Game Developers and Porn Stars
killtenrats.com
killtenrats.com
He more or less quit gaming when he was a game developer. After about a year off he returned to gaming and now enjoys the occasional MMORPG or strategy game. He returned to gaming but I don't think he'll ever return to coding.
I wonder if other roles on game development teams, aside from programming, are nearly as rigorous. Obviously, they are all worked to death, but there seems to be something about furiously debugging for a prolonged crunch mode that sucks the life out of programmers.
During college, I was fortunate enough to take a class from gaming legend Warren Spector (of Deus Ex/Thief/System Shock/Ultimate fame). What impressed me most about him was his sheer, infinite passionate for the games industry. He knew gaming so intimately that I would go so far as to call him a genius. At 50+ years old, he is still going strong in the games industry.
This class brought several guest speakers that were HUGE names in the industry, notably Richard Garriot (Ultima/Tabula Rasa) and Michael Morhaime (Blizzard co-founder). These two guys entered the industry as programmers, but quickly moved onto higher roles in their respective organizations. I think that playing the position of a non-coder is crucial in their career success. There is simply no other industry that can foster the immense inventiveness and creativity required to produce successful games.
"They are energetic and excited about getting paid to do something they really enjoy (and probably have been doing on a small scale for years without pay). "
"Others think there must be a better, more humane and sustainable way to do this work, and they found their own projects with better conditions. This latter group seems less visible and prosperous, although more outspoken."
It was a scene out of some psycho's nightmare. 18-21 hour days; 30 people at desks in a room, in virtual lockdown. They looked like the walking dead. The producer was this 5'4" guy wearing storm trooper boots, he'd walk around like Hitler laughing at how fucked up everyone looked, and saying things like "The beatings will continue until morale improves!" No one was laughing.
What was stupid about it is everyone was so burnt they couldn't think straight, kept making simple mistakes. Productivity was probably around 10-15% of peak, if that. It was one of the more depressing things I had ever seen.
All entertainment sectors do this -- they sucker ppl in with glamor and rip them off. It's built into the business model.
Probably anyone working at a company that large would get burnt out, regardless of industry.
On the cultural aspects of traders, Tom Wolfe wrote a rather biased (not to mention obnoxious) article on that a couple of years ago:
"The traders are on the front lines moment by moment, pulling the trigger with only seconds to think about it. They are our kind! They are aggressive real men! Their plain vanilla C.E.O.’s know it too. They will pay a daring, battle-hardened trader $50 million and up per year to keep him from defecting to our pirate fleet. They pay them more than they pay themselves, because they are worth more, because they are real men, because they are willing to fight. What idiot thought up "boards of directors" anyway? My board of directors consists of me, myself, and I. My investors don’t have to love me. I don’t have to charm them. I have to do one thing and one thing only, make them money."
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/04/16/The-...
Likewise, young women probably perceive the porn industry to be much more lucrative than it actually is. I've read that they get paid between $500 and $2K per scene. While that sounds amazing to an eighteen year-old working at McDonald's, it probably translates into $100K annually for three or four years until younger talent takes their places.
Still, they have the opportunity.
So they probably hit the same kind of crunch as well.