Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
penny-arcade.com
penny-arcade.com
Seems to me the 'white' part is being called out unfairly considering the rest of tech isn't a whole lot different, demographically speaking.
That's one reason why we have religious wars over operating systems and programming languages and tool sets that you don't see in other engineering cultures. (And also why more relaxed companies focus more on the mantra of "right tool for the job".) Since I don't touch gamedev with an eleven-foot-pole, it's not clear to me how much of a cost has been incurred by this.
And it's this exact kind of thing which lets unexamined biases manifest in the hiring process, leading to an overpopulation of white males.
and most people cope by reinforcing their self-esteem with delusions of superiority
That I would like to see a source on.
EDIT:
I will go ahead and say that the article makes the point that such labor has a 'dehumanizing' effect... and in such condition, bonds between people in the same situation who aren't part of the cause are usually strengthened, in my experience.
In contrast, software especially has a lot of new, young blood (average age in software is significantly lower), and one thing young people love doing is claiming superiority over each other. And the best way of doing this is via religious wars about operating systems, programming languages, etc.
Whenever I hear someone claim "such and such programming language is the best!!!" they are either 25, or they are older but they hang out with 25 year olds and their maturity has regressed to that level.
First, most software developers are taught "computer science" (or an imitation of it) in their formal education, not engineering.
Second, software is mostly not engineering. Engineering is very measurable. But software includes a lot of design and craftsmanship. If software dev. were restricted only to the portion that could reasonably be called pure engineering it would be a very, very small subset of mostly systems code. Indeed, a good hunk of software dev. could properly be called merely arts and crafts, under such a strict interpretation.
I think this explains some of the religious wars, because the debates are more aesthetic such as "do you prefer charcoal or pencil" than engineering "which is better steel or aluminum", because purely engineering questions tend to have very much more straightforward answers.
Let me put it like this: there are very very few designs in software where there are limitations that are based on intrinsics. Whereas if you talk with a chemist, it's very clear that there are actual properties underlying what they do, and these physical properties do things like go "bang" when you screw up. Or if you're building a circuit, you use the underlying equations of the resistors and other components to drive the design. Very little of that exists in computer science.
This doesn't make what we do immoral or bad or demeaning. But in my opinion, this conflation with physcial-based sciences produces a confusion of the mind.
I'm prone to consider computer science "algorithmic mathematics" and quality software engineering "software craftsmanship". It reminds me far more of house building than circuit design.
Why call out "white men" in the headline, then? This is actually a story about the importance of letting employees work reasonable hours and have a balanced life; the problem is that nobody cares about that - or at least, the PA Report thought nobody would. So they chose a headline that makes it look like a far more marketable story about sexism, racism and the tech industry. It's cheap, but it probably ends up bringing more links and traffic.
Your average industry professional is a 31 year old white
man (86 percent of the respondents were male, 82 percent
were white)
I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their salaries are absolutely laughable (I'd say a waiter often earns more than them).
I think this article goes a way to answer why young people dominate the games development industry, but not really why they tend to be white or male, if that's true.
Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doing the work purely because they enjoy it.
Healthcare is especially good in this respect. People will (quite literally) die without your product, and the payer is just about as far from the consumer as you can get, which makes demand highly inelastic. Your business isn't profitable? No worries, just double your prices. What are they going to do, stop paying you? And how much competition are you going to get (as a worker) when the work can't be outsourced and you can't hire a kid out of high school to do the work based on his GitHub profile?
I agree with your overall point but will temper it some by noting that there are VERY high barriers to entry (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-beco... for one discussion I wrote) and those barriers are enforced by regulators. That being said, once you get the necessary credentials to enter the market the gig is pretty sweet and pretty protected.
The real benefits, however, appear to accrue at the lower end of the profession (nurses, P.A.s) and the very high-end (specialists). The great middle (family docs, internists) appear appear to be hurting.
Oh, and dentistry is awesome from a money / lifestyle point of view, but it's not much respected (http://www.theonion.com/articles/local-prostitutes-eagerly-a...).
That assumes that you don't get any value out of having a glamorous job. Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome! You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically challenging, you spend your day looking at monsters and explosions instead of spreadsheets and forms. People you meet will be excited to talk to you about your work. If you're lucky, you create something that people will form real emotional attachment to.
It's not smarter to choose a higher-salary job, because salary-maximization is not the goal of life. You spend much of your waking life at work, and a bigger salary won't give you those hours of your life back. You may as well try to make them be something you love.
The only value you get out of having a "glamorous job" is that other people think you have a glamorous job. Glamour has to do with perception, not reality.
> Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome!
Wrong. They want to be game developers because they think a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome. Once again, this deals only with perception.
> You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically challenging, you spend your day looking at monsters and explosions instead of spreadsheets and forms...If you're lucky, you create something that people will form real emotional attachment to.
From the numerous comments on this thread alone, actually being a game developer is about as far from any of those things as you can get.
> People you meet will be excited to talk to you about your work.
This is probably the only thing on your list that is true, but if your happiness is primarily based on what other people think about you, you have a lot bigger problems in life than what your job is.
> You may as well try to make them be something you love.
I never said that you shouldn't do something you love. My point was that you should consider the bias of perception on market dynamics when determining your occupation, rather than falling prey to the trap of perception, like a lot of people do.
- You're expected to always be on the absolute cutting edge in an extremely fast moving area, computer graphics.
- The ultimate goal of the projects is to make images that are so appealing, people will pay money to see them projected on a screen. This is fun.
- It requires extremely high levels of creative and technical proficiency, and to do really well ideally you'll have components of both.
