Developer Stress Crippling Game Innovation?

hapwned writes "Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), looks at the big picture of the grim, dead-end careers of game developers. From the article: 'More fundamental is the notion that immature practices and extreme working conditions are bankrupting the industry's passion - the love for creating games that drives developers to be developers. When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem. How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?'"

Comments

Maybe this is a good thing in the long run

[goldcd]

I can honestly say I don't want what 99% of these people make in their 5 years at the grindstone in full time game development.
Now these people must have got into it initially for the love of games - and even if they jack it all in and get a 'real' job, I assume they'll still like games.
We're going to end up with a huge glut of people with real jobs (i.e. can do whatever they want) moonlighting in the evenings making quality mods, small games for online distribution etc etc.
Much more what I want to buy anyway and should be a nice bit of fresh air

developer stress

[xamomike]

This doesn't just apply to game developers, but most software developers as well. It's a risky business, and for most innovation developers are forced to put their career, money/life savings on the line whenever an innovative product is developed. How can we be innovative when we can't pay our mortage payments?

There aren't enough investors out there to put money on risky software development projects, so we are often forced to take big risks ourselves when it comes to ideas we are passionate about. And frankly, people with lots of money often don't understand what we're doing.

Re:Uh... yeah....

[happyemoticon]

Most of them have long since lost that creative spark by the time they're thirty anyway. One could reasonably argue that from the perspective of the business, they are merely trying to get as much useful work out of them during the handful of years in which they will actually be productive.

Balderdash.

Arguments such as these have been made hundreds of times over about every creative profession, and there are enough counterexamples to prove it's utter bunk. Take Cezanne. He did most of his important, really revolutionary work in the last few years of his life. He was only actually discovered by the around the turn of the century, when he was finally honored with an exhibition. Monet himself came up to him and esposed his genius, saying he was, in fact, the greatest genius of them all. He said (T. J. Clark's paraphrase) "Maybe... but back to work!" Can I offer you, perhaps, John Milton, or Robert Frost, or, hell, Neal Stephenson (he's 46, you know)?

Young people generally have the advantage that they're poor, desparate to make their mark on the world, too inexperienced to know what they're doing is stupid. Their brains also have a higher degree of plasticity, but this countered on the other end of the scale by the experience and wisdom that comes with age. What happens to older artists is that they get rich when they're 30 and are too busy with the trappings of fame and fortune to really produce anything good after that. After all, I don't think the decline in the Harry Potter books is because Rowling (not a spring chicken, by the way, she's 40) is now incapable of true innovation, but because she's writing big sloppy books as fast as she can. She knows they'll sell and her dedication to the craft of writing has become lax.

Re:Education

[mrchaotica]

If the people being hired are all 25 years old...

Speaking of which, it could be that people over 30 are being forced out because the game companies are only willing to hire [exploitable] recent college grads. It's not that 30-year-old programmers want to stop making games, it's just that no game companies will give them fair compensation and healthy working conditions, and they're no longer naive enough to get screwed over!

Hahaha! I was right!

[MagikSlinger]

As my profile states, I'm a reformed game programmer. I've written a couple of bitter posts on Slashdot about working in the game industry. I'm better now. :-)

But the stress caused by poor quality architecture and code cannot be understated. Coders begin to hate the designers and artists after awhile and that, as you can guess, really causes problems. If the designer wants that really cool scene or feature or art, but the coder is stressed out the kazoo with debugging the last 3 new features and hasn't seen his new born child awake since it was born, you can imagine how he would react to the new feature.

The solution is a self-learning development process. A.k.a., CMM. I met some game developers who've only worked in Game Companies who sneer at that kind of talk, but the more seasoned veterans (working 10+ years) actually liked the idea. When you reduce the stress on the developers, and improve productivity, they can spend time making stable code that can be used to build cool, new features on it.

More importantly, it will rebuild the relationship between coder and artists, designers. That is the single most important relationship in the game process, IMHO.

how about nintendo devs?

[Frag-A-Muffin]

I wonder if the sentiment is true on the other side of the earth? Do the Japanese devs feel this way too? From what I've read, Nintendo devs are a very proud bunch and lots of them have been doing it for a long time. I don't know for certain, but I wonder if they're under the same time pressures as, say, EA? We've all read stories about EA's marketing dates dictating everything. Is that true for Nintendo? If it is true, I certainly wouldn't have noticed, cuz all their games seem so polished. SSBM? Wind Waker? All top notch (in terms of quality). Can't say the same for EA. I actually bought the first Sims game for gamecube way back ... 10min into laying out my house, it froze on me. First time I had a game crash/freeze on me (on a console). I haven't bought an EA game since.

Anyways, I'm rambling. Just wondering if the japanese devs feel the same? Anyone have any insight into this?

As an independent game developer...

[pestilence669]

This is a common problem that plagues every booming industry... especially advertising. Your bean counters arrive, and apply their "insight" and "wisdom" to running the business and increasing productivity. The end result is deadlines, avoidance of solutions that are too difficult to schedule (or understand), reuse of code and concepts that should be trashed... in all: a bad work environment. Game developers, like myself, strive for the cutting edge. The idea of mandated shortcuts pisses us off.

Game development is a creative art. You can't rush or schedule that kind of a process. No project management book or body of knowledge can overcome this. As long as game publishers drive for more efficiency and output, they will burn out their staff. Game development is a business that needs a bit of fat (free time). You need more freedom to develop and burn code to test new concepts. Investing in throw-away code is almost always a business "no no."

Business folks expect that all problems in computer gaming have known solutions. This idea is false. There's a ton of R&D for just about every algorithm. There's not necessarily a "one size fits all" solution to any given problem. And even a solid algorithm can often be implemented in over a dozen different ways.

I've worked for a couple of places that tried to run game development like regular software engineering projects. They did not succeed. Sometimes, entire industries need to ditch the MBAs and embrace what got them to where they are in the first place. Operating efficiency is only a good thing, so long as it doesn't negatively impact your staff, quality, and sales.

Building games is completely different that any other kind of software development. It needs to managed that way... special needs in mind.

Re:Make your own GPL Project

[mrchaotica]

How many of us would help with code or art if some one came up with a good idea?

Apparently not that many, because there are hundreds or thousands of GPL game projects on SourceForge, and most of them are dead (or never really got started in the first place) because there weren't enough people to make them. Surely some of them had to be good ideas!

I've been thinking about this issue lately, and I'm stuck with a conundrum: Why are people so interested in modding commercial games, when they could use a Free game engine instead and have their work more widely available?

There are a couple of possible explanations for this:

• The commercial engines are more technologically advanced and come with better tools
• The commercial games provide a pre-made style and story universe, and it's easier to create a new story within that framework than making an entirely original one
• Modders start out as players; they are only interested in the game they're familiar with

However, none of these reasons seems to provide a complete explanation for why there isn't even a single example of an extremely popular GPL game. I mean, there's no reason whatsoever that the next Counterstrike couldn't be built on Cube or the GPL'd Quake 2 source... so why isn't anyone doing it?