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. 

The New God of War Is Caught Between Realms

Can a videogame serve as an effective apology?

I'm not necessarily thinking in terms of, like, Ken Levine forgetting his wife's birthday and apologizing by creating a videogame that serves as a deconstruction of birthdays and the very nature of regret.

It's unfair and reductive to say that the new God of War, a distant sequel to the series of hack-and-slash action games that dominated the PS2 and PS3 about a decade ago, is simply an apology for those famously bloody games. It's a profoundly well-made game, a labor of great effort and passion, thoughtful and elegiac and deeply interested in important questions.

But it is, in many ways, an attempt to grapple with the complicated legacy of the original series (defined here as the three main games released for the PlayStation consoles, and not including the weirdo subtitled side games). The God of War series was a genuine phenomenon at the time the games were released - God of War is the 11th-best selling game in the history of the PS2, God of War 2 was the 14th-best seller and God of War 3 sold more than five million copies.

Still, for all the sales and all the acclaim, God of War had mostly faded from the critical conversation. There was a sense that the games represented a kind of evolutionary dead end - epic scale hack-and-slash action games that refined and perfected the form without leaving much room for future development. Dante's Inferno is what you get when you try and iterate from God of War, and that illustrates the point nicely.

But there was also a sense that God of War epitomized an immature, rather embarrassing era in gaming. The original three games weren't just bloody - they were gleefully vicious, glorifying in brutality and lingering on lovingly rendered images of over-the-top violence. And the obligatory sex mini-games in each entry were particularly effective at inducing eye rolling.

2018's simply titled God of War tries to avoid all of those sins. It makes a number of core gameplay changes to enhance the depth and breadth of the experience and works hard to create a mature, thoughtful narrative. Nothing in the game fails - every element is polished to a glimmering sheen and mostly works well enough. But too many of them feel awkwardly grafted on to a property with which they don't naturally fit, and you can see the seams. And those seams are enough to keep the game from reaching greatness.

Take, for example, the game's foray into open world exploration. The original games were essentially linear experiences, with some occasional opportunities for Kratos to wonder off on a hidden path and find some collectible or power up. But God of War takes Kratos out of his traditional Greek environment and plunks him - and his son Atreus - into the Scandinavian countryside, where there's much more room for side quests, collectible hunts, exploration and the usual open world flotsam.

There's no doubt this new landscape is gorgeously rendered, and there's a lot of pleasure in simply wandering around and admiring the scenery. But the open world element of God of War feels almost obligatory, as though you simply can't make a big, ambitious AAA game these day without open world exploration. For all the effort developer SIE Santa Monica Studio put into crafting the look of the open world, there was seemingly little thought as to how that world fit with the way the characters move.

The best open world games - for example, Batman: Arkham Knight - ensure the scope of their worlds doesn't exceed their characters' movement abilities. Arkham Knight, in fact, succeeds at turning the simple act of moving about the world into a genuine pleasure.

God of War, however, builds a big, gorgeous world, and then mostly expects the player to get around it at walking and rowing speeds. There are "mystic gateways" scattered throughout the game map that allow for fast travel, but their functionality is severely limited for the first 2/3 (or so) of the game. They're essentially one-way trains to a central hub -  for most of the game you can fast travel from Point A to the hub, but not from Point A to Point B, or even from the hub to Point B.

As a result, the player is left to spend a lot of time simply rowing around the giant lake the forms the heart of the open world. Again, this isn't actively unpleasant - there's some humor and character building in the conversations between Kratos and Atreus that take place on the boat, for example. But you're always aware of the time you're forced to invest in rowing across the lake, especially since those journeys are never interrupted or broken up by, say, surprise encounters with lurking enemies.

The open world is paired with an increasing emphasis on RPG elements like character and gear upgrades. These existed to some extent in the first three games - Kratos could upgrade his weapons and find power-ups that enhanced his health and magic capabilities, for example. But these upgrades were mainly found within the character's linear path - the new God of War fills out its much larger world with a much larger range of gear to find and tweak.

There's a lot of this stuff, but most of it fails to add anything truly substantive to the experience. At their worst, big, open-world RPGs degenerate into a quest for numbers - the player is less concerned with advancing a story or exploring the world than with finding a sword or piece of armor that has a slightly higher number in the "DAM" or "DEF" columns.

