Jesse Schell

Jesse Schell has taught game design and led research projects at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center since 2002. He is also the CEO of Pittsburgh's largest videogame studio, Schell Games, and the former chairman of the International Game Developers Association. In 2004, he was named one of the world's Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's magazine of innovation. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, he was the creative director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, where he spent seven years as designer, programmer, and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and Disney Online. Before that, he was a software engineer at IBM and Bell Communications Research, and a writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer's Mime Circus and the Juggler's Guild.

Anyone can master the fundamentals of game design—no technological expertise is necessary. In Jesse Schell's landmark book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, he shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games, and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality videogames. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses, one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer and will understand how to do it.