I should be posting this in the Game Engine forum, but this applies to those who want to make games overall.
If you think you’re serious about being a game designer, read “Masters Of Doom” by David Kushner. It’s an excellent book about the “Two Johns” (Romero and Carmack), and shows their lives briefly before they became game designers at their company id Software, then goes on to show life up until the development of Doom 3, from desigining “Wolfenstein 3D” and “Doom” to Romero’s starting up (as well as the rise and fall of) Ion Storm.
I’ve been re-reading it (in non-linear fashion–just an open-up-and-start-reading-whatever style of reading), and when I read about one game one person in the game made, I thought the weird style was so good I came up with an idea for a Blender game that I’m going to keep secret. Wait a second…
I’m also going to read “The Ultimate History Of Video Games” (they should have kept the original title–“The First Quarter…” heh! You get it, right? Hmm… how to explain this… it’s about 25 years of video games, and think about it in US currency and it’s sort of a pun) and “Supercade” when it comes to my library for me. I also want to read “Opening The XBOX” (about Microsoft’s development of the XBOX, obviously enough) and “Lucky Wander Boy” (a fictitious story about a video game junkie who wants to write an ultimate history of video games), but my library doesn’t carry them.