In particular, Schreier writes about the following games:
-Pillars of Eternity
One of the strengths of this collection of articles is how they put projects into relationship with one another. For instance, the first chapter (Pillars of Eternity) delves into the financial realities of game design. I learned about how developers often estimate budget by multiplying the number of employees by $10 000 multiplied by number of months. When breaking it down that way, it’s wild to think about how much money goes into making a game and how big of a gamble that makes every venture. Setting that framework early is useful for seeing how projects like Destiny can go wrong so easily and, conversely, just how impressive Stardew Valley is, being created by one man alone.
Some common threads emerge between the stories. There’s the drama of financing, the frustrations of the ‘crunch’, the fiascos of publishers interfering with developers, the last-minute game-changing decisions, the frustrations of marketing demo versions, and the highs and lows of the creative process.
As I mentioned, the chapter on Pillars of Eternity dealt largely with the financing process to get new projects off the ground. After, the section on Uncharted 4 dealt with when to end a story. The franchise needed to reinvent itself in order to stay fresh, and a number of ideas were thrown out there (e.g. not being able to use a gun for ¾ of the game). The project was moving forward but some of the senior developers wanted to abandon the project or they were fired, which meant the game needed to be overhauled. The conflict in vision for the series is intriguing to me, not because I have a particular connection to the Uncharted series (I’ve played #3, but Tomb Raider is forever superior in my mind), but because it leads to some compelling questions about the creative process of an artist and of collaborative artists.
By contrast, the chapter about Stardew Valley focuses on a solo creator, Eric Barone. Juxtaposing those chapters is a clever move on Schreier’s part, inherently posing the question of whether it’s better to be creative in isolation or as part of a larger team. Schreier describes Barone’s efforts to build a cozy game from scratch modelled after Harvest Moon. He worked for years by himself, drawing and redrawing the sprite animations, creating game features, writing code, and so on. His wife had to support him throughout the process and it’s a real underdog story to hear about Barone’s depressive episodes and to see how wildly successful the game has been. In many ways, it’s the universal story of creators: a long grind in isolation, hoping that what you do is meaningful to others. Like many other artists, Barone experienced the obsession of completing the work, hating the work, wanting to redo the work, and the strife of never knowing when a project was done.
Speaking of projects never being done, let’s address, briefly, a running joke in the gaming industry. Publishers release unfinished, buggy games all the time, sometimes in a hilariously memeable way. Schreier’s account of the video game industry, though, really helps to explain why that phenomenon exists and promotes a great deal of sympathy for the people responsible for these projects. In so many of the chapters, we see how programmers needed to develop contingencies—what will get cut when the pressure is on, what other parts of the game will fall apart when another piece changes.
What’s even more fascinating, though, is how the video game industry is at the forefront of what will certainly be a revolution in creative industries. The video game relies on audience feedback, often at every stage of the process. When games are conceptualized and funded via Kickstarter, for instance, you really have to know what will appeal to people in order to get it off the ground. In a number of the chapters, developers talk about pouring over message boards like Reddit to get feedback on their games after demos are released. Then, after games come out, they are still in development and draws on response to make changes.
The most notable example of the evolution of creative arts is introduced in the Diablo III chapter, but is another common trend. When Diablo III was first released, it was largely unfinished and many players couldn’t even open it at all. Schreier notes the fall of Diablo and then the rise when it was rereleased as Reaper of Souls, which changed core game mechanics based on feedback to the initial release. For example, they totally revamped character scaling and revised the idea of randomness (turns out people don’t love real randomness; there has to be some parameters). Shovel Knight and Destiny had similar fates; unfortunately for the Shovel Knight team of compelling underdogs, they had to fulfil commitments they made during their Kickstarter campaign years after they felt compelled to move on.
These elements give a new spin on the “unfinished” games that get released. It’s fascinating to consider how that will affect the creative process in other fields. It’s not unthinkable that a poet, for example, would release a collection and then redraft poems based on reader feedback. Similarly, musicians that release an EP of four songs might find that two of them flop and no longer fit on the next LP. As we move further forward into an audience-centric creation model [e.g. TikTok creators having to make short videos to command attention using the trendiest sounds], Schreier’s account of the video game industry actually offers a more optimistic spin. The developers seem sincere, genuine in their efforts to make changes on behalf of the consumer—even, potentially, when it’s against their initial vision.
Of course, that sometimes leads to conflict. In the development of Destiny, an entire story was planned and then scrapped as embarrassing and nonsensical. The complex storytelling demanded by the medium present itself entirely differently. When the game was marketed, demos were necessarily incomplete and there was a fair amount of backlash from key employees. The clash between the marketing team and the actual developers is perhaps a necessary byproduct of the industry norms, but it certainly leads to dramatic firings and anger from fans.
When it comes to the massive RPGs like Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3, Jason Schreier, like myself, has a clear bias in their favour. He delves into the massive size of the games and the challenges it presents. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, this becomes a mixed bag. It was an impressive feat in response to complaints from fans that Dragon Age 2 didn’t have enough content, and yet advances in technology were perpetually causing it issues. They had to change to different game engines, and that led to a buggy release. The Witcher 3, emerging from an interesting historical context where a Polish developer emerged following a time of bootlegs and illegal software sales, had a similarly compelling creation. The sheer number of hours developers spent testing the game numbs my mind. They would go through massive maps, and add content in basically every one minute path from the point you’re in.
These massive projects demand, as Schreier notes, “a certain type of workaholic personality.” To me, there’s a few overlapping features worth exploring more philosophically: the relationship of creativity to an artist and audience, the role of capital in creating entertainment, the duality of work and play that goes into the creation of these games, the purpose for technology in our current age, and so on. While Schreier doesn’t himself delve into those issues in a philosophical framework, he nonetheless offers a lot of food for thought. Even when it comes to considerations of labour movements, these developers continually reference the late nights and sleepless hours, the crunch where they work for months and miss out on their children’s lives, the pressure, etc. It is less glamorous than one might imagine for an industry that is billions of dollars. This makes it even more heartbreaking when publishers stop believing in projects. The book ends with Star Wars 1313, a project that was ultimately cancelled. It went through a number of iterations—for instance, there was a time when it was pitched as a Grand Theft Auto style game set in the Star Wars universe. Star Wars bores me, but I’d play that game.
Back in my day there was what was referred to as the console wars: Nintendo and Sega doing everything in their power to sell competing video game consoles. In more recent times, Schreier references several times how publishers were hesitant to develop games for consoles, concerned that with the rise of mobile gaming there would be little demand for Playstation 4 or XBox One. Based on my knowledge of Playstation 5 and how competitive it is to get one, it seems that these publishers were just flat out wrong.
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is an interesting collection of stories, but what’s most compelling to me is how it reflects the creative process in general and some of the questions it raises. It makes you wonder, too, what games never get made—the gold that never gets mined for the market. Moreover, it makes you wonder how games ever get made at all. With the industry standards exposed in this book, making a game comes to seem outright impossible.
Here’s to miracles! Happy reading (and gaming)!
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