The Art of Point-and-Click Adventure Games
Published by Bitmap Books, written by Mike Bevan, Julian Hill, and Damien McFerran is a beautiful coffee table book about point-and-click adventure games (ISBN: 978-0-9956586-6-0). Quésaco? What is that? Think about King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, Flight of the Amazon Queen or The Secret of Monkey Island. These are few iconic games of the category you may have played many years ago. Memba? Otherwise, think about these games as classic adventure games where instead of using text entry such as go south, open box, etc., you are pointing and clicking – hence the name – on the image to direct the character. The authors usually focused on the graphical aspect of the game. And that’s where this book is fantastic! In 460 pages, you can re-visit your favorite games’ pixel arts – reproduced with excellent quality – and discover a plethora of unheard titles. Once you finished looking at the images, you have the texts to learn about the making of these games through several testimonies and interviews. Unfortunately, the book is a bit pricy.
Link to the book on the publisher’s site.
Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play
Written by Meagan Marie and published by Prima Games, this book tells us 100 stories of successful women working in the gaming industry (ISBN: 978-0744019537). I love this book for at least two reasons. First, it provides a unique view of stories and anecdotes about what it means to make a game. Similarly to movies, it takes a village to make a game. And that’s the second aspect of the book that I appreciate: learn about many professions of the field, thru a women’s experience. Last but not least, this is a book to put in the hands of all young women you know and may be interested in the field. It proves without a doubt that gaming – the same applies by the way to computer science – is not reserved for boys anymore. What an inspirational book!
