The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Rumour has it, management got extremely ambitious with AI. Every actor in the game world was to have a personality, daily routines etc.
The devs tried to explain how absolutely unfeasible that is, but management was convinced it's possible - and would indeed be ground-breaking.
After a large number of years of toiling with the problem, the writing on the wall was finally seen. The NPC AI was scrapped and replaced with crude "we'll just spawn the cops around you so they don't have to have a chase mode"-level hacks, to allow them to ship in 2020.
Now they're stuck in limbo, because the players are still waiting for those marvellous AI miracles that were promised, but they remain absolutely impossible to deliver. CDPR can patch things like the car physics, but people's expectations were thoroughly mismanaged and they'll forever be disappointed
Not the most polished game but easily the best murder mystery and Twin Peaks style life sim I've ever played.
So if CDPR couldn't pull it off, they must have been asked to do it at an unreasonable scale or the requirements themselves were unreasonable.
Funny how reel-life and real-life collide into each other! :D
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As an aside, after Ted Lasso (which gets all the well-deserved hype), Mythic Quest is a great trope-filled show esp. for anyone who's worked in tech in general (and game dev specifically).
Anyways, I think the big challenge compared to real time apps like Google docs is that game simulation is significantly more complex than synchronizing bits of text. One problem is that at a minimum, you have the round trip to the server as latency between “submit command” and “receive simulation result”. And this has to happen many times per second so that it looks realistic. And then on the server, it has to be processing the changes from N connected players M times per second, and then simulate what happens in the universe. And if simulation (M) drops too low, you get desync problems where players are rubber-banding and the AI gets very dumb. (An example is that star citizen appears to have great AI in demos, but in the live server, the servers can’t process changes fast enough for the AI to work well.)
And then, if you want a lot of connected players or a big universe, this just gets more and more complex, and you’ll eventually out-grow the ability of a single server to process changes. At which point you also need to handled data replication among multiple servers. For example, star citizen game servers don’t have capacity for more planets at the moment, either because of memory or cpu constraints. So sharding the universe into multiple servers is a pre-req for the next stage.
So to more directly answer your question, it’s definitely possible to implement. Many games have basic versions working. Minecraft is an example, but it can’t scale to hundreds/thousands of players. New World is another recent example, but even its servers have player caps. No Man’s Sky is sort of an example, but it keeps players spread out so that they rarely encounter each other. Eve Online is also an example, but I think it reduces the amount of nitty-gritty simulation details. (So it might not have a very in-depth physics simulation, or first-person-level details.)
So it’s basically a scaling problem, and even then still has limitations based on the speed of light (for internet latency) which limit how good it can get.
They received some AI-related grant[1] from the local government and did whatever they could to avoid penalties.
[1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/pl/media/aktualnosci/30-mln-zl-dla... - original source but in Polish
That CP2077 couldn't even reach that level remains kind of baffling.
I don't know why you'd build a game simulating more depth of interest in background characters than people actually possess, and it's not like occlusion culling is a foreign idea.
The big difference was that Radiant AI was fun. You could join the Warriors' guild, jump across the road to the Mages' Guild, use an enrage spell on them, the run out into the street. Instant chaos ensued.
[1] https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-group-sec...
[2] https://www.pwc.pl/pl/pdf/alerty-innowacje/13-PwC-Alert-GAME...
It was, and still is, my assumption that there are penalties.
Also, this seems to be another grant - "City Creation" is documented separately[1] and with different amounts from "Animation Excellence", "Cinematic Feel" and "Seamless Multiplayer"[3]
[1] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_...
[2] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/programy/fundusze-europejskie/p...
[3] https://archiwum.ncbr.gov.pl/fileadmin/gfx/ncbir/userfiles/_...
How can that be a thing of what you say is true?
Though, two through four can usually be handled without issue, provided the devs know what they're doing & architect the engine correctly. (edit: And keep the scope in check, which ultimately is the responsibility of the leadership.) Unfortunately, this appears to be where #1 messed things up for them.
definitely not trivially easy, but impossible!? nah.
