Press Reset is an Admirable, But Repetitive, Look at Death and Resurrection in the Videogame Industry

 Jason Schreier probably doesn't see it as his job to convince people that they shouldn't work in videogames, but his work does serve as a pretty good argument for that point. As a reporter, first at Kotaku and then at Bloomberg, Schreier has specialized in stories exposing the dark side of the staggeringly wealthy videogame industry. He's reported extensively on the practice of "crunch" (extended periods of long hours while working on a game) and other troubling labor practices. Gaming journalism has mostly been dominated by previews of the next big game and reviews of the next big game once it hits shelves. Schreier has carved out a niche for himself as a reporter who does actual, factual reporting of the sort that sparks real conversation and even results in real change within the industry.

Schreier's journalism has always been marked by an unapologetic moral urgency, an admirable call for attention to issues and people long ignored by credulous coverage of the industry. He brings that same approach and philosophy to Press Reset, his second book about the videogame industry. 

But while Schreier uses the book to make a compelling moral argument, he falters at the basic task of crafting a similarly compelling narrative. It's a book that makes its point on about page 20, only to continue making that same point for another 280 pages. 

The core problem with Schreier's narrative is repetition (it's hell, if you remember your Stephen King). Press Reset is broken down into nine chapters, eight of which tell the story of the death of a particular studio or studios (the ninth is the stereotypical "solutions" chapter that every non-fiction book must finish on). The problem is that Schreier isn't really telling eight different stories -- he's telling the same story eight times, with only the names and some of the peripheral details changing from chapter to chapter.

The reader will pick up on the pattern immediately. Idealistic, videogame-loving people join a studio or start one from scratch with an eye toward making the game of their dreams. They crunch themselves half to death to make it happen, only to be undermined by poor business decisions, creative mistakes, the excesses of their own ambitions or some combination thereof. Sometimes the resulting game is great (BioShock Infinite). Sometimes it's terrible (The Bureau: XCOM Declassified). Regardless, a lot of good people lose their jobs and have to move across the country to find work at another studio, only to repeat that same process again once the new studio shuts down.

It's not exactly Schreier's fault that the videogame industry keeps living out these same cycles time and again, and the fact that it can't stop the capitalistic equivalent of Reapers from devouring the lives and idealism of good people is a point worth emphasizing. But it feels like a story that could be told more effectively with a longform piece of journalism and not a 300-page book that struggles to find a new angle with each chapter.

There is an amusingly Marvel Cinematic Universe quality to Schreier's book in the way that companies and characters profiled early on turn up later in cameo roles (Warren Spector, the creative force behind beloved roleplaying game Deus Ex and the subject of Press Reset's first chapter, is something like the Nick Fury of Schreier's narrative). But it doesn't take long before the reader's eyes start glazing over at the exhaustive accounts of rank-and-file industry employees flying back and forth across the country to join different studios.

A failure common to boring stories, whether they're fictional or true to life, is a boring cast of characters, and Press Reset suffers from exactly that problem. This isn't meant as a criticism of the employees Schreier centers in the book, who universally come off as admirable, sympathetic, hard-working men and women who deeply love videogames and constantly find themselves victimized by much wealthier and much more famous executives. But the harsh reality is that every industry is stocked with admirable, sympathetic, hard-working men and women, and most of those people wouldn't make for particularly interesting or compelling protagonists either.

Schreier has a massive cast of characters, but few of them are particularly well-drawn, and Schreier mostly fails to elicit interest in them beyond the usual sympathy decent people feel upon seeing other decent people lose their jobs. You will be hard pressed to remember any of these people once you finish their chapters, and the overall effect is a blur of names and job titles and short-lived company affiliations that resembles nothing so much as half-heartedly reviewing a set of resumes for a role you don't particularly care about filling. 

The irony is that the two most interesting characters in the book are probably Curt Schilling and Ken Levine, neither of whom are meant to be protagonists. Levine was the creative director for BioShock and BioShock Infinite, two stone cold classic games, while Schilling is the star pitcher turned failed videogame executive turned right-wing Twitter troll.

