Reddit reviews Man, Play and Games

I can give you a few monographs that consistently show up in the literature.

• Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
  
• Man, Play and Games
  
• The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
  
  And a novel by Hermann Hesse that explores (among other things) games, narrative, and value.
  
  
• The Glass Bead Game

Johan Huizinga's work is pretty foundational to the philosophical underpinnings of games.

Man, Play, and Games is another significant work that predates video gaming.

On a less academic level, Inside Game Design is a book of interviews with several studios of varying success on the game design process and how it adapts from game to game.

These titles might be pretty fringe to what you're looking for, but I can recommend some web pages that provide more easily digested, general interest material that would be helpful to you. I also know of a number of relevant academic journals, if that is of interest to you.

If /truegaming were a seminar, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens and Roger Callois' Man, Play and Games would be the first two books on the syllabus, though they well predate modern video games.

Ah! Looks like I saw this post a little late but I'll throw in some additional suggestions as I am year into a PhD on a games related subject area (social dynamics of online games are of particular importance to my work).

I would start off by suggesting Johan Huzinga's Homo Ludens and Roger Cailois' Man, Play and Games which often underpin so much of the game studies field. Although many of the assertions made here are often extremely dated in new technological contexts they do provide an excellent reference point to more pure notions of play (as problematic as the concept may be).

Keeping it specific to your interest of social games and mention of T.L. Taylors Play Between Worlds I would recommend Mark Chen’s Leet Noobs; Celia Pearce’s Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds; the recent Routledge compilation Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games and also Mia Consalvo’s Cheating: Gaining Advantages in Videogames. All of these books approach the topic of sociality in and around games in different ways but I would highly recommend them all.

I would also recommend T.L. Taylor’s latest book Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming for an important study into the burgeoning cultural practices surrounding e-sports in the West. This is a subject matter that is really close to my own personal interests and current work so I might be a little biased, but much the same as Play Between Worlds, it’s a fantastically informed and important book to the field.

I could go on for a while though.. If you would like any more suggestions or have any similar material to share yourself please don’t hesitate to drop a message!