What are the best books on game design? I'm only 15 and haven't read anything on game design before except for articles on the internet. I need a single book that can teach me the most important aspects of game design, and if possible, some programming and art. So what's the best book on the subject that you've read and/or heard about?

That is FAR too many topics to try and cover in a single book. There are tons of books dedicated to much more singular topics.

A great practical book on design is Game Design Complete, by Patrick O'Luanaigh. He covers a lot of fundamentals of practical game, has interviews with a number of expects in their respective fields, and offers an outline for a game design document. He is the former Creative Directer of Eidos and now runs his own company.

Theory of Fun by Raph Koster is a great book that goes into the philosphy behind games in general. He is the CCO of Sony Online.

For programming books, I'd recommend heading over to the Beginners forum and doing a search. Questions about great introduction to game programming books are made practically every day.

For art well, depending on whether you want to get into 2d or 3d graphics they are fairly different directions.

Here's my list of books

All I can say is my friend gave me his copy of Game Design for Teens (having high dreams of making the world's greatest videogame one day) and I can assure you that it's not worth buying. Aside from being poorly written and formatted, the examples it provides are frightfully mediocre and not good learning material.

Head over to borders and go to the computer section. You'll find tons of books about many different subjects.

Or, you could just search a site like Amazon.com for whatever subject you want. You're probably going to have to choose a sub-topic or you'll have too many books to sift through.

There are some books out there about general aspects of game design, but usually they aren't very detailed in any one are; it's better to buy a book about casual game design, or game design for market [X], etc., unless you want to buy a very large book.

As for programming, it depends on what language you want to use. You could always start out with Game Maker if you don't want to bother learning code right away, but be careful or it'll spoil you if/when you decide to move on to i.e. C++. Might help you learn game design theory though, so you'll be better later on if/when you decide to make games more seriously.

Art, as mentioned by zer0wolf, is different depending on what you mean. If you are talking spriting, do a google search for some tutorials. There are tons out there. Then just start drawing; it may be poor at first, but sooner or later, you will get more skilled. If you are talking modeling, you're going to have to choose a program and search for books or tutorials specifically for that program.

Good luck.

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Original post by Tom Sloper Here's my list of books

I see it's already listed on that page, but I wanted to point out "Creating Emotion In Games" once more. One of my all-time favourite books.