Schreier deserves credit for his nuanced portraits of these two men. That's especially true when it comes to Schilling -- Schreier, an unabashedly left-wing journalist, passes on the opportunity to demonize the already self-demonizing Schilling, and instead tells the story of a charismatic, enthusiastic, earnest videogame fan whose optimism and self-regard is both understandable and, ultimately, fatal.

The problem here is two-fold. First, Schilling and Levine are already famous -- Schilling in a broader sense, to be sure, but Levine is a well-known figure to the kind of people who buy books about the economy of the videogame industry. Schreier's portrayals of Levine and Schilling are interesting, but ultimately don't break any new ground.

Second, the fact that the two most famous figures in the book are also the two most interesting characters threatens to undermine Schreier's message. Press Reset tries to focus on the men and women who make the industry work without getting a fraction of the money or attention showered on the Ken Levines of the world. Schreier several times pushes back against an auteur-driven view of videogames, and makes clear that neither of the classic BioShock games sprung fully formed from Levine's magic forehead. And yet, even after reading Press Reset, the rank-and-file employees and their struggles fade into the background, because Schreier never succeeds in rendering them as individuals.

Schreier writes like a great reporter, which is to say clearly, but with no particular grace or distinction. When combined with Press Reset's deficiencies in narrative structure and character, the end result is a book that's meaningful, important and not even a little interesting to read. 

And maybe that's OK. There are surely plenty of readers who will appreciate the importance of Schreier's message without too much concern for the book's failure to tell a compelling story. But it's worth acknowledging that important stories can still be interesting, finding an interesting way to tell an important story is at the heart of the author's responsibilities. 

Fire and Blood is an Enjoyable - But Unnecessary - Game of Thrones Side Story

Book: Fire and Blood
Author: George R.R. Martin
Grade: B-

Falling in love with a fictional society is pretty easy - lots of people have done it. But it takes a very specific kind of personality to become truly fascinated by the history and backstory of that society. These are the kinds of people who don't just care about Kings X, Y and Z who show up on screen or on the page - no, they want to know all about Kings A-W, their wives, their wars, their evil ministers and even the non-royal lords and ladies who populated their courts.

Which is to say there's undeniably an audience for Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin's history of the Targaryen dynasty, which ruled Westeros for about 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin's justly popular series of fantasy novels that spawned the HBO mega-hit Game of Thrones. For those readers or viewers who just enjoy Daenerys and her dragons or Jaime's redemption arc or Tyrion's wit, however, Fire and Blood might have limited appeal.

Martin always took a somewhat patchwork approach to sketching in the backstory of his universe - he would occasionally joke that he'd likely lose a trivia contest to particularly devoted fans. Westeros had lore, but it always felt more instrumental than comprehensive - it existed to provide context for the story being told. The Targaryens had a history so Daenerys could have a history. There was a story behind Robert's Rebellion so that the relationship between Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon could have weight and texture. And so on and so on. There was no sense that Martin's universe had a carefully written history dating back thousands of years, and that was fine - the story he was telling was compelling enough as it was.

Fire and Blood isn't Martin's first attempt to fill in the details of his universe - The World of Ice and Fire, written in collaboration with super fans Elio Garcia Jr. and Linda Antonsson, takes a more comprehensive approach to the whole of Martin's world, while Fire and Blood is a more detailed narrative focused specifically on the reign of the Targaryens. Fire and Blood begins with Aegon Targaryen and his two sister-wives bringing their dragons to the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and conquering the land with...well, you know the title of the book.

There's a framing device here: Fire and Blood purports to be the first volume in a chronicle written by one Archmaeter Gyldayn, with Martin a mere transcriber (in typical Martin fashion, the book got a bit out of hand, and what was supposed to be one volume became two, with the second yet to be written and presumably years away from release). It's a bit of an affectation, but it gives Martin a chance to have a little fun - the "author's" commentary makes him a bit of a character (albeit a prissy, judgmental one), and there are some genuinely interesting passages where Gyldayn wrestles with the necessity of synthesizing multiple unreliable narratives into a single, comprehensible account. This is the kind of thing - bringing realistic questions of history and governance to a fantasy narrative - that Martin has always excelled at, though the conceit of the Maester's chronicle does render some of the long passages of dialogue a little out of character.

