Frustration and Unhappiness In the Games Industry 422
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.'"
Welcome to the Real World (Score:2, Insightful)
Fill in the blank with your own industry (Score:3, Insightful)
"fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the _________ industry"
Gee.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:0, Insightful)
Whoa same thing with music.
Welcome to a highly competitive industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The Biggest Issue With Journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Game dev is technically difficult and challenging (Score:5, Insightful)
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 new game is the old game (Score:3, Insightful)
Oversupply = Exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:The Biggest Issue With Journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you are asking too much when you expect an arbitrary scoring system to be anything but arbitrary. They're idiotic because they are made for idiots. Read the reviews, read the critiques, ask your friends, play the demos, and forget the stupid score card.
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:3, Insightful)
The piles of console trash that fill up brick-and-mortar stores have always been terrible. Remember that the vast majority of game releases in the 90s were garbage; you just recall the great ones like Half-Life, Quake 3, and UT99. Well the 2000s have seen many more quality releases.
Re:The new game is the old game (Score:2, Insightful)
Also like the tabletop gaming industry, economics is telling us there are too many companies.
what, all 3 of them?
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Welcome to a highly competitive industry (Score:4, Insightful)
So in some ways it is like Hollywood, in some ways it is not. In some ways it is like other industries, mostly not. A financier is in it to make money, and is not going to throw a fit because the grue is the wrong color. An engineer is mostly not going to have a temper tantrum because someone modifies his truss. In most other industries there are measurable. We might get frustrated but life goes on.
This is mostly a case of not confusing a hobby with a job. If one wants total creative control, have a hobby. If one wants revenue, get a job. I think many game developer think they can maximize revenue and simultaneously keep it as a hobby.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fill in the blank with your own industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this common in your own industry?
Yes, that one's very common.
Re:Fill in the blank with your own industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Greetings and Salutations....
Hum...this sounds as if it could be applied to almost ANY industry, not just the gaming industry. Think back to the days when Dave and Bill were running HP and it was rated "the best company to work for". For every ONE HP there were thousands of companies that treated their employees like slaves, and were rampant with the sort of evil doings listed here. That remains true today, alas, and may be MORE true with the stresses of the economy being what they are.
It has been my experience that MOST companies are run by greedy, thieving bastards, and the best the employee can hope for is to not get screwed too badly as the company is drained into the pockets of upper level management.
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
Re:Gee.... (Score:1, Insightful)
I certainly don't like paying $50-60 for a game only to be asked to whip out my credit card to access a certain quest in an RPG, or to download a few new maps in an FPS.
And something tells me that the guy coding it didn't like it either, but naturally he's forced to say, "Yes sir, right away Mr. Kotick."
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In other words, it is work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Game dev is technically difficult and challengi (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:News at eleven. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
this is happeneing not just in the games industry (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
Bobby Kotick (Score:5, Insightful)
"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 [arstechnica.com] 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.
Read the article comments (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The price of richness (Score:3, Insightful)
Developers need to stand up for their rights, but unions (especially those that dominate an entire industry) can themselves become like the bureaucrats they're supposed to fight against. I'm not usually one to argue for new laws, but I think I'd rather have employees' rights protected through specific legislation than be forced to join or otherwise be represented by a union before being allowed to work for a particular employer.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop playing JRPGs (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:To video game developers I have only one thing (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's an odd disconnect (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Not a troll at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's not exploitation (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Today's gaming is not fun anymore. (Score:3, Insightful)
Like how STALKER is another Doom or Sins of a Solar Empire is another Command & Conquer only if you oversimplify the ideas to the point of uselessness?
Face it, there's no credible argument to be made for the idea that games *used* to innovate but don't anymore, things are just as they've always been. If you like that, good, if you don't then pity, but no, things weren't "better in the good ol' days".
Re:The price of richness (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you suggesting only unions can successfully lobby for employee rights?
I don't deny unions do often lead to positive results, but the fact remains they can be awfully bureaucratic and will in some cases act against the interests of individual employees who may nevertheless have no choice but to be represented by a particular union (just Google "sole bargaining agent" and "national labor relations act").
What you see as a "subconscious aversion" I see as conscious and rational aversion to the negative aspects of union-dominated workplaces. As for becoming "realistic", unless you can explain exactly how my views are unrealistic I'll just dismiss it as an empty attack devoid of any real meaning.
Re:Welcome to a highly competitive industry (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight:
You were fired for having a dissenting opinion, and then you gladly accepted to be rehired once your boss came to his senses? Do you really want to work with someone who would fire you over a technical debate?
Most of the people on my team debate with me about the odds and ends of all sorts of technologies. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. I'd never fire someone for disagreeing over terminology. That just seems like it'd lead to me never getting the advice I really need when I really need it due to employee fear.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:2, Insightful)
I also do technical interviews, and I know for a fact that skilled programmers are in high demand, and that there is absolutely no reason they should settle for the kind of stuff the parents are describing. If you're good at a technical discipline, you can always find work that doesn't suck.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a troll at all (Score:4, Insightful)
And then workers both North and South suffer a lowering of incomes. The civil war was supposed to be over a few years ago.
