The morning that our former GMG friend and current bestselling author Jason Schreier joined us to record this week’s Distractions, our producer Eric noted that his podcast feed included three other shows on which Jason was a guest. While Jason’s new book—it’s called Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard EntertainmentAnd that will come out next week – in some sense Schreiber will sell himself because of his Titan status in his field and Blizzard’s massive following, in another and more literal sense that guy will still have to go out there and sell it. We could only do our part to help, in this case by talking about our diverse experiences with the current New York Jets and New Jersey Nets Keith Van Horn administrations for 12 minutes before turning to Jason’s (fascinating) book. Went.
I think it’s clear that I’m not bragging when I say that I can talk about the Jets and Nets for a long time, with a guest or simply in a mirror like a version of Travis Bickle who Todd knew McCulloch and cared about him. , Jason was a great foil there, but with Drew out this week I needed help with the gaming stuff. Thankfully, Luis Paez-Pumar was willing to join in to provide The Gamer’s Perspective – and a story about hanging out with Kerry Kittles – where it was needed. Louis, after all, is the boy who stays up all night playing world of Warcraft Whenever a new iteration drops. That game is arguably Blizzard’s signal creation and greatest success, and Jason’s book tells the story of its creation in a way that even my non-gaming self enjoyed. But be politeAnd our conversation about it, to me, was most interesting not only when it was introducing the story of that weird, shaggy company that produced that game, but also when it was putting Blizzard’s decades-long legacy into the context of how an industry Was presented. To match the size of the film industry, and which suffers under some of the same distorted financial incentives.
Whereas be polite To Jason’s dismay, probably filed away in the ORC section of your local bookstore, this is both a commercial book and a thumbnail history of various cultural moments within gaming. As a mega-dummy on the subject, my goal was mostly to sit back and watch Jason explain how Blizzard got so big and so rich. I actually didn’t, because there are so many things about how the gaming business works that confuse me that I asked both Luis and Jason about a lot of it. The physical facts of how the business works – how games are made and shipped, how to make them better, the culture that makes and maintains this weird work, and how companies like Blizzard make more from the games they produce. – are fascinating to me, and Jason and Lewis both had some interesting things to say here, including a bold and refreshing Ryan Fitzpatrick/Witcher Compared to Jason.
After the break, we turned to the broader context, starting with Blizzard’s various unhappy experiences under ownership by its various dysfunctional corporate parents. The way it worked, with businesses getting too big, growing too fast, and then having to deal with the pressures that come with owning and managing contemporary business types, was familiar enough that there were some digressions into how Blizzard’s The difficulties are similar to those of online media. But mostly the main thing was so interesting that we stuck with this studio and this industry, and it’s an example of how the MBA mentality and the rote appetite for Wall Street expectations have conspired to make gaming fail and fail like everything else. Rachi. We also talked about the mess that those incentives have created in other industries, the importance of a workplace culture in which the people involved really care about what they do and managers respect the work of those people. Are, and also talked about the systemic problem of never-ending and constant demands. Growth in any business, leave alone any creative business. This excerpt is especially recommended for those who like to hear me get so nervous that I forget what question I was supposed to ask.
It sounds disgusting, and I guess it was, but Jason is a great talker and knows a lot, and I enjoyed the conversation so much that I was surprised to see that we were bumping into the front at that time. When Jason needed to release Funbag Zoom without asking questions. Thankfully, there is information about what happened to the old, funny type of facemasks that were once but no longer prevalent in the NFL. Where is the strange cage? An episode that started with unnecessary sports discussion ended with unnecessary sports discussion. everything in between was ice cold gamer fuelThere are more unbalanced diets.
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