8 Apr 2009
The Many Myths of Crunch
The topic of crunch and its place in the pantheon of unholy sins against game devs is probably the single most discussed and debated subject in the history of game development, so it’s no surprise that this well-worn subject has reared its polarizing head again, this time from everyone’s favorite Che Guevara wannabe, Greg Costikyan (founder of Manifesto games, designer, and frequent pontificator on All That Is Wrong With Game Development).
Mr. Costikyan apparently took issue with a comment made by Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, who said rather candidly that Epic really isn’t interested in hiring someone who isn’t willing to put in overtime to make a hit game, if that’s what’s required. Considering both Costikyan’s penchant for attention-grabbing rants and Epic’s track record of developing hit games and handsomely rewarding its employees in turn, this seems like a classic case of seizing on an out-of-context quote that really isn’t a fair representation of the organization’s M.O. and using it to drum up controversy.
That, of course, hasn’t stopped the gaming media from milking the headline for whatever traffic they can get from it, and voila! We’ve got this year’s EA_Spouse tempest in a teacup.
To be fair, Costikyan’s primary beef appears to be that Capps used to be an IGDA board member, which proves that the IGDA can’t even get its leaders to stamp out abusive practices at their studios, much less effect change elsewhere. For what it’s worth, I let my IGDA membership lapse and stopped volunteering to help because I really don’t think they serve any purpose to me as a developer. In this respect I agree with Costikyan.
I do, however, think a lot of the ensuing commentary about crunch and how badly game developers are being abused is, frankly, a lot of shite. This isn’t going to win me any popularity contests, but here are my observations about some of the myths of crunch.
Myth #1: All Crunch Is Created Equal
One of the biggest problems in the debate on crunch is that the terminology is totally broken. “Crunching” to finish a game used to refer to the sort of manic, frenzied overtime that always accompanied the close-out phase of shipping a game, and this process lasted a couple of months at most. (This is key — crunch was a temporary thing.) Young men would see this as an opportunity to earn their Merit Badge in Hardcore Game Developing, and the rituals of eating dinner together and tracking down elusive bugs until 3am and then crashing on couches, the floor, or on your desk were born.
Somewhere along the way, a month or two of crunch became a couple of months, and a couple of months gave way to six months. Every standard distribution has some really sad sack cases, and so the horror stories of the yearlong crunch even entered the collective consciousness at a certain point.
The thing is, mandatory 60-hour weeks for a year isn’t a crunch. It’s no longer temporary when you can’t remember what eating dinner in your own home feels like. Thankfully, the software development industry has already coined a term for this kind of torture: the death march.
Hell, in Japan, they actually have a word for literally working yourself to death: Karōshi. You won’t find many people willing to stand up and defend the legitimacy and necessity of the death march. Adam Martin goes a step further here and decries the use of the term “crunch” entirely, suggesting that it’s an unethical, almost evil practice to require unpaid overtime of employees, and then trying to sugar-coat that evil by nicknaming it something innocuous like “crunch”. I think this is a little extreme, personally, but you get a sense of the passion that this issue ignites.
Unfortunately, a lot of commentators choose to ignore the extreme difference between a temporary “crunch” period and a death march, and as a result there’s a lot of wasted outrage and indignation that could be put to much better use, like creating online petitions to bring back Firefly or something. Considering that in the two decades between 1977 and 1997, the average American full-time worker’s work week increased from 43.6 to 47.1 hours a week, you could even make the case that it isn’t really a game industry issue at all, but a much larger problem.
Myth #2: Crunch Is Entirely A Result of Management Failure
There was a time I naively believed this to be true (as a fledgling manager, no less!), so folks can be partially forgiven for propagating this meme, but it’s also borne out of laziness, because it implies a neat and tidy villain for the issue of crunch and absolves individuals of any responsibility for the problem. Don’t get me wrong — if you’re death marching a year before you’re scheduled to ship, there are some pretty significant problems that aren’t being addressed, and odds are good that the folks who own them are not in the trenches.
That said, game developers take a LOT of freedoms and flexibilities for granted that, when taken individually, are probably inconsequential, but when aggregated do have an impact on the schedule. I’ll cover a few of these in a minute.
Probably the most well-documented impetus for crunch outside of the “incompetent management” straw man is “those damn youngsters trying to prove they’re hardcore”. I don’t personally think this is anywhere near as prevalent as it used to be, but OTOH I’ve had the luxury of selecting my teams for most of the recent past and I haven’t had too many damn youngsters in the mix, or at least not enough to generate any appreciable internal pressure towards the “crunch for street cred” ideal.
