Reset

I've been a distant fan of Jason Schreier's work for some time. He's almost certainly the best journalist covering video games. There are lots of great columnists and critics, but the vast majority of "journalism" in the field is just reprinting corporate press releases. Jason is very different: he actually interviews front-line developers, gets scoops on how and why projects failed, and has deep insight into the causes of the many problems that repeatedly plague this field. I've eagerly devoured Twitter threads from him, a few long-form articles, and even a great podcast appearance on Bullseye. It was a particular treat to read Press Reset, his second nonfiction book.

 

This book combines several of my current obsessions: video games, labor and capital. It reinforces a lot of my prior beliefs, but adds a deeper layer of understanding and nuance. In lots of ways, the book feels tailor-made to my interests. It starts off strong by opening with a chapter on Warren Spector, one of my favorite game designers of all time. And it doesn't just start with Deus Ex, but goes back to Steve Jackson Games and Origin Systems. One of my frequent old-man gripes is how the Ultima franchise is completely missing from contemporary discourse about games. I'm very aware that there are MANY games out there, and I've only experienced a narrow sliver of them (mostly in the RPG/adventure/strategy genres), but somehow the book manages to keep playing all of my hits: Ultima, System Shock, Rock Band, BioShock, XCOM and more.

One reason for this is that, as I've previously heard but not fully understood, game development is a relatively small and collegial field where the same people keep bumping into each other: someone leaves, starts a new company, hires their old colleagues, those colleagues leave and start their own company, which then re-hires people from the first company, and so on. That sort of cross-pollination is infamous in the Silicon Valley tech world, and it's fun to see how that plays out on the national (or even international) video game market as well.

Location is one of the major themes of the book. Jason keeps coming back to just how hard it is to work in games: the sudden surprising layoffs that happen when a game does poorly, when a game does well, when a game doesn't do anything. Software developers in Silicon Valley startups can find other gigs within the Bay Area; people working in the film industry in Los Angeles can look for other projects when their previous one ends. Gaming shares the same market volatility but not the same geographic cohesion. If your Austin gig ends, you might need to relocate to Rhode Island for the next one, then Chicago for the one after that, then Montreal, then Melbourne. The companies almost all offer the salaries and 401(k)s that you would expect from a white-collar job, but the actual employment pattern is much closer to seasonal work. Near the end of the book, Jason focuses on this as one aspect of volatility that seems solvable:  the boom-and-bust cycle seems very unpredictable and doesn't have an easy solution, but the rise in remote working during the pandemic may (may) offer a path forward that's less disruptive to peoples' lives.

Heh, I feel like this blog post is unusually disjointed, which is strange because Jason's book is very smooth and coherent! I'll hit a few more random thoughts:

One small section that I particularly loved was a brief description of the development cycle for Ultima Forever. That's actually a game that I was tracking somewhat closely on this blog, from my initial confused excitement ("BioWare is rebooting the Ultima franchise?! That's awesome!) to my dawning skepticism ("Oh, wait, EA just branded another studio BioWare. And it's mobile-only. Hmmmm.") to my inevitable crushing disappointment. It's a thing that I followed closely, but now I realize just how little I understood about the project: why it happened, who was involved, what their goals were and what they took away at it. I really only saw the tip of the iceberg, and after reading this book I understand so much more about what was happening beneath the surface and why.

This is a relatively ground-level book, mostly focusing on the experiences of individual developers as opposed to the whole studio: what it feels like to get called in to a pizza party and told that you're being laid off without severance, or the camaraderie of sitting in an open office with seven other people trying to make combat in a game feel great. But there are a few parts where politics intersect the story, always in very interesting ways. One of the most bonkers plots has to do with Curt Schilling's 38 Studios, which takes a long and messy detour through Rhode Island GOP politics. Organized labor isn't much of a factor for the book, but in the very end Jason does broach union organizing as a nascent force in the industry and one that offers a potential solution to the workers' pains. Jason makes clear his own personal bias, writing in a footnote "I can speak from personal experience here - at Gawker Media, we organized [a union] in 2015, which helped protect us from potential problems when our company went bankrupt in 2016 thanks to a vengeful billionaire."

Jason doesn't come off as very polemical, but personally I found my mind often drawing connections between the specific harms detailed in this book and the universal problems created by our current flavor of capitalism. As one specific example, a lot of the problems with EA have to do with the fact that the executives only care about quarterly results, so their decision making is entirely driven by what will most please analysts in the coming months. As Jack Bogle would say, though, it's counterproductive short-term thinking: you can easily juice your numbers a bit for this quarter by closing down a studio or rushing a game to market, but that same action will also kill off a beloved franchise that would otherwise pay well for decades or more. The executives are focused on counting instead of focusing on what counts. But those execs are acting in their own rational self-interest thanks to their compensation structure: they'll make millions if they fail, and hundreds of millions if they succeed, so why wouldn't they go for it? While the Warren Specters of the world are happy making games that are merely profitable, Wall Street and the C-suite demand exponential growth, no matter the human toll. As with so much of America, changing this dynamic will probably require changing our ownership structure. What would it look like if workers had seats on the EA board in Redwood Shores? Or if executives knew that they would be at the same company twenty years from now, reaping what they sowed back in 2022?