- You work with people who are extremely passionate about what they do, and not what it might pay them. This does actually make a difference.
Now there are definitely significant down sides, but it's not that people are brainwashed into thinking they enjoy their work.
> The work itself is what keeps people in the industry, and the work is genuinely more fun than other jobs I've had for a number of reasons.
Let me say once again:
My point was that you should consider the bias of perception on market dynamics when determining your occupation, rather than falling prey to the trap of perception, like a lot of people do.
If your job really is as fun as it is perceived to be, then everything I've said obviously doesn't apply to you.
Now, I don't know anything about the film industry first-hand, but I've heard plenty of stories from friends and acquaintances about how ridiculously difficult it is to get into (primarily on the acting side of things, though, so it may not apply to your particular occupation). There's definitely a reporting bias. For every person like you who is happily employed in the film industry, there are hundreds of people who journeyed to Hollywood with the hopes of making it big and then realized that things weren't so easy.
It is very similar to working in the games industry, to the extent that people can easily move between the two.
It also suffers from some of the negative aspects of the games industry, namely punishing hours and relatively poor compensation compared to similarly challenging roles in other areas of technology.
However, as I said, it's fun work. Too much of it, certainly. But nonetheless fun. The games industry is similar. That's the point I'm making.
And the point I'm making is that the games industry isn't similar (in that it isn't as fun as people make it out to be), as evidenced by numerous such assertions by various people who have worked in the industry.
The actual work is fun, that's why many people work on similar things in their spare time.
Laid back, to me, means "Oh, we had to work 60 hours last week, so this week I'm gonna leave around 4 pm on Thursday. I'll send an email to the team lead to not expect me tomorrow"
From the stories I've heard, "laid back" in the game industry means "great news! it's 7 pm on Sunday evening, everybody go home and be with your kids"
You can dress and look however you want. And, in return, you draw in the kind of creative, interesting people that care about that kind of stuff. Believe it or not, this is not a given at all software jobs.
There's not a lot of process and formality. Less time writing TPS reports, more time making software. This doesn't mean it's all unstructured cowboy coding, just that there's less pointless overhead than at other companies I've seen.
Lots of kidding around and laughing. Less people taking themselves too seriously.
> Laid back, to me, means "Oh, we had to work 60 hours last week, so this week I'm gonna leave around 4 pm on Thursday. I'll send an email to the team lead to not expect me tomorrow"
I think that depends a lot on the project and schedule. Certainly, the worst crunch was right before a deadline, and things were more lax after it. Taking several days off after a big push wasn't unusual. The months following shipping a title which were mostly focused on writing design docs were often "nominally 40 hours but really closer to 35 and we aren't exactly killing ourselves during those hours either".
> From the stories I've heard, "laid back" in the game industry means "great news! it's 7 pm on Sunday evening, everybody go home and be with your kids"
Well, of course the stories you hear are always extreme. Otherwise, they wouldn't be a story. No one ever says, "Breaking news today, area man works 40 hours in one week."
Me too, or costume production, rather. It's insane how much they have to work for so very little pay. It's hard to tell if they're happy or unhappy, overall--they seem proud of their work, but at the same time, incredibly stressed over bills and whether they'll still have a job after a certain production's wardrobe is finished.
(This is skipping over the sewing people who went to college for it and now work at starbucks or whatever. These people are also a much larger percentage of the total than the people who were even able to get into the industry at all.)
1. A belief that any obstacle can be overcome, any deadline met
2. One tool in the toolbox: I can personally make this happen by writing enough clever code
There is very little:
a. Has this been done before?
And even when that is present, a total absence of
b. How long did it take them?
As is said in the article, management selects people from the first group, and actively punishes anyone who asks questions.
Now, this latter may be true in any large industry where there's more money than sense, but so far my experience is that only in the games industry is this coupled with insane hours and a hit-driven industry that makes failure a guarantee of layoffs.
It's a huge problem, both by discriminating against people unwilling or unable to put in ridiculous hours, and by driving away those talented women and men who are finally becoming experienced experts when they become so burned out they have to leave the industry.
I worked in games for 5 years. I no longer do. I had a lot of good times but I'll never work for a mainstream games company again.
I am considering applying for a job once I complete the internship if everything goes well.
I would like to see if the studio where I will work has a decent workflow. If not I would be willing to tough it out as a generalist programmer while trying to apply to other jobs that interest me in another industry. The idea is to have decently impressive job on my resume and to have fun at work.
Do you think this is a reasonable idea?
If you go into it with your eyes open and don't let yourself get pushed around, consciously or otherwise, you'll do Ok. Just get in the habit of working sensible hours and in sensible ways, and if you get taken to task for it, stand up for yourself and explain why it's important that everyone works in a sustainable manner. Good managers (and they do exist) will understand.
Career planning is pretty stressful for me and it's great to hear from someone in the industry.
I'll keep everything you said in mind when starting out.
I know you have to start your career somewhere, but keep that in mind.
My perspective is that who you're working with and how you're working is a lot more important for day-to-day happiness and job satisfaction than the specifics of what you're working on.
You want developers who come into work and WORK. Not work a little, check a little HN, work a little, eat, check a little Reddit. Living at work forces coping mechanisms like this on you because you really only have a finite amount of creative attention.
http://www.newser.com/story/117942/why-successful-people-wor...
People who are overworked for extended periods have negative productivity - you can't throw a rock without hitting a dozen studies that have proven this decade after decade.
This sort of management and process is pure cargo cult - this is the way blockbusters have been made since ages past, so this is the way blockbusters will continue to be made, even if it is woefully inefficient and costs more than a saner attitude about work.