Star Citizen's "Subsumption" and Quanta system is very similar in goal, and if it goes to plan will be one of the most engaging "AI population" simulations to date. It does't individually simulate every person in real time, but instead simulates a set of tasks and demands to be done, all the resource nodes, and an approximate population of simple entities carrying out those tasks, and when you spawn near said tasks, it spins up a "meta NPC" to represent in full 3D space, an agent of one of those simplified population entities.
So for example, you fly to a mine site, the system knows there are currently 40 miners here mining aluminium to take to the factory, it knows at what point they are at with their tasks, and so it generates 40 NPCs to represent those miners. At that point you can interact with them and influence the simulation, say steal their ship and minerals. That updates the simulation but the simulation need not care about the specifics of the NPC. Just that he has no minerals and he is no longer capable of mining.
You fly away with their ship, and all the other NPCs return back to simplified entities in the graph.
In regards to Star Citizen being vapourware, my recommendation would be to take a critical look at their timeline and what state the game is currently in and ask if you could really see it going any quicker. It's a controversial project, but I think calling it vapourware is just the industry being dismissive.
They had to build the team from nothing, now 700 people, and they are building two games not one, both are pretty groundbreaking in features and scope. That considered it is actually moving pretty quickly. They have already delivered a bunch of those groundbreaking technical hurdles to players. Of course the whole thing could implode yet, but it's looking good.
They deliver consistent progress reports and updates to the playable alpha, which has enough content for me and friends to play regularly for fun now. Updates every three months is the schedule, plus any in game content events that get run.
I tried this on a limited scale in a text-based MUD in the 90s, and even then it quickly became an ungodly nightmare. What sounds good in your head isn't always feasible in reality.
With current GPT-3 technology (or even GPT-2, accessible by then), it should be possible to create each agent unique. But if the research started earlier, I am not surprised by the dissonance between marketing and devs.
This is why film scheduling is a serious discipline and software scheduling is a joke.
As paid overtime becomes more common, people start factoring it in production costs, and standard hour salaries are adjusted accordingly. When people negociate they get told "don't worry, with X hours of overtime you'll get a pretty good pay" and we're back to square one.
For a real world examole of that, Japanese companies have had these kind of deals for a few decades.
I'm generally all for Devil's Advocate, but when it comes to giving workers reasons to _not_ demand more, I need to see some really compelling evidence of serious harm before I'm willing to tell people to reconsider.
makeitdouble isn't saying workers shouldn't demand more; they're saying that paid overtime doesn't solve the problem of crunch time. It makes crunch time acceptable, and (potentially) gets factored into renumeration packages in the long term.
If you want to solve the problem of crunch you need a solution that removes it, not one that pays people to continue doing it.
But either way: I don't necessarily view crunch time as a thing that can or will be solved. I just want the game to be more fair than it is now.
That way if you’re overflown with overtime it’s in your compensation, if you manage to not do any overtime you’ll benefit from it.
It’s arguably harder to negotiate, but I think it would be the best way forward. Now, if the choice is between nothing and paid overtime, yes it’s worth it getting paid overtime.
Creating a regulation that says “workers in this sector get overtime pay” is probably easier than creating an industry-specific minimum wage.
In France it often was a separated contract you had to sign, but most people above “junior” level were pushed into it. It works pretty well in some companies, and heavily abused in others.
And I will add that we constantly complain about how there are just a few hours daily of truly useful work. Adding more money will not change anything. Paid overtime also can give people the wrong incentives.
Edit: what I mean is that we should not plan for overtime. Of course it should always be paid.
I live in a country with a 40-45 hour max work week. After that, you pay 1.5x rates. Saturdays are 1.5x rates for salaried workers and Sundays and public holidays are 2x. There are very serious legal consequences for trying to skirt the system.
As paid overtime becomes the norm, it becomes another metric to track. Project managers that routinely run into overtime are punished. The same as any other expense caused by analysis failures.
You seem to think paid overtime suddenly incentivises a company to just up the price of their product. Like it was equivalent equivalent the rising price of materials. It just doesn't work that way.
Not everyone is a piss poor planner who can't react to changes in environments. Plenty of projects I've worked for have been pretty close to budget. When overtime is required, we talk to the customer. Their money, their decision ultimately.