Another factor that has very little to do with management “failure” is simply the desire of devs to make a great game, and the demands that places on a plan and schedule. Most teams have no desire to work even a 9-to-5 job making shoddy, inconsequential games. (this makes the rhetorical attack on Epic even more absurd)
Even making a 70+ metacritic game is no trivial matter, as evidenced by the vast majority of titles that fail every year to hit that mark, much less an 85+ or the real Holy Grail, the 95+ game, which is Sports Car Bonus Check territory. Given that so few teams can execute even once in this manner, much less consistently and reliably, you may start to form a hypothesis here — making smash hit games is really hard.
It therefore stands to reason that it’s unlikely any team is going to be able to lay out an accurate and exhaustive blueprint for how to build a monster hit game, accurately forecast and schedule it, and then execute that plan to perfection without relying on any overtime. Reality check: if you think you’re The One True Developer who can make this happen, I invite you to fall on that grenade and get back to us in 25 years when your masterpiece is complete.
You may be thinking, “a-ha! If you were only using agile methodologies, you wouldn’t *need* to build a perfect blueprint up front!” And this is true. Sort of. Agile allows you to react to shifting priorities better, and helps you to realize when you’re totally overbooked. But you still have to deal with the issue of how to fit all the toys into the box. And if you run out of room, you either throw out some of your toys, or get a bigger box.
Myth #3: Other Professions Don’t Have This Problem
This is a logical offshoot of the “gaming is still an immature, Wild West medium that needs to grow up” fallacy. Even if you toss out some obvious parallels in competing media, like television and film (“but they pay overtime so it doesn’t count!”) or writing (“but the author himself chooses when to write and nobody’s making them work late!”), you have situations like the legal field, where people work themselves to exhaustion to try and make partner, or medical students, or even teachers, who aren’t paid overtime to do lesson planning or grade papers.
Even retail, which could arguably be considered one of the most rote and mundane types of jobs, have seasonal hours that stretch long into the night. Sure, the cashiers and hourly employees get paid extra for that, but most store managers generally don’t. And if you told them that they’d been relieved of the burden of having their stores open an extra four hours a day during the holidays, do you know how overjoyed they’d be? Not very, since the bulk of the annual sales they need to hit to make their sales goals occur in that timeframe, and I’m guessing they’d generally prefer to remain gainfully employed.
OK, so we can argue that they are being taken advantage of just as badly in this situation as we are, but when you really compare the plight of retail store managers to the average game developer, which group sounds more worthy of sympathy? The bottom line is that as well-paid professionals, the vast majority of us are hired to get results, not to put in a quota of hours each week.
Myth #4: Crunch Is Totally Unavoidable In A Creative Medium
A lot of beleaguered managers adopt this position, under the impression that if there’s no silver bullet to fix the problem, there’s no value in even trying.
Simply being open about the company’s view of overtime and commitment is a big step for a lot of organizations (which again makes Epic’s position even more sympathetic), because potential applicants know up front that the company is realistic about crunch and won’t shy away from it if it means the difference between a marginal product and a wildly successful one.
That said, it is totally possible to design, schedule, and develop a game without any crunch. The caveat here is that you have to dramatically limit your risks to achieve this type of development footprint, and rarely is risk reduced without a corresponding reduction in reward. I’m sure there are a few examples of highly successful products that endured a negligible amount of uncompensated overtime, but I suspect no more than a few, and I certainly can’t think of anyone who can pull this off consistently. Even the IGDA’s Quality of Life group has precious few real-world examples to point to in this regard. Blue Fang did pretty well with Zoo Tycoon for a while, but you can see from their product portfolio that they are the very definition of risk-averse and sticking with their core competency.
Besides, if your boss ends up asking you to crunch, are you more likely to agree if he tried everything in his power to avoid crunch, or if he just goes to this line and tells you to suck it up?
Myth #5: The “Quality of Life” Myth
As I’ve tried to illustrate above, our industry is not unique in struggling with work/life balance, nor are we likely to get much sympathy from a lot of other occupations, especially given the extremely specialized nature of what we do, the fact that we’re reasonably well compensated for doing it, and that we don’t risk our lives or (much) of our health in return.