For a long time the regular non-game software industry was a lot like this also, except unlike the games industry there wasn't a long enough lineup of impressionable, desperate young graduates waiting to be drawn and quartered by the executioner inside. Nothing meaningful will change until the supply of people willing to take on this horrible system dries up.
The number of games jobs as a % that I see advertised is pretty high as well.
Please, throw that rock. We had this discussion[1] and the conclusion was that there is no (known to the participants) solid study relevant at least to "knowledge" work, if not for software development directly.
Maybe for a lot of people, but generalizations like that are never true for everybody. Different people have different amounts of time they can work without reducing productivity.
> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity,
This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me.
I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.
> Many companies want to own your work even when you’re off the clock. “Here at Nine Dots, we aren't using any non-concurrence agreements, so these personal projects can actually benefit them financially if they make something that is commercially viable,” Boucher-Vidal said.
This was also another major reason I left EA. I couldn't work on games in my free time. Meanwhile, the stuff I did at work didn't actually scratch that itch: it was either huge franchise games I couldn't care less about or technology stack stuff that wasn't an actual game. I spent more time feeling like I was "making games" when I didn't work at EA.
> Until there is evidence that other models will work, and that's going to take a hit game or two, very little with change, and the revolving door of young, white, childless men will continue to make our games.
I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry. In both, you have:
1. A product that people don't need to consume.
2. A product where consumers increasingly expect prices to be tiny or zero.
3. Hordes of young people who want to do it.
4. Work that is intrinsically satisfying for its own sake.
Push aside all of the bullshit and making games is crazy fun. Lots of people want to make them. Lots of people want to play them too, but they don't really want to shell out much cash to do so. I think the end result of this is that it's just a domain where it will be a young person's game and it's very hard to make a lot of money.
Yes, some companies will be able to make real money at it, but for every Rolling Stones, there's a thousand local independent bands playing dive bars that you've never heard of.
And that's OK. I was in one of those bands you've never heard of once. It was awesome. When I had kids, I gave it up, but I certainly don't regret it. Maybe we should think of making games the same way: a fun thing to spend a few years doing when you're young and have the time.
> This is pretty spot-on.
I've studiously avoided working for EA (they almost had me once, but I said no when they pulled a bait-and-switch on the project that convinced me to interview to begin with), but I've been in the industry for 20+ years, mostly working for smaller companies or doing consulting.
I think that while most people (historically) have worked for big companies, that there's a new trend (Kickstarter/crowdfunding) that is making it possible for indie developers to compete, and more importantly, to make a reasonable income while they develop the game.
Granted, a lot of game Kickstarters fail, but then a lot of the people who put them on are not as qualified as they need to be to impress the public.
>I honestly don't believe this will significantly change. I compare the game industry to the music industry.
EXACTLY! And Kickstarter is democratizing the music industry as well! Heck, throw in the movie industry -- there were 17 Kickstarter-backed films at Sundance this year [1], and musicians are using Kickstarter (and digital distribution in general) to get away from the awful music labels that almost universally eat up their profits.
The biggest problem in games/music/movies is typically that you have to make them before you can sell them. All three industries are really hit-driven. If they don't strike the right chord when the product is released, then any money invested in production is lost. So the investors get very conservative about what they'll make, and the general quality goes down as they try to reduce costs in stupid ways (80+ hours a week etc.).
Crowdfunding turns this idea around completely, in that you can invest a small amount of time and money in trying to prove that your idea has legs, and if it does, then the product can be made with the money put in by your fans. If it doesn't, then you either fix your idea or start from scratch with the next idea.
And if none of your ideas work, then it's off to a different industry. The public has spoken.
I'm a game developer with a family and a social life. It can be done. [2]
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-funded-films-hea...
[2] I have yet myself to "hit the jackpot" with anything I've made; some of my time is spent doing consulting (I'm a programmer), where I make enough money to pay for the time I spend trying to make games. My burn rate is low (even with a family) in part because I left the Bay Area because this is what I want to do, and in order to do it I can't have a huge mortgage that forces me to have a day job that I can't quit. It's all about deciding what your priorities are and then acting on them.
The sad truth is that I feel like a lot of things that go on are either not worthy of writing about, or they involve some kind of sensitive negotiation or relationship that I shouldn't post about. At the end of the day I end up paralyzed by these fears and fail to post anything.
But you can find the rather rusty company blog here [1], or my personal blog here [2]. The latter has a bit more activity because it has my Pinboard stream on the side, and I try to post a comment with most links.
In general, though, no, I don't really blog as well as I should. Yet, anyway. Kickstarter may change things for me.
For what it's worth, I found work-life balance increased steadily during my tenure at EA. The whole ea_spouse thing brought a lot of attention to problems. It still wasn't great, but it was better than when I started.
When I left EA, I was working 40 hours a week reliably. This was in large part, though, because that was a high priority for me and I moved off game teams and onto shared tech stuff because it was less high-pressure, even though that wasn't ideal for my career.
> And Kickstarter is democratizing the music industry as well!
I'm really excited about Kickstarter too. However, even when it works well, I don't think you get much more than a living wage. I think that's OK, but it's worth keeping in mind that it isn't a golden ticket.
I also worry that the social structures around Kickstarter have not settled down yet. Right now, I think a lot of money coming in is based on novelty or optimism. As Kickstarter matures (and more projects fail) I think both of those will wear off. It can still work, and I hope it does, but it won't be as easy as it is right now.
> The biggest problem in games/music/movies is typically that you have to make them before you can sell them.
