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Are there any good resources for learning about game architectures? I am looking for high level overviews of different architectures. I tend to find information about the various pieces of a game such as entities, physics engines, scripting, etc but not about how to bring all of the pieces together.
As a bonus, how does the type of game influence this? For example, a platformer and an MMO would have differences.
Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory is a good book in this topic. You can read it in Google Books before buying it.
My book, Game Programming Patterns, is incomplete and on hiatus, but what I have is freely available online. You may get some use out of it.
Enginuity is one of the best free tutorials on game engine design. Behold, this is not exactly what You asked for. It's a tutorial on writing a game engine down to the low level aspects - however - it's a general purpose engine and You might be able to derive a greatest common divisor for every game.
Just read through the introduction and stop when it becomes too detailed for Your taste ;)
Game Programming: The Express Line to Learning provides a nice, beginner-level introduction to a basic game engine structure the author calls "IDEA/ALTER":
The book walks through a complete example game implemented in Python/Pygame.
I can recommend the book Game Coding Complete, Mr. Mike knows a lot about Game Architecture and does a good job explaining it to the reader. I don't know about the third edition, I only have the second edition, but it was worth a read. He explains everything from Scripting to Sound, even a bit of 3D math. Not in the deepest possible detail, but good enough to dig deeper using other materials. At the end of the book he constructs a complete game utilizing everything you learned with this book.
My good friend Joel posted a talk he gave at a conference concerning the architecture he ended up using on some PS1 games. Though the talk is specific, he ends up bringing it all back to general advice about what to look for in a good architecture.
Talk is here: http://jdinolt.tumblr.com/post/756062883/hrraaah-ego-trippin-my-first-talk-at-the-igad
Not game-related, actually, but an invaluable resource for any programmer: The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. It won't tell you how to write a 3D pipeline--rather, it will take you on a tour of the principles that underly good software architecture.
Jeff Plummer "A Flexible and Expandable Architecture for Electronic Games":
http://members.cox.net/jplummer/Writings/Writings.htm
Nice overview and comparisson of different Game architectures.
Scene graphs ftw. These can be used for game logic as well as rendering, and they let you really optimise your pipeline. If you're going to use them, you want to do it from the start.
I think for overall architectural knowledge, experience/trial/error are the main resources.
Because the overall architecture WILL change so much based on the kind of game you're writing, looking at resources/papers on entity systems/engines/scripting/etc and putting it together into something that has meaning in your own application is the best way to learn.
That said, I really like the Game Programming Gems books for going into depth on the individual components that you can use in your games, I still commonly use a lot of the ideas published in them across my professional activities, as well as in my hobby-code.
An interesting source of game-building knowledge that I recently became aware of is Penny Arcade - Extra Credits. They are in the form of short (~5 minute) weekly videos. They have covered a variety of topics, all of which are available for viewing at the above link.