Nerds in action

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels 

The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made

Jason Schreier 

HarperCollins

278 pages; $15.99

The global video games industry is worth over $101 billion in 2016 revenues and is growing at 8 per cent a year. That dwarfs the movie industry, which logged around $40 billion in 2016 box office receipts across the world. Of course, films have large alternate revenue streams, from home-DVDs to franchised products, spin-off books, in-story product placements, ads on TV re-runs, and so on. There is a huge literary corpus dedicated to cinema, consisting of umpteen books, magazines and websites offering content ranging from haute classique commentary and great biographies to salacious gossip. 

There is no equivalent focus on the video games industry. Star producers and game designers are unknown outside of their own geeky bubbles. What’s more, the internal processes – what goes into the making of a successful video game – are utterly unknown even to aficionados. 

This book fills some of the gaps. It offers a lively and snarky survey of the landscape, its personalities, work processes, atmospheres, funding, timelines, and “crunches”. The last is a word used in the industry to describe the last manic days when deadlines approach and developers go into 24x7 mode in desperate bids to outrun the clock. 

Mr Schreier claims to have interviewed over a hundred industry folks in putting together descriptions of the making of 10 different video games. This includes monster bestsellers such as Destiny and The Witcher 3, which both involved development teams of 600-plus and big roll-outs. It also includes “singletons” such as Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley, both developed by an individual. One chapter is about a failure. Star Wars 1313 was never released by LucasArts, falling into the cracks during a corporate battle between George Lucas and Disney.  

Video games are considerably trickier to produce, minute for minute, than films. First off, they span a vast range of technologies, ranging from old cell phones to top-of-the-line gaming computers, with massive power and large screens. As the technology improves, games must evolve in tandem to take advantage of new hardware. Gamers are unforgiving of technological obsolescence. Developers have new programming challenges every time hardware improves — this is analogous to building a new camera for every new shoot. 

Some games are single-person; others are played by thousands simultaneously. Those needs are obviously very different. Also, by definition, games are interactive. The next frame varies with the actions of the player, and this places huge demands on the technology platform and on the ingenuity of the developer. A “game minute” may actually be multiple alternately-presented minutes and it is a “game engine” that’s making the call. Plotlines will see multiple forks, in a way that no film ever will. The game itself also may have to save and recall prior actions by a player as well as predict the players’ actions in duels, for example. Finally, it has to be fun to play, in terms of storyline as well as technology, and huge efforts go into ensuring that. 

There are also the usual issues about political correctness (there is a huge gender bias within the industry) and fierce arguments have often erupted around this. For example, a first person shooter was designed to award points to players carrying out sexual assaults. Is this excusable in terms of artistic licence? Women gamers who protested the “rape-score” concept received death threats.

Gaming also resembles the movie industry in terms of disagreements between producers and developers about what will work as well as in terms of mis-budgeting or simply running out of cash and time. The author contends that there is no such thing as a normal process for development. Every game goes through the “crunch” and every development process is in some ways, abnormal. 

Successes can be surprising. Eric Barone wrote Stardew Valley, a role-playing game set in a farm atmosphere and somehow turned it into a multi-million franchise. This was despite epic procrastination — he wasted lots of time playing other video games and guiltily pretending to work on the development whenever his wife walked past. 

Ambitions can be overwhelming. The design house, Bungie, dumped its corporate sponsor, Microsoft, after “creative differences”. It nearly went bankrupt while it tried to build and promote Destiny, a multi-player role-playing game set in an entire “universe”.

Each chapter is like a case study of things that go wrong. These include running out of money, technical bugs, glitchy game engines, bureaucratic judo, overpromising on features that turn out to be undeliverable, and mad disagreements about branding. Not to mention servers crashing because the game proves to be more popular than anticipated! 

The interviews are very detailed and highlight the special character of those who work in gaming. A distinct kind of nerd gets involved. Developers usually combine a talent for narrative, with programming skills. Most aren’t good at getting along with others, especially not with the “suits” who bankroll them. 

Gaming is an entirely new art form and an interactive one at that. Chronicling the lust for life of its creators is a difficult task and one which has been rarely attempted. I certainly enjoyed reading this book and it was both informative and illuminating.