Anyone who has read through histories of European dynastic struggles can tell you just how tangled and confused they quickly become, and Martin's fictional history of the Targaryen dynasty is no exception. Things become muddled almost immediately after Aegon the Conqueror dies. There are surely readers who can easily differentiate in their minds between Queens Alicent and Alysanne and between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Rhaenys Targaryen. And there are surely readers who can remember the hopelessly intertwined family relationships that run through the narrative. The rest of us, however, have to flip back and forth from the family tree in the back of the book, and even that is only so helpful.

The fact that Fire and Blood has loads of characters with complicated relationships to each other isn't necessarily fatal. "Loads of Characters With Complicated Relationships to Each Other" is basically the subtitle to Game of Thrones.

But Fire and Blood lacks the key ingredient that made A Song of Ice and Fire so compelling: a sense of character.

A Song of Ice and Fire is, essentially, an attempt to complicate the basic narrative of both history and fantasy. The easy story is, "And so Robert the Brave overthrew the Mad King Aerys Targaryen with the aid of his loyal and honorable friend Eddard Stark and all in Westeros lived happily ever after under the new king's just rule." But what if Robert the Brave is a good soldier and a crummy king? What if Ned Stark is so loyal and so honorable that it ends up getting him killed?

Martin's novels succeed because he writes characters, not just names in a family tree. They're complicated and they're compelling, and so they're easy to remember even when the sheer number of them can get a little overwhelming.

Fire and Blood, by contrast, throws a staggering number of names at the reader without ever really bothering to build characters around them. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, old men and children who die in their cradle - they're introduced, their basic personalities are conveyed in a sentence or two and then they just become another set of names that occasionally show up every few pages.

As a result, there's no real drama in the book's story, and not just because the outcome of the Targaryen squabbles is foreordained. It's hard to care who wins The Dance of Dragons - the cutesy name given to the brutal civil war between rival Targaryen claimants, over Archmaester Gyldayn's amusingly fussy objections - when the two principal characters, Aegon II and his half-sister Rhaenyra, are so flatly drawn and unmemorable.

And this dynamic is even more noticeable when the book turns away from the royal family and starts naming other lords and ladies. It's essentially impossible to keep track of which house is on which side of the Dance, for example, and scenes set at the royal court lack any real personalities. Tywin Lannister is one of A Song of Ice and Fire's best characters, a brilliant, ruthless, relentlessly competent individual who is the best kind of villain - the kind who could make for a compelling protagonist in a point of view-flipped version of the story. There's no one like him in Fire and Blood, no endlessly fascinating character to keep the audience's attention when the focus turns away from the Iron Throne.

Much of Fire and Blood, then, reads like an (admittedly erudite) college student's term paper on The Wars of the Roses - a chronological record written with no real passion or verve that manages to successfully name all of the participants without making a case for why the reader should care.

None of this is helped by the competent - but uninspired - illustrations from Doug Wheatley, who mainly serves up a series of generic blond Targaryens and indistinguishable dragons.

There are, to be sure, some exceptions. Mushroom the Fool, one of the sources from whom Archmaester Gyldayn draws his information, comes off well, eventually earning the Archmaester's grudging respect. And Corlys Velaryon, lord of a house that's essentially a side branch of the Targaryen family tree, is drawn well enough that the reader comes to respect his dignity and honor, though this is perhaps a reflection of the character's age and the fact that he hangs around for five monarchs and a few hundred pages.

And Martin has not lost his eye for grand tragedy. The most compelling material in Fire and Blood is a long, detailed account of a massive, days-long riot that consumed King's Landing, culminating in a mob storming the Targaryens' beloved Dragonpit and, in a fit of religious frenzy, killing all five of the dragons housed there. It's a beautiful piece of writing, one that manages to capture both the epic scale of the rioting and the intensity of the dragons' final moments.

Still, though it checks in at 736 pages, Fire and Blood ultimately feels like a profoundly lightweight experience, a curiosity of interest to only the most devoted Song of Ice and Fire completionists. There are real charms here - Martin is too good to write a book without a few. But in removing the human element from this story, and turning it into a mostly dry chronicle of names and events, Martin has drained much of the fire and blood from Fire and Blood.