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Frustration and Unhappiness In the Games Industry
Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander recently wrote an editorial about the atmosphere of irritation and dissatisfaction that pervades all aspects of the video game industry. Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either. Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun? From the article:
"More and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the game industry. That being the case, it seems natural that elements like emotional detachment, anxiety and a lack of fulfillment make their way, even subtly, into the products the industry creates and into the ecosystem around the industry and its audience. 'Because of the secrecy and competition, a lot of development teams end up having a siege mentality — batten down the hatches and refuse to come up for air until the game's done,' says [an] anonymous developer. 'Game development has a way of taking over your life, because there's always more that can be done to improve perceived quality. I've seen a lot of divorces in my time in the game industry. I feel like it's much greater than average, but I have no statistical evidence.'"
work is work. work sucks. nobody promised you work would be fulfilling. get over it.
'Because of the secrecy and competition, a lot of development teams end up having a siege mentality -- batten down the hatches and refuse to come up for air
Sounds like it would make a great game!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the _________ industry"
The newest games are crappy recycles of old games. Same ideas recycled over and over again for ages. There is almost nothing new in the gaming industry and nobody takes the risk to experiment with innovative ideas. That is why the retro gaming scene gained so much popularity. Especially in Europe there are lots of fans of the retro games produced before year 2000. I have seen people in the train playing Super Mario on NES emulator on their ultra fast laptops. Some people does not have a single PC game installed on their Windows or Linux computers, but wide variety of emulators for gaming. This speaks magnitudes about the appeal of the recent games.
I can't believe gamers are unhappy being charged upwards of $50 a game and having to pay for every little add-on that used to be free or handled by a modding community that did it for enjoyment. No the companies have to lock down their software and lose a part of what made certain series of games sell, at least on the PC side, the modding. Who would have thought the console would wreak gaming on a PC too.
My guess is that there's not much that can be done to combat this given that game development is such a highly competitive industry. I bet you'd find a similar atmosphere in Hollywood - the millions of wannabee actors and actresses that move to LA all dream of being the next Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn.
Similarly, all those game developers dream of building the next Warcraft, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn sites.
If there's something like that now for today's machines, I haven't seen it.
And they need to can the back story "video" shit. I don't want to see how the character got the job or whatever.
See, that's why I haven't played a video game in years.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
We now need a version of Wii, Move, and Kinect domestic violence. This will solve all our problems.
If gaming journalists didn't want half of the flames they get, maybe they could actually try doing their job a little better. Don't get me wrong, I know full well that sometimes committing your feelings and thoughts down to a piece of paper can be a daunting task. Yet, a lot of reviews we all see never jive with their arbitrary scoring system. Why is that if three-quarters of your review is negative, the game still gets an 8.0? An 8? 8 should be considered good. Not great, but well above part. Likewise you'll also see massive praise, but the game will score a 7. Come on. You can't find something negative to say? Something clearly wasn't working for you, so figure it out or up the score.
And then all the reviewers do is complain that people piss and moan about their articles. Well shit son, if I wrote like you did on a consistent basis, I'd deserve all the flames I was receiving too. Yet, when you point these very things out to them, it goes right over their head.
Really, are we readers possibly asking for too much when we want their arbitrary scoring system to coincide with what's written?
Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun?
The focus is fun for the gamers. For the developers its work and/or business. While the products can be fun the development side can be some of the most technically difficult and challenging. I've worked on software for embedded devices, telecommunications, molecular modeling and visualization, and games. Modern games are far more difficult than most outsiders imagine.
... Add to this the competitive pressures where you have to maximize performance for a given hardware platform. There is little room for error in any of the areas.
There is hardly a traditional area of computer science where in depth knowledge and proficiency is not required. Architecture, data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, database, graphics, numerical methods,
That said, the greater the challenge the greater the satisfaction upon success.
You have the same problem in the venerable table top game industry: people (fans really) willing to work irrationally hard for the chance to be close to their hobby without commensurate compensation. When the industry begins to fade, and it's clear what they do is actually work, there is inevitable disillusionment. What's the solution? Also like the tabletop gaming industry, economics is telling us there are too many companies. Yes, fans want an enormous selection, but the business model is unsustainable. However, also like the tabletop gaming industry, there will always be some shmoe willing to work for a buck an hour for the chance to be a game developer. Smart people, those who can do anything else, those that don't see games as a calling, would be wise to flee.
Maybe its because of the organization type.
Back in the day when music started to become an "industry" it was done with buddies and pals or they knew somebody and they had talent and then they made music. It was about personal relationships and people put faces to names and names to groups and songs in albums etc...
We had a personal relationship with Lord British. We kind of had that van halen effect when Carmack went on his ego trip and destroyed id. Blizzard gave us a personal relationship with Battlenet and supporting their games but went all Metallica on us by suing the b.net guys and charging us our first born child for wow and making us grind. For the rest of the industry its been turned into a no name chum factory, not really listening to us but pushing more of the same crap with little or no value.
The music industry now has 1 good song per album and 7 songs of crap. The LP art is gone and we get nothing for our money. They are starting to get the picture now that we wont buy there peddled crap and lowering prices....but the software industry still needs to learn that lesson. We wont but halflife 43 just because it supports 100 gpu graphic cards.
What has to happen software teams to be rock bands and then they will get paid like them... work out deals like musicians if you have a good game...otherwise churn out muzak
The vast majority of those interested in programming these days try to go into game building. After all, it's not sales reports and data-entry screens that motivate most.
This means there is an oversupply of game programmers, which results in long hours and exploitation.
Table-ized A.I.
My weirdest experience with gaming has been with the Left 4 Dead series.
In both games, Valve has spent the first two or three weeks after release fixing any bug big bugs. After that they basically only fix a bug if it ends up crashing the game client. Bugs that allow you to lag out the players, crash the server, change maps when you're not supposed to, get maximum scores for an entire map even when your team dies, and spawn extra infected AI bots exist for both games, and never get fixed.
After those first few weeks, the only changes they make are ones that are trivial to implement -- very minor balancing fixes like changing the damage things do, or adding game modes that vary what weapons/monsters get spawned. None of the changes the community actually requests are ever added, like a working lobby system. There is basically no communication between the developers and community.
It's an odd disconnect. Especially for an industry that likes to hire directly out of it's hobby modding community.
Working in the entertainment industry is stressful. Big budgets. Big egos. Tight deadlines. Unless you have the magic touch of a Pixar, most of your projects will crash and burn.
I guess part of the problem is the pressure created by the rising expectations of a "successful" game. Big publishers like EA and Activision aren't content with a game earning back twice what they put in, they're looking for a small fortune from each franchise. It's a problem that's been plaguing the entire entertainment industry recently. Where you used to have hundreds of smaller publishers and developers, all of whom would be thrilled to see a product making a profit at all, you now have a handful of huge, lumbering giants that demand every penny be squeezed out of a project. Companies with entire departments whose only job it is to go through every project and cut costs to the bare minimum, then go through them again and cut the costs even further. At the same time these giants are stifling the smaller competition by flooding advertising mediums and buying up any IP that shows signs of being successful.
Capitalism may be the lesser evil, but I just feel like it's running out of control these days.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I'm a very very long time player of RuneScape. Many scoff when that game's name comes up, but there are few, if any, other games that offer such a widely varied array of activities and freedom of play.
Why do I love that game so much? Their style of game creation has always been one focus, to make a game that they would want to play. That's how RuneScape was born, and it became a literal overnight sensation. That's why their profits are so low per player compared to other games in the industry. They don't care about profit, they care about fun.