If your costs unexpectedly skyrocket, you're not keeping customers.
I'm getting a little bored of these "qualification by differnce of opinion" reasoning. You've gotta actually qualify your opinion
Not everyone is a poor planner, but deadlines become firm when large marketing spends are deployed, as they are in the gaming industry.
(Of course, you can disagree with that.)
My personal take is that the overall discipline of managing software projects is so woolly and ill-understood to begin with that the incentives aren’t really there beyond the obvious fairness of actually paying people for the work they do. You don’t need a cost to competently push back against unrealistic processes.
Now, if the employees unionised like in the film industry, it might happen.
150% salary for weekdays+saturdays overtime (200% if at night) and 200% sundays and bank holidays. ~400 overtime hours a year hard limit.
I worked in both types, usually contractors are treated as second class citizens, e.g. some perks don't apply to them.
I have yet to see a company where contractors are majority.
When I was made to work three nights without sleep for some imaginary deadline, and staff came in on the fourth morning and they had to pry the gold CD out of my hand as I was asleep on the floor under my desk - that was the end for me.
https://www.amazon.com/Abomination-PC/dp/B00001ZT3Z
I left and became the World's #1 seller of Beanie Babies. (True story)
Yes. I live in the Netherlands and we have this. I am a software engineer and working in a free sector (meaning I don't have a union or common branch contract) but it's normal that overtime pays extra. It's also the reason I rarely work overtime. Plus it's fairly common to be compensated in time. So if I work on a Saturday I get 1,5 off on my paid vacation sheet. Sunday pays out 2.
The first step to getting there is a union.
Mainstream economics would suggest that high productivity and plenty of competition between employers gets you benefits. That's what worked for programmers rather well. Thanks also to low barriers to entry for new companies.
(Especially if you compare programmers to people in other industries, also in other countries and in other historical eras. That would make the impact of unions vs the factors I outlined above more apparent.)
In any case, feel free to form or join a union, if you want to try it.
And, of course, all this while gaming is a booming industry attracting (and requiring) workers in droves.
[0] https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-ceo-and-others-blamed-for-institu...
It totally is!
So first, I suspect crunch time sort-of works. In the sense that it allows you to bring out a product a bit sooner, but burn out your people in the process.
The game industry is as bad an employer as it can get away with, because so many people are eager to join. That's why the game industry can mostly get away with low pay and crunch time.
Working your standard programming job at Boring Inc is less cool, so people demand more in return. More money, more perks, better treatment.
It's all about equilibria.
So if you want to 'fix' the game industry, the way to go about this is to make the alternatives more appealing.
There are plenty of example where regulation (or similar) tried to fix unsavoury industries by fiat. Eg look at Orange in France. Orange is the former French telecoms monopolist. As such, they employ way more people than current management wants.
But firing people is extremely hard in France. As unintended consequence, management has no incentive to make the life of marginal employees bearable, and every incentive to avert their eyes from bullying, etc.
Cue the French complaining how 'neoliberalism' causes suicides at Orange. https://www.dw.com/en/france-orange-top-bosses-caused-employ...
This is the whole thing, you've laid it bare here. The games industry is exploiting it's workers' passion.
If there were game workers' unions, we'd see a lot less of this type of behavior, as has been shown time and time again.
I have no clue how a union is supposed to help here. Perhaps they can restrict who can work in the games industry? Just like they keep non-union people from appearing in Hollywood movies?
The current state of employee "choice" between companies all colluding to offer the same conditions is no choice at all.
Someone could break rank, hire programmers for a dollar more or an hour less crunch time, and still make a killing, wouldn't they?
If you're not working for EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, Valve, Bungie, Epic, Rockstar, or Riot Games, you are almost certainly not working on a major video game project, and certainly not on a game that will make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
And conversely, if all of the developers on, say, World of Warcraft were to strike tomorrow, Blizzard would not be able to afford to replace them. That's the power of a union.
I have no idea where you got this idea that it's easy to start a gaming company. Unless you plan on making a mobile game, they're a very hard industry to enter, like all other art industries.
Unionise.
Please unionise all you want, but don't force me to be part of your union or adhere by what you negotiate.