Yes, it's inevitable in any product where the initial cost is very high and the marginal cost is effectively zero. Digital content like games and movies one example. Drugs are another, I think. I wonder if oil drilling is similar?
It seems like in all of these cases, a consequence is conservatism in investment leading to missed opportunities.
The industry launched her album, 25K bought it and it was a failure, on Kickstartet she raised 1.5millon dollars with almost exactly 25k backers. The irony, there are a lot of people and a lot of people like music, and even if its not the everyone, it's big enough that they can make a good wage.
By shared tech I assume you mean tools and engines? And that's worse for your career? That sad.
It's a common trend I notice that companies don't often spot and reward tool makers (policy drivers, etc), which often boost productivity for large portions of employees, instead of just themselves.
I was doing tools, but not engines. UI toolkit stuff, asset pipelines, a bunch of metrics gathering. At the EA studio I was at, being on a game team was a better career path if you want to get more clout.
My last gig had me working 30-35 hours a week reliably. And I made way more than EA was offering.
>This was in large part, though, because that was a high priority for me and I moved off game teams and onto shared tech stuff because it was less high-pressure, even though that wasn't ideal for my career.
The one time I worked for a big company (well, a studio owned by Activision -- the studio itself wasn't that big) I did tools as well, similarly to avoid working in the critical path of a game Gold Master release.
That was the worst fit for me of any job I've ever had. Not because it was tools, but for more complex reasons...mostly, I guess, because the tasks they assigned me didn't play to my strengths.
Both of these pursuits are entirely compatible with having kids and a normal job, so long as you pursue them in a way compatible with your lifestyle. You don't have to go on the road and live out of a van to be in a band; you can pick up some cheap hardware and software and record at home. Record a vocal take, change a diaper, add some reverb, let Dropbox sync the file for your bandmates to add to tomorrow.
Same thing for games. There's no reason you can't make an indie game when you're older and have more responsibilities; you just need to work with the right kind of team, on the right kind of game, with the right kind of scope.
Yes, you can still record solo, but that's making music. What I gave up was being in a band. Keeping up with bandmates, practicing regularly for several hours a week, and playing shows in bars is possible but much harder when you have kids. I also find it much harder to keep up momentum when it's just me and just in my free time.
Ditto for making games. You certainly can make them in your free time (and I do), but it's a different experience from what you can get jammed in the same room with a few other inspiring people for hours at a time. In today's "everything digital, everything asynchronous" world, I think we seriously undervalue to importance of being there with people.
Something else that people will start to understand more over the next few years as programmers get older: Once you get past a certain age, you tend to have less responsibilities again. Once the kids leave and you start to pay off your car and so on, possibilities begin to open up.
The only point I might contest for that analogy would be (2), but I think we are still seeing a trend towards disrupting traditional payment systems (e.g., people expect Facebook to be free and funded by ads).
And it's worth mentioning that Silicon Valley startups do have their fair share of underpaid, overworked positions. But I think that is slowly changing, and we are seeing startups--especially ones that have been around for a few years--paying market or even above market wages for reasonable 40-50 hour work weeks.
Hell, I was just reading an old thread on reddit--about 3 years old--where people were posting their salaries. I was shocked to see a lot of people working at Google, Facebook, or a Silicon Valley startup, with a few years of experience, posting that they made $80-85k in salary. That's what I'd expect in South or Midwest, but not the Bay Area. Now fresh grads there are getting $100k with signing bonuses (at least from Google/Facebook).
Also, I think the startup scene is newer. While there are some younger developers now whose childhood dream is to build a website, there aren't as many of those as there are people who grew up playing videogames and who want nothing more than to make them.
As the web gets older and you have more adults whose software experiences during their formative years revolved around websites (or, I guess, soon, mobile apps), that may change.
Six years here.
This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more than 50% of the engineers had never shipped a game before. Those that had spent all of their time fire-fighting the messes created by the energetic yet clueless brigade of novices.
I agree completely. I still remember the HR presentation where they talked about how long most of the developers at our studio had been with the company. I had only been there 6 years and I was somehow one of the 10% most senior people at the studio.
At one point our studio (EA Burnaby) was run by a nice fellow named Jonathan Schappert who later went on to be CEO at Zynga. I'm told that his vision for the studio was for some small percentage (like around 5%) of the programmers to be senior engineers - SE3's or better - and for the rest of the programmers to be kids straight out of school. You can imagine how this 'pyramid of excellence' worked out in practice.
I think the article is somewhat accurate, but I think it also pays short shrift to the improvements that are happening in games.
One of the big things I've noticed in recent years is the amount of people who enter games who are aware of the quality of life issues, and practice work to rule more often than not. It puts pressure on managers to learn to schedule properly, and it puts pressure on directors to learn when to cut.
On top of that, there are a lot of studios that lean older in terms of age. Ubisoft Montreal is a good example of this; I couldn't tell you what the average age is, but I know that it's just as likely someone has a kid at home as not, and that also puts a lot of pressure to run things right.
Also a lot of the managers these days have kids at home that they want to see, so if nothing else, they are improving their methods for selfish reasons.
There's still a long way to go in games, but the game industry today isn't anything like what it was in 2000. It has been nearly a decade since I was expected to pull an all-nighter, for one. It's been nearly that since I was expected to work both a saturday AND a sunday.
These days it's not impossible to find developers who believe in quality of life. But what is very very possible is to find a place to work where it won't be held against you that you have a family at home, and I think that's largely what this article is missing.