I started playing RS as a teenager, I went to college to study language because I thought it would be useful, but now I'm switching to computer science. Why? Because I've played a game for the past five years that two men built not to make money, but because they wanted it to be fun. I'm currently building a series of tools for RS players to give me the skills to create my own games that fill yawningly empty gaps in the gaming industry. I want to do what jagex did and build something fun.
If other game development studios would realize that it's about the gamer having fun and not about the executives making big bucks then they would be a lot happier with their work.
That isn't exploitation, it's simply that the developers aren't as valuable as they would like to be, because there are plenty more ready to take their place (the aforementioned oversupply).
Game quality is often taking a back seat to graphics. Case in point, Final Fantasy 13 versus Final Fantasy 7. The story and game play took a back seat to the cinematics. FF13 was just an action game with RPG elements, with a perfectly linear gameplay and lost a lot of what made the game play of Final Fantasy games what they were.
In business terms, this is a loss of **value**. Get that, business people? A spit-polished, so shiny it burns your retina turd is still a turd. Game companies would be far better off focusing on reusing existing technology and focusing on the **content** instead.
This insane focus on bleeding edge everything is killing the actual products.
and allllll da wittle p.woblems went away
I see the same things happening with iPhone application development so I walked away. Management will never listen to reason as long as someone younger is willing to step in and work insanely hard for no other reason than just being able to tell people that they work on "X" technology.
A-title games today are large, rich worlds with great detail and complexity. That requires an army of people building the world, one tiny bit at a time. That's a factory job.
Developers need a union. Like The Animation Guild, which represents the workers at Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, etc. Union contracts have tough overtime provisions. The key point is time and a half for overtime; double time for a seventh day. That makes "crunches" expensive to management, and discourages unnecessary overtime. As a result, film staffing and scheduling is much more realistic than game scheduling.
May I recommend you form a union? Or maybe just a guild/mutual benefit society that allows you all to prevent your employer from working you 80 hours a week for no overtime? Just like in show business, there will always be some 17 year old in his garage with no wife, kids or mortgage that would be happy to do your job for less money, more hours and no complaint. Something generally has to be done before the labor pool destroys itself and the ONLY people you can find to do the work are 17 year old greenhorns; the video game medium will never develop artistically if the work environment is actively hostile to people who want to spend a lifetime doing it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I have seen people in the train playing Super Mario on NES emulator on their ultra fast laptops. Some people does not have a single PC game installed on their Windows or Linux computers, but wide variety of emulators for gaming. This speaks magnitudes about the appeal of the recent games.
Or it might speak more about PC game publishers' failure to think outside the FPS/RTS/MMO box. Due to the historical lack of large PC monitors until the rise of HDTV, major companies tend not to publish PC games in genres traditionally associated with consoles. Apart from Street Fighter IV, most fighting games are made for one or more consoles but not the PC. So are most "party" games like Mario Party. These people who emulate Super Mario World might be playing a comparable PC platformer if only one existed.
It all began with John Romero trying to make himself out to be a rockstar instead of a game designer.
The fad caught on. Now people realize they are just geeks.
I was born in 1970, and in the 80's bought a lot of video games. Unless I subscribed to gaming magazines - which I did not - my experience of a game involved taking it home, and playing it with some friends. If we didn't like it, which wasn't often, we shelved it and moved on. No big deal.
Now the internet lets hordes of jackasses participate in a mass-evaluation of a product, including the vast number of ways it could be better. The experience of the game is somehow tainted because some unrelated moron with a web site gave your new game a rating of 7. Listening to people bitch about how a slightly twitchy steering system for a racing game is "completely broken" and how the company should just give up lowers perception of the game.
That's bad enough but these days it's not even necessary for the game to be out before people are already expressing their dissatisfaction. Huge web sites spring up years in advance of release just so that sad, sorry gamers can bitch about how the textures in pre-pre-pre-alpha screen shots seem glitchy.
Finally, we have the shitheads who freeze a shot in a game just so that they can find and reveal every last visual discontinuity. It's not important that you'd never notice it while playing, it's just something people do when they want to make perfectly sure they cannot enjoy their purchase.
Frankly, I don't know how the companies do it. If I were developing games, and some outlier twit gave me a 7 in the midst of an ocean of 9's, I'd want to drive over to their home/office, throw a big 1980's style C++ programming guide in their face, and say, "YOU do it, you talentless fuck."
More and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the game industry.
And this is different from every other industry how?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Too many people think that just because something is fun to do as a hobby means it'd be fun to do as a job. Not even close. When you are doing something for fun, as you say, you do just the parts you want. If you don't like it you don't do it. That keeps it fun. With work? Not to much.
You can see this in a lot of OSS software. Some programmer threw together an app he wanted because it was fun. However it has a shit UI and no documentation, because that is not fun (for the programmer at least). Fine, but at a job that is probably not an option. A UI designer will look over the UI and say "Make these changes, " and you'll do it, like it or not. You'll be required to write up at least rough draft docs to go on to the technical writers and so on.
No different with games.
Also, for some people, doing something as a job can make doing it as a hobby no longer fun. I used to screw around with things like overclocking and so on. Saved money, was fun, and I'm a tech guy, I can deal with the problems. No longer. The reason is I support computers for a living now. Diagnosing and fixing problems with computers, software, network, and users is what I do all day at work. Thus I seem to have no patience for it at home. I want my computer to work and let me play.
That is why I'm not a game tester. It was a career I'd seriously though about. I love video games, they are by far my main form of entertainment. I also have a good understanding of how computers and programs work, though I'm not a programmer (I do know how to program, I'm just not good at it), I can document well, and so on. I'd be pretty good at it. However I'm also a realist. Testing games doesn't mean playing games, it means TESTING games. You try to break it. You do things over and over to isolate bugs, play on very broken early versions, etc. It is work, not fun. I worried though that in taking a job, where games were work, it would make them no fun for recreation. So I decided not to.
The games industry is a fine place to work, so long as you are realistic about what you are doing. By and large you are NOT making games. The only real person that is true for is the designer, and even then most games have multiple designers who work together, and other people they have to take direction from. If you are a programmer, then that's hwat you do: you program. Your code will become a game, but your job is to code, to solve problems by coding.
I blame most of it on helpless managers. The producers, directors, and upper management are generally clueless about the technical disciplines and therefore prone to frequent panics when things aren't going as planned or on schedule. They in turn make life hell for everyone else. /15 years in the industry
You miss the role that management has on the overall feeling at a workplace. A bad supervisor, manager, or executive can suck the fun out of ANYTHING, and a good boss can make a bad job at least not seem to be all that bad. This applies to everything from software engineering to customer service, and all the way down into fast food. The harder the boss pushes employees who are normally motivated, the worse things will be, and productivity goes down as a result.
Now, if you treat your employees from the bottom to the top like they are a vital part of the team, and you encourage them in a POSITIVE way by showing how vital they are to getting the product out the door, they will WANT to work a bit harder to get things done right, without needing to force them. If you treat employees as just "resources" to be used, they will feel your lack of understanding, and will not want to work there. Now, how many of these business classes teach how to motivate employees in a positive way, because not a single person with a business degree I have ever seen seems to understand that basic idea. The role of management is to get the most productivity out of your employees, and the BEST way is to make the employees happy so that they will want to work overtime to get the job done properly.
There is big money if you can be first to get a game to the public that is a hit. There is also the potential for huge pay for programmers. That means great pressure and that almost always means trouble. Put that together with the fact that there are a few very, very gifted programmers who are highly sought after and have a distinctive artistic type of personality and you might as well hand out sabers and grenades.