Sure, extended crunch periods or death marches wreak havok on one’s personal life, caused people to miss moments in their children’s lives, and have put stress on their marriages. This is regrettable and something we should continue to strive to improve, but the fact is that these problems are part of nearly every other industry, too. And let’s consider just a handful of the freedoms and “soft benefits” that game development affords:
- The freedom to arrive much later than most “traditional” jobs. Anecdotally, of course, but it is rare in my experience for developers to arrive before 9:30, and fairly common for people to arrive as late as 10am at times. The concept of “Core Hours” is fairly prevalent among game development studios and demonstrates the need to accept flexibility from employees while still maintaining a single team feel for communication and coordination purposes.�
- A significantly relaxed atmosphere in terms of clothing, freedom of expression, and individual space. Having worked in Corporate America before joining the game industry, it’s worth recognizing just how big a deal this is, and how easy it would be to take this for granted, especially for those who enter gaming right out of college. Not having to wear a suit every day is A Big Freaking Deal. Being able to have tattoos, piercings, dreds, or extremely poor hygiene in general and *not* have your career negatively impacted is A Big Freaking Deal.�
- The freedom to play games at work! Sure, a lot of the time it’s research, and it can get tedious. Yes, even the guy who tastes the ice cream at the Ben & Jerry’s factory gets sick of ice cream, but it sure beats the hell out of being the guy who has to taste the sardines at the sardine packing plant. �
- Lucrative financial rewards / bonuses / profit sharing when products are successful. What? You’re calling bullshit? Okay, fair enough. There *are* companies who do this well, but most do not. Epic is one of the ones who does it right, as did Firaxis (my former employer), and I’ve heard Blizzard is pretty good about this now that they’re worth more than the entire nation of Iceland. But I think this is really the root of most of the bitching about crunch: people don’t want to kill themselves to ship a game that tanks and doesn’t reward anyone for the effort.
Does any of this mean that it’s “OK” for game developers to be forced to work unpaid overtime? Certainly not. What it does illustrate, however, is that compared to a significant amount of other professions, we’ve actually got it pretty easy. I pretty much agree with everything that Erik Bethke said in this comment on the subject. The fact that “Quality of Life” is constantly being used as shorthand to describe how awful game developers have it is incredibly ironic, in my view.
Myth #6: You Don’t Have A Choice
A lot of younger developers believe this, and it’s unfortunate. To begin with, we have to take a step back and realize that we’ve chosen to work in this field and not, say, business software, IT consulting, or manual labor for that matter. It’s a choice. Even at the organizational level, unless you happen to live in a market where there is literally only one employer, you probably have a choice of where you want to work. And not all workplaces are equal, not all projects are equal. Dare I say it, but not all team leaders/producers/management types are equal.
Even beyond that level, though, you as an employee have a choice to say “no, I’m sorry, I can’t do that”. You’re (probably) not going to get fired, especially in today’s climate. You WILL be scrutinized, though. Are you really working a full eight hour day? Did you take a smoke break every hour and an hour lunch break? How long did you spend on SomethingAwful before the morning meeting? Run some WoW raids during lunch that spilled over into the 1 o’clock hour, maybe? It’s a two-way street. As Scott Jennings correctly points out — 60 hour workweeks usually aren’t, and the truth is, the 40 hour workweek often isn’t, either.
As a producer, I’ve had to accommodate people who couldn’t or wouldn’t work any overtime, and most of the time, those guys were like clockwork. They weren’t the ones chatting for an hour in the morning about the news or taking extended breaks, because they knew they had a lot of work to get done to get out of there on time. I had no problem working with them and knew exactly what to expect and what not to expect. Any producer worth his or her salt should be able to handle both types of lifestyles. But you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
Finally, I’ll say the opportunities for indie game developers and smaller-scale teams to make a living off of games have never been more plentiful than they are right now, so there really isn’t any excuse for people to feel forced to crunch to the detriment of their health, family, or job performance. Vote with your feet and raise the issue and/or leave if you’re in the situation. There’s never been a better time to be in control of your own destiny. It’s your choice.
So You’re a Crunch Apologist, Then?
Here’s what I believe — when something is offensive to you, you have a choice. You can suck it up and keep doing what you’re doing, you can try to change it, or you can leave and try to find a better situation. The trick is to make sure you’re really being critical and objective about just how bad the problem is, and whether the grass is really greener.
As a producer, I don’t really care for crunch. It makes people cranky, it’s a pain in the ass to coordinate dinner every night, and it’s debatable if the additional hours outweigh the brain fog-induced errors, but there are times when you cannot cut any more fat without damaging muscle and bone, and crunch is your option of last resort. I try to limit its use to all but the final hectic days before an important milestone if at all possible, and I don’t believe in mandatory overtime, so I ask rather than mandate, and only when I feel it’s absolutely needed. Even then, I won’t ask my team to do anything I wouldn’t, so I’m right there with them.
