{"id":886,"date":"2009-04-15T11:11:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T11:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chocobeam.me\/playground\/2009\/04\/quality-bits\/"},"modified":"2009-04-15T11:11:24","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T11:11:24","slug":"quality-bits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2009\/04\/quality-bits\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality bits"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

So Gears of War producer said crunch was necessary<\/a>. Here we go again.<\/p>\n

Crunch makes work relationship between people tighter, a bit like firemen fighting flames that\u2019s true. The cost (unhealthyness) is just not worth the price (better game? not necessarily shipped on time? neither).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more<\/a> (via BoingBoing) and this is where it has to stop. As a comment points out on Greg\u2019s site:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTo tie in to the quality of life discussion, the reason I’m not working for a game studio right now is that before you are offered a job, they always ask you if you’re "passionate" about working in games. Not everyone uses the same word(s), but they always ask a question designed to determine just how far over you’re willing to bend<\/strong>. I take my work very seriously, I am competent and dedicated, I work hard, and I strive to work efficiently. When the situation calls for it, I will work until the job is done. What I will not do is allow myself to be used like a five dollar whore until I burn out, or until my handlers have the opportunity to replace me with a two dollar whore.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is why I switched to indie self-employed status with some scary unemployement times. But I can\u2019t no longer stand that \u201cphilosophy\u201d which is kind of pure BS allowing the childish\/teenage culture of people unable to stop what they do until someone does. It\u2019s not managing people, it\u2019s nursing peons.<\/p>\n

A comment on Gamasutra:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI continue to find it hilarious that guys like Rod Fergusson are arrogant enough to believe that they know better than a century-worth of collated data on worker productivity which has lead every other industy to realise what constitutes an optimal (40hr, 5 day) working week.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And still going down, thanks to technological progress (Naturalmotion<\/a> someone?). From a cultural point of view, crunch is<\/strike> used to be the mark of the elite league of game developers, the mark of the triple A where students dream to be. It\u2019s moving fast and now, digital distribution is there and indie game is hawt. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s like a few people are noticing that better tools and better skilled people are the way to work efficiently when sucking all the energy of passionate guys six days a week is not. Once again comments at BB are great:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOf course, what people don’t know is that during "downtime" at some of these companies you <\/em><\/p>\n

get paid for 40 hours a week to simply show up and hang out.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, this is a friggin\u2019 bad business habit to ship millions dollars games in a one-two months window around the end of year with maxed out competition. And then people are so dead tired from the heavy loaded work summer, they do just nothing for months. If those dead times are the counterpart of 60+ hours weeks, maybe there\u2019s some improvement to be done in managing teams and projects earlier in the production process? I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHaving worked for many years in the game industry (and still tangentially close to it), I <\/em><\/p>\n

can attest that I would not wish a career at a game company on my worst enemy. It is a soul <\/em><\/p>\n

crushing business — and that’s at the best of times.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

9 years in the business. Do I have coworkers from 2000 still working in the industry? Yeah, like 1% maybe less.<\/p>\n

I love that one:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c[..]at every company I’ve been at the management practices a not-so-subtle form of passive-aggressiveness:<\/em><\/p>\n

"Well, yes, I understand your wife’s birthday is this weekend, and of course here at Entertainment Conglomerate we believe that family comes first. Now the rest of the team will be in over the weekend, and it’s possible the CTO might be in as well. Sometimes he likes to come downstairs, just see who might be around, but really not a problem. And as long as you’ve got that code branch complete ahead of schedule, I’m sure taking the weekend off won’t affect your eventual bonus [after having already worked a thousand hours] in the slightest, compared to one of the other programmers who is less diligent but never goes home."<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Last year I was working in a big wide open space in pure concrete. I had to design audio with coders meeting around me, with the most efficient and noisy hand dryer in the world<\/a> pretty near too. It was batshit crazy and management told me I was leaving a bit early at 6:00pm while my bleeding ears were just saying to myself \u201cfuck you fuck you well, fuck you today I won\u2019t work anymore for you!!\u201d.<\/em> Coders were at work until everybody was out I did that too in the past, I know how work is not really the same when there\u2019s no manager around. Classic cooptation<\/a>. Follow the horde or die tryin\u2019? Hell no.<\/p>\n

 
I prefer fighting that zombie attitude.<\/em> <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something we can\u2019t change: tracking problems and elaborate solutions are things that makes you totally unaware of time<\/strong> because if you do, you definitely won\u2019t find anything. Composing music is quite the same, time doesn\u2019t matter when you\u2019re building things, solving problems with your mind and little action from your hands. This power of doing with no dependancies at all makes us wanting to achieve the daily goal. \u201cIf I finish that, if I fix this..\u201d.<\/em> Still, it\u2019s manageable.<\/p>\n

Anyway a little change like one line of code or two notes can dramatically change everything. You don\u2019t have that power with visual design, eyes are not efficient enough to feel some pixels change whereas a tiny code change that make the game more robust or a music arrangement that add melancoly is perceptible by a large crowd. Not only by people making it.<\/p>\n

Petri did a game on that whole subject<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wanna join the 60+ hours week anyway? Read this<\/a>. Want to understand why we work less now than ever before ? Read this<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Gears of War producer said crunch was necessary. Here we go again. Crunch makes work relationship between people tighter, a bit like firemen fighting flames that\u2019s true. The cost (unhealthyness) is just not worth the price (better game? not necessarily shipped on time? neither). There\u2019s more (via BoingBoing) and this is where it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}