I am a mechanical engineer (MIT) by schooling, and one of the first things we learned when actually *designing* and *building* something (as opposed to just messing around with equations) is that you should avoid over-constraining your design both in the dimensions you specify on your drawing, and how you actually bolt things together. Alas, the Wikipedia article is woefully lacking on the subject, so I shall briefly try to explain what this means: if plate A and plate B are bolted together in one spot, and this bolt constrains the plates from moving relative to one another in the X direction, that means that if you place another bolt further down in the X direction, one of the holes it passes through should not be a hole, but a slot oriented in the X direction. This is necessary because you can only drill holes with limited precision. I'm sure many of you have seen first hand why over-constraining with fasteners is bad if you've ever tried to mount a motherboard and use all the screw holes.
The problem this article talks about is industry-wide and not just limited to games development. One thing I have tried to pound into people's heads (but nobody listens) is, you can constrain the feature set you want, or you can constrain a release date, but you can't constrain both. You need to pick either one or the other. Without even checking, I would guess that game developers at Blizzard are happier than elsewhere, because this is a company that clearly has a grasp of this concept - they hold their guns on quality and features, but do NOT stick with release dates. They only announce them when they've entered the polishing phase (and boy do they polish), when almost all the serious development is complete.
Many of us developers are made to suffer at the hands of those who do not appreciate the inherent unreliability of estimation. We are just expected to suck it up, work very long hours, stress out, and - WRONGFULLY - accept responsibility that the project is falling behind schedule. Being a happy developer requires that you grow a pair and just say no, I will not give up my life, and work insane hours, simply because someone doesn't understand that they can hold a schedule, or hold a feature set, but not both.
"For the love of money is the root of all evil."
-Quote from a somewhat popular book
It would be reasonable to say that a significant percentage of people involved in the game industry do it for the love of being part of the game creation process. Programmers, QA personnel, and managers put in crazy hours to fulfill their personal dream of inspiring somebody else with their game. Once they get a great game that sells well, all of them are on top of their game (pardon the pun). Their eyes start filling with visions of being able to live the good life and being able to do what they love. Time passes and more great selling games get made and these people are rightfully feeling like gods of their own domains.
Enter the investors and business people. Their sole purpose is to make money. They do not care how it is made, what widgets are used to make people shell out money for said widgets, only that the widgets generate the maximum amount of profit given the amount of resources used to make said widget. A very significant percentage of business people are only interested in the game of making money, nearly everything else is secondary. Specialized (and sometimes even general) knowledge of those widgets is not necessary at all.
In the case of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick is on public record stating these very things. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/01/activisions-bobby-kotick-brings-cash-but-not-heart.ars When he talks, he isn't talking to the consumer, he is talking to the investors - although I do believe those type of people delude themselves into thinking they are talking to the consumer base. The investors are the most important people you need to make happy to be able to make those large sums of money. By now, the consumer base is so large that a few missteps in execution will be absorbed by the sheer number of consumers. Just as long as the quarterly balance sheet is an improvement over same quarter last year all is well in the money making world.
Meanwhile, the people who have sweat blood and guts getting the company to where it is are dismayed at the change of direction the company is taking. They like the extra money and the even better benefits because the families they have now demand such things. They internally file this under mid-life crisis and buy a big toy for themselves to sooth the ego bruised dream of making a difference in the world through their passion. By now, the patterns of malcontent from the consumers and the many compromises in game design is way too frequent to ignore. The more brilliant people of the core team that made the company great have seen the writing on the wall and have already formed new opportunities for themselves (exit strategies), while the ones not so confident are basically biding their time and polishing their resumes. It is no longer a joy to leap out of bed ready to attack the day with finishing up whatever game related task you may have. You go into work dreading whatever the new edict comes down from upper management. Your life has reached The Dilbert Level(tm). Congratulations.
Eventually, the game company spends of all the consumer good will that was accumulated during the glory days. Even the "sheep" consumers are leaving because there are better games out there. The investors spit up the company and sell the pieces and leave with their bags bulging with money while the soon employed ones are left wondering what the hell happened.
I just hope that Diablo 3 has enough of it's roots in the pre Activision days to be a good game. I already know that it will be the last ActiBlizzard game that I might purchase.
Let me see, the pirate version of a submarine game is one where you are sent to the Somalia coast to capture the pirates there?
Behind the stress is mostly flooded markets and a lack of cash to go around for everybody.
We've been producing a game called Beakiez (http://beakiez.com), which is a super hardcore bubble pop game. Indie team, no funding, just using savings and odd jobs to fund it. Despite getting reports that it's a lot of fun and that going for the high scores is quite addictive, we've been denied by all the major casual game portals for the following reasons: a. it auto-patches when new versions come out, b. it talks to a central server to list high scores, and c. it's a bubble pop game. Almost all the major portals have strict guidelines that don't allow external server connections or auto-patching, and one really major portal normally associated with being indie-friendly has an issue with bubble pop games, as they've been deemed a "dead genre." As a result, we got rejected from some of the biggest portals out there.
This means we have to get every single player to come to our website and to buy from us directly. As you can imagine, this isn't easy. It can be really hard on morale, but you have to let go and not be angry.
This isn't really just about the game industry at all. One thing that's become extremely obvious to me as a game designer is that capitalism features extremely poor balancing and pacing. Imagine if in WoW, 50% of the players never leveled their characters once, as it was excruciatingly difficult to get to level 2, and really only 5% made it to level 5. From there on out, levels 6 to 80, levels get progressively easier to get past, to where you can literally wake up and find that you've gotten through 8 advanced levels in your sleep, equivalent to waking up and making $100k in interest income, for example.
Capitalism is essentially the world's oldest MMO, and the rules (laws) are so complex and hackishly patched that you have to rent people (lawyers) to interpret small corners of them. The more money you have, the more people you can hire to navigate and circumvent those rules, so you get a lot of cheaters at the top. In an MMO, this would lead to a mass exodus from the game to a competing game, but capitalism doesn't really let you leave. It's the game we all have to play.
I keep hope alive that someday our elected representatives and lawmakers will be accomplished game designers. They know how to motivate people better than just about anyone. They make addictive, balanced, and fair systems for a living. I frankly think our industry's best designers could run circles around today's top politicians and lawmakers.
In the meantime, I think we all just need to keep our noses to the grindstone, lower those burn rates, and try to eek out what satisfaction we can in our work and personal lives.
You're assuming games developers are writing their own engines and everything from the ground up. That's complete bollocks and those days are long gone. Why do you think there are more asset types involved, those creating the artwork and sound, and theatrics than there are actual programmers? Programmers are using existing tools and libraries, and are mostly writing glue. The fact they're dumb enough to work crazy hours on artificial deadlines is there own problem. We've all been there and done it, but those that grew up soon told them to fuck off and left.
Working is hard. Film at 11.
Think about it. You like to have sex, but would you like to make a job of it ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You know, Sonalysts (I work there!) has a collection of sub sims, which I think are available on Steam. However, they are pretty dense.
While I agree there are some games that suck because they focus only on visuals, there are plenty that don't. Square seems to be annoyed you want to play a game, they just want you to watch it. Fine, fuck them. Get Mass Effect. It is a beautiful game with a very compelling story and good gameplay.
You can have good content AND gameplay. Also don't act like good visuals are worthless. Part of a game is creating a fun, immersive, experience and good graphics and sound help.
