I've been hearing a lot of good things about the book "The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses" and I've been considering buying it. But I just noticed that there's a free companion app, which has questions for most (or all?) of the lenses from the book. So now I'm wondering whether you even need the book, maybe the questions in the companion app are enough? But on the other hand, surely there's a lot of extra knowledge in the 500-page book, that you would miss out on if you just used the companion app. What do you think? Is it worth picking up?

2 hours ago, tobloef said:

I've been hearing a lot of good things about the book "The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses"

The book is just a reference so you can look things up, the app is a more user friendly way of doing it.

The problem with the app is that it is a second hand version of the same idea. Think of a artist trying to draw a human but they do so from a other artist drawing instead of real life. Even if they cloned it they would only copy the same mistakes.

The book it'self is already a interruption. The app is a interruption of a interruption. If you follow only the app your concept would be a copy of a copy of a copy.

What I recommend is that you learn from your own experiences, use both the book and app as tools to only aid you in learning.

You can't go wrong by having both or either of them, as long as you don't think of them as a magic bullet.

If you like the questions in the app, and want Schell's explanation of the intent and value of each lens and how he's applied it in his own work, get a used copy of the first edition, or borrow it from your public library if available. The questions in the app are like the table of contents of the book. They give you an idea of what's in the book.