Crunch Makes Games Worse
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Oh, I see: workers should repay employers for a "fantastic employment experience".
Boy oh boy. I say if your industry is such that you must have this sort of in-depth investigation in order to simply work normal work-weeks, your goose is already cooked.
And what I meant is, rather, few people can claim to have touch millions of people through their work, but someone who worked on GTA V can, even if it's just a tiny part of it.
Here Lies Jerf
Probably in at least
the 60th
Percentile
of Parents
(Based on a Biased
Self-Reporting
Survey of his
Children)
THIS EPITAPH APPROVED
BY EKIANJO
Whereas the impact you've made to "millions of people" because of the quality of graphics in a game where pimps shoot people in the streets and beat women up is a subjective accomplishment?
Do people really think it's tactful and/or polite to suggest psychiatic treatment to others in a discussion?
Especially after mis-reading their whole point?
I don't do anything in GTA, have never played the game.
The parent comment presented it as a something to be proud about as compared to being a parent/friend/etc.
I just wanted to point out it's not some great achievement humanity wise.
Please consider actually getting a first hand impression of things before you regurgitate some propaganda.
I wanted to point out that the things you mentioned are not what the game is about. The suggestion for psychological (not psychiatric) help arose from the fact that you sounded overly distraught from playing a game in your own way.
"The mission "By the Book" features graphic depictions of kneecapping, electrocution, dental extraction and waterboarding, and the player is required to perform the acts in order to progress in the game."
It's amazing how modern 'feminism' has taken the victorian idea of women and children first and somehow made it 'progressive'. The heroes of the first two waves are crying.
Seen that "shoot people in the streets", above? That was the first thing I wrote describing the game.
Also the whole rant re: feminism totally misses the point of my comment. I could not care less about modern feminism.
I just wanted to point out that it's a BS fast-food-like violent game, not some great cultural achievement.
Perhaps the argument should be reframed as - why is it that despite high-profile and commonly known, and completely batshit insane working conditions, do people still sign up (and then quit the industry entirely)?
Are we doing a poor job publicizing these conditions, or are the stories just so horrifying that they become almost outlandishly unbelievable?
For what it's worth, this also seems to be true of the legal and medical professions as well. And, more relevantly, startup founders.
The games industry seems quite similar to the music and fashion industries in some ways. They are all glamour industries that attract a lot of young people with stars in their eyes who will put up with poor conditions and pay that can be as low as zero. All for the chance to "make it".
Maybe what you're saying is true if you're talking about self-employed indie devs, but that's not who the article, or your parent post is talking about. Also, very few of the tons of potential game developers go this route. Most just apply to every gamedev shop in their area.
There's also really not a concept of making it big. Without looking any up, can you name 5 game developers?
Just doing it for the fun, not the profit of a publisher that only cares about ideas that sell.
Most people are. They get to meet with cool folks, they get press coverage, there's a lot of feedback loop between users and creators (much more than in virtually any other industry), and you get to work with people who have the same passion as you - and you can actually USE and ENJOY what you create as well. That's worth something, even if not necessarily in monetary value.
But people still do lots of horrible jobs. People work waiting for crap pay and abuse by people as well.
Especially if you drop them like dead-weight when they grow a little, and want to have a family et al and 80 hour per week doesn't seem that enticing anymore, and working on a game is not "the be all end all" a 15-year old thinks but just work.
I have never heard of someone being asked to work more hours, and I imagine a manager even bringing it up would be very taboo.
This all applies only to my team, as I'm sure there are some at my company under more pressure. But the point is the same: why would anyone do this to themselves? We may be in a bubble, but at least for the moment, software developer is a cushy job with lots of great opportunities available. Why anyone would work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop baffles me.
Who cares whether it makes games better or worse? I'm sure I could put out a better product if I worked 80 hours instead of 40. But I'd rather go home, sleep with my girlfriend, read a book, or (heh) play a video game. Our CEO is doing fine and doesn't need my charity.
Because idealistic 20-somethings are easily riled up into a frenzy. Promise them a chance at glory and they will do anything no matter their personal cost.
And they're full of piss and vinegar to boot.
I'm not morally judging the situation, I think of it as a natural effect of market forces. A rational person would just go to another industry. I'm a software developer who was never anywhere near the game industry, fwiw, though I have had an appreciation for computer games since childhood. But In these industries, there are enough enthusiastic, perhaps not quite rational people, to keep that workforce unusually pressurized, metaphorically speaking.
The thing is, it seems that the incentives don't actually line up in the first place. According to this data, the most successful games companies will be the ones where the developers work reasonable hours and are treated with respect. So what's going on?
For engineers, there's a wide range of disciplines (graphics, networking, systems, gameplay, AI, audio, etc...), so in theory there's a ton to learn and it's easy to continually be challenged. In practice, at a large company, you'll most likely end up working on a very narrow specialty, on a very specific genre of games. Much like the film industry, people continue to join thinking they will make it big, i.e.: have a critically acclaimed title on their resume.
Looking at the app store shovelware using cookie cutter Unity engines, I'm not sure about this. I think scripting a level using an existing engine would qualify as game design, not as programming.
No you couldn't. People seem to often miss this point. It's not a choice between "work crazy hours or produce less". It's a choice between "work crazy hours and do shit work" or "work sane hours and do a decent job".
“Schedule 40 hours a week and you get 38. Schedule 50 and you get 39 and everyone hates work, life, and you. Schedule 60 and you get 32 and wives start demanding you send out resumes."
That's a pretty great approximation of my experience with the concept.
