thanks, good to see he's not flying completely blind. still, according to that he'd been making games only for three years before he wrote a book on it, and even less before he started teaching it in a university. if this were any other subject but game design, wouldn't that feel a bit weird? would you want to learn chemistry from a university professor who had only been a chemist for three years? and that's an actual science.
my intent isn't to personally attack everyone who writes books on game design though, it's just to recognize that, with rare exceptions, most of them have very little experience making games. they probably don't know much more about game design than the average person on this forum does, yet they say claim to be able to teach it to others. i just wish they were more humble about it, and not write in such a way as if they felt they had all the answers (coming up with rules and so on).
Why make it a book? If you think you could do a good job with a workshop-style teaching method why not start up a thread here with exercises and suchlike?
There was a similar thing started for level design a few months back, it's not still going but I found it useful at the time and would be very interested in other similar projects.
the main reason to make it a book would be to compete with all the other terrible books and hopefully displace them with something more reasonable and useful to beginning developers than the gobblygook they're being fed. but there's no reason we can't do it on the forum too, sure. but we already sort of do that with contests: ludum dare, tigsource contests, and all the other thematic small contests are basically exactly what i would recommend the beginning game designer do anyway.
it's just that, in the game design classroom, they *don't* do the kind of helpful stuff people on this forum generally do. likewise with the 14-year-old who sees a game design book in the store and reads it; he doesn't know how to start making games at all, and has no experience programming, and is far more likely to be misled by these books than people with game design experience are. so i think a book would help reduce all the 14-year-olds out there who fill their heads with ideas about what game design "should" be like even before they've made one.
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