Six books that'll help you understand video games, 29/08/2024
Fiction, non-fiction and just a little slice of love
I pick out great reads about video games to get your brain whirring
Apple splits its App Store team in two to respond to competition challenges
The force is with Star Wars: Outlaws in this week’s releases
Good morning VGIM-ers,
Well, wasn’t gamescom fun? I returned from Germany with my head full of ideas, my heart full of love and my stomach full of enough carbs to help me smash out another half marathon for GamesAid. Bosh.
With that trip in the rear view mirror, it’s time to look ahead to my next international journey that will take me to the other side of the world.
As mentioned in VGIM passim, I will be in Australia between Monday 30th September and Monday 21st October to find out more about its current golden age of independent video game development.
The bulk of my time will be spent in Melbourne. Thanks to Creative Victoria, I’ll be attending Melbourne International Games Week to take part in a keynote at the Games Education Symposium, judge the event’s school hackathon, head over to Game Connect Asia Pacific to deliver a talk on the business and reputational benefits of keeping game communities safe and pop in to all manner of fringe events (and one VERY exciting museum exhibition).
I will then head over to Sydney as Games Week draws to a close to attend SXSW Sydney, where I plan to hear from some top keynote speakers and dive into the event’s video game showcase.
And in between doing all of that, I’ll be interviewing people for the book, running a three part VGIM: Down Under special series (which will land on the 10th, 17th and 24th October) and drinking gallons of Melbourne’s famous coffee. A boy has to have his fun, y’know.
So if you’re in Australia and want to say hello, drop me an email to george@half-space.consulting. I’ll get back in touch with you pronto.
In the meantime, would you like a Video Games Industry Memo that’s all about reading? Go on then.
The big read - Six books that'll help you understand video games
One of the things about writing a book is that you have to read quite a lot of books to do so.
It turns out that the process of getting from having no words in your manuscript to 100,000(ish) relies on you doing quite a lot of research before putting pen to virtual paper. Surprising, I know.
Fortunately, it also means that I’ve had plenty of excuses to read (and re-read) a series of great books that are about video games or adjacent to the medium to push forward Power Play.
And by doing so, I’ve been able to spot the books that teach you plenty about how video games, and the industry, works - while keeping you on side as a reader.
So here’s a quick list of six books about video games that you can read to get a usefully rounded view of the sector.
Blood, Sweat and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made - Jason Schreier
Jason Schreier is one of the great writers about the video games business. Across his time working the beat, especially at Bloomberg where he currently works, Schreier has developed the enviable combination of an excellent contact book, deep knowledge of video games and the capacity to tell stories with a crisp clarity that I am, frankly, bitterly envious of.
His entire body of work is worth reading, especially ahead of the release of his next book about what on earth has happened to Blizzard over the past decade. But if you were to pick one that is particularly useful for understanding the sector, then it’s hard to look past his first.
The genius of Blood, Sweat and Pixels is its simplicity. Schreier provides clarity about how video game development actually works by doing something remarkably straightforward: picking a number of games and getting people who worked on them to tell the story behind their development.
In doing so, he captures two things. The first is explaining the processes, approaches and philosophies that underpin pretty much all of game development in a way that makes the topic understandable to a general reader.
Whether examining a major triple A developer grappling to get a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition over the line or an independent creator struggling to make ends meet while working on their Stardew Valley passion project, Schreier effectively anchors you into the practical considerations of game development - what tools are you using, what’s your budget, how much time do you have - to ensure you understand why some projects go well (and why others go awry).
Second, he does something that few others do when it comes to video games industry stories; he shows you the people hiding behind the curtain.
By introducing the personal into the procedural, Schreier is able to explain much more effectively how a hit independent game can be genuinely life changing for its creators or why gruelling crunch - where developers are worked to the bone to produce a demo or final version of a game for release in time for a tight deadline - can burn a studio down from the inside.
Good commentary, like well-written history, understands the interplay between the macro factors that shape a market’s conditions and the micro actors who make the decisions to move it. Schreier’s work is some of the best in games at doing precisely that, making Blood, Sweat and Pixels a must read.
Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World - Kelly Clancy
On the face of it, Kelly Clancy’s book has a remarkably similar pitch to mine. It seeks to argue that the role of games in society is more significant than most people assume it to be and seeks to make the case about why play matters to the world at large. No wonder I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it on the shelves of a local book store earlier this year.
However, Clancy’s approach to the topic is - luckily for me - quite different to mine. Rather than looking solely at the direct social, economic and political impact of video games, Clancy provides a much more theoretical view on how play - and games by extension - have shaped the way we learn, the way we think and how we engage with the world around us.
