lots of stuff is related to game design but is not quite game design, like anything can be related because anything can go in a game.
so um. i recommend anything about world history, psych, comedy, etc...
um you dont have to take my word for it, there are lots of kooks who will tell you this. the hard part is finding game audiobooks, but there are lots of game podcasts, but not many ar theory, most are 'what have we been playing this week' and industry news...
http://www.raphkoster.com/category/reading/ <<kosters reading list
http://www.costik.com/weblog/ << costiks old blog before playthisthing, lots of good recs there. hard to find audio though.
http://auntiepixelante.com/ << the third best games history kook is anna, but she doesnt maintain a bibliography i dont think. annarchive, but its games not books. maybe youll find one (a bibliography) in one of her books.
http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/index.html << chris crawford, king of kooks. his bibliography.
WORLD HISTORY
like the best intro book on how world history unfolds is probably 'guns germs and steel' by jared diamond. i think diamond is less-true the further he gets from his own expertise, which is sociology if i recall correctly but still-true-enough. diamond has written other books since this. a lot of this academic stuff is gonna be heavy.
anything by stephen pinker.
I like dan carlin's 'hardcore history' podcast - even just the first episode on steppe people. nobody talks about the steppes. but from the steppes we get the scythians, the mongols, the turks and the huns. these guys affected history just by being terrifying, but they have their own cultures and their descendants have writing. the chinese and the romans wrote about how scary they were. hes a politics weirdo and he also does a indie politics podcast but its not required reading.
another thing here is anything on philosophy... any philosophy. eastern, western, presocratic, socratic, stoic, enlightenment. trust me: psychology is philosophy is games. same field.
bertrand russel can do you a rundown of all philosophers and whether they were right or wrong. you ucan trust bertrand russel a fair bit. like at least hes read all these dudes and has an opinion.
PSYCHOLOGY
npr does a good popular psych podcast or they used to.... radiolab. anything about tech and science that touches on the impact of these technologies moving forward. hmmm... any science fiction and fantasy novels tbh. a song of ice and fire if you havent read it or watched the tv show. even if you have watched it, the books are better, i dont have to prove this.
religion is also psychology. so like, theology, any religion. doesnt have to be your parents' religion.
the 'mental illness happiness hour' podcast will help you understand psych and understand the player. and why the do all the weird shit players do.
COMEDY
you can just listen to live acts, whoever you like. but all radio is comedy at some point, some more than others.
<< 'talking funny' these guys are at the top of their game. 150 years of expertise distilled into an hour.
um... what else is the same field as games. learning and teaching? tutorials. how to write a tutorial. this means all academics are game designers (many of them are bad at it. the market weeds out the worst stuff. you can choose your own popes.)
LANGUAGE
we all live in the shadow of chomsky so we should know chomsky. the criticism with chomski is he doesnt care much about the native people whose languages he describes.
stephen pinker. pinker writes about everythng but hes a linguist.
'the secret life of pronouns'. pennebaker. good probability analysis. if im talking it matters if i talk about myself 'i, me' or all of us (we, us). it affects people whether you talk to them or to yourself.
how to concatenate and recombine strings to make new strings that are still readable, that's computational linguistics.
SOCIOLOGY
i never did a sociology degree, its the nearest field to games i barely know anything about. sociology these days is sjw, so you'll have to listen to sjws.
so like: anything on being trans. anything on being queer. anything on being black, or just not white. anything on being a woman. anything on being a man, but more than this: poor. crazy. in prison. in work. danerous, dull and dirty work. in the military. in religion. in the family. we hide this shit but its still important.
anyway, we could get stuck talking about mens rights and feminism. just listen to people who are different from you. if you dont have black perspectives listen to some trade podcast about some black culture - like hip hop. this will give you guys that came up outside the academia, so newer and less well represented perspecties tha dont have to pass through the university system.
MILITARY
game theory, definitely game theory. people will tell you this isnt related to games but they're wrong. the developer is required to live in an iterated prisoners dilemma with the player.
what else is military? soldiers diaries, strategy and tactics: so sun tsu. um i dont know what else. blind spot for me. ask a military. but yeah: anything about guns and missiles and how best to use them i guess. guns are games too. economics. where does all the military money go.
which leads us back to politics... politics is games too.
COMICS
scott maccloud.
you can just read comics but they never have audio books really? i think. but the webcomics money models are the same as ours.
dont watch indie game the movie if you can avoid it. too close to home. how the sausage is made.
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