The Copycats Who Made Some of the Biggest Video Games in the World

PLAY NICE: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, by Jason Schreier

Office life is drudgery. Even in the mid-19th century, when the modern office first became a thing, it already sucked: so many Bartlebys copying and copying until the work broke them, deep down in their souls. “Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn’t produce anything,” Nikil Saval wrote in “Cubed,” his 2014 history of white-collar life. “At best, it seemed to reproduce things.”

Could you make the office fun? Perhaps by copying something exciting, like a video game? As Jason Schreier suggests in “Play Nice,” his airtight chronicle of the embattled video game studio Blizzard Entertainment, that’s what the company’s recent-college-grad founders, Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, thought when they first opened the doors of a tiny space near the University of California, Irvine, in 1991.

The poorly washed, sometimes violent, often drunk 20-something coders they hired didn’t immediately start working on the hit games they’d be known for — the sci-fi skirmishes of StarCraft, the virtual fantasy realms of World of Warcraft, the heroic gunslinging of Overwatch. Instead, they accepted contracts from other companies to take already-popular games made for one system (say, Windows) and adapt them for another one (say, the Commodore 64), a process called porting that often involved reproducing the game in another coding language.

Schreier, a reporter for Bloomberg, is a widely respected industry hound with sources in every corner of the game-making world, from the badly lit cubicles to the glittering corner offices to the e-sports arenas where teams of nerds project their virtual battles for a screaming audience.

His first book, “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” (2017), a collection of dispatches from video game developers big and small, rests on scores of interviews and draws genuine insights from programmers and artists. For instance, many players, whether they’re plumbing a dungeon for treasure or tapping gems on their smartphone screens, don’t mind if their success depends on chance. A touch of randomness helps provoke the same dopamine drip that a Las Vegas slot machine does; but, after much trial and error, the developers behind Blizzard’s Diablo III found that, since there’s no jackpot, it’s better to ensure that the house doesn’t always win.

In “Play Nice,” Schreier covers Blizzard’s entire history and has less time to go deep on individual design choices. Even so, a single insight, or a dozen, are not enough to make a hit game from scratch, and Schreier’s protagonists flounder when they push too hard for originality. “Play Nice” makes clear that Blizzard got big not by taking chances on new ideas, but by letting other artists roll the dice on the hundreds of mostly inexplicable decisions that go into a blockbuster game and then swooping in behind them to ape the best stuff — with new features, stories and art, of course.