That recent photo eulogy of Lucas Arts talked about things that I literally have not seen since before 2005; it's not shocking that a studio which would expect people to miss funerals and prioritize work over relationships would fail to put out games of quality.
The game industry still has far to go, there's no doubt about it. But if you want to have a family, there are large swaths of the game industry these days who are perfectly willing to accommodate you without complaint.
Note that I actually fit into the article's title as a 35 year old guy who doesn't plan on having kids. I will often spend a few extra hours polishing something up because I relish the end result and because it energizes me to come in to work every day. Sure, I could make "double the money for half the work" in some other industry, but I love making games and can't imagine sacrificing my passion to make some equation look better on paper. But I never pressure others to stay late, and from what I'm seeing these days, more and more studios are converting to a reasonable outlook on developer productivity and happiness.
Edit: And the major downside of working this way is that you don't have the slack needed to truly innovate (technically or artistically).
Some companies do a better job (Valve comes to mind), and those companies tend to focus on quality and unique IP over schedule pressure. Also, indie game development is becoming a bigger part of the industry. The bad-old-ways are still hugely profitable for many game studios though so I imagine it will take a good long while for things to change.
Edit2: Also, the working conditions part is just one way that game dev is maybe 20-ish years behind software dev (on average) in terms of best practices. You can see this in lots of other aspects as well such as development patterns, QA, tooling, release management, etc.
But there is one good thing I would say about the industry. You LEARN ALOT. C/C++/AI/Shaders/Animation and the intrinsics of low-level hardware, all in a days work. Compared to most folks I know that didn't spend time in the industry, their only experience with those topics was a semester in University.
Just yesterday there was a topic here in HN about python/ruby being slow, and while going down to C was suggested, I find appalling that most of the replies to those were 'it is hard to find a decent C programmer' or 'most of the ruby/python devs don't know C'. I can honestly say I this isn't an issue for me and for most I know that I worked in the industry. Heck my previous job had me writing nginx C modules and C++ cross platform (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Linux) download/caching/audio code.
In smaller companies, most of the time, Gameplay programmer = Just do whatever it needs to be done, including shaders, AI, sound, etc.
Heck, since I left the industry I've been working on a few projects that taxed me as well (multi-platform threading code, nginx custom modules, metrology algorithms (most of the math here went over my head to be honest)). But in all honesty, and I may just have been unlucky, most developers I know can't do C/C++ or any kind of memory management in non GC languages and have trouble developing algorithms that a bit more complex than qsort.
As I pointed out, I find it sad that most replies on the older thread to 'when you need performance you just drop down to C for that part of the code' where complaining that most Ruby/Python developers couldn't do it. Comparing this with having someone (and that was over my head) profiling the damn game for cache misses on the Xbox 360, and you can understand why I said what I did.
This isn't weird, because people aren't rational - I know plenty of people who took degrees in fields where the supply of labor outnumbers the jobs available, and thus work less than ideal hours, for less pay and more abuse than they should.
I'd love for everyone to be able to do what they love, but frankly this is frequently the result.
Also, there's an unfortunate truncation on that URL...
Some examples: the game that swept the GDC Choice awards was Journey, made by a small independent studio with an exclusivity deal rather than a more traditional publishing relationship. Minecraft is one of the best-selling games of all time: the XBox 360 version alone sold more than Gears of War 2, to give you a point of comparison. The average indie game won't see this level of success, of course, but neither will the average big-publishing mainstream game.
When I was last interviewing for programming jobs in New York, only one of the places I interviewed at (and I looked at a lot of companies) wanted people working more than 40 hours a week, on a regular basis (they were a startup with a fixed runway). All the other places (a mix of established companies and startups) made it very clear that work-life balance is important to them, and that normal workweeks and generous vacation time was to be expected.
So I read these stories about people being asked to work 80+ hours a week, and I can't for the life of me figure out why anybody does this, when there are so many companies which don't ask for it. And it's not like the 80+ hour jobs pay any better, as far as I can tell.
What's going on here? Is it geographical? Industry-based? Do some programmers just not know any better?
What they tell you in the interview is very rarely what happens in real life. Every company says they have a dynamic environment where you work on interesting problems for 40 hours a week at above-market salary. The reality is often different.
Through the next few years, he got job offers right out of college from some larger studios. Eventually he picked a small, local studio that went bankrupt without releasing a single game. Apparently that took him by surprise, and he vowed he'd never be in that situation again. He took a job at a top-five company (where he was later laid off, proving some irony). He then went to another top-five, and he complained about everything I worried about for him.
When I asked him why he put up with this, why he didn't take his talents elsewhere, his response was romantic. He liked the games coming from these studios, and had always wanted to be a part of it. He liked the games from Maxis, and wanted to be where they were. He liked the games from Blizzard and wanted to be where they were. It didn't matter what the working conditions were, he was there.
It's taken him a few years to get over the romantic idea of working for the company whose games raised him as a child. It's much different on the inside, and it takes a while for that to sink in. I can't speak for the entire industry, but that was his perspective as I've seen looking through the small gap his life has left me peek through.
Most companies have reasonable employment policies on paper.
Did you just say it's respectable to hate on white people?
Not to accuse you of any impropriety, but that was the most artful dodge I've ever seen outside of a presidential debate.
Please answer the question as asked. As far as I'm concerned, anger and hatred on a racial basis is rarely, if ever justified.
^---this.
If we say it's okay for a certain race, why not the others? It's logically unsound. Far better to not hate anyone on the basis of their skin color. Only way NOT to be a racist, too, for that matter.
(Then again, in the sense that I dislike the odd parts of me which have been bent by race and gender, and actively wish them to disappear, maybe there is something to calling it "self-hate". But it's like the self-hate of a novice, who wishes to transcend their current inability.)