It also wouldn't surprise me if major game studios have a handshake agreement to never offer paid OT. It would probably be easier to avoid a class action lawsuit for that than salary fixing a la Google and Apple et al.
As a customer in retail you seldom negotiate explicitly with Burger or Walmart or Amazon directly, you just vote with your feet (and wallet).
Investigate your potential employers before you take a job. If you like none of them, at least pick the lesser evil, or move into an adjacent industry. (Eg lots of game programmers are more than welcome in Internet or in finance etc.)
How would you test / falsify this?
Tangentially related: https://socialgoals.com/
But I suspect it has more to do with most big films being made in relatively similar ways.
It would be interesting to compare different film industries in different countries and different times.
Eg classic Hollywood studio system, modern Hollywood, Bollywood, etc.
It was unplayable on console, and a buggy mess on release (even on PC), but some of the acting and story telling in the game is really something else. I've been playing games for 30 years and nothing has really come close in terms of voice acting. Judy, V (both male & female VO's are great, but I prefer the female one), Keanu Reeves does his best work, and is totally at home in a melodramatic setting, all the smaller characters have proper voice actors that are more than just an after thought.
The story is interesting, there are limited, but real choices along the way, along with a plethora of non-impactful decisions, that merely change how your character interacts with the world. The world itself feels great, the architecture of the city feels real, and it's the first game that I've played that explored the vertical aspects of a city, though they definitely could've done more.
The action aspects are a little limited, surface level stuff. It's such a shame that the game wasn't given the same scope it has right now, but another year or two for polish (pun unintended...) and I think the systems in the game could be fleshed out and be much more fun.
For anyone that has moderately decent hardware, I highly recommend a play through.
EDIT: forgot about the music. Might be the best soundtrack of anything ever. Movie/TV/Game/Other.
From a psychological perspective I found Johnny silverhand fascinating, there is something about an insane self confident rock star that you can imagine leading a cult terrorist organisation in another life. I found myself thinking someone like Steve Jobs might have been a terrorist in another life, that unshakeable self belief coupled with charisma, narcissism and actual skill is fascinating to me. And they made it work. I’ve not played a game with that depth before.
Possibly second favorite game to the original deus ex.
Still fun though.
All the crunch and pain and buggy games are a result of humans trying to force the other humans who are programming the games and content, and indirectly, the computers themselves into doing a rush job.
You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done.
Yes, there are millions of paintings of meadows, just as there are millions of copies of very similar but ever-so-slightly different boring line of business applications. But if you want THIS painting, this one that you have commissioned to show the meadow in YOUR back yard, you can't rush the artist, or else the painting quality will be reduced. Depending on how much rush you add, the quality can be subtly bad but close enough, or horrifically bad as if, say, this pretentious commenter were painting it.
Let the artists (programmers) take the time they need to produce the artifact. Yes, the artists can sometimes get stuck in cycles of tweaks (goldplating) and need to be told this artifact is done, ship it, but it always seems like we lean too far to the other side: feature factories, churn churn churn, crunch crunch crunch.
Let the artists paint / program in peace!
Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye.
The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them.
That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece.
[1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...
Take a look at the development for the game Hades. They took their time and polished everything, even having a pre release game in steam and incorporating community feedback. Rushing is not the only option
What happens between consenting adults ain't anybody else's business.
Eg I love Amazon as a customer, but I wouldn't really accept a programming job with them.
Doing so makes you at least complicit in that, and at most an active perpetuator of it.
Doing what? And who is 'you' in that sentence?
"Consenting adults" is a fine heuristic for what happens in a private bedroom between individuals with equal power. It does not apply to for-profit exploitation done by organizations with special legal privileges. Privileges they have only because we see commerce as generally beneficial and to be encouraged.
What do you mean by exploitation? When was it the norm and where?
While I appreciate your point and even agree to a large degree with your point, the stakes are very different between these two products.
This is part of the issue I think. AAA games are so high flying in their technical and artistic scope, and they have all the business and power bullshit that comes from their now massive, 100mil+ budgets. Their failures are spectacular because when there is so much complexity inherent in the system and teams, lots can go unnoticed, and it falls apart in many different ways.
