Books, Papers and other reading material for Game Design and Worlds

[Melooon]

This is a thread for collecting useful books and reading material related to virtual worlds, video game design and more! Please share any useful books you find! Please try to link a readable pdf or online copy if possible!

Some Useful Books:

• Designing Virtual Worlds (2003) by Richard Bartle - essentially the turn of the millennium manual on creating MMOs
• A Theory of Fun (2004) by Raph Koster - the defacto Game Design book anyone making a game should read
• Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974) by Ted Nelson - a big zine that defined a lot of ideas that lead to the web and more!
• World of Art - Digital Art (2003~) by Christiane Paul - a regularly updated textbook cataloging many major art-virtual-worlds of the last 30 years.
• Game Feel (2008) by Steve Swink - A useful textbook on making digital space feel tactile.

[TheFrugalGamer]

This may not seem immediately obvious, but I've just finished reading 50 Years of Text Games, which goes in depth on 50 different, well...text games, throughout the years. Although it's not about virtual worlds directly, many of the games featured were attempting to create worlds completely through text in a way that was immersive and believable. Fallen London, for instance, is one that managed to achieve this and saw a lot of success for it (and is featured in the book).

If you're interested in creating non-3D worlds, or in writing for any type of virtual world at all, it's a very good read.