Again, God of War doesn't quite fall into that trap, but it comes closer than you'd like. There's the usual rush that comes from your first big armor upgrade, and a couple enhancements genuinely help - you'll definitely want the Niflheim Mist Armor when trudging through Ivaldi's Workshop in Niflheim. But most of the time you'll find yourself shuffling through various combinations of chest armor, waist armor, gauntlets and enhancements in an attempt to make the numbers on the right side of the screen just a little higher.

In theory, these combinations favor different skills and can be tailored to your unique play style, but the reality is that your "unique play style" is probably the same as mine. Whether you slightly tweak your vitality, your attack power, your defense or your runic abilities, you're likely to approach combat challenges in more or less the same way.

Part of the reason so much of the seek-and-upgrade RPG elements here don't really matter is that God of War's combat never really encourages variety or creativity. God of War is clearly going for a more grounded combat system than the original three games, where combat was a gleeful, acrobatic affair full of spinning blades and flying bodies. The new God of War is more indebted to Dark Souls and other games where combat is a careful, strategic affair.

Except God of War doesn't quite have the courage to go full (or even half-) Dark Souls, and instead settles for a functional, mostly pleasing combat system that never really evolves after the opening battles. You can rack up as many experience points as you like, upgrade Kratos' skill set to include increasingly complicated combos and, in the final battles, you're still likely to get through combat by mashing the light attack button and tossing in the occasional heavy or runic attack.

So instead of the over-the-top fun of the original series or the intellectual pleasures of a more tactical game, God of War mostly ends up creating a simplistic, unchallenging combat system that never finds a niche.

There's no real ability to customize your approach or tactics - you can't build a stealthy Kratos or a long-range specialist Kratos or a tank Kratos. No matter how you invest your experience points or which armor set or enhancements you choose, your game is going to look the same as everybody else's. That's not, in and itself, a crippling flaw - not everything has to be infinitely customizable. But it's aggravating when the game goes out of its way to make you jump through all the RPG min/max hoops, then makes it clear that none of it really affects your experience in a meaningful way.

The same sense of not quite here and not quite there drains some of the force from the game's narrative and atmosphere. God of War clearly has a more complicated relationship with violence than the original games - it doesn't want to wallow in blood and guts, and it wants to interrogate Kratos' rage and aggression.

But God of War wants to have its violence and critique it too. Kratos is more of a reluctant killer than he was in the original series, but he's still slicing through armies of anonymous monsters and demons. And while God of War doesn't revel in over-the-top bloodshed in the manner of its forebears, it's still more than happy to capture decapitations and dismemberments in all their gory, meticulously detailed glory. .

The core of the game is the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. And to be clear, it's exceptionally effective. The dynamic is heartfelt, the product of great care and effort. Director Cory Barlog and the other writers here clearly poured everything they had into sketching out the father-son relationship in God of War, and both the diligence and execution are easy to appreciate.

And yet...for as skillfully crafted as this relationship is, it lacks a certain specificity. In this sense, God of War is hurt by the recent proliferation of videogame stories about fatherhood. Kratos could very easily be Joel from The Last of Us through most of the game - he's distant and struggles to express his feelings, spurns Atreus' attempts to connect, realizes the error of his ways and eventually grows closer to his son. Atreus, for his part, feels both generic and surprisingly modern - he's your standard-issue gregarious little kid, always asking questions and annoying his withholding father, all while quipping in a discordantly 21st century dialect.

Look, stories don't have to be unique to work. The classic storytelling tropes exist for a reason, and even imaginative writers borrow liberally from those who came before. So it's no great failing for God of War to till the village commons.

But still, it's slightly disappointing to see a character with such a striking legacy reduced to the role of Grouchy Dad. There's only a limited sense of how Kratos' specific history shapes his relationship with his son, and the game is oddly silent about Kratos (kinda sorta accidentally) killing his first wife and daughter in the backstory to the very first God of War, which is the sort of event that would seem relevant to current family dynamics.

In the end, God of War is easier to appreciate than it is to love. It has the feel of a genuine passion project for all involved, and yet the attempts to integrate so many of the most popular trends in videogame design that have emerged in the decade or so since God of War III hit consoles robs God of War of some of the uniqueness its pedigree suggests. It's a mish-mash of game elements - all crafted with skill, but without an apparent sense of how they fit together and form a whole.