You can't even really compare the clean delivery of a AAA war shooter from 2005 with one from 2021 for example, the technologies and disciplines involved have grown so much.
BTW I believe the best place for a game developer is something similar to ID before Activision. It's small and flexible, but not too small to develop big titles. Nowadays you might need some 50-100 developers for a big title but if you go over the number and/or go public the productivity and more importantly the focus is going to be lost.
Ah, so they leveraged unpaid quality assurance and design labour in order to cut financial corners.
Are you going to tell me that The Witcher 3 was a success because it was released May 19th 2015 instead of October 24th 2015 or even May 19th 2016?
It's unrealistic to believe there's no reason for deadlines. For a FAANG company, sure, they're making so much money they can -- mostly -- afford to do things without deadlines but few video game studios are at a level of funding that they can spend another 3, 6, 12, months.
The internet claims Cyberpunk 2077 had 500 to 5000 people working on it. I'm sure that 5000 number is not full time but it's not hard to believe the 500 number. Just paying 500 people $15 an hour, 40 hours a week $1.2 million a month, not counting rent/power/taxes etc... And of course some large percent of those people are probably getting closer or $30 per hour $60k yearly salary) to $60 per hour ($120k a year salary)
Witcher3 claims 150-250 employees so your delay, shipping October instead of May is easily $4 million needed and I suspect that number is low. $12 million if it took an extra year as you suggested and that's a low-ball estimate.
That The Witcher 3 ended up being a massive success is great but it was never a guarantee.
Development cost at least doubles, the graphics would start to look dated relative to other titles. Competition with other open world action rpgs increases.
The people responsible for making it the game that it is would have moved on, and other ideas would have come into the dev cycle.
Cyberpunk could have been delayed again, but it still would have been bad. The Witcher 3 could have had less crunch and released a year later and been as much of a success, but the studio would lose way more money.
Labor is extremely expensive and a year more of labor isn't worth it, so they rush. It just worked that time.
He spent three months just on planning the design for a completely new MMO to replace the current one. Then went to upper management and told them to choose - they could have him just manage the current game, fix the bugs and issues, and make it a really polished, but still fundamentally flawed game, that would never have the kind of audience like WoW, one that would forever tarnish the brand; or, he could make a completely new MMO from scratch in one year, while also supporting the existing one. They chose the latter. Today FFXIV is the world's most popular MMO.
The process of getting there has been documented in interviews and it is what Naoki-san says in this one [1], that I want to bring attention to. Paraphrasing, "we could only get there by aggressively cutting down features and micromanaging daily tasks for each employee, to the point that the tasks fit into a standard 8 hour work day, which generally has about 6 hours of actual work done, when you factor out meetings and breaks".
This is a man tasked with fitting 5 years of work into 1, while also supporting the existing product, and he didn't immediately reach for overtime. He absolutely worked himself to death, but he didn't push the team beyond their limits. It helps that he was an MMO fan and had a full design document for the game he wanted to build, but it still shows that with good management you can deliver a product better than everyone else while not doing overtime.
To be fair, 6 hours of actual work is still a bit more than I hit most days. Having to work at full capacity every day would still be straining, but nothing on the order of doing 12 hour days 6 days per week for months.
Compare being chased by the police in GTA vs Cyberpunk for example.
The game is simply better made than Cyberpunk. It's not really a knock against CDPR, it's their first attempt up against rockstar, but there is simply not enough polish, not enough game design etc. For me to say anything else.
I wanted to love cyberpunk, but the moment I picked my faction and then was immediately funneled into the same story as everyone else it kind of set the tone for the rest of the game.
I sincerely hope they keep developing it but at the moment I can't bring myself to play at all vs. GTA which is very satisfying just to drive about a bit before I go to bed.
It's a simple game, and as limited as GTA is.
The first link is filled with early-mid 20th century resources on this subject. The rest are all from the 80s - 00s because people... stopped studying this. Most of the studies covered the same thing, and it very quickly became an uninteresting problem in the field of Clinical Psychology because the answer was almost unanimously, unequivocally, "yes, this makes people output lower quality work product". It's one of the most settled problems in Psychology that exists in the modern day.