I work on the fringes of both industries at the indie level and I agree completely. Video gaming still has a lot to learn from Hollywood. In 20 years it might actually be a good place to work. Until then, I'll stay indie.
+0 Meh
The many complaints seem warranted. There's obviously way too many overpaid executives and greedy investors, too many top down, undemocratic, irresponsible decisions, way too much DRM and too little good product. I really wonder if corporations are even capable of providing good products and services at fair prices.
"I'd bitch slap you with the guide (which would knock you senseless as it is a big 1980's style guide), tie you to a chair, and then proceed to give you a point by point rundown on why your game sucks so fucking hard because you're the talentless fuck who could have improved the game it if only you had taken some time to think about what you were doing and taken some time get it right....One person could handle a good deal of that stuff in a day and since solving and patching your major problems is likely to take many days having that one person fixing little stuff could make a huge change in the perception of your game.
None of what you had to say had anything at all to do with my post. I didn't advocate releasing buggy software with glaring errors. Why is your rant a reply to mine?
You miss the role that management has on the overall feeling at a workplace. A bad supervisor, manager, or executive can suck the fun out of ANYTHING, and a good boss can make a bad job at least not seem to be all that bad.
I'm not missing that point, I think it is tangential to a degree. I am merely debunking the general idea that game development is "fun", in reality it is very hard work. Again, despite being very hard it can be personally rewarding and satisfying.
...
Let me backtrack a bit to be clear. I'm not implying game development is devoid of "fun". To elaborate I would say game development is not inherently more fun than other areas of software development. It is fun to see something that you create work and be accepted by its users, game or not. There are fun moments in molecular modeling and visualization, say when you see your code rendering and rotating a DNA molecule for the first time, or when a visitor at a trade shows says he didn't expect this sort of performance on a PC, that he though a Sun workstation would be necessary. The feeling is not terribly different than when watching someone play your game and get into it, to see them lose awareness of what is going on around them as their focus intensifies.
My objection is to the meme that developing games is somehow like playing games. Programmers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 1,000 entry bug list, testers quickly lose any such illusions as they see their first 100 page test script,
Maybe the explanation is simple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
um. look at the culinary industry. it treats its employees worse and yet people still want to be cooks. form a labor union???? LOLOLOLOLOL. been there done that. not gonna happen when all management has to say to get the workers on their side is to dangle the promise of higher pay for those dont join the union. *poof* there goes yer leverage. not even timothy hutton can help you when yer already starving...
The problem here is that games are meant to be fun.
Game development was touted as a fun career to pursue. It can be
but mostly it's a long slog through less than creative swamps of
business, finance, marketing, and plain old nuts and bolts work.
So, game developers are unhappy. No surprise, it turns out to be a job
like any other. You look at the same materials for months on end, and for
anyone with any spark of creativity that's a real mood killer.
Gamers are unhappy because they are essentially looking at exactly
the same games this year as they have for the past 10 years. Maybe
the games are repackaged with a new story line but one FPS is
pretty much the same as another. Once gamers start realizing that,
evern if it's just subconscious dissatisfaction, they get down on the mood.
Media...?? How do you polish a turd to make news out of it?
There's nothing trollish about the above AC's comment.
As corporations try to get higher productivity out of fewer workers, despite record profits it's going to cause unhappy employees. The last few weeks had earnings reports that showed huge profits, yet corporations have decided they're not going to hire, because they believe the wage/benefits have not yet bottomed out. In South Carolina (a "right to work" state) there was a story about a factory looking for experienced machinists with advanced training and offering to pay $12 per hour, which is approximately what a fast food worker would make after a year or so.
Declining wages, disappearing benefits, unhappy unsatisfied workers are the natural result of the all-out attacks against labor unions by the corporate/government combine. As Alan Greenspan famously put it, it's good for corporations when workers are "uncomfortable" about their futures. Greenspan was talking about how it was his job to create unemployment so that "comfortable" employees don't expect raises and cause inflation. Well, inflation has been nonexistent for about a decade here in the US, yet corporate America continues their crusade to make workers as frightened as possible. There's talk on Wall Street about how it's good for business to have ten percent unemployment become the "new normal".
Of course workers (in any sector) are unhappy and becoming more unhappy. Workers have been under all-out attack by the elites ever since Ronald Reagan declared war on unions. As we saw in the WWII and post-War years, organized labor raises wages and benefits for ALL workers, creates a strong middle class which helps lower poverty levels. As we started under Reagan to return to the gilded age before the Labor movement we see the opposite happening. Even though it will ultimately hurt our economy and our society as a whole, anti-worker policies do boost short-term profits, and that's all the corporate elite care about.
Get used to it. Unemployed is the new black.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Now, if you treat your employees from the bottom to the top like they are a vital part of the team, and you encourage them in a POSITIVE way by showing how vital they are to getting the product out the door, they will WANT to work a bit harder to get things done right, without needing to force them. If you treat employees as just "resources" to be used, they will feel your lack of understanding, and will not want to work there. Now, how many of these business classes teach how to motivate employees in a positive way, because not a single person with a business degree I have ever seen seems to understand that basic idea.
Your idea that business schools teach managers to abuse employees is even more erroneous than the meme that game development is somehow as fun as playing games. I recently earned an MBA. One of the core classes was Organization Behavior (OB) and it focuses on motivating individuals and groups. It is heavy on psychology, interpersonal interaction, and covers some of the points you raise and more. Throughout the rest of the program there were occasional references back to OB, some in case studies where companies/projects failed due to a lack of understanding of how to lead, motivate and incentivize people.
I think we are decades past management being taught to stand around with a stop watch and treat people like parts in a machine. Does it happen, yes, but not because that is what people are learning in business school.
Just so you know people in the 90s were saying this about 80s games, and in the 2000s saying it about 90s games.
Or maybe as Moore's law marches forward it becomes continually easier to replace style with substance.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
...make that "replace substance with style."
Fucking coffee. How does it work?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
gaming industrialized circa 1995, with the advent of cd. big companies moved into gaming, bought or smashed out small companies, or small companies got bigger. 'competition' ensued, which was supposed to be a good thing. but, competition was to get the most money to please shareholders with minimum risk.
...... ^n, are the reincarnations of those days' games.
what happened ? innovation, free spirit, enthusiasm of discovery, excitement, adventure that made its way into games in early days of gaming in 10-15 years preceding 1995 got out of the picture. it was much better to capitalize on existing formats, tried and surefire methods, even existing titles than to take risks with new things. everything is to please shareholders.
and because all the companies did or had to do it, at least which have a wide reach, people came to accept this as the reality of gaming. unfortunate in itself, for those who remember 1980-1995. ironically, games of those time still play good in regard to gameplay, and actually most of the prime titles that are selling again and again in 2,3,4,5
not only the games deteriorated in quality, but also their prices have gone up, and stabilized at certain price levels. thanks to the perception of marketing departments of megacorps, which decide these things independently and at large.
this is the way with capitalism. supposed competition does not end up being to the favor of the customer - all companies try to escape with the minimum satisfaction they can get away, while taking maximum money with no risk. and when entire industries act in this mindset, mediocrity becomes a standard, and people come to accept mediocrity as the reality of life.
Read radical news here
Perhaps software marketing should take a page from the societies for animal welfare or "fair trade" logos and start promoting a sticker that certifies: "no overtime was used in the development of this product." I don't know if it would actually end up affecting my choice of product, but it would certainly be something I noticed.
I haven't RTFA but this is Slashdot so I'm gonna respond to this line from the summary:
"Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun?"
People in general want to work in an industry that is "fun". That means the industry gets to skim the cream from every new year of graduates.
