can't do anything about that, if a million gamers hated Niel Druckmann then they will post about it, create forums about it, and some of them will harass him, just like any other huge emotional mob.

There was a semi-deliberate effort to reshape ideas about programming in the 60s and 70s, as awareness of its coming importance was rising. The most infamous of these changes was, of course, the shift from the perception of programming being simple clerical work for female secretaries to prestigious knowledge work for men diverted from math and physics academia. There was also, however, a shift from the perception of programming being a highly collaborative (and soft skill-sensitive) administrative and professional process, to one where a lone genius or small group of whiz kids in fly-by-night circumstances (garages, rented office space, etc.) drove productivity and innovation. Tin foil hat time: I'd wager that this was itself driven by the rise of the microcomputer and the coming-of-age of people whose first experiences programming were on the home PC, instead of in a college course or on-the-job. This would be during a time where computing skills were discounted if not maligned; there may have developed a sort of culture of reactionary pride (and the sensitivity to rejection and humiliation that accompanies passionate, personal investment in an identity) as a result, without the controls of business etiquette.

A horrible list highlighting how disconnected mainstream video game journalists are from people who actually play video games.

I'm a person that actually plays video games and I love the kinds of articles linked to in the post. It's worth examining the way that video games are both impacting and reflecting our culture as a society.

Hmm, I was hoping for a list of longer reads, aka books.

offtopic but just want to say...I have been programming for a long time, but not being much of a gamer hardly ever noticed what was happening in the gamedev world. Thanks to covid, I started poking around out of curiosity and joblessness and its been great.

I have always used coding as a sort of escape?/theraputic tool to kind of shift mental focus off negative stuff out of my control to something positive and controllable. It really helps reenergizing my batteries but beyond a point (esp in the open source world) I get pulled me into drama that again drains energy.

But feels like there is something different about gamedev compared to other forms of coding. I dont know if its a younger more enthusaistic crowd or something else...havent put my finger on it but I always feel much better after a session. Was wondering if others have noticed a diff?

Gamedev is the coding equivalent of creative writing. The goal isn't to make a program to solve someone's problems or serve some other function, instead you aim to make a program that is so fun to use and fiddle with that people will use it even if it serves no other purpose.

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