The Dream Architects

At Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, a key division of one of the largest, most influential companies in gaming, Managing Director David Polfeldt has had a hand in some of today's biggest video game franchises, from Assassin's Creed to Far Cry to Tom Clancy's The Division, the fastest-selling new series of this generation that revitalised the Clancy brand in gaming.

In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career which began at the dawn of the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox era. From successfully pitching an Avatar game to James Cameron — which digitally creates all of Pandora — to enduring a week-long survivalist camp in the Scandinavian forest to better understand the post-apocalyptic future of The Division.

Along the way, Polfeldt ruminates on how the video game industry has grown and changed, how and when games became art, and the medium's expanding artistic and storytelling potential. He shares what it's like to manage a creative process that has ballooned from a low-six-figure expense with a team of a half dozen people to a transatlantic production involving five hundred employees on a single project with a production budget of over a hundred million dollars.

A rare firsthand account of the golden age of game development, told in vivid detail, The Dream Architects is a seminal work about the biggest entertainment medium of today.