So hopefully we might accept that race is a similar, complicated -ism, and it's fine to be a "race traitor" or gender traitor if yours dominates.
Your use of the word "dominates" is disingenuous. Let's imagine:
- - -
There exists a country in which 95% of all leadership in government and industry is male. There are a few women here and there, but for the most part, it's all men at the top. And at the top, people are pretty protected. They can generally get away with whatever they want, as is often the case.
This country has gender roles. Legally enforced gender roles. Women are viewed as more fragile caregivers. Men are viewed as sturdier providers. People at the top of society are pretty insulated, but for everyone else, these gender roles are a fact of life.
For a given crime, men are held to higher standards, and they are subjected to more brutal punishments. Men overwhelmingly find themselves in dangerous, thankless jobs.
Young men tend to work menial jobs, while young women tend to attend university.
Men do not live as long in this society. An overwhelming amount of public money and attention is spent on issues that primarily affect women.
And when a woman is perceived to be slighted, men and women are expected (and socially rewarded) for rushing to her aid. Men, being sturdier, are expected to fend for themselves.
- - -
Every well-off feminist man I've encountered would say that men in that society are not victims of sexism—they are simply victims of patriarchy.
Why on Earth would one call that system "patriarchy"? Aside from the top of society, men have it worse in this society. Men have it much worse. Why lump the men at the top in with the men at the bottom just because they all have penises?
Please realize that men can be sexist toward other men. Men can actively oppress other men on the basis of their gender. Men love competing with other men. Men love one-upping other men. Men love protecting women from those other, less civilized men. In short: Many men love oppressing other men.
For poorer, underprivileged men, it's incredibly marginalizing to hear a hyper-privileged man display his plumage and say it's alright to hate males, because males "dominate" society.
Unfortunately, repeating that mantra costs that hyper-privileged man nothing, yet it can potentially increase his social standing among other hyper-privileged men. So why wouldn't he?
In fact, the reason it was called "patriarchy" in the first place was to draw an analogy between men who ruled entire nations and patriarchs who had no influence outside their own family - to treat them as though they shared in and benefitted from the exact same male-dominated power structures in the same ways, ignoring little details like some of them having far more downsides than benefits.
You can use the word "Patriarchy". You can use the phrase "male domination". But it doesn't change the fact that men at the bottom have to watch the men at the top stomping all over them while preening themselves.
[1]: http://goatinahat.tumblr.com/post/45265637509/behaxrant-wesh...
It's an incredibly cruel thing to do. For example, I saw my mother beating my father all the time when I was growing up, yet I get a bunch of straight liberals yelling at me if I mention supporting the establishment of domestic violence shelters for men about how they can't believe any "legitimate" GLBT person would support something like that. I once had a person tell me that she couldn't believe any self respecting GLBT person would support them, since "ANY study" would show that men were predominantly the agressors. I linked her to 200 studies showing equal rates of male vs female aggressors, and she made a vague post about cleaning her friendslist based on "politics" and promptly removed me. I don't know how to deal with people who literally refuse to acknowledge that my entire childhood is something that could never exist. Or refuse to recognize that they're wrong, when science says something that happens to contradict their pre established worldview.
It's incredibly bewildering, and more than a little cruel. I have to deal with the memories and trauma of my childhood, on top of conservatives AND liberals being unwilling to associate with me because of my views. That are mostly based on how and where I was born (GLBT, and understanding of how women assert their "female privilege" within our current society, which is matriarchal in many respects, based on observing my mother in action for 17 years).
Conservatives hate women and liberals hate men. What's an egalitarian to do? :(
I'm already severely marginalized, and liberals shunning me isn't exactly helping. I wish they'd stop enforcing mandatory privilege checks and actually just listen to the people they pretend to be advocating for, even just for once.
"You don't deserve a safe space, John, because people with your genitals are the ones committing violence."
They have disturbingly collectivist notions of guilt.
Please don't hate yourself for the way you were born.
Believing in the moral righteousness of self-hate over unchangeable attributes invalidates the mantra of pro-GLBT rights groups everywhere. People have told me all my life that I'm disgusting and degenerate and innately evil because of something I have absolutely no control over. I don't like seeing GLBT hating themselves, and I don't like straight people hating themselves either, whether agender or female or male.
Would you tell a trans guy that he should hate himself for being male? No? Why a cis guy, then? Because the average trans guy does not want to be considered any different from the cis guy.
Of course, there are some feminists who believe that trans men are traitors to females everywhere for trying to "become" part of the patriarchy. These feminists say that trans men are just women that are trying to make a grab for male privilege, but the reality is just that the trans guy is trying to be who he is. He can't help the way he was born. And yet, here you are saying "it's fine" to be considered a "gender traitor" and that it's acceptable to "hate" maleness. Can you see how this is harmful to GLBT? We're already really marginalized as is because of the general attitude of "you were born the wrong way."
But I can't help it, and neither can you.
Do you see where I'm going with this? I hope you can understand, at least a little.
"Youth" and "maleness" were relevant. Younger people tend to be more "desperate" and willing to trade time and health to "make it" in their career of choice. They are also less likely to have young children. Males tend to be more passionate about the gaming industry.
But what is it about White people that makes them more likely to go into the gaming industry? Nothing, right? So it's not relevant to call it out in the title.
Put another way, it's not the whiteness itself that's objectionable, at least not exactly. It's the lack of diversity. It just so happens that the lack of diversity presently and historically manifests as a bunch of white dudes. And a great many white dudes just don't notice; for them, that's the "default."