You guys have heard of Hollywood, right? Hollywood Accounting? Cocaine? It's a savage, SAVAGE industry and they chew up staff like candy because everyone wants to work in Hollywood. Game development is the same thing on a smaller scale, people literally think "I like games, therefore I will like working on games" when it is so far, far, brutally far from the truth.
Get a job in manufacturing and enjoy living your life outside of work.
You're assuming games developers are writing their own engines and everything from the ground up ... Programmers are using existing tools and libraries, and are mostly writing glue.
I make no such assumption. Even when licensing a graphics engine, physics engine, etc there is much work to do on graphics, physics, etc. And that is not even considering going into the source of these engines to fix bugs, customize things, or add enhancements. (IMHO a project that has a binary license rather than a source license is in trouble from day 1). Now add the enormous amount of work that goes into the logic that is specific to a particular game.
Your statement regarding programming is as erroneous as someone who might say that artists and animators are merely buying off-the-shelf assets from stock libraries and tweaking some models and textures. Even with off-the-shelf code engines and art assets there is a tremendous amount of work to be done by programmers and artists in a modern game.
Why do you think there are more asset types involved, those creating the artwork and sound, and theatrics than there are actual programmers?
I focus on programming because that is my personal experience, I can't speak for how an artist feels. Well not beyond the frustration of being limited by low end consumer hardware.
The reason some games need so many artists is because of the expansiveness of some gaming worlds. These worlds need to be populated with unique and varying content. Its an area where adding more people can make things go a little faster. Of course more people includes more lead artists acting as "managers" to keep all these people on a common visual/thematic style.
For a glimpse of a highly regarded independent creative vision - try Eskil Steenberg's highly regarded multiplayer world LOVE.
you had me at #!
Correction: sewage treatment plant software
Table-ized A.I.
How about something's actually done to push more original IPs and game concepts than labor for weeks, months, years over a generic "me-too" shooter or wii minigame compilation?
I'd like to see more original game concepts like braid, p.b. winterbottom and portal, each of which probably took exponentially less time, at least if a team was involved, to create than a generic shooter. Although portal could have had a long development time, I'm unaware about that.
Even if those types of games take just as long as generic shooter #9, it will probably be infinitely more rewarding.
that point in time where the frustration/unhappiness curve for engineers/developers shoots to infinity. All development stops, ushering in a new stone age.
you mean there are people who don't like their jobs? no fucking way. hobbies are for fun. work is to pay the bills. if you just so happen to be able to do both, good for you. for the remaining 99% of the population, quit crying and put on your fucking helmet, these new damn tps cover sheets don't put themselves on...
My other sig is a knife wound.
I agree with the article. I've felt this way for about the last 3-4 years. When Team Fortress 2 came out, and it ended up being just a remake of TFC after so long in development, I finally had enough. Valve should have been *owned* by journalists for taking so long to produce what was basically a remake. But no, all of the reviews praised it and Valve. The same thing happened with the last two Mega Man games. They were the *exact* same thing as all the other core Mega Man games - no one really pointed this out as far as I could tell and both of them got good reviews. To be honest, people should be ashamed of themselves for failing to innovate, even if the end product is less than stellar. Hell, even Fiddler's Green had a good multiplayer game.
Clever and witty sig.
Being fulfilled by your work isn't a promise you can trust when made to you by somebody else. It's more the kind of promise you ought to make yourself, and then keep. I've had bad days at work. Lots of them. But I've never had a job that was more pain than pleasure. Most of the jobs I've done, I'd consider doing for free if I didn't need any money. Come to think of it, all of my jobs have been like that. Is that luck? Absolutely not.
I don't think it's true that work sucks, that it has always sucked etc. I think that no matter how good work gets, people will still find a way to be ill content, and no matter how much fulfilling work is available to them, people will still make bad choices.
The Stoic philosophers had an interesting take on this problem (which is by no means a new one). If happiness is having all your wants fulfilled, the surest path to happiness is to restrain your wants. The more extensive and interconnected you let your desires become, the more certain you are to feel unhappy.
Let's look at the young programmer who desperately wants to work in the games industry. Unfortunately, that's oversimplifying his wants. What he really wants is a job
a) in the gaming industry
b) that is interesting
c) with excellent pay
d) with reasonable responsibilities
e) where he is treated with respect
Now you can probably get any one of these desires fulfilled by a job pretty easily, but all of them? That is a tall order. A stoic career counselor (if there were such a thing), would advise a trimming of desires, and (a) would be right at the top of his list. There are so many people who want to work in the games industry, that a realistic person should see that he'll have to compromise on his other desires in order to get it.
There are undoubtedly people working in the games industry whose talent and skill would enable them to fulfill all their desires if they just let go of (a). If they cannot let go of their other desires in order to achieve (a), they've made a bad choice.
The good news is that if you can compromise on overvalued desires (like working in the game industry, or making a boatload of money) you can probably find a bargain on the undervalued desires, like decent working conditions and personal respect. That also requires disciplining your wants in other areas, like driving a very expensive car or collecting lots of high end home electronics. That may sound terrible, but the payoff is that you get to be happy and fulfilled.
I've had a huge payoff on a job criterion that I got from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Be useful to somebody; be a burden to no one." Most people never even consider the potential of a job to make the lives of people around them easier, more pleasant and rewarding. That property doesn't sound so exciting, but it is extremely undervalued in the job seeker market. That means it's bargain priced. You can get boatloads of the stuff practically for free (i.e. not compromising on other desires). I can almost guarantee that if you put that at the top of your list of job desires, you'll find work that is personally fulfilling.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I was on the OS team of the original PlayStation, as well as a supporting OS engineer for the 3DO at EA; I worked on a dozen high profile games over a 15 year career. I left bitter and angry over never, ever receiving any promised bonus over all the productions where I was team or lead. The "producers" are weasels and their publisher counterparts force these weasels to suck their dicks, so they take it all out on the developers and artists. Studio owners are soulless hacks that have turned to the dark side and are exploiting their own "because that's the industry". The whole industry is so corrupt, I hope someone goes actually postal someday... that's the only thing that will bring light to the sweatshop this industry actually is.
After 20+ years in the industry, I can tell you that its far from fun for most of the people involved. Its only fun if you get to work on exactly what you want, and without too much crunch time, and those conditions are rare. The problem with modern game development is that by the mere nature of todays acale of projects, you are just a small cog in a large machine, and control of the project is firmly in the hands of our evil insect overloads, the bean counters.
Grandparent:
I've had someone say he wanted to kill me and eat me
Parent:
All of the things in the parent have happened to me in the film business
So, can you describe the time when someone told you he wanted to kill you and eat you? I never knew it was so common! ;)
Effects: Creates Reality-Shield protection around the player. Extra immunity to Recession Blast (c), and Lack-of-Health-Insurance Attack (c)
Side Effects: 100% increase in chance to get stuck in Douche Level
I think that what you're saying is true but I don't think managers are trained to be abusive. It's more "The shit flows downhill" that makes bosses jerks. The CEO/President/Big Boss sets the tone for the company. If the chief screams/abuses/threatens the middle managers then that attitude gets passed on. That's why I'm dubious when a manager gets replaced with a new manager about whether anything really improves. Either the new manager will quit because of the threats or he/she will pass on the stress to the people underneath.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Unionize. Seriously, look at the film industry. We need a "Game Producers Guild". It won't solve all the problems, and yes it will create some new ones, but it will radically transform the industry for the better.