I do find it hard to mentally categorize exactly where video game workers should fall in the labor hierarchy. On the one hand, they're treated very poorly in some very unique ways. Crunch, which Jason doesn't dwell on a whole lot, is one of the most egregious: video game companies will hire people for salaried positions, then use social pressure to make them work 100-hour weeks instead of the 40-hour they should. But, on the other hand, these are still white-collar workers who are earning six-figure salaries, have health care and comfortable work environments. The layoffs always sound terrible, but I was surprised by how many times workers describe the process as being "very kind" or "generous", with many months of severance and active assistance in locating new positions; lots of workers don't get that sort of support. (Interestingly, this is one area where the hated Electronic Arts seems to actually be really good, while cool independent studios seem far more likely to ask people to continue working without pay after running out of cash and then leave them insolvent.) A lot of it seems to come down to just how badly people want to work in this industry: people who are very passionate about games will make sacrifices and accept a lot of turmoil in order to do it. Which sounds positive - passionate people love working on games! - but seems to be cynically exploited by studios to treat workers less well. Late in the book we hear about several people who leave the video game industry entirely and take other jobs, like writing entertainment software: inevitably, their new jobs pay better and are infinitely less stressful than their previous ones. Of course, all workers should be treated well, and video game developers winning more rights shouldn't take anything away from lower-status jobs.

It's kind of astonishing just how many ways games can go wrong. Like a lot people who play games, I've had a relatively simplistic view of it: "Someone wants to make a game, everything is going great, and then the big mean publisher comes in and tells them that they need to ship it before it's ready, and it all turns out terrible!" Well, that is one thing that does happen. But, at least judging by Press Reset, the publisher is just as likely to save a game as destroy it. BioShock Infinite, for one, was careering towards disaster thanks to the mercurial management of Ken Levine, before 2K sent in someone to make the company focus on finishing the game. And yes, there are lots of times that the publishers are pushing hard for something that financially benefits them. Gamestop looms large in the second half of this book: thanks to a rise in reselling physical media of games, sales correspondingly dip, which makes EA and other publishers demand content that can't be resold: an online pass or multiplayer code or something, which harried developers then try to graft into the game they want to make. Or the publishers decide that traditional games are dead, and now everything has to be an MMORPG. Or a mobile game. Or a MOBA. Or whatever the flavor of the week is.

There are two particularly crushing and bizarre stories. One is The Bureau: XCOM Unclassified. Everyone who was working on this game hated it: it was started at a separate studio, then transferred over to 2K Marin. It wasn't their idea, and it wasn't a genre or style of game that they had experience in making. And, as gamers, they were baffled as to why it existed: XCOM was a turn-based strategy game, with a recent and well-loved update from Firaxis, so who the hell was the market for an XCOM third-person shooter? After reading a book about publishers killing off cool and promising new games, it's beyond strange to keep reading about how 2K would not kill off this game that was behind schedule, over budget, and that everybody (everybody) hated.

Similarly, Mythic Entertainment's mobile version of Dungeon Keeper is bizarre, but probably even more sad. The studio was trying to stay afloat after losing money for many years, and pushed by EA to make a mobile came to compete against Clash Of Clans. (I am not at all tuned into the mobile game market, and was stunned to learn that Clash Of Clans has earned over six billion dollars!) The OG Dungeon Keeper was a beloved 90s icon, a quirky and subversive strategy game from the legendary developer Bullfrog. At first this seemed like a good candidate for a mobile game: the mouse point-and-click interface of the original game translates well to tapping on a screen. But EA kept demanding more and more monetization, in the form of inserting timers that would slow down the game unless players paid real money to skip. The developers recounting the experience come off as glum and defeated: it didn't feel fun to play with all those timers, but, after all, EA is the one with all the market research and business insight, so they must know something that Mythic didn't. And the game came out, and Mythic was flayed alive for ruining a classic. Which seems so much more heartbreaking than making something you were proud of and enjoyed that didn't get to see the light of day.

There's a lot more good stuff in this book, but those were the stories that most grabbed my attention. The book does reinforce my preexisting relief at not working in the games industry: I'm sure that there are a lot of joys, but it does not seem to treat people well. And the increasing specialization of the field seems like a turn-off: thanks to the scope and technical fidelity of the latest games, someone can't just be, like, an artist in a game, they need to specialize on specifically lighting scenes, or just defining joints, or just animating movements or something. It's good to see smaller indie studios still carrying that torch, though. I'll be curious to see where the industry moves in the future. In some ways it seems like AAA games are already slowing down: we've gone nine years without a new Grand Theft Auto and eleven years without a new Elder Scrolls. I'm curious if we'll see an increasing bifurcation, with expensive and rare tent-pole games along with a steady tricky of $10-$30 small-studio efforts, or a recalibration of the industry that pays appropriately for appropriate labor and changes its product as a result. That's what the title "Press Reset" ultimately refers to: given that the current situation is so bad, could we start over and do things differently in the future?