Game Studies
Game Studies
Open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research on computer games since 2001. Articles apply humanities and social-science methods to game aesthetics, narrative, rules, and player culture, helping readers follow scholarly debates and build rigorous critical analyses of specific games.
More resources on Game Analysis & Theory
Game Developer
Trade publication, formerly Gamasutra, publishing postmortems, design deep-dives, and technical breakdowns written by working developers. Reading it regularly gives designers concrete accounts of how shipped games solved mechanics, economy, and production problems.
Esports Earnings
Esports Earnings is a searchable database that tracks prize money and earnings for esports players, teams, and events across major games. It provides up-to-date tournament results, prize pools, and historical earnings data to analyze income trends in competitive gaming.
The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses
Presents design as a set of over a hundred lenses, focused questions about players, mechanics, story, and aesthetics, that a designer applies to interrogate a game in progress and find what is actually wrong with it.
Designer Notes
Soren Johnson interviews designers across whole careers — Sid Meier, Amy Hennig, Zach Barth, Patrice Desilets — digging into why specific mechanics shipped or were cut. Multi-hour episodes, effectively a primary-source oral history of design decisions. Supplies primary testimony on how design decisions were actually made rather than a framework for reading finished games.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Mark Brown dissects shipped games one design problem at a time. The Boss Keys series maps Zelda dungeon topology as graphs; other episodes cover difficulty curves, accessibility and level design. Structured argument over gameplay footage, not reaction commentary.
The Chemistry Of Game Design
Models gameplay as 'skill atoms' — action, simulation, feedback, modeling — chained into skill trees. Gives a diagrammable method for mapping a game's learning loops and pinpointing where players burn out or stall.