Just like in show business, there will always be some 17 year old in his garage with no wife, kids or mortgage that would be happy to do your job for less money, more hours and no complaint.
Yes, but the 10+ years you've sunk in the business should've given you time to develop the skills, work habits, connections, and professionalism that would more than justify the difference in pay. If not, why is the CEO being a bad guy for going with a cheaper substitute? It's certainly true that lots of people have, instead of 10 years of experience, "one year of experience repeated 10 times". Their skill development during that time is sufficient to keep them abreast of developments in their industry, but no more, so their relevant skill base could be equalled by a recent college graduate.
You could have replaced almost every single word that corresponded to the gaming industry and replaced it with the restaurant industry. Same thing.
Sometimes, you can, you go to hell for the rest of your life! That's a true thing.
You apparently have just decided to hate anything and everything that has a story, yet you still want to play RPGs. Nothing I can do there.
Mass Effect has TONS of play time, you spend most of the time playing your character. All the cutscenes are skippable, except the intro and outro.
So sorry, but you are likely to forever be unhappy with gaming because you have an odd set of standards in your head that don't match with what most people want. Sorry, nothing I can do.
Personally, I think Mass Effect is the best RPG of all time, any era, any platform, etc. Gameplay was fun, the story was great, visuals were great, etc. Prior to that I'd say BG2, particularly with its expansion, was the all time great. If the best isn't good enough for you, then either:
1) You are playing games you don't like. If you demand immediate, frantic, action, get a shooter, in particular an online shooter. BFBC2, TF2, in either case you get on a server and the only story is "Kill the people that are not your team." All action, no chatting. There's lots of different kinds of games out there, play the ones the right style for you.
2) You've set your standards unrealistically high. You've got some hazy notion of how a "perfect" game ought to be with no consideration for if that'd be realistic. In that case, knock it off. Be a realist. Play games and enjoy what there is.
3) You are looking back to an awesome past of gaming where every game was lengthy, involving, well thought out, and involved no repetition. A past that never was, in other words. In that case get some emulators (DOSBox for PC games, check emulator-zone.com for various consoles) and go play some of those old games. Get reminded of how simplistic they were, how RPGs padded length with battle grind, of how shooters would retrace levels, how action games would have you fight the same thing over and over.
I just don't see this decrease in game quality that people whine about. I've been gaming for about 25 years continuously, so Atari 2600/NES days to now. I'm also a big fan of emulation and play older games often for nostalgia. I think I have a pretty clear picture of what gaming is and was, and I'd say it is more fun now than it has ever been.
There are no more superstars. there are no more John Romero's or Duke Nukem guys. Make better games! When you go to a gamestop and face a shelf of PC game where only 3 or 4 of them are even worth buying something is wrong.
The same sort of problems are commonplace in the Visual Effects industry as well. Both industries have a lot of parallels.
"...Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either..."
Games industry like just about every other industry on the planet; news at ll.
-Styopa
I'm not a union expert, but I've been in the game business for over ten years.
Most of the major development houses are really interested in outsourcing to reduce dev costs.
Now, as a skilled programmer, I'm worth at least a dozen overseas developers. But two dozen? Three dozen?
I don't even blame my current bosses. I've seen them lose contracts to oversea dev houses who can do a project for half our lowest price.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
See: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
For the future, see Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Or me: :-)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Make lots of money.
Enjoy your job.
Work within the law.
Pick two.
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
The videogame INDUSTRY is not about having fun, it's about making money of course.
You can find programmers who enjoy making games all by themselves, in their free time and seeking no (economical) profit. They exist, and I think they are the only ones having "fun" making a game.
I include myself in that category. I don't think I'd be able to do it as my real job, with other people (who are probably clueless or only trying to satisfy random market statistics) telling me what I need to change or whatever. I seek no profit, just fun. For profit I already got a regular job that pays the bills. I can do game creation at my own pace, using my ideas and having to respond to no one.
You'd say it's a work of love.
"Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes" by Alfie Kohn
http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0395710901
"Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053/
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857
And something I organized on why work as we know it is going away (according to Marshall Brain and many others, given that the same technology that makes fancy computer games with fancy game AIs possible is also reducing the value of most human labor relative to automation and better design):
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Ultimately, there will be no greener pastures to leave towards as robotics spreads; see for example Marshall Brain's "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I read the same in Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, and the idea is pretty compelling. There are a few catches though (which might be worth even accepting!).
The first is that hunter-gathering societies lack advanced medicine, so early death from childbirth and disease would be more common (to what extent modern medicine can be adapted to a hunter-gatherer society I think is an interesting question). That said, diseases of excess -- diabetes, heart disease -- would also be less common, and evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers were better nourished and healthier than their agricultural peers until quite recent history (biologically speaking), so it has positives to go with the negatives.
The second is that many fewer people can be supported per acre of land. To deal with this, hunter-gatherer societies practiced (and some still practice) infanticide -- something we find repugnant -- to keep the population within sustainable limits. Terrible as it may sound, I sometimes think they have a point; most of mankind's ills -- pollution, hyper-competition -- currently seem to stem from an excess of people.
At this point, however, I do have to remind myself -- as tempting as it is to romanticize the noble savage -- that were it not for civilization I would be dead. Maybe that's a selfish point, but as counterarguments go it's hard for that not to resonate with me.
Interesting.
Were you able to take your skills and land in something more sane?
A group of folks I've been working with were laid off en masse so instead of disbanding we formed a co-op. It seems a lot of the new gaming companies are being formed by teams that previously worked together for a major developer/publisher.
An interesting article written several months ago about Duke Nukem Forever and what the developers at 3D Realms went through
Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1
Employment is a somewhat dynamic equilibrium but still an equilibrium nonetheless. All of the factors for an against ultimately balance out (albeit taking a few years to do so every time there's a boom or bust). Those factors tend to include: pay, working hours, working conditions, perceived sense of enjoyment, desire to be in the field, qualifications needed to get there, and many more.
Every year, millions of kids enter the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of them think gaming is just the coolest thing ever. If they get in via QA/Customer Service, they don't even need a degree to get there. On the positive side: They get to be in a field [they think] they love and they get to work in it with f-all experience or training. Even the coders get in on the back of a basic degree or a successful game mod.
Funnily enough, with a massive supply and only a finite demand for these employees... employers have discovered they can ask for longer hours and pay less for them than they would in fields where hardly anyone wants to do it and they need years of specialized training.
Not exactly rocket science.
I was in the industry for five years. I got sick of the crazy hours and too many people with a maturity level way south of their customers so I left. I'd imagine it took them a second or two to replace me because that crazy supply of people who want to be in the field, no matter what, continues unabated.
The difference between the people complaining/writing rants and myself is that I recognized what the reality was and stopped whining about it being unfair. Of course I wasn't going to get the conditions people in much less desirable jobs have - because I was trading them for getting to do the desirable thing that a million other people would make the same trade to get to do. Sure, after a few years, most people in the field realize the trade off isn't actually worth it and move on - but, like me, they get some great memories, they get to know they lived their dream for a while... and a million new kids get to take their places and do the same... for the few years it takes them to burn out too.
A lot of the guys I used to know now work sane hours for way better salaries in places where they have to wear a tie, not have nerf fights in the office and never release anything a tenth as much fun as a videogame. They don't bitch about that either as they recognize that, too, is a trade off they chose, with a balance point set by millions of other people choosing where their values lie.
In short: You don't have to work in the games industry, or programming, or any other industry. Stop bitching about what you don't get compared to someone else, somewhere else, when they're making other tradeoffs you don't have to. Instead, figure out what's more rewarding to your values than it is for most other people, skewing the equilibrium in your favor, and then reap the benefits of being there.
