Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight For Art and Soul in Video GamesBy Walt WilliamsAtria Books, 2017 Shortly after being expelled from college and losing his Air Force scholarship, a twenty-something Walt Williams walked into Marvel Comics headquarters in a suit and tie, résumé in hand, hoping to jumpstart his aspirations of being a professional writer. Having just moved to Manhattan, he had just enough money to last him through the summer. The first and only person Williams managed to meet was a casually dressed mail room clerk who opened the door barely enough to speak to him. Williams expressed his interest to the clerk, and received nothing more than some grunts and a door slammed shut in his face.Eight years later, Williams found himself sleep deprived and living on a daily cocktail of Red Bull and Pringles. He was catering to the worst of his workaholic tendencies, buried in rewrites, and waist deep in production as the Lead Writer on what would become the critically acclaimed military shooter game, Spec Ops: The Line.Williams chronicles this journey in Significant Zero, a memoir capturing the arc of his career from his failed attempt convince Marvel’s mail room clerk for a job, to serving as one of the lead writers on the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront II. Williams shares his story as well as his philosophies and musings about video games, culminating in a state of the union about video games and how Williams would like to see them evolve.Trying to become acquainted with the video game industry as a newcomer can feel like trying to get caught up on a soap opera in its twentieth season. Williams wisely chooses to instead focus on the human interactions that lie at the core of every anecdote. Where his variety of monologues cover topics like how he struggles with throwing himself into his work and ignoring the rest of his life, the anecdotes he shares about coworkers and acquaintances are ripe with joy, despair, and the bizarre. They’re recounted with a brash voice, hardened from experience yet sentimental and genuine, showcasing a deep rooted love for the work he does.An example of this is when Williams describes how, early on in his career, he demoed games for audiences at entertainment expos, a job consisting of repeatedly playing the same section of a game in tandem with a scripted presentation:

Presenting demos can be a thankless job. You’ll occasionally have someone ask a question, like “When’s it coming out? What platforms will it be on? Will it have multiplayer?” Both of which require the PR-approved response of, “We’re not talking about that yet.” The best you can hope for is that you might tell an off-the-cuff joke during the demo and the room will laugh. That always makes you feel good, but it’s just showmanship. Showing demos for the press can be even worse. You’ll get game journalists who try not to show any emotional response, so as not to betray their opinions. It’s like talking to a wall, until you reach the end and they ask, “When’s it coming out? What platforms will it be on? Will it have multiplayer?”[...]But then some random kid wanders into your demo booth and you get to make his day by letting him know your game is waiting for him in the future, and for a little while you both get to be excited because holy shit, video games are awesome.

Williams also adopts this human focus when describing his day-to-day office life over the years, where he served as a Game Analyst and later Associate Producer on a variety of titles. The core relationship of the book is with his boss at game publisher 2K Games, whom he only refers to as The Fox. Their relationship starts off as what seems to be a standard manager/employee affair, but evolves into something endearingly paternal.One especially memorable conversation is where Williams, who describes himself as mildly narcissistic and at one point carried a pink baseball bat around the office as a subtle means of intimidation, submits an unsolicited rewrite of the script for the game Bioshock 2. Williams had been at odds with the narrative producer, the person responsible for how the storyline will affect a game’s overall production efforts. Williams felt like everything was going in the wrong direction and submitted his script, “let[ting] it go like a fucking hand grenade”. Some time later, The Fox called Williams into his office to compliment him on his script, but to also let him know they wouldn’t be using it:

“You get this way with every game,” [The Fox] said. “You think you should be the writer, but it’s not your job to tell developers what to do. A studio needs ownership over its game.”“What about my ownership? If you tell me to edit a script and that script turns out badly, it’s my fault. If I have to shoulder the responsibility, I should have a say in how it turns out.”“These aren’t your games.”“Maybe they should be. Did you ever think that?”“Yes!”“I’m sorry, what?”“I called you in here to tell you your script was good, and that I think we should find a project for you to write, but you didn’t give me a chance.”“You’re going to let me write a game?”“I was thinking about it. Is that okay, or would you like to yell at me some more?”“No, I think I’m done.”“Great. I’m glad we had this talk. Now, get the hell out of my office.”

