Review: Blood, Sweat and Pixels (2017)
I picked up Blood, Sweat and Pixels after finishing Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and realizing my actual knowledge about the video game industry was functionally nil.
I hate not knowing things, so here we are! I’m slightly less ignorant now. (Yay.) Also the book was pretty good.
What you see on the cover is basically what you get: It’s a book about the development of ten different games that were released — or in one notable case, not released — in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Author Jason Schreier was a longtime staffer at Kotaku, the video game blog/news website, and he obviously put in the work; there’s a note near the beginning saying he interviewed roughly 100 people in the industry for the book, and this reporting gives the stories he tells a genuine sense of detail and depth.
What stood out most is how Schreier goes out of his way to document the brutality of the video game industry for workers, especially in the near-inevitable “crunch” period before a game’s release. It’s not unusual for developers to work 80- to 100-hour weeks for months at a time! (This probably isn’t news in the year of our lord 2024 but again, this has never been a subject I’ve known much about.)
I do have some minor complaints: The book gets a bit repetitive. While there are standout chapters — the development of Stardew Valley, which was the passion project of a single man working by himself for five years, was fascinating — some of them started to blur together for me. (I can only read about so many fantasy RPGs, and the book features three.)
I also found myself wishing Schreier would zoom out and talk more about the big picture: Apart from a short introduction and conclusion, most of the book is immersed in the day-to-day, play-by-play events of game development, and I would’ve loved more perspective about WHY the video game industry is the way it is.
Again, these are minor issues, and telling a Grand Narrative about video game history isn’t what the book set out to do. Blood, Sweat and Pixels accomplished its central goal, which was to tell interesting behind-the-scenes stories about how modern games come into being.
Anyway. Schreier is working at Bloomberg now, still covering video games, and one of his predictions for 2024 is that there will be a big wave of unionization in the industry. I sure hope he’s right. Given the dismal, precarious working conditions he describes in this book, it seems very necessary and way, way, way overdue.