I’ll level with you here: Clancy’s approach is much more intellectual than mine. She manages to thread together Greek philosophy, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the creation of game theory to bring her clever thesis together in a way that is, frankly, Very Brainy.
But this admirably academic approach hones down to one thought provoking question in the end: if play and games are influencing our lives so extensively, how do we make sure we maximise the value of them while protecting the world from people who may seek to corrupt play for negative purposes?
In a world where how we exercise, which languages we learn and even who we date are shaped by game design, it is one we need to find a better answer to. And Clancy’s book is a good place to start on that.
Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Games And What They Can Do For Us - Pete Etchells
Continuing the theme of what’s going on in the mind, Pete Etchells’s Lost in a Good Game is an important read for anyone wanting to think about the actual impact of the medium on our mental health.
Starting from his own personal perspective as someone whose enjoyment of video games grew following the death of his father, Etchells makes a personal, but powerful, case that the benefits of video games on our lives - both in terms of supporting our mental health and their wider societal impact - has been lost in unfair, poorly evidenced moral panics.
As well as riding forth against the issue of low quality academic research into the medium that has negatively shaped the argument, Etchells explains effectively why people play games, how they’ve been used for societal good and why the medium’s ability to offer comfort and solace to players tilts the balance of the mental health argument in its favour.
Yet that isn’t the reason I recommend reading it. Instead, I think there’s a lot for the industry to learn from how Etchells constructs his argument.
By combining his personal story, perspective and expertise as an academic researcher, Etchells achieves the balance of making his argument convincingly while retaining his ability - and capability - to express concerns over certain aspects of the industry such as specific monetisation tactics.
His even handed approach was a useful guide for me when I started as Head of Comms at Ukie back in 2019. And though we are, despairingly, half a decade on from that moment, we can still learn a lot from Etchells’s approach today.
Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent & China’s Tech Ambiton - Lulu Yilun Chen
Tencent has an enormous impact on the video games economy, but the company itself is little understood. That is why Lulu Yilun Chen’s book about the evolution of Tencent into the biggest tech business in China, and one of the biggest in the world, is a must read for anyone working in the industry.
On the face of it, Chen’s book doesn’t appear to be overly video game related. On the back cover of the UK paperback, the book is pitched as the story of how the operator of WeChat became one of the most important tech companies in the world. That’s an interesting comment on the perception of games in society in of itself.
But within, Chen clearly draws out how significant video games are to the company’s business. Rather than acting as a footnote to the company’s story, Influence Empire demonstrates how video games made Tencent’s fortunes, how it remains the biggest part of its business and how important it is to the way it perceives its future.
In doing so, it achieves two things. It effectively shows the quandary that lies at the heart of Tencent’s success, whereby its evolution into a tech leviathan makes it both immensely valuable and remarkably dangerous to the country’s Communist leadership - marking its card in the process.
And it does so, it shows specifically how video games have the power to project a business to such a significant position within society through its commercial power and community reach - showing how the medium has evolved into a force capable of shaping the world.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
There is now plenty of fiction where video games shove their way into the story.
Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem puts a video game at the heart of an interstellar intrigue that goes off in a very different direction after the first book. Neale Stephenson’s Reamde puts a massively multiplayer online role playing game called T-Rain at the heart of a full blown thriller. And Ready Player One…well, it continues to exist.
Gabrielle Zevin’s immensely popular Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, however, is the work of fiction that is worth reading for three reasons in particular.
First, it offers a sense of what the games industry actually is in a way that few fictional works rooted around games do. Instead of putting a single game at the heart of the story (or driving the narrative forward), it puts the people who choose to make games - and the relationships that form which allow them to do so - instead. This provides an often inscrutable medium with the personality that it actually possesses but rarely has a chance to show.
Next, Zevin creates an authentic facsimile of industry life that shows what games are without losing a wider audience. Yes, there are moments where she takes liberties with what could truly be achieved through games (it is fiction, my friends!). But throughout my time with the book, Zevin’s fictionalised games industry remains plausibly grounded in the reality of the North American sector - providing its entire story with an authenticity that has the power to resonate.
But finally, and pertinently for most readers of this newsletter, it has cultural cut-through. Zevin’s view of the games has touched millions around the world already and will reach even more when the film version of the novel eventually lands in cinemas.
It is the work of fiction that has done most to define what game development is to a popular audience. This means reading it is important to understand what the popular perception of our profession is (and where you may find opportunities to succeed in Zevin’s slipstream in the years ahead).
Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists - Julia Ebner
“You’re not about to talk to me about extremism and games are you, George?”
This may have been an actual sentence uttered to me at gamescom last week. But unfortunately, yes that is exactly what I am about to do here because it is related to the final fascinating book on my list.
