An entertaining and provocative look inside big-time video game development.
Looking back on the decade he spent helping to create some of the most memorable titles in video gaming history, Williams comes clean on scripted violence, workplace politics, situational morality, and the deleterious effects of little sleep and a junk-food diet.
In 2013, the outrageous “Grand Theft Auto V” earned $1 billion in just three days after its release. Such huge profits often demand teams of creators sacrifice their souls on the altar of the gaming gods. Louisiana-born Williams did just that as a brash 20-something short on cash but long on dreams of making it as a writer in New York City. After Marvel Comics shut the door in his face, he managed to cultivate a few old college ties into an interview with the burgeoning 2K Games. Both acerbic and witty, the author not only charmed his way into a professional gig playing video games; he also earned the respect of “The Fox,” the legendary 2K honcho who would consistently elevate Williams inside the gaming industry’s arcane hierarchy. The author was also able to survive the “Crunch,” or single-minded, all-consuming focus needed to bring top-notch video games like “Spec Ops: The Line” to market. The work drove him to confront conflicting personalities and thorny morality questions head-on in a quest to deliver the kinds of immersive video games fans love to play. “Whatever it takes to make you feel something, we’ll do it,” writes Williams. “But that’s not always enough. Sometimes, to get your blood pumping, we have to let you decide how far you’re willing to go.” In the case of “GTA V,” that means “running over civilians with a car, shooting police officers, sleeping with prostitutes and then killing them to get their money back.” But the author is completely fine with all of that and more, and in this bitingly acrid chronicle, he explains why.
An entertaining and provocative look inside big-time video game development.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2995-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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