Crunch was, quite simply, an expected part of life in both industries. I think it may be something that emerges from the way human brains work, when dealing with projects that take more than a year to finish. People slack off near the beginning because, wow, they have YEARS to get it done. (Or obsessively try to polish a small part, because, again, wow, YEARS.) As the release date approaches, it starts to feel more like an actual thing, and people start panicking because there is a colossal amount of money involved in a big-budget game or feature cartoon. You can't take longer because you're running out of money, and you have a ton of sunk costs in the advertising that says a specific date, there are merchandising tie-ins waiting for the release, all kinds of things pushing towards "the team works crazy hours and burns out".
Me? I draw a graphic novel now. The only deadline I have to make is the self-imposed one, and I'm lucky enough that my finances have enough slack that my schedule can have some slack, too.
Much of Hollywood animation is unionized. (animationguild.org, IATSE Local 839). Crunches mean paid overtime. From the Animation Guild standard contract: "All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 1/2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
This discourages unnecessary "crunches".
If you would like The Animation Guild to represent you and your fellow employees at a game company, print up some of these cards and get your fellow employees to sign them: http://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Represe... You can force your employer to have a union election.
Supply of programmers in the games industry is almost completely inelastic. No matter how little they get paid (relative to tech standards) and how poor conditions become, young programmers will continue to flock to the games industry because it's perceived as "cool."
Why people make employment decisions based on what they play in their free time I will never understand. I also love reading books, watching movies, and eating food—but I have no delusions that those would be good career options.
More generally, I think the best way to improve working conditions across the tech industry is to kill the meme that working on "sexy" tech is important. So long as companies are able to attract talent through silly stories or sexy projects, rather than a good work environment and competitive salaries, programmers are going to continue to be abused and perceived as unprofessional.
Lawyers don't choose which firm to join based on who has the coolest name. It's time that programmers stopped chasing cool and started acting professional.
> As we get deeper into the process we discover that things that sounded good on paper don't work in practice. Things that worked in prototype don't work in a fully textured and lit level. And then the folks providing money or distribution randomize and disrupt by demanding demos or screenshots at the most inconvenient times!"
That quote was listed as one of positive quotes for crunch, but it solidifies even more that the process is broken and/or better project management has to be done.
Nope. At least in white collar America professionals demand fair compensation for intense work.
Gamers, on the other hand, are not behaving rationally and demanding appropriate compensation or the right work environment. Instead, they're unprofessionally stuck in a teenager's mentality that working in gaming is somehow amazing and fun.
In other words, the medicine has awful side-effects, and it doesn't even treat the illness.
The four strongest correlations with our crunch-related questions were:
+0.51: “There was a lot of turnover on this project.”
+0.50: “Team members would often work for weeks at a time without receiving feedback from project leads or managers.”
+0.49: “The team’s leads and managers did not have a respectful relationship with the team’s developers.”
-0.49: “The development plan for the game was clear and well-communicated to the team.”
Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is not going to fix these issues.
Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+) metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process. The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship better games.
The more hours you throw at a problem in my experience as a developer, you end up with more problems than you started off trying to solve. You lose focus, when you lose focus things that were once obvious are not in your peripheral vision and you make mistakes. It is akin to driving a vehicle tired, you are more likely to be in an accident.
Sadly the gaming industry is notorious for this kind of behaviour of expected crunch. Yeah, you push yourself to get out a game, but then what? You start working on another new game or DLC for the current game and you find yourself working 80 hour weeks again, what was the benefit of those long hours other than keeping your job? It is a repeating cycle.
People have been decrying the crunch in the gaming industry especially since the 90's and yet, nothing ever changes or improves. Someone writes a blog post or article, people unanimously agree things need to change and then it all blows over until the next article comes along. What's it going to take: a spate of sleep-deprived, stressed game developers taking their own lives?
I accept the fact that avoiding crunch altogether is unavoidable in any industry, but we need to better manage it. We need to have a framework in place that prevents people from being expected to work 80+ hour weeks for years on end. Sometimes you need to put in some extra hours to finish a project, that's cool, just don't factor it in every time, expect it for months or years on end and above all: don't forgo compensation for the sacrifice your employees are making under the guise of "we need to do this"
Look at mostly every single AAA game released in the last few years, more issues than you can poke a stick at. Look at GTA V, when it launched people couldn't even play the multiplayer component, same thing happened to the highly anticipated and hyped Destiny and pretty much every insert game name here - is it the fault of the developers who were enslaved to complete the game? No. It is the lack of resources, lack of care for sane work hours, lack of compassion or concern for employees that causes large games with budgets that rival Hollywood movies to fail spectacularly on launch.
When is the last time a large company like Rockstar Games or Electronic Arts released a game that wasn't broken or buggy to some extent on launch? Besides having an extremely generous budget to hire the best and produce something spectacular? I can't recall a time that happened in the last few years. Perfection is not a priority, churn and burn is the name of the game. Get it out now as long as it is complete and we'll sort out the bugs with a patch shortly after launch. Oh, and hurry, the investors want to see a quick profit on this one.
Some of you might recall the famous post from an anonymous blogger by the name of EA Spouse. A wife of a video game developer working at Electronic Arts pouring her heart out over the toll his long hours take on him and his family, the excessive work hours he puts in: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/ - large publications lapped the story up, people were outraged and yet here we are in 2015 reading another article about long hours. Things will not change until something bad happens (and probably not until it starts happening frequently).
We've been talking about things needing to change for far too long, but nothing ever seems to get better.
A staggered release of features is quite a good solution to the problem. There's no reason why a game has to be feature complete before it's released. Some parts can be added in subsequent minor versions. It happens with every other kind of software.
Can we have "crunch makes your startup worse" next? Then we an see a raise of hands for how many now successful startups were born in crunch.