Now Playing
The book recommends a minicanon of 12 games for any course and a
full canon of over 200 games that any developer or game academic
should be familiar with. Those are largely games that have stood the
test of time, and the merits of each are explained in detail in the
text.
This page lists a simple selection of recent games for most
platforms that we recommend because of their exceptional
design in mechanics, content, technology--and in the best cases, all three!
This is what we're playing.
The "Now" Canon
These are the new
exceptional games that developers and academics are discussing
right now. If you want to stay current, you should be playing
them too. You might not like these games personally, but you'll probably
acknowledge that they're important. This doesn't replace the all-time
canon. These are the games that you should play once you've covered
the original canon.
- Portal 2 on PC
- Bastion on PC or Xbox360
- Risk: Legacy board game
- Troyes board game
- Skyrim on PC
- Minecraft on PC
- Battlefield 3 on PC
- Batman Arkham City on Xbox 360
- Uncharted 3 on PS3
- JetPack Joyride on iOS
- Infinity Blade 2 on iOS
- Scribblenauts Remix on iOS
- Super Mario 3DS
- StarWars the old Republic on PC
There are other games like Angry Birds and FarmVille that are big
casual hits. I think that they succeeded for important reasons
(marketing, right place/right time, "going viral") but not ones
that are particularly interesting to game developers.
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