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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.'"
"fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the _________ industry"
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.
That's actually the truth, of which we will be gently reminded by the current economy. Work usually sucked throughout human history. Non-suckful working conditions are not the norm.
The way labor gets to vote is to leave for greener pastures.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when an art becomes a business. The MBAs come in because they understand business and take all the art out of it. They get the art mass produced by factories based on numbers and shove it through with marketing.
And since making games now is so expensive, you're not going to get a lot of risk. That's why every thing that comes out doesn't deviate from the formula.
But... indie games... lots of stuff going on there...
I totally agree with the above poster. Everything is classified into convenient genres and too much money is spent on replicating the exact same experience over and over nowadays. Game producers need to learn to take risks again. Studios need to spend much more efforts on creating something unique, not necessarily in terms of gameplay mechanics but in terms of intelligent plots that are compelling for the primary target group (=adults) and stories that really allow for immersion. Procedural content generation and randomized missions/campaigns would be the way to go, yet most studios choose to go the easy and secure but ultimately boring path of creating short, cinematic games that do not offer anything new except better graphics.
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.
Really, nobody takes any chances? Online only games aren't taking a chance? How about taking a chance on a new platform like iPod touch? Or games that have in-game addons for purchase?
I think people are too down on "the games industry" or maybe too focused on a certain segment (which indeed may be worthy of being negative about).
I think there's lots of crap like there has always been, but there ARE gems. You just have to find them, as has always been the case.
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.
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.
The magic of Pixar is that the management understands that you want a positive work environment. Most corporations have clueless managers and executives who have never understood how to motivate people without threats.
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.
I think it says a lot about how much people have internalized the "management"/corporatist/Randroid line when someone argues with a straight face that living with constant anxiety about your employment and having working hours that afford you no personal life are simply "the norm."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"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.
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.
There is a difference between how things should be and how they are.
For the foreseeable future there will be no full employment, so employers will start degrading working conditions ... it shouldn't be normal, but it is still the norm.
That's because there aren't any developers to communicate to. They've all been moved onto another project, even if it's just the sequel.
It's called standing up for your rights.
Seriously, unless you work for a megacorporation where the management is totally detached from the actual workforce, you are working under a boss who, in many cases, is human, too. Talk to him or her about how a better working environment has many (unfortunately hard to quantify) positive side effects for the company as a whole. Particularly people frequenting Slashdot should work in jobs where that case isn't hard to make, i.e. knowledge related jobs.
Heck, even assembly line factories profit from having happy workers that, due to being content with their work, self-identify with the work being done and come up with ideas to improve the workflow. Of course, the case is somewhat weaker than in e.g. software development, but it's still true.
That's why workers mustn't be afraid to organize. Companies where workers have some say actually do better on average than companies that are being driven by the McKinseys of the world - because despite all their fancy titles, the latter don't actually know what they're doing (on average, obviously).
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.
Work sucked long before there were corporations and long before Ayn Rand was born. Work is suffering in return for money.
That is NOT to say that if you can compel better conditions through individual or collective bargaining you should not do so. Labor and management are enemies, so get what you can any way you can.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.