If you have modern health issues, please see:
Dr. Fuhrman on healthy eating (as we almost all eat too much junk):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
Dr. Cannell on curing Vitamin D deficiency (as we almost all spend so much time indoors):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
As far as population density, you are right that it can be an issue, but that is what space habitats and ocean habitats are for. :-)
"Growing a Space Habatit with a Lichen Composite"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4XFqyKx4BM
"1st Seastead Design Contest overall winner by András Gyrfi from Hungary"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCCStJ8a7pg
If we have the technological capacity to change the planet's atmosphere as a geologic force, surely we have the capability to create a few self-replicating space habitats and seasteads?
Anyway, this is not to disagree with your larger points about bad aspects of many hunter/gatherer societies in the past (infant mortality, disease, even wars). Ideally we want the best of both cultures -- an end to "work" and a return to "joy" and "community", along with an end to needless suffering that advanced technology can help prevent as well as a chance at transcendence to whatever the better aspects of technology can, in theory, provide.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Times are tight so they have the right to shit all over you? That's bullshit! And the person telling you that this is OK and the 'new normal' is a psychopath and a manipulator.
If your mistress left you, the wife is pregnant, the ex wants her alimony cheque, the mortgage is underwater, the delivery date has slipped again, the bank wants money, your white knight has morphed into the the black knight riding a Harley, and the Porsche has a scratch, you still do not have the right to abuse your staff, and slam and break things, and yell, and scream and throw chairs or walkers or monkey poo.
Grow a spine. Grow balls. Stand up for yourself. Once in every man's life he has to beat up the bully. Or take the beating. Yes, you're gonna get hurt, but that's what fight club is all about. Scrap back.
Or don't. Nothing you say can change or affect a psychopath anyways. It's like talking to a farm animal.
Things you cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Pick your battles.
Know right from wrong. Morality from immorality. Don't let what some idiot says on Slashdot set you up to take shit and abuse from anyone. Human nature has not changed in the last million years. When your mental and spiritual house are in order, it is unassailable by the wicked, the corrupt and the mentally ill.
God did not put you on this earth to take shit from yuppie scum.
One day you're gonna be dead and nothing will matter anyways.
So why are you scared of bullies. You have the right to stand against evil. This is a god given right. You need no permission from anyone to use it.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The golden rule and all that. Go ahead. Make excuses. Enable. Say god is dead. Eat shit because someday you can climb your way to the top, and now you get to dish it out. This is Sickness of The Mind and Soul. This is not the way to live. There is no happiness at the end of this trail.
Don't enable the abuser. The abuse will only continue. Despite Oprah and Jerry, victimhood is not cool. Stop being a victim.
Decent, respectful, pleasant, confident, professional, competent. A day's work for a day's pay. Then go home. WTF. They're gonna outsource your ass next month anyways, so why sweat it.
They call it work because it ain't fun. But there is no need to treat people like shit. And it's still a kick to beat the competition and bang out the best dam product on the planet.
Don't enable someone's lack of adult, mature, professional interpersonal skills.
Don't worship people. You are not property or chattel or fungible or any less worthy of respect than anyone else.
MOST IMPORTANT: Don't expect the other staff to even ADMIT the place is toxic or that management is psychopathic. In fact, most of them will line up against you, if you let push come to shove. Be careful here.
Maby redundant but looking at what i personally like and dislike,
I like well thought through games like Oblivion, X3, borderlands etc. where you can see the builders enjoyed making it and took the time.
I very much dislike fast ports from console to pc, most EA games that are halfbaked, not ready, very short, litle replay and lack imagination.
(On both sides there are exceptions of course)
When you put creative builders under pressure it kills imagination imo. The games are seen as fastfood now, calculated to what we accept minimally to spend money on "even 12 hours gameplay!(more like 8)" like Singularity whereas an Oblivion has 100+ hours in the box and many more with replay, mods etc. Singularity was more expensive too.
message to the companies, start making actual games....
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
Here's a couple of technical things that game-development almost never touches (except MMOs): Distributed computing, distributed caching, cross-systems integration, real-time computing, sub-millisecond latencies, web-based interfaces, relational-databases.
And then non-technical things: business requirements, technical analysis, technical architecture.
Game development is a segment of software development concerned with developing applications for a specific purpose, just like all others.
TF
Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval.
Gamers are spoiled, thus creating games is not an art anymore, but a race - like trying to see who can cum first, because that's all that counts. Apparently. Grow up and and learn how to make love.. err.. make games, properly. Satisfy creativity, not overstimulated rickety gamers.
Vitamin D deficiency can lead to depression and mental illness (as well as all sorts of other medical issues including joint pain), and I would expect most game developers working such long hours indoors are suffering from it. Here is how to get treatment for pennies a day using supplements:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A better diet than chips and diet soda would help too, like Dr. Fuhrman recommends:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Related funny video:
"Code Monkey"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The industry treats its people like garbage because they know that when one cracks, 20 eager (and naive) young ones are already queued up for a chance to work with da video gamez!
~Syberz
Except it's not the "real world" - other parts of computer/technology industry don't seem to have the problems of long hours and low pay that exist in the games industry. It's the game companies that should "get over it", and start treating people like in the rest of the "real world".
If by "all people's material wants" you mean plenty of furs, bones to make tools out of, and lots of meat to eat, and a life expectancy of 30, then yes, everyone's wants were satisfied. If, on the other hand, your wants consist of hot and cold running water, sewer treatment, medical care, police, firemen, roads, transportation, and a life expectancy of 80, I would suspect a great deal of wants were not met by a hunter-gatherer society.
I love these Luddites that claim everything would be great if we would just go back to living in caves or tents somewhere in the woods. Why don't they try it themselves for a few months first and tell us how it is?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
It's pretty ironic that Activision today is being pointed in the recent Treyarch debacle as having the EXACT same kind of boarish, control-freak behavior that pushed the four founders of Activision to leave Atari back in the 80's.
Huh? those things you mention are exactly the things that make game dev fun.
It's not the industry, it's you! Exact same work environment will seem like a sweatshop to some and a dream job to others.
I have left the gaming industry because of reason's simmilar to these "findings". I have also worked in many other corporate settings and NO, it is not like that everywhere especially nowadays, we are not in the 1950's anymore. Accepting the "work sucks" only prove the point of a demoralized, drained and in some way psychologically beaten attitude. Poor managment, that tends to have moved up not because of experience but really because the are "known". A complete lack of forsight and few that suck all of the budget's money...and time with frivolous ideas with no planning. That is the gaming industry. They don't care about you and never will. A well paid programmer makes 90k, while nincomputs managers clear 200k so that they can B.S. all day long....too many chiefs not enough indians. If other businesses were run like the gaming industry, they would go bankrupt within a few years. In the case of the gaming industry, they get so many millions jsut from government incentives that they are used to live at other people's expense and those poeple are more often than not their employees. If you feel that work sucks and that this is the way it is everywhere, you are nothing more than a slave that has given up on your freedom. Its too bad really.
as a game it may never be made. There's always more obstacles it seems. Too much creative control and power away from the tentacles that grip hollywood ensure that creative power is kept to a minimum. Distractions are favoured.
I work in the games industry. I've been on death marches and unbelievable project crunches (100 hours a week for four months on one project that actually left with a weakened immune system and a liver infection).
Not every studio is like this. Even studios where there are crunches and issues can change and get better.