I thought whether you agreed with a comment or found it to your own liking was supposed to be orthogonal.
In fact, it's only going to get worse as people keep expecting more and more out of next-gen games. AAA game budgets can't keep skyrocketing like they did over the past decade, and that means squeezing the workforce to produce more with less.
If you have the idea of "I must work on games, no matter what," you will be rewarded commensurately.
If you have the idea of "I want to work, and games would be cool, but not worth more than an extra 5 hours of work per week and losing $5,000 of salary per year," then the industry would have to pay the talent more.
If you're a programmer, contracting out the art/music is very common, and the indie dev community is quite small and self-organizing for that kind of stuff.
But what doesn't help is the hordes of people that seem to be invading the industry, yet again, in search of riches and just want to learn the bare minimum. Get in and get paid so they can get out. The analogy I often use is poker. For some it's just a way to strike it rich and the lure of those riches draws a lot of people in. But for some of us it's a way of life. We wake up in the middle of the night yearning for the game. And no matter how much we make we'll never walk away because we love the game so much. How can you explain that to someone who just wants to hit aces, scoop a pot, and then leave a "winner"?
Put simply - how can we bring rational thinking back to startups? How can we convince others that experience is important, engineering and architecture are important, tools are important, and it's not just some quest for riches?
The argument being made is that game are bland and homogenous because they're made by childless white men. The childless white men the article is talking about aren't actually making the decisions about anything that goes into the game. They are assembly line workers, not management. You could replace them all with an outsourced team from India or hire an all female team and the only thing that would change is the bug count and level of productivity.
The end product would remain the same because it's being driven by executives.
As the consoles got more and more powerful, the pressure to deliver next-gen experiences just overwhelms the team. Quite often at the expense of delivering good gameplay.
I worked at a number of medium sized development houses, and the failure rate was probably 75%+. Some games wouldn't make it to market after 2 years+ development, some would make it to market but the publisher buried it (no real marketing). The most successful title I worked on was one for Nintendo, where the focus was on the gameplay (our producer was Shigeru Miyamoto). Even that title was massively late.
I was an engine and tools programmer and I believe the level of complexity of the systems being developed (to fit into consoles with very little power, slow memory etc.) was pretty high compared to development in most other fields. So the rewards should be there too.
However, I think the constant struggle that development houses have to keep their heads above water - due to the high failure rate of games - means that the rewards aren't competitive. So naturally you start looking elsewhere, especially if you have new found responsibilities in your life.
It's a shame really, because it's actually one of the most fun and creative fields to develop for (in my experience) - however it's just set up for burnout and disillusionment.
I left 7 years ago to form a healthcare software startup here in the UK and haven't looked back since.
Obviously it depends which company you work for in terms of how well you're treated, that's obviously an intangible. For example I employ several developers now, and I very, very rarely ask them to work out of hours.
If they have ever done it then it's because they wanted to, I also will stop them working excessive hours - which stops the peer-pressure aspect of the long-hours culture.
I give clear ownership of key areas of our product to developers, so they feel a sense of pride and responsibility for what they're doing.
I will also offer pay rises when I feel they're underpaid, I don't want to wait until they're halfway out of the door before offering what they're worth. Also I'm flexible with working-hours and remote working.
It's not hard to have a basic respect for your staff.
Even the games industry which I said didn't pay well, with long hours etc. is good to work in as a young developer. It's a very creative environment to be in, and most of the programmers I worked with were hyper-talented and have gone on to running their own startups, or are high up the food chain now.
So in terms of learning ones trade and gaining long term contacts it's great.
Just like actors and actresses go to Hollywood to be in show business. Many programmers enter the gaming industry so they can work on games.
While I love video games, I can't see myself in the gaming industry.
An avid gamer all my life, I joined a game company to work on a gamer centric non-gaming project. Without saying much about my time there, it culminated upon completion with the entire team being laid off, with only the lowest paid hardest working "white childless males" being kept on because they fit the founder's expectations of ideal workers.
I like to work a lot. I like to work 60 to 80 hours a week. The things is that reward has to be somewhat commensurate with effort. And as a developer you are expected to take a discount compared to adjacent markets. That just doesn't make sense when you have a car, a mortgage, and like to take two vacations a year.
Key quote? "If the cost of a fun game is a failed marriage, then it may be time to admit that the cost is too high." - agreed.
What is comes down to is that the steady supply of labor entering a field causes it to be a buyers market.
I find that AAA games are often very disappointing in as far as they're full of one-dimensional characters, terrible cliches and limited understanding of anyone who isn't young and male. (I'm relatively young and male, but enjoy stories that aren't entirely filled with people like me.)
There's a market for video games with a storyline written by someone with some maturity. It might even pay for sane office hours...
There's so much churn in the basic technology of gaming systems that it makes it difficult if not impossible to concentrate on only story telling.
Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3, I'm looking at you. :(
That best describes the game industry, but it fits the major label side of the music industry, the bottom 95% of pro snowboarding, military combat, resort work and i'm sure there's more.
And if include a set that misses just one of the traits you arguably could ad tv and film, the junior level investment banking scene, pro sports maybe.
Hell, startup employee is a fairly close fit as well.
I think it's just human nature - young people have a lot of passion, energy and without a stretch of office employment may lack some of the context necessary to decide how exploitative or appropriate various demands are.
Given some of the common psychological traits often associated with officers and directors at many firms, it's not surprising that a certain number of them would see no problem in or perhaps even their responsibility to structure their business or process to take advantage of (exploit) this pool of people that dream of being part of it.
