Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Taken in tandem, the two books provide a rare, comprehensive portrayal of the stresses and strains of game creation.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Subtitle The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Author Jason Schreier Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels illuminates the process of video game development but from a more detached seat: His book collects the development history of 10 games from the last decade, from massive hits like Destiny and The Witcher 3 to the niche success of indies like Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley. The valor of cashing in your twentysomething singlehood for a creative gamble, in his eyes, outweighs its drawbacks.Īnother recently released book provides a parallel journey to Williams’-more than one of them, in fact. If anything, crunch is a natural occurrence brought on by the creative process.” By this point in the narrative, he’s has established himself to be enough of an eccentric that he willingly throws his entire life overboard for a project, but his screed in praise of crunch still feels like an echo of hustle-harder startup culture. “It’s not even exclusive to the games industry. “Crunch isn’t a pandemic or a death march,” he writes.
The emotional toll crunch takes on workers and their families is universally derided, but it’s hard to find a story of game development that doesn’t fall into this trap. The term describes the moment when “game developer” ceases being a 9-5 job, and morphs into a haze of constant overtime, nights and weekends lost to endless coding, troubleshooting, and tweaking in order to ship a game on time. It’s not until two-thirds of the way through Significant Zero, his memoir of working in the videogame industry, that Walt Williams finally invokes the dreaded five-letter word: crunch.
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