Well Played 1.0 is a nice series of essays published under the Creative Commons license and available via Lulu. So, it’s free, and you can read it all. It’s about games and their meaning. For my purposes, there is an essay from Kurt Squire about some boys who play Civilization IV multiplayer and the meaning they bring to their experience, Greg Costikyan giving a playthrough analysis of Europa Universalis III and blog chum Corvus Elrod writes about Ultima Underworld’s design ethos.

And lots of other stuff from people smarter than me.