Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight for Art and Soul in Video Games

Amazon.com Price: $20.22 (as of 15/10/2019 00:09 PST- Details)

Description

From the award-winning videogame author at the back of Spec Ops: The Line comes an exclusive at the back of-the-scenes look at how today’s blockbuster video games are made.

When his satirical musings in a college newspaper got him discharged from the Air Force, it became clear to Walt Williams that his destiny in life was once to be a author—he just never thought he’d finally end up writing video games, let alone working on one of the vital most successful franchises in the industry—Bioshock, Civilization, Borderlands, and Mafia among others.

Williams pulls back the curtain on an astonishingly profitable industry that has put its stamp on pop culture and yet is little known to those outdoor its walls. In his reflective yet comically-observant voice, Williams walks you through his unlikely and at times inglorious rise within one of the vital world’s top gaming companies, exposing an industry abundant in brain power and out-sized egos, but struggling to stay innovative. Significant Zero also provides clear-eyed criticism of the industry’s addiction to violence and explains how the role of the narrative designer—the poor soul responsible for harmonizing gameplay with storylines—is the most important for expanding the scope of video games into more immersive and emotional experiences.

Significant Zero offers a rare look inside this fascinating, billion-dollar industry and a path forward for its talented women and men—gamers and nongamers alike—that imagines how video games might inspire the most efficient in all of us.

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