How To and How Not To Make Video Games: A Short Review of Play Nice

I am a sucker for writing on the creative process, any creative process. I love reading about how people have made the art that they make - their inspirations, their struggles their thought processes while working. Jason Schreier has been a wonderful chronicler of the process of making video games over the years, and his latest book, Play Nice, details the rise, fall, and sale of one of the premier video game studios in the industry — Blizzard.

Blizzard’s story is an interesting, if not especially unique story. Gamers in the 90s who wanted to create games they liked started a video game company with money from friends and contacts. What makes the Blizzard story interesting is how good they were at making games, juxtaposed with how crappy a culture they had and how the success at making games eventually lead to the businesspeople taking over and ruining the company’s ability to make excellent games.

Blizzard made great games almost from the start, and they did so by having an almost religious aversion to schedules. Games shipped when the consensus was that they were great, not in order to meet any deadline. Blizzard was purchased early in its life, but it retained independence largely because it kept putting out really good to great games. But that chaotic management style led to horrible personal behaviors, unfair crunch, harassment, and the mismanagement of several projects, eventually leading to Blizzard being turned into just another game churn factory ripe for sale to Microsoft. In the end, the MBAs took a people management problem as an excuse to stop focusing on making quality products and instead to turn to just making a lot of products in the hopes of making the line go up perpetually.

Schreier does an excellent job of chronicling all of this. He gets into the heads of the people who were focused on making the great games but does not shy away from the damage the hands-off management did to the people who worked there. From unstainable, burn-out inducing crunch, the wildly unprofessional behavior making the company look bad to whatever corporation who owned it at the time, to horrible sexism. He does an excellent job of showing how the alleged singular focus on making games players wanted justified terrible, sexist, unprofessional behavior that made the company worse and allowed it to miss out on entire categories of games. Blizzard was swallowed whole by people who didn’t care about games because they convinced themselves that bad behavior was acceptable if it resulted in good games.

Play Nice is an excellent read, filled with the honest opinions of people who were there, and an excellent look at how art can be made and then lost because the people in charge of its value the outcome more than the people making the art. If you are interested in how art is made, and how how art is made can ruin art, then I highly recommend this book.