It goes a long way to explaining why the chapter on the ignominious Star Wars 1313, a long-delayed and ultimately scuttled game in which the player was to assume the role of a bounty hunter in the Star Wars universe, is a lot more fun to read than the chapter on Uncharted 4, the bestselling conclusion to a bestselling video game franchise. You think about this phenomenon often while reading journalist Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, a series of portraits chronicling the turbulent process of video game development. (Well, it's not entirely schadenfreude.) It's that failure is, more than anything else, deeply familiar, with a smell as warmly recognizable as that of a favorite coat - it's our smell.
Stories of failure, on the other hand - real, abject, soaring failure - may be much more common than tales of success, but each one is distinctive, idiosyncratic, highly personal, and thus, entertaining as hell. But it's always the same instructions, the same virtues hear enough rags-to-riches stories, and you'd be forgiven for wishing that successful people would, occasionally, put a sock in it, and let the rest of us poor indolent wretches go about our comparatively miserable lives in peace. There's a performative virtuousness to the success story, alongside the tacit assumption that its audience will of course seek to adopt its espoused virtues as a set of instructions in their own endeavors. Stories of marvelous achievement may earn our admiration, but they tend to follow the same trajectory, hitting all the same pious stations of the cross along the way: hard work, determination, never giving up, blind luck.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Subtitle The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Author Jason Schreier
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