"Free trade" agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA made the "free market" radicals and globalists really happy the past few decades, but they've totally screwed anyone who's had to work for a living. And don't tell me how small farmers have benefited, because it was the huge transnational agriculture giants, the ADMs that really cleaned up, and the farmers ended up right back where they started.
When I hear a supposedly educated Southerner refer to the northern states as "union states" it really makes me sad. You know, couchslug, it's no coincidence that the "right to work" states were also mostly slave states.
When when you say "if the South goes union, they can simply outsource and shut down their plants" there nothing "simple" about it. There are still tax incentives in place to encourage them to move jobs overseas. Then there's the bonus that Wall Street gives any company that moves jobs off-shore. But let me tell you where that little game of south vs north vs China ends up: with everyone working for the Chinese wages. It's a race to the bottom and shortsightedness is making people who believe as you do that there's a pony down at the bottom waiting for you. I'm here to tell you there is no pony at the bottom, just low wages, lower standard of living, and lowest futures for both of our kids and grandkids.
Re:Read the article comments (Score:3, Insightful)
The real world is actually a lot nicer. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not a troll at all (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't really keep first world economies afloat when everyone is making fast food worker salaries though ... our economies need a large middle class, competing with China on wages doesn't really give us one.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:1, Insightful)
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."
When, in human history has that not been the case? A subsistence farmer worked pretty long hours, and had constant anxiety about starving to death.
20+ years experience (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not a troll at all (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly. And "supply side, trickle-down, voodoo economics" have proven themselves to be a massive failure after 30 years.
It's time to go back to what got us the strong middle-class to begin with: a new New Deal, strong trade treaties that don't stress "free markets" and the celebration of organized labor, not demonization.
Re:The real world is actually a lot nicer. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's simply because they get confused between "a job you love doing" and "a job you love the idea of doing", I think.
Re:The real world is actually a lot nicer. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the company that you work for is demanding that you work outrageous hours, then you're going to get burnt out no matter how interesting the work may be. It sounds like the competition for jobs in the videogame industry is just too fierce, the hours are too long, and burnout is commonplace. These folks might find that their talents are better appreciated in other industries.
I work for a company that sells used cars online. Not exactly the glamorous position in A.I. or Computational Linguistics that I dreamed of I was studying computer science in university, and yet - I love my current job. There are so many interesting aspects to software engineering that the work itself - the thrill of trying to engineer something to be faster, more robust, or more user friendly, and the successful completion of those goals - is enough to keep me interested no matter what it is I'm working on.
Is it a "prestigious" job? Maybe not - but then again, to the folks I work with I am a "rock star" and they really appreciate the work I do. And having a little time left at the end of the day to enjoy my wife is, in my opinion, infinitely more rewarding than any benefit I could derive from a job that did not allow me that privilege.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:1, Insightful)
Bravo! Americans have accepted the lowest common denominator in their working life without ever seeming to questioning why.
Hint: It's because you let them do whatever they want to you.
Wake and take some responsibility for your lives, especially your civic and social lives.
Well duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not a troll at all (Score:1, Insightful)
When I hear a supposedly educated Southerner refer to the northern states as "union states" it really makes me sad. You know, couchslug, it's no coincidence that the "right to work" states were also mostly slave states.
He was using "union states" to mean "states with strong labor unions," because, you know, he was talking about labor unions.
Please explain what you meant about right to work states being mostly slave states though. It's not like bad working conditions in blue collar jobs affect blue collar black people any differently than blue collar white people. Or were you calling all southerners racist because you have some kind of problem with them? The civil war was supposed to have ended a few years ago, asshole.
Equilibrium (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not a troll at all (Score:3, Insightful)
>Workers have been under all-out attack by the elites ever since Ronald Reagan declared war on unions.
It's amazing to me that anyone wants the middle class to be poor. At first, "I have all the money and nobody else does," sounds like a great idea...until you go outside.
You walk down the street surrounded by poor people. So you get in your Lexus and you are surrounded by poor people in their cars. You go to work and a poor person brings you lunch. You turn on your TV and a poor person is talking about how a poor president is sending all of our poor people into a poor country to fight with their poor people.
When everybody else is poor, everything is about poverty. Even your own life as a rich man.
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:2, Insightful)
I can see that yes, in a perfect world, every father would like 6 months off to help raise their newborn, but what happens if that father is an engineer in a critical position 3 months before the launch of a new smartphone? Do you just say "sorry guys, we'll release the phone next year after Jens gets back from paternity leave"?
Clearly the rational approach is to say, "Sorry honey, I can't help you with the new life you brought into the world, I have to ship a telephone."
Re:Welcome to the Real World (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're that dependent on a single person, you have a major dysfunction somewhere in your system. If somebody was that valuable, they could hold the entire company hostage: "pay me X or I'll quit and you won't be able to release your product!"
It also seems like an over-simplification to attribute a company's failings to treating their employees well. All sorts of things go into a successful product; company direction and marketing seem much more important than whether your employees are out for a few extra weeks a year.