God of War, then, is both ambitious and a safe play, a game that tries to say and do so much while staying firmly within established boundaries. That it manages to mostly pull off that off is impressive. But it's impossible to shake the impression that God of War could have achieved more if it had committed to something instead of trying to incorporate everything.

Two Years Later: Why Arkham Knight Remains The Best Of Rocksteady's Arkham Games

Rocksteady Studios' Arkham series of Batman games, which launched in 2009 with the justly lauded Arkham Asylum, illustrates just how much goodwill a videogame can generate by simply getting a few big things very right.

The games' Predator encounters, in which Batman has to stealthily take out a room full of heavily armed enemies by using the room's features and his own array of gadgets, are consistently tense and challenging, and they give the player tremendous freedom in solving the problem at hand.

The Freeflow combat system created for the Arkham series is one of the finest core gameplay mechanics debuted in the last decade or so - it's simple and intuitive, simultaneously balletic and kinetic, allowing the player to effortlessly guide Batman through a crowd of goons while rewarding reflexes and anticipation. Combat in the Arkham series has impact - blows feel real, they have weight, and the system provides the right feedback to the player at the right time.

But more than anything else, the Arkham series nails the feel of the experience, of actually being Batman. The Arkham games put players in the cowl of the iconic character by allowing them to truly inhabit Batman's strength and athleticism in all parts of the game, including those without any enemies.

The series got these big things right, and in doing so it was able to move past the games' relatively uninspired stories, blunt, on-the-nose dialogue and a basic structure in which everything else was essentially thin connective tissue between the next Predator encounter or combat section.

I have, over the last couple weeks, been replaying Arkham Knight, the final game in the series. And the experience has only strengthened what I came to believe after finishing the game the first time: Arkham Knight is the best game in the Arkham series because it is, in a handful of very important ways, a striking, genuinely beautiful experience, one that, like the series as a whole, succeeds by hitting a few perfect notes.

Movin' On Up

Consider the following Indisputable Ranking of the games in the Arkham series:

1. Arkham Knight

2. Arkham Asylum

3. Arkham Origins

4. Arkham City

Set aside Origins, the competent but unnecessary prequel put together by an outside studio - there's basically nothing it does that other games didn't do first, which makes it somewhat irrelevant to the conversation, even if it's a basically enjoyable gameplay experience.

There are plenty of folks who would disagree with that ranking, callously disregarding the fact that it is, in fact, indisputable. Perhaps the biggest disagreement I have with the public view of these games comes with Arkham City, the second game in the series.

I put Knight on top - and City on the bottom - for a number of reasons, and I'll get into most of those below. But the biggest thing putting Arkham Knight over the top in this competition is also the simplest: movement.

Character movement is, of course, the most basic element of gameplay, and it's almost always the first thing a player learns - "Press the left thumbstick to move Batman forward." But when your game is set in a massive, wide open sandbox, the ability to efficiently move the player character from Point A to Point B is not just central to the experience, it's crucial to the success of the game. When you have to traverse a lot of territory, difficult, tedious movement can wreck an otherwise solid game.

And that's one of many areas where Arkham City falls short. City moved Arkham Asylum's gameplay into a wide open sandbox setting, but it did not adequately adjust Batman's movement capabilities to the new, much larger environment. 

Put more simply, getting around Arkham City was a pain in the ass. It was a tedious experience, especially early in the game before the player had unlocked the grapnel boost, which enabled easier movement across rooftops. Getting across the game's map took too long, and it certainly wasn't "fun." It took the experience of playing as Batman and turned it into a commuting simulator.

Arkham Knight avoids those pitfalls - first, by bringing the much-maligned Batmobile into the equation, enabling rapid traversal of the environment, but even more importantly, by equipping the player with the grapnel boost from the get-go.

The grapnel boost (which can be upgraded throughout the game to allow for greater speed and length of travel) does more than let the player propel himself from ledges and roofs through the Gotham night - it allows the player to more fully tap into the experience of being Batman. The iconic image of Batman is not of the character beating up a generic mook or even fighting the Joker - it's of Batman illuminated against a full moon, cape fully extended, descending from some striking bit of Gotham City architecture.

