Gaming Books Round-up

The Pretty and Useful

So, we've looked at the good books out there for gaming aficionados and we've looked at the books which you shouldn't even pick up if you find them on the street – the type of books which libraries should be burned down for.

Now, it remains to look at those books which don't aim to offer Top 50 lists or making-of tales – those which survive on the merit of being really pretty art books. Those books are a minority, true, but they exist nonetheless and some of them are really worth picking up.

Below, we've got the low-down on our favourite picture books which have a a focus on artistry and the graphical advances in computer games. It's only fair that this section should get a page all of its own because, despite all of the developer smack-talk and hyperbole, computer games are still very much a visual medium. Crysis proves that much.

Anyway, enough with the introduction and lead-in. Below are two of the best coffee table books a geek can have with them for when their system is backing up or on the blink. Assuming they don't have a DS or PSP, that is...

Game Art

Author: Dave Morris, Leo Hartas (192 pages)
UK Price: £5.00
US Price: $7.29

A book truly suited to just picking up and leafing through, Game Art varies wildly between being thoroughly interesting and utterly uninspiring. The text is by and large a collection of filler information and fluff punctuated by semi-interesting trivia, but it occasionally swings into some massively informative and well-worded interviews.

The art is the main attraction here though and the book doesn't disappoint – it's laden with beautiful vistas of the non-windows variety and has some interesting breakdowns of how scenes are conceptualised, built and realised into the final game. Some of the games it looks at are rather obscure and the selection of interviews and titles could have done with a bit of a refining if you ask me, but it's a minor concern.

Game Art isn't the type of book you can expect to find yourself reading cover to cover as with some of the books on this list – it's more suited for those who dip in and out of the books, stopping somewhere different everytime. In that regard, it's a nice little hardback art book for those with a more geeky and alternative taste than most other art-lovers.

While it doesn't offer up anything extraordinary, it's still a testament to just how much work goes into designing a single level of a computer game and does a lot to increase the credibility of artists specialising in computer games.

The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon

Author: Steven Kent (624 pages)
UK Price: £10.49
US Price: $13.59

If you're a trivia whore, always enjoying and scouring for little anecdotes and nuggets of information about your favourite games, then Ultimate History is the book for you. Especially if your favourite games include retro or abandonware games.

The book is literally the most complete history of computer and video games ever assembled and the fact that much of it is comprised of anecdotes from the developers means that it isn't the type of content you could easily track down online even if you cared to.

The book is studded with interviews with the likes of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, as well as Sony's Kaz Harai and Nintendo übergod Shigeru Miyamoto. While very little in terms of actual useful content is provided, it's still undeniably fun to learn that Pac-Man was originally meant to be Puck-Man and that Lara Croft was only created when Toby Gard's mouse slipped during the character design stages. (slipped on the Breast Scale slider perchance? -Ed)

The one weakness of the book is that it's a little behind the times now and the timeline, while both thorough and pithy, only charts up to the launch of the original Xbox. Still, with 500 or so interviews and stories straight from the developer, the book is still definitely worth picking up and is enjoyable as both a serious read and a casual page-turner.

The End

Thus, this little round-up comes to a close and while it is by no means complete, we do hope that it has at least proven useful – if it hasn't then you can always read our own attempt to look at how games are designed and made.

The sheer number of books out there on the topic of computer and video games is, to me at least, very encouraging for the future of the medium. It represents a growing acceptance for computer games as a worthwhile and artistic medium – one contested by Roger Ebert and many parents who still see computer games as nothing more than uber-violent gorefests which corrupt their children.

The end of that path towards mass acceptance is still a long way off, but the fact that intelligent authors are now trying to express that idea sensibly (for a fee, of course) is a large step in the right direction and one that we should all be grateful for. After all, we all need something to read when there's a power cut or we can't get into the forums, right?