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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.'"
Is this common in your own industry?
FTFC Joel Payne says:
+0 Meh
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.
Engineer here - I wish I could say that you were right about engineers. Believe you me, we have just as many argumemts; however, the stakes are often higher and so the politics fall by the wayside in the face of numbers and simulation. That doesn't mean trivial things don't blow out of proportion, though...
Bizarrely, the first spat I was involved in at my current place of employment revolved around whether a stiffening section could be correctly referred to as a 'truss' (as I called it), or whether it was a 'strut' (as my boss called it). I pointed out that a truss is made up of struts, but I was quickly admonished by my boss and told that a truss consists of pin-jointed members only, whereas this was a single piece of material with cutouts in it and it therefore could not be a truss. Now, I disagreed and cited numerous texts which provide examples of trusses (such as the box truss) which support moments at corners - and that was when my boss fired me. As it was, we realised that it was ridiculous and I was immediately rehired, but you can see how something as minor as terminology can get out of hand. Ultimately, we compromised and referred to it as a 'web' in the documentation.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
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.
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.
I've worked in microchip development, flight simulators, commercial display systems, and games.
Games sucks much more than any of the others. This is why I don't work in that industry any more.
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.
Well to show people how green the pastures are on the other side. I spent some time with my brother in Sweden, he moved over there during a student exchange program. He liked it so much he stayed. Why does he like it so much? Well he works for Sony Ericsson as a programmer/engineer and to say they have a different work philosophy is an understatement. To list some of the perks: On day 1, out of university, he gets 6 weeks vacation, with the ability to bank another 2. He has 8+2 weeks now. Overtime, period....law...no such thing as "Salary employee". You are payed extra to carry a blackberry By law a person has to be no farther that 10 meters from a natural light source...even in a skyrise. They have a whole classes in architecture schools on this. Free medicare Free gym Free bereavement time no questions asked 6 months PATERNITY leave free daycare services Managers and executives that fail employee review are often pushed into no managerial roles. Sony-Ericsson is considered a slave driving company in Sweden. Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.
Well yes that sounds nice but doesn't he miss the free market???