Arkham Knight understands that to fully inhabit Batman, the player needs firm control over his movement, as well as an ability to gracefully glide across the night sky. As such, the simple act of movement in Arkham Knight is a genuine pleasure. When the player propels himself from a roof and glides through the rain, he's not just traversing the map to reach an objective - the sense of control and athleticism in that simple act is crucial to the experience of playing the game.

An Art Deco Joy

Of course, there's another reason that moving through the Gotham City of Arkham Knight is such a pleasure: put simply, the city is gorgeous. 

It's tempting to contrast the Gotham of Knight with the walled off prison town of City and say that Knight's Gotham feels more like an actual city. And it's true that the environment of Arkham City doesn't feel like a real place: it's a same-y, unattractive mess of boring, blocky buildings, lengthy, tedious interiors and a dull gray color palette. There's nothing aesthetically pleasing about the city of City.

But there's nothing particularly "real" about Arkham Knight's Gotham City. It doesn't feel like a real, lived-in city. Gotham, in this game, is a city where every building is either a soaring Art Deco skyscraper or a Gothic cathedral. The entire city is designed to provide Batman convenient ledges to grapple off of or to silently brood on. 

Very practical architecture

But realism is overrated, especially in a videogame based on a comic book property. Arkham Knight's Gotham City is something better than realistic: it's awesome. It's a creation that is glorious and grandiose, monumental and magnificent.This game's Gotham City is, in fact, one of the most beautiful environments in the history of the medium, a rare case of aesthetics meshing perfectly with the tone of the story and the very core of the character.

Every city should have massive statues liberally sprinkled throughout

Arkham Asylum is a very different experience than the three games that followed it. Asylum is a deliberately claustrophobic experience, one that values atmosphere more than aesthetics or movement. Batman spends more time in Asylum crawling through vents or striding through hallways than gliding across striking vistas. 

It's not an inherently inferior experience, but it is decidedly less spectacular. And that's the best description of Arkham Knight's environment and, in fact, its entire "vibe:" spectacular.

I'll rent an apartment in that building

"This Is How The Batman Died."

Arkham Knight has the best story in the run of the series, but if we're being honest, that's not really saying much. These haven't been games defined by their nuanced and complicated narratives - Arkham Asylum ended with Batman beating up a TITAN-infused gigantic Joker, after all.

Arkham Knight tells a solid enough story about the end of Batman, and manages to keep it relatively tight and focused. Arkham City spread itself too thin and tried to accommodate all the members of Batman's rogue gallery, and in doing so it short-changed most of them. Arkham Knight, by contrast, lets peripheral villains like Two-Face and Penguin stay in their side quests, keeping the main story focused on Scarecrow and the new, titular villain. 

Still, there's plenty to criticize here. The Arkham Knight's secret identity really isn't much of a secret - most players guessed it pretty quickly. And the game tries hilariously hard to milk genuine emotion out of Poison Ivy, one of Batman's weaker villains. There's an undeniable charm to watching massive plants spring out of the ground and destroy tanks, but if your narrative is leaning hard on Poison Ivy, you've probably mis-calculated. And the decision to turn Catwoman into a damsel in distress was not well thought out, regardless of the fact that the character herself calls it out within the game. 

But what Arkham Knight's story gets right is tone. The plot points don't all add up, and there are definitely ridiculous points within the narrative. But the game's story embraces the necessity of "ending" an iconic character with true panache. Every element of Arkham Knight's story is infused with the importance of the moment - it feels big in a way that Arkham City's narrative does not.

In the end, that's what makes Arkham Knight such a compelling experience. It's certainly not a perfect game, and I'd probably grant it falls short of greatness.The Batmobile is not the miserably boring addition that many critics say it is, but the game definitely leans too heavily on it, reducing many sidequests to lengthy tank chases through the streets of Gotham. And the game's side quests are too reliant on the now-ubiquitous open world game collection missions.

But Arkham Knight finds the right tone from its opening moments and stays consistent with it throughout. It's an unapologetically big game in its narrative and its environment. It's a genuine epic in a series that called for an epic conclusion. Arkham Knight is, like most of the best Batman stories, almost Wagnerian in the grandiosity of the sentiments expressed and the striking iconography of the visuals. 

And the game maintains this tone in all of its most striking elements: movement, aesthetics and narrative. For this consistency, and for all of its successes, Arkham Knight is both an outstanding experience and in sore need of a re-evaluation from the gaming community that greeted it with significant skepticism upon its release.