Nice Play

Jason Schreier is my favorite writer covering the video game industry, and is increasingly becoming one of my favorite writers, period. He has a deep knowledge of the business, including its history and process and technology, as well as a genuine love of its produce. But by going deep into this one specific industry, he can also illuminate broader truths that affect all of us: how art and commerce interact, how unfettered capitalism destroys itself, how companies exploit workers, how knowledge advances and industries mature.

Whenever I see a gift link to a Bloomberg article from Schreier, I always click on it. Of course, I've been particularly moved when he writes about the games I've most loved and the people who made them, most recently the closure of BioWare. I've also recently started watching his YouTube channel, which is refreshingly authentic: no gimmicks or edits, just a single take of Jason talking into the camera about his latest reporting.

And, I also just finished reading his third book, "Play Nice". His first two books felt a little like anthologies, with each chapter chronicling the development of a particular game. This book is more like an institutional biography, devoted to the once-revered titan Blizzard Entertainment, from its founding in 1991 up through its present form embedded within Xbox. In a way it reminds me of Ron Chernow's "House of Morgan", a look at the people who led an institution, but with a timespan of decades rather than centuries.

Personally, I have a kind of funny relationship to Blizzard: I've long admired them, but I've never actually played any of their games. Well, I think I played a demo of the original Warcraft ages ago, and I subscribed to World of Warcraft for a month or two on launch, and I played the tutorial of Hearthstone, but I've never played through any of the Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, or Overwatch games, and never got deeply into WoW or Hearthstone. Nonetheless, I've been aware of their immense reputation, and even my friends who aren't particularly into games love many of their products. I've particularly appreciated the phrase they're best known for, "It will ship when it's ready," which is soothing balm to players who have been burned by pre-ordering games from other developers only to receive a hot buggy mess on launch.

I learned a lot about the company while reading the book. I was surprised to learn that the founders actually sold the company very early on, and for almost the whole time I've been aware of Blizzard they haven't been an independent company. Schreier also unpacks the weird Cendant / Vivendi conglomerate saga, which I was more aware of from the perspective of devouring Sierra Online, my favorite developer when I was growing up. A bit of trivia that delighted me is that the name Diablo is actually named after Mount Diablo, the most prominent mountain peak near where I live: the game's creator grew up near the mountain, and would imagine it filled with tunnels and caves and monsters.

There is a very small amount of overlap with Shreier's earlier books, in particular the launch of Diablo III and the dreaded "Error 37" snafu. But even when the same incident is covered the treatment is different; the earlier chapter started after the launch and mostly focused on the war room effort to fix the issues, while Play Nice covers the entire development of the game and puts more attention on the Auction House.

I'm amazed by how many people were willing to go on record for this book, and Jason directly quotes many dozens of developers, QA testers, designers, executives and others. A few people are quoted anonymously, and my sense is that he avoids being a proxy for feuds. While the author is highly critical of many people and decisions throughout the book, there are also cases where he provides evidence that counters the widely held impressions that the public has of certain events. For the auction house, it seems that Blizzard wasn't primarily motivated by greed, but honestly wanted to solve the problems it had seen in earlier Diablo games and WoW of sketchy external stores leading to fraud and cheating, and saw their transaction costs as just a way to keep the service running. The Blitzchung Hong Kong incident is widely assumed to be about Blizzard kowtowing to China, but the immediate aftermath seems to have been more concerned with upholding existing rules around political speech in general, itself kind of a reaction to the threat of losing control of their IP in South Korea. And most controversially, while Blizzard definitely was a testosterone-fueled male-centric space that was frequently creepy or exploitative towards female employees, several of the individuals called out during #MeToo seem to have been mis-identified, as when one man who intervened to block the advances of a drunk boss towards a female employee ended up being portrayed as the abuser in a notorious Kotaku article.

Again, Schreier definitely isn't writing a hagiography, and there's more than enough criticism of Blizzard to go around. I think his overall viewpoint is perfect. On the one hand, he doesn't depict everything in black and white: early Blizzard was fun and also inappropriate, crunch had a terrible toll but also resulted in amazing games. But he also deftly avoids the Terminal Pundit Brain mindset that there are two equally valid sides to any topic: Bobby Kotick is even more terrible than you think he is, Warcraft 3 Reforged really is an awful game, it is really awful that Blizzard forced employees to relocate from Texas to Irvine and then fired them a few months later.

There are a ton of great stories within this book, and long-running themes and drama. I think it would be gripping to any reader, and even more so for someone familiar with the games. That said, I haven't really played the games and it's one of my favorite books I've read all year.