Jesse Schell - The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

Jesse Schell - The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

From The Game Developers' Library by Indie Game Clinic

July 31, 2025 · 1h 16m · Episode 3

About this episode

The episode discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Jesse Schell's game design textbook and its impact on new developers.

In this episode we cover this weighty game design textbook, discussing its stronger and weaker areas, how it can help new developers to understand design and player psychology, and why so many more technically-oriented folks bounce off the book. Host Joe Baxter-Webb is a game design educator and YouTuber. He has previously been the course lead in Game Design at Canterbury Christ Church University, and has helped develop for multiple commercial games companies including King (Candy Crush Soda Saga) Karta (Blackpink in Roblox, Spotify in Fortnite) and Adult Swim Games. Guest host Jeremy Johnson is an indie dev and also Assistant Professor of Video Game Development at St. Edward's University, Texas, USA, where he teaches from A Book of Lenses every semester.  Most books mentioned are available via my bookshop.org affiliate page. This allows you to purchase books online in a way which benefits small local retailers. https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/indiegameclinic other things cited: Deck of Lenses, the free online version: https://deck.artofgamedesign.com/#/menu/0/?lang=en Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, online version: https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html Achievement Relocked…

People in this episode

Host: Joe Baxter-Webb

Guest: Jeremy Johnson

Topics covered

  • game design
  • player psychology
  • design education
  • indie development
  • game design textbooks

Keywords

  • game design
  • player psychology
  • Jesse Schell
  • A Book of Lenses
  • indie game development

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Canterbury Christ Church University, St. Edward's University, King, Karta, Adult Swim Games

Books & works: The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Deck of Lenses, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design, Fermat and Pascal on Probability

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