You'll find my recommended resources (books, links, etc.) below, relevant to UX, education, cognitive science, game design, ethics, and more. I regularly update this list. Don't hesitate to let me know if a resource that made a difference for you is missing here! 🙂

Join the Game UX community!

  • New to game UX or interested in getting in? Read this blog post.
  • Check out the Game UX Summit & follow #GameUXsummit and @GameUX_Summit on Twitter
  • Join the Game User Experience group on Linkedin (I encourage companies looking to recruit UX practitioners to post their job descriptions on this platform)
  • Participate in the Ethical Games initiative & follow @EthicalGamesOrg on Twitter
  • Join the IGDA GRUX group on LinkedIn (Games Research and User Experience SIG), browse the GRUX website (jobs and many resources are listed there), or discuss with the community on the GRUX Discord channel
  • Check out Fair Play Alliance to learn, share, and create best practices in fostering fair play
  • Check out the GAconf (game accessibility conference) & join the GAconf Discord channel
  • Join the We can Fix it in UI Discord channel (UX/UI)
  • Join the GameUX Slack channel
  • Check out myYouTube channel: lots of videos about game UX, user research, the UX summits (the Game UX Summit and the UX summit at GDC), education, social questions, etc.  youtube.com/c/CeliaHodent

Check Out My Books

Hodent, C. (2017).The Gamer's Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Available in English on Amazon, Kindle, and CRC Press. Also available in French, Japanese, & Korean.

Hodent, C. (2020).The Psychology of Video Games. Routledge. Available in English on Amazon & Routledge.

Celia Hodent's books (book covers)
Visit my About page to learn more about me.

About Cognitive Science / Psychology

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
  • Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
  • How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
  • Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using your Brain by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb
  • Great Myths of the Brain by Christian Jarrett
  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  • Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology by Ronald T. Kellogg
  • Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio

About Design and Game Design

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
  • Emotional Design: Why we Love (or Hate) Everyday things by Donald Norman
  • Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, by Tim Brown
  • Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
  • Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensations by Steve Swink
  • The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell
  • A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
  • Flow in Games (and Everything Else) by Jenova Chen: link to pdf
  • Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games by Tracy Fullerton
  • Challenges for Games Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite (Romero) and Ian Schreiber
  • Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers
  • Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
  • Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
  • Great online library of game UIs: https://interfaceingame.com/

About Usability / User Research in Video Games

  • Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience by Katherine Isbister and Noah Schaffer (Eds.)
  • Evaluating User Experience in games. Concepts and methods byRegina Bernhaupt (Ed.)
  • Games User Research group: http://gamesuserresearchsig.org/
  • Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data by Magy Seif El-Nasr, Anders Drachen, Alessandro Canossa (Eds)
  • Games User Research by Anders Drachen, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Lennart Nacke (Eds)
  • Game Accessibility: gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

About Human Factors / User Experience

  • Nielsen Norman group: http://www.nngroup.com/
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society: https://www.hfes.org/
  • Interaction Design Foundation: https://www.interaction-design.org/
  • Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  • Designing the User Experience of Game Development Tools by David Lightbown
  • Human-Computer Interaction, by I. Scott MacKenzie
  • Introduction to Human Factors: Applying Psychology to Design, by Nancy J. Stone et al.

About Education, Learning, and Child Development

  • Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education by Fran Blumberg (Ed.). I wrote a chapter in this book "Toward a Playful and Usable Education" talking about the importance of UX in educational games.
  • Apprendre au XXIe siècle by François Taddei.
  • Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert
  • How Computer Games Help Children Learn by David Williamson Shaffer
  • Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown
  • Play and its Role in the Mental Development of the Child by Lev Vygotsky
  • The Psychology of the Child by Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder
  • E ssentials of Human Development: A Life-Span View by Robert V. Kail and
  • Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/
  • Multimedia for Learning by Stephen Alessi and Stanley Trollip
  • Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts by Fran Blumberg and Patricia J. Brooks (Eds)

About Project Management and Creativity

  • Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
  • The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr
  • Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
  • The Game Production Toolbox, by Heather Maxwell Chandler

About Ethics, Implicit Biases, AI, Inclusion, & more

  • Ethical Games website
  • The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart
  • Dark Patterns website, by Harry Brignull
  • Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by C. Criado Perez
  • Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong by Angela Saini
  • Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saint
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
  • Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West
  • Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt
  • Stand Out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, by James Williams
  • Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O'Neil
  • Future Ethics, by Cennydd Bowles
  • AI Ethics, by Mark Coeckelbergh
  • Towards a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence, by Paula Boddington
  • Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Umoja Noble
  • Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, by Kishonna L. Gray

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