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Next-Gen has compiled a list of the 50 books from which everyone in the game industry could learn something. Game designer and author Ernest Adams’s list covers game design theory to histories of games companies to sociological texts to novels.

The list is divided into twelve categories, including theory, design practice, graphic design, online community, and inspirations.

Some of our favorites on the list include:

Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman,
A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster,
Designing Virtual Worlds, by Richard Bartle,
Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson, and
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud

The Art of Computer Game Design is a book that was written in 1982 by game design guru Chris Crawford. Crawford worked as a game designer for Atari in the 70s and is the author of Balance of Power, a bestselling game. The orginal book has been out of print for years, but this link will take you to a downloadable .PDF copy of the book. Crawford includes six precepts for computer game design that are still true, twenty years after the original text was written. The precepts include: Go with the grain (work with the strengths of the computing medium); Don’t transplant (taking a board game and converting it to a computer game doesn’t work); Keep it clean (stay close to the theme and avoid distracting details); Store less and process more (what we in computer simulation call dynamic complexity vs. detail complexity).

by Guy Kawasaki

Rules for Revolutionaries isn’t a book about simulation or e-learning, but it is an inspirational book on entrepreneurship and Guy Kawasaki (formerly chief evangelist at Apple Computer) is a fantastic public speaker.

Guy Kawaski is a big fan of “top ten” lists and so the book is divided into ten rules that entrepreneurs should use to help their businesses. One of the rules, “eat like a bird and poop like an elephant” resulted in the development of the resources page for Forio, so it’s appropriate that we mention the book here.

Link to Amazon

by Everett Rogers

What is the process by which new technologies get adopted? The same processes that cause technology to spread are the same that cause many diseases and belief systems to spread– namely interpersonal communications. Rogers explains how all social change requires to voluntary cooperation of members of society.

The diffusion process creates product lifecycle behavior. Product lifecycle behavior is frequently modeled in management simulation because it is a basic force that drives business. The diffusion process described by Rogers is used in the PDA Sim simulation.

Everett Rogers builds on Frank Bass’ diffusion model and uses several intriguing examples of how ideas spread through a population. Inc. Magazine named this book one of the twenty-five most important books on business ever written.

Link to Amazon

by Thomas Schelling

This book is now old enough (first published in 1978), and popular enough to be considered a classic introduction to economics and systems analysis. Schelling uses examples throughout the book that you might have thought of before, and then applies analytical techniques for understanding their behavior.

One of Schelling’s main points is that the behavior of groups is caused by the choices of a large number of individuals, each of whom is responding to the choices of the others. In one example, a rush-hour driver decides which route based on what he thinks other drivers will do. Using this and many other examples Schelling shows how individual decisions can aggregate to a collective outcome that is no one prefers.

The book is a good introduction to both the value and dangers of using simulations and models of human behavior.

Link to Amazon