Meta-Formalism: Exercises in Style
Explore form and style with Meta-Formalism: Exercises in Style—a curated reading list blending books on game design, true crime, and visual storytelling. Featuring Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun for Game Design, James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, this collection examines how structure and medium shape narrative, play, and meaning. Ideal for designers, writers, and fans of formalism, meta-analysis, and creative exercises.
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Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.
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My Dark Places
by James Ellroy
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
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Theory of Fun for Game Design
by Raph Koster
Discusses the essential elements in creating a successful game, how playing games and learning are connected, and what makes a game boring or fun.
