Good thread. I pre-ordered. (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, October 25, 2018, 15:49 (2226 days ago) @ Cody Miller

We're critiquing a complex system here of which we're a part. We want bigger and better games and we tend to want them around the end of the year. We are a force exerting pressure. We can't boycott and get what we want--boycotting games for practices most studios engage in would, in fairness, require us to boycott AAA gaming full stop. Sure, unionize, and see game development move to more flexible locales. (It's why film crews often move to right-to-work states.) Game development isn't tied to geography by history or climate or anything else. People would move to Antarctica for the opportunity to work in games.

The problem is crunch, and it exists in many industries because we're mere mortals, and we don't always know exactly what will happen. You don't know how hard things will be, you don't know what demand is going to be in our industry, and you often have hard deadlines that can make or break your success. And especially in creative endeavors like making games, years can go into trial and error while you figure what it is you're making. By the time you figure it out, you've got a lot less time/money to make it than you would prefer, so compromises have to be made. So choose: quality or time? You can't have both.

I keep hoping someone will figure out crunch, and I expect/hope that as the industry matures, the expertise necessary to effectively anticipate and schedule will reduce it. I’m sure some studios already do it better than others. At a certain level, though, obsessive commitment is very nearly an absolute requirement of creative masterpieces. Similarly, in my experience coding is the type of work where more can be done during sustained periods of focus than when you break it up. I suspect if crunch didn’t exist, some would do it anyway.