An informed, well-balanced report on the video game industry’s passions and pitfalls.
The inside scoop on the cutthroat competitiveness that saturates the world of video game creation and production.
After examining the integration of art and science in video games in his debut, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (2017), Schreier directs his focus toward the volatility of the businesses through which they are created and sold. The author recognizes that such an industry doesn’t generate $150 billion in global revenue without its share of defeats and melodrama (as evidenced in the elaborate, rocky-road profile of lifelong gaming designer Warren Spector), but it’s often at the expense of the industry’s underappreciated designers. Schreier questions why such a lucrative business model fails to provide more stable employment for its content creators, as abruptly terminated employees scramble for replacement opportunities or drop out of the industry altogether. Through firsthand interviews with veteran game designers, Schreier presents varying perspectives on how the industry’s instability consistently leaves developers and designers stranded. The author scrutinizes the consistent challenges caused by studio shutdowns, which directly affect how and where designers live. He also charts the tempestuous histories of early platform games like Disney’s heroic adventure series “Epic Mickey” as well as more interactive, online role-playing games such as the dystopian “feast of sights and sounds” BioShock series, from now-defunct Boston-based Irrational Games. Schreier fair-mindedly counters his industry criticism with success stories of game designers who turned their initial misfortune into opportunities for collaborative endeavors and independent entrepreneurialism. Both seasoned gamers and neophytes will learn a great amount of history, insight, and insider detail about an ever evolving business that, to Schreier, continues to put out sophisticated products “created in the shadow of corporate ruthlessness.” The author offers further perspective via the epilogue. “As I wrote this book between 2018 and 2021,” he writes, “more than a dozen video game studios shut down.”
An informed, well-balanced report on the video game industry’s passions and pitfalls.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3549-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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