Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation (Morgan Kaufmann Game Design Books) [Kindle Edition]

First of all, this is not about haptics (literal 'feel', as in force feedback or other simulated touch) though haptics are touched on (har). It's about tuning the feel of a specific kind of game - the sort where your avatar, seen or unseen, becomes a virtual extension of your real self. This requires a certain tight feedback loop of repeated player input and game response that's fast enough that it becomes to some degree chunked and unconscious. Games like Super Mario 64, Half-Life, Burnout, and Geometry Wars all qualify. Civ IV and Starcraft, even though they're great games, don't qualify - the input is too far removed.

It comes with a companion website, [...], and you are expected to follow along by downloading various example apps from the site at given points in the text and play with them. And they do add a huge amount to the book.

I'm slightly conflicted by this book - Swink does a good job of laying out exactly what makes a good game feel right, but it's a bit too chatty and repetitive, and there is a lot it 'it should do x' without as much indication of how to do x as I would have expected. If you tinker with the provided example apps much of it will come into focus, though from a tuning side if not implementation side.

I also didn't feel I learned a lot new till the end of the book, though it certainly helps to have it all laid out semi-rigorously as a checklist. On the other hand I've also played too many video games since Super Mario Bros where the designers obviously did NOT know this stuff, so I would highly recommend that anyone working in the game industry read this if you're not already Mark Cerny.

The real payoff for me came in the last several chapters where he analyzes several videogames in detail: Asteroids, Super Mario Bros, Bionic Commando, Super Mario 64, and Offroad Velociraptor Safari. And the chapter on experimental games to push the limits of the various game feel metrics was quite interesting as well.

There are charming hand illustrations throughout, and a constant stream of references to games (new and old) that you should have played at some point if you're a serious game author or player and which provide a shared reference. On the other hand, if you haven't, you might lose the point being made.

I'd give this 4.5 stars if I could - it's a good informative book, but for most of it I didn't feel utterly compelled to keep reading no matter what, and I need that for 5 stars. There are also some obvious errors an editor should have caught, though since the technical content is almost entirely on the website it doesn't hurt too much.

Steve Swink writes at length in this book about an aspect of game design that's rarely considered in a formal way: How to make a game feel responsive and consistent with a player's expectations. He's particularly concerned with games that play in real-time and give instant feedback, and makes his point with a rich set of examples. For instance, why was Street Fighter II so much more successful than the plethora of other, superficially similar fighting games that came out around the same time? Swink's answer: Because when you press a button in Street Fighter II, you get a response very fast--usually within 100ms, even if your character is in the middle of another move. Any lag beyond 240ms, Swink argues (with scientific data), leads to player frustration.

Swink also talks about "polish," the subtle visual or aural cues that alter a player's expectations. A slight change in the texture filter used on a sphere changes it from solid to squishy in the player's mind, and affects how they'll try to interact with it. The importance of polish to a game can hardly be overstated. It's what separates "Gears of War" from the hordes of other zombie shooters on the market.

Think of this as a more in-depth sequel to the superior Game Design Workshop. It should be on every video game designer's shelf.

When playing a video game, it's common to talk about how it feels. Stiff, floaty, slippery, etc... The feel of a game has got to be the most crucial, yet hard to define aspect of a game. Game Feel explores this elusive yet essential quality.

The book looks at the feel of a game both in abstract and mathematically definable ways. It surveys areas like controller input, rules, game world context and experience enhancing polish effects (sound design, particles, etc...)

Later chapters focus on examples of popular games that exhibit good game feel (Asteroids, Super Mario Bros., Bionic Commando & Mario 64) and break down the components that make these games feel so good to play.

This book is kind of a dense read, which is pretty much unavoidable given the topic, but the author does a pretty good job keeping things entertaining with a rather humorous writing style. The topics are also well divided, laying out each concept separately.

The book also has a companion website that contains playable examples of the concepts being covered. Unfortunately at the time of this review, only a few of the examples are actually there. Plus they have to be downloaded onto your computer rather than simply loading directly in the browser. It would also be nice if the site linked to all the articles the author mentions in the foot notes so I could avoid typing in a bunch of 40 character URLs.

This book is an enlightening read even if you only desire to play video games rather than design them. I personally liked the parts on virtual perception and how some of these principles of appealing game feel are similar to principles of appeal animation. (Overlap, Squash & Stretch, etc...) It's also nice that the author wraps up with a look at some of the possible future developments of game sensation.

All in all, Game Feel is an eye-opening look at the most important part of video games; the part going on in our heads.