While doing this resulted in his first real opportunity to make his mark on the industry, Williams goes on to admit that submitting an unsolicited rewrite was a huge mistake, and should have backfired. Reflecting on this experience, Williams admits to having a disruptive ego. It is this recognition which allows him to develop the ability to be more aware of and in control of his natural tendencies. Williams demonstrates a capacity for humility, and it’s this which highlights his primary motivation; for games to be better. To do better. As video games have entered the mainstream over the last few decades, they’ve unfortunately garnered a reputation for being nothing but murder simulators. Game franchises like the well-known Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty revel in violence, providing the player with endless amounts of people to kill, and a huge arsenal of weapons with which to do so. This subject periodically comes under surface level scrutiny during major news cycles, usually in the wake of shootings like Sandy Hook in 2012. The causal link between violent tendencies in adolescents and how many violent video games they play is continuously re-examined, often ending with no conclusive evidence to support the claim.Williams admits that he asks himself at least once a year, “Why are games so violent? How did we reach this point?”Do video games have a violence problem? Williams argues that:

Existence has a violence problem. Video games, like all art, are just expressing the world around them. The reason games face more scrutiny is because they are the latest mass-market art form, they are interactive, and most are built around some form of violent game mechanic. It’s unknown, technologically different, and brings joy to children by letting them pretend kill people; of course people will get up in arms.

Williams also speaks to one of the side effects of video game violence evolving over time:

The problem is, constant exposure to imaginary violence can lead to desensitization. Our job is to keep pushing the envelope and make killing great again.

This desensitization Williams refers to is an accurate take on the modern game industry’s view on violence. This attitude peaked in the early to late 2000s, when games began find their footing in perfecting the art of verisimilitude. Representations of human beings in games evolved from sentient potatoes with legs to unsettlingly lifelike androids. The illusion of reality was still present, but it became increasingly difficult to deny how games began to look more and more lifelike each year.This especially applies to the assembly line of military-themed games being released at that time. Franchises like Call of Duty throw the player into a first-person perspective, shove an assault rifle in their hands, and stuff their pockets full of grenades. They set the player loose into a random, war torn city as endless waves of dudes with guns run towards them and a commanding officer screams at the player, “There’s the enemy. Take them out.”Williams’s brief stint in the Air Force colored the way he saw violence in games, and soured his affinity for military shooters. While Williams was a trainee, a gunner fresh off of a tour of duty in the Middle East showed Williams and several other trainees surveillance footage from one of his missions. Williams watched the grainy footage, white dots serving as abstract representations of other human beings running for cover while tracer fire blazed towards them. Other trainees hooted and hollered as they watched, while the footage left Williams feeling like he “had just watched a snuff film”.Williams carried this experience with him as Lead Writer on Spec Ops: The Line, which has become notorious for its subversive story. It is a game that is painfully aware of the perception that it is yet another military shooter, ready to pull desensitized players along and seduce them with the promise of yet another power fantasy. Spec Ops: The Line leverages this expectation to catch the player off guard and instead tell a story of how Capt. Martin Walker, the character the player controls throughout the game, becomes crippled by post-traumatic stress. The player’s actions and decision to continue playing the game result in the deconstruction and eventual collapse of Capt. Walker’s sense of reality. This approach from Spec Ops: The Line was so well received in part due to a common crutch and expectation in modern game design to, above all else, cater to the player. Williams describes one of his run-ins with this mentality while working as a writer on Civilization: Beyond Earth, a sci-fi turn-based strategy game where the player colonizes undiscovered planets. His first piece of writing was for a mission in the game where the player discovers a marooned spaceship containing cyborgs who have been struggling to survive:

The quest plays out in one of two ways. The player can aid the cyborgs by inviting them into their community, causing technological body modification to spread among the player’s citizens. Or, the player can kill the cyborgs to ensure their citizens remain fully human.“We like what you sent,” said a voice on my phone. “It’s well written, but it’s too dark.”“I mean, it’s kind of a dark choice,” I said. “We’re giving the players the option to kill refugees to protect the genetic purity of their people. I hate to play the Hitler card, but it’s a little Third Reich, don’t you think?”“We hear what you’re saying, and in the real world that would be true. But in a video game, the player is always good. Whatever choice the player makes is always the right choice. The script needs to reflect that.”Whatever choice the player makes is always the right choice.It was the most insightful and damning description of video games I had ever heard.

Video games are on the verge of a paradigm shift regarding this attitude. Games like Spec Ops: The Line are trying to discourage this default expectation that games are nothing more than power fantasies, existing only to cater to the player. Games can ask more of players, encouraging them to take a step back and objectively think about the meaning behind their actions while playing. The generation who grew up playing games are now making them, asking themselves what else the medium can do and how games can transcend beyond being extremely satisfying air pockets of escapism.Williams’s passion for making this a reality is infectious. It’s the center of Significant Zero, amidst the chaos and internal struggles to balance work and life, to produce results and meet deadlines. It’s worth reading to get a snapshot of the agony and the ecstasy involved in making mainstream games, all told by someone who has seen and experienced the best and worst the process has to offer. After reading Significant Zero, it’s hard to play any shooter game and not ponder the question that Williams says drove the core of Spec Ops: The Line’s development:“What are you going to do with the gun in your hand?”____Tony Perriello is a software developer who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He also plays way too many video games.