The Fun Was the Point
The best parts of this book are the ones where Sid stops being a game designer and is just a strange, happy man. He swaps into a Swiss family to study abroad. He brings a desktop computer on vacation, not out of obligation but because the machine is where the fun is. That is the thread worth pulling: for Meier, work and play never separated, so the question of work-life balance simply dissolves. That is the asymptotic ideal I want to reach inside the gaming industry, and the memoir is just an existence proof that such an arrangement is possible, even if not a manual for getting there.
Because Sid is not the person to ask how he succeeded. He is a bit of a Wozniak: the ideas half of an ideas-plus-business duo, dropped by luck into exactly the right partner and the right market. He is the only human ever branded that heavily in video games, “Sid Meier’s” bolted onto the box, and the way he tells it that was a strategic call by his business partner that he mostly went along with. He is the Kanye West of the form, a personality so precisely matched to its moment that once he reached the top he simply stayed, without ever being able to reverse-engineer why. Charming, self-deprecating, and analytically useless on the mechanism of his own career. A 1980s John Schulman, if you like.
The frustration is that the coverage runs inverse to the interest. Alpha Centauri, which did as much to shape my worldview as almost any game, gets a few sentences. Civ III and everything after it barely registers. The bulk of the ink goes to flight simulators, which is honest to his own chronology and passion but leaves the reader who came for the grand-strategy canon underserved. A memoir gets to be about what its author cares about; I just cared about a different slice. Worth reading for the life, not the design.