I would have posted about this earlier, but I read slower than Helen Keller when she's wearing gloves.

Well Played 1.0 is an anthology book of videogame critique, and probably one of the most interesting I've read. A group of twenty-two writers made up of designers, scholars, and bloggers wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as why BioShock's story is a failure, to an indepth analysis of a game you've never heard of called Mines of Minos.

It's got its low points, of course (it must be written somewhere in the halls of academia that any article written about Metal Gear Solid must be so self-important and needlessly complex so as to be completely useless), but overall, I learned quite a bit from this book which alternately attempts to push forward the discussion on games as an aesthetic medium, while not losing sight of that which made them so alluring in the first place. 

You can download the entire book here for free (minus images), or purchase a physical copy here.