At some point, whether or not the constant crunch turnover and burnout is worth it versus a more sustainable style that increased retention and experience level seems like an unsolvable riddle for any firm thats culture has been built on crunching.
Anybody who has made it to senior management in these places has done so by being successful at executing the model and getting their underlings to work under those conditions. If you can't stomach it you won't stick around. So essentially upper management is full of people who have shown they're cool with it and have seen it work. Some probably flat out enjoy it.
With this kind of environment it's hard to believe you could even finish pitching the idea, let alone get enough traction to investigate or even come up with a plan to implement something that would take so long to have any measurable results.
Unless great results came quickly, I'd be surprised if they had more than two years before everybody got sacked and they reversed coarse
I've been following the Doublefine guys and a lot of their development was put into making developer tools. I suppose I understand that, but when I hear of these 400 person teams building a game that takes 4 years to make, I'm honestly a little bewildered.
Also, while the engines do most of the visual stuff, which was what a lot of the '90s-era tech-talk revolved around, they do nothing to implement your gameplay.
Here's the credits for one of those big-team games, as an example (81 or so engineers/scripters, but only a fraction of the total team size): http://www.mobygames.com/game/xbox360/call-of-duty-black-ops...
i wouldn't presume to comment beyond that though.
I do love programming, even more than games, so it wouldn't be a problem for me to work at something less gamey. But should I nonetheless continue with cherishing C++ and making it the best language for me? Your replies are highly valued. Also, I do understand, that in reality, it's unlikely ever about just one language.
The truth is, if you don't like C++, you won't like working on an industry that relies heavily on it (however, not every game is done in C++, and certainly few games use it exclusively), so in that case it may be a good idea to go for another industry where you feel more comfortable. If you like C++, of course, keep using it, and don't worry about finding a C++ job, they're still very common.
The best advice, and the one you'll read around here most often, is: don't learn a single language. It's OK that you specialize in C++ (so do I), but never put all your eggs on a single basket. From C++ you can very easily go to C, Java and C#, which also provide a lot of jobs, and outside of the C family there is a whole universe of languages you should always be aware of.
Also, when I am thinking about possibly being in web development, then is it a much more diverged path from the C family or could I somehow keep this as an open option? Is the easiest solution simply learn e.g. Javascript in parallel?
In academia there are a lot of ad hoc scientific simulations, and yes, many people still prefer C++ over Matlab, R or Numpy (because of speed or because they feel more comfortable with it). In those cases, you'll write a few medium-sized programs from scratch, and will probably be free to use the new features.
In videogames you will likely develop new code over an existing engine, which means that C++11 may be available, but the engine will probably be written in an older version of C++, and C++11 maybe won't be allowed during engine maintenance.
When maintaining big ancient systems, which are all over the place, chances are that you will be restricted to C++03 or maybe an even older version, but it's not the only possibility, so you may get lucky.
In any case, C++11-ready compilers should accept C++98 and C++03 code, so there is always the option of starting to use modern compilers, and when every potential problem is solved, you can use the C++11 features. Just hope your boss is not too averse to changes, and keep in mind that mixing modern style C++ with older style may result in poorly readable code.
As for web development, well, there actually exist a few people using C or C++, but the only languages from the C family you're likely to find on a web server are Java and C#, and they're less and less prevalent nowadays. You're more likely to find PHP, Python or Ruby. In the client you're obviously restricted to javascript, but beware: despite the syntax, it's very different from the C family. If you want to learn javascript, that surely won't hurt, just keep in mind that it carries a few paradigm changes (lack of static typing, object modeling and inheritance through prototypes, and A LOT of quirks about the syntax).
I've seen high-employee turnover before, and it's generally down to the company demanding too much overtime or being disgustingly underpaid. There's plenty of companies about now that understand overtime doesn't = productivity.
>Your average industry professional is a 31 year old white man with one to three years of experience
I've got no idea how true this is, but in my experience it's around 3-6 years average, though I've never worked for an indie or mega-studio, and I'm based in the UK.
I wonder, where was that 31 year old professional all his first 28 years? And how could you call professional a man with three years of experience, let's leave a one year?
More than once I've walked around the dev people and told them to go home after 8 hours.
The friends I've had spend time in games industry have either left or transitioned to design consulting for all the same reasons cited.
However, I tend to think this problem is in the process of solving itself through the continued rise of "indie" game development and slow collapse of studio tiles [1].
There are all sorts of great outlets for people who are so inclined make and publish games that didn't exist even 5 years ago.
Developers/designers don't have to buy into the established industry culture to make and consumers don't have to pay into it to play.
1: http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/1/3439738/the-state-of-games-...
Or they don't want them...It may be anecdotal, but I know a good many of people around age (26) who don't really want to have kids
Your actions show your real priorities. How can he really mean what he's trying to do if he doesn't live it himself?
I imagine this article gives me a very limited caricature of what's happening, but I'm busy and will go read something else now.
Liken it to a family. When I was a child, my mom was awake before us kids to make breakfast, got us to school and then went to work, picked us up from school and made dinner, and was in bed after us while she was cleaning the house. She did this to ensure that us kids led a good life and had the things we needed. Her kids and her home were her priority, like a CEO's employees and company are their priority.
Are you guys now belting out CRUD apps using the latest web framework like the rest of us? Or did some of you walk away from programming all together?
I'm just curious what a "post gaming" career looks like. Feel free to share any numbers on how your pay/lifestyle changed as a result.
The issue is marketing and what the market become recently.
Games now work just like hollywood. It's just a matter of releasing something with the right name at the right time.