the corner office

On Thursday night I finished reading Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris. No, I have no pretensions of getting into game development, but let's be honest, it's the coolest part of the IT industry, and I bought the book for a bit of armchair tourism, if you will. The fact that it took me months to finish is perhaps indicative that I found it pretty slow going. If I hadn't coughed up so much for it, I'd probably have given up.

It's a fairly comprehensive treatment of games development - not much nitty-gritty technical stuff, but instead a detailed treatment of various aspects of the games making process - from the earliest design phases to the final goal of shipping a game. It is interesting and valuable in that it applies good old software development best practices and principles to the context of game development, and that obviously is still applicable to the boring work the rest of us do. Some of the principles almost seem heretical and counter to our images of what ubergeek game developers do - but that's the point the authors repeatedly make - games are BIG these days, and need a different set of rules now: the anarchic culture is actually holding the games industry back.

The book is well written and I kept coming across truisms and examples and observations that had me thinking 'hmm, I should make a note of this' - but in the end I just didn't find myself excited about reading it. I can't say why - some sections just seemed to go on forever, and in general, I guess what I should call the "resonance to noise ratio" just wasn't that high for me. There's some really decent, insightful and useful content, but not enough for me to say I enjoyed the book.