The only people still researching it are non-profits, and their research serves simply as advocacy, because otherwise businesses won't listen that this extremely, absurdly well-known and well-supported fact is true.
https://igda.org/resources-archive/why-crunch-mode-doesnt-wo...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267837890825693...
https://synapse.koreamed.org/articles/1125602
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40967587
Nevertheless, here is something specific to Game Development from 2016: https://www.takethis.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CrunchHu...
Select quotations from papers quoted in that article:
"In a national Australian survey, employee cognition increased for hours worked up to 25 per week. Beyond that, cognitive abilities decreased. By 60-hours of work per week, cognition was lower than people who weren’t working at all (Kajitani, McKenzie, & Sakata, 2016)"
"In a large study of 4 US-based companies, productivity losses related to fatigue were estimated to cost the employers $1,967/employee each year (Rosekind, Gregory, Mallis, Brandt, Seal, & Lerner, 2010)."
"Lost productivity due to presenteeism (being at work while ill) is almost 7.5 times greater than that lost to absenteeism (Employers Health Coalition, 2000, p. 3)."
"In a study of a large, multi-employer, multi-site employee population, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress were 46% higher than those for employees who did not have high levels of stress (Goetzel et al., 1998)."
"People identified as workaholics were found to have higher rates of ADHD, OCD, anxiety and depression compared with those who weren’t ranked as being addicted to work (Andreassen, Griffiths, Sinha, Hetland, Pallesen, 2016)."
Cos if you can be max productive at 3 challenging but sufficiently different cognitive/creative tasks for 15-25 hours per week each, that sounds like a super fun, productive, efficient, sustainable, healthy, and balanced life
If what you are saying is true, you'd expect game companies that follow the advice to have a much easier time recruiting people (for less money even, probably) and deliver better games quicker?
What's going wrong? Is everyone involved an idiot or evil?
There are still people that don’t approach things rationally though. And there are ignorant people who get funding that run their teams extremely badly. There are also “evil” people who think crunch is necessary (forged through adversity etc) to make a good product.
I’ve heard more stories of long working weeks from tech startups than I have games recently. Loads of people posting here seem to regularly clock in long working weeks when the topic comes up.
I'd think though that the factors affecting the success of a company is very complex and to boil it down to one point is insufficient when talking about competition within the multiple markets that comprise 'games'.
If you don't deliver a better game quicker the change of process (I.e. less hours) and by extension you, will probably be blamed even if there are other legitimate reasons.
I see that this would apply to _most_ existing game studios. But if what fao_ says is true, studios that are explicitly set up to take advantage of the research should easily out-compete those that don't?
The article relating loss of sleep to loss of productivity is fair and robust, it's worth taking seriously.
The article relating suicidal ideation with work hours is devastating, but it's hard to see how it relates to your point since the highest percentage of suicidal ideation is among those working less than 40 hours (17.2% suicidal ideation). The study itself is in Korean so I am not able to dig too deep into it but there is a table on p342 which I think is pretty revealing. Basically what it shows is that suicidal ideation is highly correlated to one's level of education; people who have little to no education showing the greatest level of suicidal ideation whereas those with a college education have very little suicidal ideation. My suspicion is that those with little education either work very long hours, or work very few hours which is why suicidal ideation is bimodal. Those with a college education are most likely to work within the 40-60 hours a week which had the lowest suicidal ideation.
The research linked to jstor.org is behind a pay wall, but I managed to find another source for it at [1] and it contradicts your point. It specifically states that no difference was found among those working an 84 hour work schedule compared to those working a 40 hour work schedule, and I quote right from the study which I link to below:
"In conclusion, working of one's own free will on an 84-hour workweek schedule with physically and mentally demanding job assignments does not necessarily induce greater physiological strain than working with similar tasks on an ordinary 40-hour workweek schedule."
It appears the problem with working long hours is not the duration of time, but rather the manner in which those hours are scheduled. The article points out that when people are able to schedule their own extended hours, they perform as well as those who work a given 40 hour schedule, at least as far as their physiology is concerned.
