cover image The Dream Architects: Adventures in the Video Game Industry

The Dream Architects: Adventures in the Video Game Industry

David Polfeldt. Grand Central, $27 (320p) ISBN SBN 978-1-5387-0261-1

Art erupts from the crassest of commerce in this rollicking memoir by a video-game studio chief. Polfeldt recounts his path from being a dreamy Swedish art-school grad to head of game developer Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment subsidiary, maker of mega-seller The Division, in which special-ops fighters battle bad guys in a plague-ridden Manhattan. He paints the industry as Hollywood without the movie stars (his meeting with James Cameron to explore an Avatar-based game is a study in unspoken power-plays), but still full of temperamental creatives—software engineers, artists, scriptwriters—whose egos need massaging and executives who put profits ahead of quality. (“[E]veryone knows it's great, but no one wants to pay for it,” says one suit of a gorgeous but mediocre-selling war game.) Amid the money-grubbing and high-pressure coding crises Polfeldt recounts miracles of immersive visual art and epic storytelling his team managed to pull off (such as jumping in at the last minute to help finish an Assassin’s Creed game called Revelations). Polfeldt delivers insightful commentary on gaming tech, as well as piquant character sketches. (“He was a smoker, the kind who smokes with no guilt, as if to signal I am killing myself and I like it,” he writes of a “closer” sent to crack the whip on a project.) The result is an entertaining and nuanced look at the human side of digital media. (Sept.)