Julia Ebner’s Going Dark is not a book about the games industry. It is the story of Ebner’s efforts to infiltrate extremist groups online and about what she experienced in the corners of the internet where the likes of the far right and Islamic extremists rule the roost.
For the most part, the book is about understanding the motivations, tactics and aims of those within the spaces. It does this powerfully in a number of ways, including when Ebner admits during a foray into the ‘trad-wife’ movement - which she took part in shortly after a break-up - that its offer of easy answers to complicated feelings was briefly alluring.
But for me, as it will likely be with you, it was impossible to ignore how regularly video game communication platforms, video game streaming services and video game terminology come up within Ebner’s book.
And with the book concluding with a chapter on the Christchurch shooting in May 2019, it is disconcerting to consider that many of the ‘contemporary’ problems I’ve written about recently are disquietingly old in their provenance.
Despite being readably written, Going Dark’s subject matter can make it an intense read. But if you want to read a measured account of where video games culture and technology can negatively overspill into modern society, this is a strong place to start.
News in brief
Apple crumbles: Apple is splitting its App Store team in two to account for the emergence of alternative App Stores, according to Bloomberg. The move came just days before Apple also announced that it’ll be making changes to iOS and iPadOS to give users more choice over their browser, default apps and which apps they can delete - suggesting the company’s appetite to take a bite out of the EU’s Digital Markets Act has proven rotten to the core.
One in 37 million: Steam has hit a new high for concurrent players, reaching the 37m mark for the first time ever. The PC games distribution platform hit the new peak a week after the release of Black Myth: Wukong which, for all of the controversy around its influencer marketing instructions, has attracted enough players to push Valve’s store to its latest dizzying peak.
Savvy reporting: Savvy Games Group has delivered its first annual report since Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman set forth a strategy for the group as part of his push around Vision 2030. You can read it here or wait for my write up on the report in The Debrief, which is out this Friday for VGIM Insiders.
State of PlayStation: PlayStation is reportedly set to announce a new mid generation PS5 in a State of Play event next month. The rumoured stream is likely to take place during Tokyo Game Show, providing cheer to both fans and feckless industry pundits who staked their good name on such a thing happening.
Luck is the draw: Nintendo’s latest Direct conference took place earlier this week. The star of the show was new content for Balatro themed around games such as Dave The Diver and The Witcher. The showcase also confirmed that Civilisation VII will come to Switch, providing me with plenty of entertainment for long-haul flights in 2025.
Moving on
As part of Apple’s App Store reshuffle, Matt Fischer, VP of the App Store is on the way out of the business. Carson Oliver is set to take over the reins of the App Store specifically, with Ann Thai handling the Alternative Stores…American trade association ESA has hired Jennifer Gibbons as its new VP of State Government Affairs and Carlos Linares as Chief Counsel of Intellectual Property Protection…And intriguingly, Heather M Decker is Zynga’s new Director of AI Governance, a job title that I’ve not seen before in games…
Jobs ahoy
A glut of jobs in games this week for legal and policy minded types…First up, Activision Blizzard is hiring an Associate Director, Legal (Privacy) in the UK…Sony Interactive Entertainment, meanwhile, is looking for a Director, Privacy and Data for America in its San Mateo office…And Electronic Arts is recruiting a Director, Product Management, Player Safety to round off…For those of us who don’t have a law degree, Epic Games is hunting for a Senior Producer in London…Finally, Manchester City is, bafflingly, hiring for a Senior Metaverse Manager. Good luck getting Jack Grealish into Fortnite…
Events and conferences
PAX West, Seattle - 30th August-2nd September
Nexus, Dublin - 25th-26th September
Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo - 26th-29th September
GCAP, Melbourne -7th-9th October
AI and Games Conference, London - 8th November
Games of the week
Star Wars: Outlaws - Ubisoft’s open world Star Wars game brings much needed stardust to a quiet video game release calendar.
Tactical Breach Wizards - Long sought after indie “magic meets SWAT teams meets XCOM” title lands on Steam.
Gundam Breaker 4 - Customisable robot building game based on the popular anime series releases across all platforms.
Before you go…
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few years, travelling to gamescom via train from London really is the way to go.
Not only do you get to dodge airport security and enjoy plenty of leg room, you can also form an impromptu UK video games industry snack party in Brussels when your train home is delayed by *checks notes* a truck falling off a bridge.
A toast to the many excellent people who form our wonderful industry and, specifically, to Emily Britt for lobbing me multiple cans of Jupiler to help me pre-drink before a friend’s birthday party that Friday evening. Cheers!
Since Covid hit, I've not been to conferences - thanks for helping keep me feeling connected with the wider industry! Love the book recommendations (and shade on Ready Player One!).