All told, the arguments you presented should not be quickly dismissed and need to be respected, but they are not as strong you made them seem and certainly do not establish my point as being patently absurd. On the contrary one of your sources says that crunch time over short periods of time from 2-3 months can produce an increase in productivity, and another one of your sources says that working long hours is fine so long as one is in control of their schedule. It is somewhat strange that you'd present said sources while also claiming that I'm being absurd.
Yes, follow up on the citations (It was written in the 80s) and you'll find it quickly contradicted.
> All told, the arguments you presented should not be quickly dismissed and need to be respected, but they are not as strong you made them seem
As I already said, we stopped bothering to do psychological research on this en masse, because it's not an "interesting" problem -- it's mostly been settled that it's unequivocally a bad idea. The idea that you think that you can look at 5 links and suddenly emerge with a complete understanding is very interesting though! Those were left as breadcrumbs for you to follow up on that I could gather in the shorted time possible, not as the complete picture.
I think posting a few links that you likely didn't bother to read through yourself (given that one is behind a paywall and another is Korean) and then proclaiming absolute confidence and authority on a subject shows not only poor critical thinking skills on your part but also a propensity to discuss challenging topics in bad faith.
No, and it showed. Witcher 3 was a success because of previous games. 3 was a dissapointment for a lot of people, they took the Ubisoft formula of repetitive content and diluted the experience until I got bored after about 100 hours.
W3 was a huge financial success but the writing was on the wall and only people who did not pay attention where surprised at Cyperpunk disaster. They tried to force a good game out with W3 and even more so with Cyberbunk. The results where clearly different than W2 which I personally think was their peak - a human curated story pace that left you dreaming for more.
Compare this with GTA games. Rockstar knows you can't rush things nor can you force industry revolutions in AI over night. Slow and steady wins the race. To which company do you think will the investor money go next?
While it's great to see games/companies become widely recognized, I feel that it always slowly gets poisoned by investors. Anyways, cheers all - stay safe.
I know there are a lot of people who enjoyed it. For me though it was a sign of things not going in the right direction.
I’ve not played but I hear AI is still dumb af, it’s COD with a cliche Hollywood cyberpunk style.
Pretty sad our art is still tethered to 80s-90s fanboy stylings. I feel like the obligation for things to fit such a literal expectation constrains creators. Then again the stories coming out of the the dudes running these places. Egh
It's more about getting the right personalities on your team than giving blanket license for artists to take as long as they please.
The recent IGN interview was great. It was an hour of hot chocolate for my niche demographic. It also confirmed that the magic of Halo was what we thought it was all along. You want to make a great game? Watch the Halo Vid Docs and take notes.
(I played about 3 levels of the first one, it was ok for that time, I know people really love it, but so do Doom, or Diablo, etc)
As for storytelling in the campaigns: it was a space opera complete with mysticism and an epic journey. It's really hard to stretch that into a never-ending story, but the books have done well. The games have not. The first problem is in making the self-insert chief a human. It was obvious from the beginning. When I played Halo 4 I had a mental list of all the ways the creative direction dropped the ball. There's something that 343's culture has never understood about the Halo games. They think it's a Michael Bay film because the audience is young men but it's more like Star Wars V.
This is a highlight reel of what I'm talking about.
Eh, if you want to make a comparison, I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'.
It's of course all subjective, and there's no one true category. They are just different ways of thinking about the subject.
A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract.
Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders.
> Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.
(In some sense, this reminds me of getting startup equity, which is basically worthless until the company goes public.)
Interestingly I played Psychonauts 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, both at times felt like playing a movie rendered into video game form.
The way the core narrative is structured is one of the core problems with Cyberpunk, the games mcguffin implying an artificial time constraint to drive the narrative to resolution. Except driving the narrative to resolution ends the game.
Ran into a good dozen crashes during my 40hour+ playthrough and one bug that affected my playing in any way (some quest-related audio didn't play and missed some stuff).
From what I've gathered there was a massive group of people, bolstered by what the Witcher 3 had become after years of development and multiple DLCs, who believed and took to heart every single word from the marketing department about three separate plotlines and AI NPCs with full lives etc.
While in actuality the "separate plots" were three short intros and a few background-specific discussion options.
