Raph's Website » The Game Bookosphere

The Game Bookosphere

December 9th, 2006 (Visited 3124 times) Tags:

At the center is game design; from there the other disciplines attach.
Based on Amazon data. Click for the huge version.

OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. I started with my own book, of course, and worked outwards. For every new book that popped up, I double-clicked it to expand its links as well, unless it wasn’t actually a game related book in some fashion.

I then went through and color-coded regions of the graph, because it was interesting to me to see where things overlapped and where they didn’t. In the small version here, it can be hard to see some of the regions — I didn’t label them all. But in the big version you can see the many categories I imposed.

Some things I thought were interesting:

Game studies and serious games, however marginalized it may have seemed over on the blogosphere graph, is well-represented in the publishing world.

Why don’t graphics programming books and art books have more of an overlap in these days of shaders and technical artists?

Comics has a continent. I cut the comics continent from the web graph because it was too unwieldy, but there was one there too.

Game design as a category did in fact stay at the center. I think this is a good thing.

AI in games is a huge topic. Physics in games, not so much.

There’s a nice connection from game design to interface design, interactivity theory, and thence to cognitive psychology. Interestingly, this does not connect to game studies except through game design.

The new media stuff could arguably fall into several buckets, and I ended up fudging the edges of lots of other things as well. Where should The Long Tail go? Heck if I know.

There’s a little pocket of “MMO culture” books in light purple — I forgot to label it on the big map, but look over under Law and Game Studies.

We still reference Writing books from outside the industry than those from within. Of course, there’s a lot of connections over to the New Media stuff as well.

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Audio Books wrote on December 10th, 2006 at 5:00 am:

At the center is game design; from there the other disciplines attach. Based on Amazon data. Click for the huge version. OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. … Read full story Tags: Amazon Used Books

rascunho » Seção de dados do blog » links for 2006-12-10 wrote on December 10th, 2006 at 12:25 pm:

[...] Raph’s Website » The Game Bookosphere OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. (tags: http://www.raphkoster.com 2006 TouchGraph games raph_koster blog_post) [...]

Mapping MMOG Reality at MMOG Nation wrote on December 11th, 2006 at 8:13 am:

[...] He followed that up today by mapping game design books with the same utility and some help from Amazon. That’s a pretty interesting sight too. [...]

covert.c. said on December 9th, 2006 at 4:42 pm:

Interesting! I’d be interested in knowing if that dearth of technical artistry you mentioned extends online as well.

Renan Fontana said on December 10th, 2006 at 10:27 am:

Hi! Amazing job. Is there any way you could make the Touchgraph file avaliable? Some of the titles are overlapping and it´s hard to read (for example, Murray´s ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck’, in ‘New Media’ area, only ‘hamlet on’ can be read). It would be great to get a clearer view, and be able to print it in higher quality. (for example, I´d love to attach this as reference in academic work).

Raph said on December 10th, 2006 at 10:35 am:

Alas, Renan, TouchGraphAmazon is a web-based tool, and there’s no “save” function. I don’t think there’s a print function either!

That said, it’s not that hard to recreate, and I think that TouchGraph DOES have a “manual layout” option (right-click on empty space, and turn off the automatic layout). So you could fix the overlapping titles, with a bit more work than I was willing to expend.

Trucegore said on December 10th, 2006 at 9:45 pm:

looks like yhe eve map, lol.

Charles Ellis said on December 11th, 2006 at 11:05 am:

One of the things I always found interesting about game coding books is that, while there are many books on writing the 2D and 3D graphics components of a game engine, there aren’t many books that cover game engine design and development as a whole. Even the books whose titles would imply that they teach this, (according to the ToC for those I haven’t read) tend to stick only to the graphics.

As someone who has worked on major game projects (although perhaps not in the programming area), do you feel there is a good reason for this? Or, given you experience as an author, would you say it is related to the troubles of profitably publishing such a book?

Spot said on December 12th, 2006 at 4:02 pm:

This is some very interesting information to peruse through. Thanks for the posting. I am definitely checking out TouchGraph as well.