If I had a limitless budget to kit out a new games studio with lovely, physical books, what would I buy? I went through the secondary source list for my work-in-progress Dreamcast Worlds and picked out the most useful and thought-provoking entries.

Hiroki Azuma’s Ge-muteki riarizumu (Gamelike Realism) (2007) hasn’t been translated yet but Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009) has and it’s almost as good. If Gamelike Realism does get translated you should buy it.

Roland Barthes (1957) Mythologies

Roland Barthes (1981) Camera Lucida

Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger eds. (2007) Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism

Scott Bukatman (2003) Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century

Tristan Donovan (2010) Replay: The history of video games

Katie Salem and Eric Zimmerman eds. (2006) The Game Design Reader: A Rules Of Play Anthology

Bruno Latour (2005) Reassembling the Social

Lev Manovich (1993) The Language of New Media

Daniel Miller (2005) Materiality

Michael Nitsche (2008) Video Game Spaces: image, play, and structure in 3D game worlds

Donald Norman (2002) The design of everyday things

Giles Slade (2007) Made to break: Technology and obsolescence in America

Susan Sontag (1978) On Photography

Lucy Suchman (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions

John Urry (2007) Mobilities

Steffen Walz (2010) Toward a Ludic Architecture: the space of play and games

Bernard Wolf, Mark Perron eds. (2003) The video game theory reader

**Note that if something obvious is missing (e.g. Aarseth or Bogost) it’s because I didn’t use it for Dreamcast Worlds. Doesn’t mean I don’t think it would be worth kitting out your studio with!