Macguffin Games

My Part in the IGDA Quality of Life Discussion

Here’s a video Darius took of me speaking at the annual IGDA meeting this year:

(For more on this subject, along with a link to video of John Feil’s statement on the subject, check out Darius’ post on his IGDA candidacy blog.)

Not sure if this is helpful to anyone, but here is a print version of what I said:

I wanted to discuss the recent controversy over crunch time that sprang from the Leadership Conference panel. I feel the IGDA cannot afford to equivocate at all on this issue.

Although as an organization we need to be inclusive as an umbrella for all developers, having a “live and let live” policy on hard crunch with any company makes the organization look like a complete paper tiger, and robs us of any credibility on the issue with the larger overall development community.

While the attitudes and practices of Epic may work well in their culture, a lot of development houses make the same arguments simply in order to compensate for a lack of rigorous process in their production cycles.

I would urge the board to take a stance that, while acknowledging some studios have a culture of crunch that has their employees’ buy-in, that it is not something the IGDA can condone in light of the abuses other studios will commit with that same reasoning.

If this isn’t possible, I think that as an organization we should reconsider our advocacy around working hours. If the IGDA cannot be credible to developers on this front, we should instead focus on things where we can.

There may be small variations from the video in there – this was what I wrote down beforehand.

I’ve been somewhat reluctant to open my mouth any more on this topic… mostly because the immediate response from board memeber Tom Buscaglia and outgoing chair Jen Maclean (paraphrasing here) was, “Thank you, we hear you – and we could use your help if you care about this issue.”

The reality is that I can’t take that time.  It makes me feel like a jackass, because I’d like to be fighting the good fight on this one.  But looking at it?  I’m in the middle of starting a company and trying to get an ambitious game from scratch to the IGF in about eleven months.  Not only can’t I find that time, but I don’t have any of the enthusiasm for this fight that I know I’d need to really do a decent job at it.  And that makes me reluctant to shoot my mouth off anymore.

So… why am I posting?  Because I realized today that the call from Jen and Tom to help was NOT something I should read as, “Jump in or shut up.”  In fact, I’m sure that they would both be appalled at that thought.  That was just the connection drew on my own.

The IGDA does need its members to step up and help out in greater numbers.  It also needs to know what we think, what’s important to us, and constructive thoughts on how we’d like them to represent us.  These two items both stand up just fine on their own; while both are needed, one doesn’t flow from the other.  While it behooves me to try and help, I shouldn’t keep quiet just because of that.

The only thing I’d add to my above statement, from my perspective as a producer in a previous life,  is that I feel some crunch is inevitable in most game development.  There are number of reasons; I think the two biggest are that our processes are still immature, and often our amazing ambitions often exceed our time and capabilities.  A lot of this will go away with more practice, but yeah, sometimes we will all work overtime.  God knows I’m doing it right now on Heritage.

However, it is completely unacceptable to me when studios encourage a culture of crunch being utterly necessary and intrinsic to game development, but are not up front about what devs are signing up for, don’t compensate their employees for their extraordinary efforts, and make no serious efforts to improve how they make games in order to eliminate that crunch.  If crunching is part of your up-front deal with people like apparently it is at Epic, great.  If it’s a relatively extraordinary measure for a company & they try to mitigate the need for it, I have no problem.  If it’s an excuse to keep your profits high and you can’t be bothered to innovate your way out of it… that’s sad.

Whatever stance the IGDA takes on Quality of Life, I feel it needs to address the problem children of our industry – not Epic.  And if Mark Rein, Mike Capps and company get upset because they’re left out in the cold, they should suck up and deal.  I’ve seen Capps go on enough about how Epic is a bunch of rock stars… well, rock star away.  I don’t think not having the IGDA Seal of Approval is going to hurt their recruiting much, given the buckets of money they are apparently lobbing around.  And having that seal actually mean something might start to help with the problem children.

Tags: Game Development, igda, QoL