Developer's Dilemma, a study of video games developers from a sociological and science and technology studies perspective, is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the workings of the games industry. Casey O'Donnell, a former games developer turned ethnographer, makes playful use of his subject area (for example, instead of chapter conclusions he has ‘boss fights’), but his analysis is detailed, serious and scholarly. Indeed, it is easy at times to almost forget that the work he describes is all about the creation of entertainment products. Yet this reveals one of the book's overarching truths: games production is a complex and serious business. O'Donnell has produced a thorough analysis of how the games industry works at its grass roots, drawing heavily on fieldwork and illustrating his arguments well with interview excerpts.

Developer's Dilemma paints a vivid picture of the games industry as a place of tenuously managed chaos, a place where engineers, artists, designers and others have to collaborate to make games, but have clashing priorities and understandings, which constantly have to be negotiated and managed. With the help of his participants, O'Donnell gradually teases out what teamwork means in this high-technology industry, such as the nuanced interactions between engineers and artists. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this, and a major theme of the book, is information flow and secrecy. Games development relies on collaboration on a grand scale, yet the industry is an amazingly secretive world. Non-disclosure agreements, patents, copyrights, staff turnover, disciplinary boundaries and the sheer size of projects all conspire to limit the flow of information between the various collaborators and to limit their horizons. Even the tools to make games for consoles, ‘dev kits’, are often licensed rather than sold, by console manufacturers who wish to control what appears on their platform. O'Donnell provides a critical analysis of this secrecy and its many negative consequences, not least developers struggling with insufficient information or being forced to waste time reinventing technologies already created elsewhere.

The exploration of other aspects of industry culture is a high point, particularly the gradual explanation for the ‘perpetual start-up’ ethos that characterizes video game development companies. As O'Donnell notes, this is partly strategic, as promising new developers are bought up, and often closed down, by major industry players seeking their intellectual property. Yet by rooting his account in stories from developers themselves, O'Donnell shows us fresh perspectives. Video games development is a young person's job. It is competitive, the hours are long and demanding and the work is characterized by a mix of love and hate, which drives many to abandon it. The result is a constant churn of staff and few veteran developers to act as institutional memory. Not only this, but the dorm-room habits of university computing students, with their procrastination, experimentation and deadline-driven late-nighters, contribute to a similar culture in the industry. However, it is surprising how little gender features in the discussion of what seems like a rather masculine, geekishly macho, sort of environment. Although most of the book concentrates on the well-established industry in the USA, comparisons with the nascent industry in India, largely made up of subcontractors working on projects for overseas developers, provide some interesting contrasts.

It is churlish for historians to criticize sociology for not being history, but Developer's Dilemma would have benefited from more historic context about how the strange world of games developers, which is not one any rational actor would have created, came to be. This is particularly so given how the modern industry O'Donnell describes, with its secrets, insider networks and walled gardens of development, is almost the antithesis of what the computer game industry was in its early years. That said, O'Donnell's occasional diversions into the historic, such as Nintendo's long-running campaign to control both its intellectual property and what can done with its platforms, are fascinating.

While this book is obviously of use to those concerned with science and technology studies, history of computing and games, there is much to interest wider audiences too. Often it reveals classic STS and history-of-science themes, but in a very modern industry. The ongoing negotiation of disciplinary boundaries and the emergence of distinct classes of developer, such as ‘technical artist’ or ‘tools engineer’, are well explored. The discussion of software tools, a carefully controlled resource in this restrictive world, offers interesting comparisons with classic studies of scientific instruments. Standardization, or rather the reasons for its absences in the games development process, is another sub-theme of wider concern. Anyone interested in workplace studies and the realities of work in high-technology industries will find much food for thought here. Yet this is also a work of advocacy as well as analysis, and perhaps one of the most important audiences for O'Donnell's arguments for greater openness and standardization should be those in the industry themselves.