I currently work at Netherrealm Studios (WB Games Chicago) on the Mortal Kombat team and I am honestly extremely happy with my job. I work with smart, energetic, bright and talented people who are for the most part also very happy. The tech team enjoys hanging out with each other and the members often stay late to hangout with coworkers by playing video games, sports (basketball court in back), or board / card games. A bunch of folks from the studio (from a variety of depts) go out for a couple drinks regularly at a local bar one night a week and occasionally get together for other personal events. We even treat interns as valued potential future members of the team.
We are going to head into a crunch for our game but due to careful management the crunch shouldn't kill anyone. We have the design idea of limiting to the scope and features of the game to something we can do on time and that we can do well and make fun. If we have to cut unneccessary and untried features to hit ship dates -- that is usually the preferred option on our team over continually deathmarching and blowing past ship dates. We do add new features and ideas fairly continuously until we get close to alpha but all of them go through a sanity check. In short, we have pretty darn good management on the team.
We have some simple (and extremely controversial) ideas that reduce crunch and make working on the game easier. First, the game should always build and run on all platforms -- this sounds obvious, but I have experienced first hand many teams that either let a platform lag or break regularly or even teams where it was nearly impossible to sync and build the game. Second, we always run without our limits of performance and memory. This one is very controversial because everyone assumes you can optimize at the end and decries "early optimization". The truth is -- at the end you need time to work on bugs and to add polish to make sure your game is fun and doesn't suck. In order to have this time, you can not be spending it fighting memory and performance issues. Furthermore, if you keep adding stuff when you are over budget, you only make your job harder. If you can find ways to do the same thing faster or with less memory up front, you can add more stuff in the long run. Also, if we run into bugs or crashes, we fix them up front. If things appear generally unstable, we tend to focus on restabilizing over adding new features. Especially if a technical bug persists (crash vs game-play idiosyncracy), we throw more people at it including top tech guys until the bug is quashed before moving on.
We will definitely have a crunch later on in the game but hopefully, it's just going to be people fixing issues and fine tuning the heck out of things rather than trying to fight enormous disasters. I've seen games deal with memory and performance and buggy code by taking one guy with a pail and asking them to bail out the Titanic.
It hasn't always been like this, especially when we were Midway and before WB purchased us - but things were getting better even during the Midway years. A lot of the battle for getting to a good working environment is fighting bad management and bad design (both game and code) that makes working harder.
Be sure your rights are not being violated. Department of Labor -FSLA. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17e_computer.pdf
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
So this is basic project management. In any project you have control over 4 things: Scope, Time, Budget and Quality. In the context of a software project, this basically boils down 1) to the set of requirements or features that you want to implement, the 2) duration of the tasks that are necessary to implement said scope, and 3) the number and quality of the engineers you have available to implement the scope, and 4) how much time you spend on testing the fuck out of whatever it is you created. There is interplay between all 4 axes.
Different software engineering approaches deal with these variables in different ways. "Waterfall" methodology basically tries to nail down all 4, but in reality tends to result in variation in quality. You deliver on-time, you deliver the required (as documented) scope on time, but the quality sucks. Agile methodologies favour nailing down time (fixed iterations, time-boxes etc), budget (you have n engineers), and quality (you have a "definition of done", continuous integration etc) but scope can vary.
This isn't anything new.
Sounds to me like the managers (project & engineering) in the gaming industry along with their senior management are a bit retarded, and are living in the 80s as far as programmer heroics are concerned. There's only so much you can keep that up before your developers hate you.
Then again, I used to work at Symbian and the Symbian OS' future does not seem so bright these days so what do I know :-)
The flip side of this is the case of Duke Nukem Forever, which had no constraints on either features or release date. 12 years and one giant development team layoff later, even what was developed for DNF still probably won't see the light of day.
That's a rather materialistic view on "the good life".What happened to the value of singing, dancing, telling stories, eating food you enjoyed, having free time, not having someone bossing you around, time for communion with nature and the infinite, doing comprehensible work you enjoyed doing at your own pace, having time to raise children, and so on? The Sahlins article shows how most hunter/gatherers most of the time had no want for food. Would you trade, say, having time for singing and dancing and friendships for some hot water? You can always put hot rocks in a basket of water if you want hot water. And while you don't have hot water on tap, you also don't have property taxes to pay or dioxin in the food supply to digest.
Also, you've overgeneralized the point. There is a big difference between saying there were a lot of good things about a period in human history and saying *everything* about that period was wonderful or that we should just abandon other aspects of our current lives that we enjoy. But clearly, these game developers are not enjoying their lives. So, something is wrong. Looking to the past helps give us some perspective on that.
By the way, life expectancy after age five in hunter/gatherers may have been comparable to today. It is only in the last 100 years that human skeletons are now as tall as they were 10,000 years in the past (because agriculture was a big step backward nutritionally and culturally):
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
Some things like sewage treatment are only needed because of high population densities today.
Many people don't have access to medical care, and even when they do, the for-profit medical system harms them compared to simpler approaches (whole foods diet, fasting, sunlight, meditation, good sleep, etc.). Many chronic disease today are caused by eating poorly or not getting enough sunlight (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, depression, influenza, autism, etc.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
so it is not completely clear how much happier most people are now compared to people 10,000 years ago.
Also people back then did not know what was possible, so someone from now sent back to those times might feel different than people did who grew up then.
And young children in the USA spend more than a decade in prison, so that can't be happy for them compared to back then either:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2445404/the_war_on_kids_a_polemic_against_public.html?cat=9
So, sure, there are some good things about today (the internet overall seems to be a wonderful thing). But there is plenty of bad too, so the equation of how different times stack up is not so simple.
A little bit on what America was like before Columbus (describing Haiti): ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
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A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
tl;dr Features, Quality, Date: Choose Two
Regarding "the inherent unreliability of estimation", this is exactly what agile methods like Scrum try to compensate for. People are wary of buzzwords like "agile" because they're wrongly applied all over the place (at one job I worked, we tried "agile" as meaning "nothing gets spec'd and business expects more features").
But if you practice agile / Scrum well (I highly recommend the book "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" for a starting place), you start to see that they actually make a ridiculous amount of sense. Schedules are based on short timeboxes and bottom-up planning means devs are the ones who say "yes we can do that in this timebox" or "no we can't". The system expects you to make mistakes and feeds that input back into the next round so your estimates get better and better.
This clearly works best in the SaaS world, where there's generally low deployment / deliverable overhead, but I believe some of the lessons of this methodology can be applied to almost any field. By empowering the engineers, you encourage a sense of pride and ownership. And when everything's humming smoothly, you deliver regularly, on time, and without a lot of stress.
Hahahah! I got about 3/4 of the way through and skipped to the end of the essay.
FREE LOVE! Have sex with everyone, have babies, the human race will go on!
Yes, well there is what goes on during those 'in between having sex' moments. Remarkably, even with a steady diet of playful and pleasurable sex with multiple partners, there will be some people who are not satisfied and will seek fulfillment in other forms and fashions. Some of these forms will involve harming another human, there will still be competition, and there will still be grabs for power. Power in play.
I feel his arguments and conclusions are cohesive, yet incomplete. I think he ignores the anthropological evidence of a work-based society as the default for Homo sapiens. A default society is not the only society or best society, but it is the one which has been chosen over and over again. I would enjoy living in Mr. Black's primitivist utopia, but would not cry out or fight back when it naturally develops into a work-based 'nightmare' once again.
Good point. I'm not a newbie, but I find that I still need deadlines to get things done unless what I'm working on is really interesting. And most of the projects I've worked on haven't been even remotely interesting.