Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

By Jason Schreier

Developing video games—hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes readers on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and Donkey Kong-sized monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean—it's nothing short of miraculous.

Taking some of the most popular, bestselling recent games, Schreier immerses readers in the hellfire of the development process, whether it's RPG studio Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition; indie developer Eric Barone's single-handed efforts to grow country-life RPG Stardew Valley from one man's vision into a multi-million-dollar franchise; or Bungie spinning out from their corporate overlords at Microsoft to create Destiny, a brand new universe that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—even as it nearly ripped their studio apart.

Documenting the round-the-clock crunches, buggy-eyed burnout, and last-minute saves, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a journey through development hell—and ultimately a tribute to the dedicated diehards and unsung heroes who scale mountains of obstacles in their quests to create the best games imaginable.

I have to say, the Popsugar challenge is definitely getting me to read more books that I might not have prioritized before, and some of them are quite interesting!  BUT NOT BS&P! Just kidding, I was very much entertained.  I am a person who plays video games, but I am by no stretch of the imagination "a gamer", or at the very least, not of the games described in this book.  I do love and live with someone about whom that is accurate, and I have to tell you, video games are some weird cultural touchstone for these generations.  I had some basic familiarity with some of the games that Schreier zooms in on, which helped a little, but not so much that I didn't need some of Schreier's occasional oversimplification, like "an ENGINE for a GAME is like the INSIDE GUTS of a CAR." Honestly, I appreciated it.

BS&P is, at its heart, an attempt to draw out how games succeed, mostly, it seems, in spite of what is put into them.  As a reader, it seemed to boil down to two things: not enough time/money (these go basically hand in hand - when you run out of one, you run out of both) and not enough leadership (or too much leadership).

As much as I enjoy reading about How Things Are Made, I don't think I'm the target audience for this book.  I read it and was immediately like, "What a terrible waste of time and money."  Actually, my first thought was, "I hope that Amber Hageman is adequately compensated for basically supporting Eric Barone for five years while he diddled around making Stardew Valley, because she is in a real precarious position." It's nice that he has 12 million dollars now, but he has that because of her.  Like, directly because of her.  And they were not and still aren't married, it's giving me hives.   I did appreciate Schreier's shout-out to the fact that video game development is still very much a boys club, for better or worse (probably worse, though, right?  I mean, without other perspectives, this is how you wind up making tunnel visioned games). Let's hear it for the ladies.

I was actually just watching GoldenEye (the movie) the other night, I don't think I've seen it in at least a decade, if at all since it originally came out.  There's a fun oral history of the video game that was floating around a little while ago, and it's a great article.  You hear a lot of the same issues: younger crew of guys, 100 hour work weeks, building a new game while simultaneously working out the way new technology actually works, and again, a complete lack of direction (in this case allowing crucial proposals and ideas like multiplayer and slap fights to become part of the game).  And at one point, one of the creators says, what made the game so popular and successful was - luck, a lot of luck, a perfect storm.  I think that idea is what's missing from BS&P in some ways.  We hear about all these successful games, but what distinguishes them from the unsuccessful games?  The last chapter discusses a mythical Star Wars 1313 game that was never produced, but the game is cancelled because the studio gets cancelled, not because they made it and it sucked.  I wanted to hear more about those types of games, to compare them to the ones described in the book.  I'm sure there's games out there that someone's spent years working on that fails - what makes those different from these?

This is ostensibly my "book about a hobby" but BS&P reminds us how much work it takes to make effortless entertainment.  There's no such thing as a free lunch, young man!  I still think video game development is in an ass-backwards state of operations, but I appreciate the peek behind the curtain. 



08: A Book About A Hobby