This might be the worst case of mismanaged expectations in the history of gaming. CDPR shot for the moon, said they were gonna get to the moon and the result was a sparkler thrown off a roof. It was the prettiest sparkler in a long time, but that's not what the crowd was expecting.
I now had the same with MTGA. Turns out discussion about games seems to always turn into complaining.
What happens when your release date is "when it's ready"? Star Citizen.
Surely there's some happy medium.
A company/studio that actually needs to make games to survive can't afford to be perfectionists.
Hollow Knight's release schedule was (at least partially) determined by the founders running out of money. Seems to have worked ok for this one.
The sequel is still in the making.
You might like https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Anime#on-development-hell
Basically nothing they release now could ever live up to the hopes, so even without the profit motive, the incentives would lead to endless moving goalposts...
Thats it? Such a uber long article to reach such a feeble insight? Not impressed, New Yorker
You can add flavour text to a video game as well. FTL is a great example of that making the game feel much bigger.
Maybe for board games. But for tabletop rpgs, I think it's different.
Games like Dungeons & Dragons are limited more by what you can describe with language and reasonably bookkeep without slowing down the pace of play.
On a side note, if you can get the CyberPunk 2020, it will give you a chuckle on the tech comparison with the real world. I think it fits into the Cassette Punk genre.
As far I remember, the problematic role was always the Netrunner, not the Solo. While the Solo was just your standard warrior, the Netrunner played their own subgame while everyone else was waiting.
You could of course work around it like with all flaky rule systems - make stuff up, and try for reasonable balance/spotlight among the group. But the solo ("fighter") might be one easiest roles for group dynamics (eg the nomad is likely to be more occupied with pack/tribe/clan matters than group - assuming not all players are nomads/part of the pack..).
In general I'd say cp2020 is quite typical for "mature" systems - it works well for stories/groups where everyone is content getting their fair share of the spotlight, and enjoy a bit of intrigue, conflict and backstabbing...
Just because your D&D character's class is "Fighter", it doesn't mean they need to fight everyone they meet :D
Solo is just the asskicker class of CP2020
Source: Played CP2020 in the previous millennium a bunch.
What do you think improv is? And pen and paper RPGs are a form of improv constrained by some rules. But those rules are what people agree for them to be and you can make them as restrictive or as loose as you can agree to.
Mind you, I don't necessarily agree, but I also don't think it's such a grandiose claim.
TTRPGs are group pretend play with (a wide variety of differe r styles of) dispute resolution systems and supporting guidance.
The solution is consumers paying way higher prices for games. The reason games are rushed is because labor is a huge cost, and it isn't cost effective to continually bleed money waiting for revenue.
Easier to just release unfinished.
In 2000 you could buy Deus Ex for $40. It was a fantastic and fantastically successful game, developed with a budget of ~$7 million dollars. It needed 175000 sales to break even, which it did.
These days the standard price for a game is ~$60, so we are paying more. The market has also grown enormously. Video games used to be a thing played exclusively by "nerds" and now nearly everyone plays them in some form.
And that's not even touching the whole micro purchases thing.
So revenue has already increased, why do we need to increase it even further?
at the same time, I really hate to pay $60 for pretty much any AAA title that comes out these days. AAA games are in a weird state. so much time and money has been spent patching and optimizing a fundamentally broken lighting model. bigger, prettier open worlds are created every year, and they really are impressive. but 95% of the map feels like no human has ever actually thought about whether it would be fun to play in. I kinda wonder who is playing all these 100+ hour games with mind-numbingly basic mechanics.
All of a sudden, a company would need a compliance team to make sure they don't get sued if anything goes wrong with their pre-orders.
CD Projekt has spent the year since the game’s launch trying to win back the faith of gamers—and investors.
Giving a brief explanation helps the parts of the audience that need it, and everyone else can just quickly gloss over it.
I am sure there's plenty of stuff that I found obvious that you don't know, and vice versa.
It's just chonky dudes chewing tobacco and hitting a ball really hard. Then sauntering over to a white pillow for a rest, right? =)
(Of course, I have at most the vaguest idea how Cricket works.)