I also recognize that because it’s likely I will need to ask my team at some point to volunteer some unpaid overtime, I try to be as flexible and generous with accommodating team members’ needs during the times when we’re working a normal work week. Perhaps most importantly, I believe that you should only hire people who share your passion for the project, and I believe you need to give those people a sense of ownership and investment in what you’re trying to accomplish. That means giving them a say in major decisions, and rewarding them financially when things go well.
I suspect that is really what Mr. Capps was trying to emphasize, and based on friends and acquaintances of mine who have worked at Epic over the years, it sounds like most of their employees feel the same way (and have no regrets about the products they created or the way they were compensated). I just don’t see how that’s a bad thing for our industry.
It’s a bad thing for our industry because Epic is in a position of influence, and they’re not saying “This works for us but it may not work for you”, they’re going to GDC and saying things like (actual quote) “I am a believer that if you’re going to make a great game, and there is that caveat, I believe that crunch is necessary.”
It doesn’t matter what Rod Fergusson or Mike Capps believe on the issue. It’s certainly fair game for people to point out that the idea that great games require crunch is ridiculous and counterproductive. Most of us realize that extended unpaid overtime is harmful and potentially unethical on some scale. So when a company champions it while the rest of the direction of the industry should be to minimize it, we rightly cry foul.
You didn’t provide another convincing reason for the existence of crunch under Myth #2. Capps did make one good point, which I’ll paraphrase: if game developers are not motivated to finish work that has been reasonably scheduled on time, how is it not management’s fault for keeping them around? The production department’s entire responsibility is to both create and maintain the schedule, so when unpaid overtime needs to be wielded to stick to the schedule whose fault is it?
I see three possibilities. Either there was an unexpected event (death, illness, publisher meddling, massive change in game scope, etc) that forced the schedule to change in a significant way, or the schedule was unrealistic when it was created, or the schedule was not enforced throughout development. Two of those are ultimately production’s fault, though art, programming, etc are complicit in the third option.
Regarding “you have a choice”, have we forgotten about everyone that’s laid off right now? Can we all just quit and magically get new jobs where there is no crunch? It takes balls to say to someone’s face that they have a choice when you know nothing about their situation. Do we tell battered women that it’s their fault for not leaving? Sometimes the equation isn’t as simple as it looks on paper.
Dan Olson
April 11th, 2009 at 7:13 pmpermalink
Thanks for the reply, Dan.
You unintentionally illustrated what I believe to a be a huge misconception about production when you said “the production department’s entire responsibility is to create… the schedule”. I believe I know what you meant, and I didn’t really get into this in my post because it could fill up pages of blogging, but in my opinion, producers should never be “creating” the schedule. The process of creating a schedule should be every bit as collaborative and iterative as the process of developing a game, and requires a lot of input from all disciplines to work.
Schedules are always off because estimates tend to be poor. Because it’s impossible to think ahead about every system and technical requirement up front. Because you can’t account on paper for what turns out to be fun or boring when it gets in the hands of a player. These are all risks that can be mitigated but never fully eliminated. Even when you have really kickass veterans and a well-defined product target that the team has made successfully in the past (because I’ve been in this exact situation), there will *always* be something that comes up.
Trust me when I say this can happen in the absence of any of the scenarios you mention above. I’ve lived it. As I mentioned in Myth #4, you *can* solve this problem. You can cut features, or just start out by being extremely risk-averse and stay ultra-focused. Neither approach is without significant drawbacks, however.
As far as Myth #5, I knew that would earn me some flak, but to answer your question, no I haven’t forgotten about the people who are laid off. I was one of them a few months ago. I don’t take the statement lightly, because I am acutely aware of the challenges that face developers in this market. However, even as I was preparing to apply for unemployment benefits, I was considering the options available to me and what I needed to do to provide for my family. Ultimately, I took a huge risk and had the opportunity to set up a new studio, where I was in a position to extend a hand to a number of great people I’d worked with before who were also laid off. So yeah, I know about that situation, and have probably done more to fight it than most.
The bottom line is that working in games *is* a choice, and I made the choice to get out of one industry and get into his one a decade ago. I believe every one of us bears a personal responsibility to ensure we have a backup plan. Nobody said it’s going to be easy, or that it’s going to come overnight. But if you want to ensure that you never crunch again, find a boss who will guarantee that. Work for yourself!
Game developers today have opportunities that are historically unprecedented in this industry. Between casual gaming, XBLA, and the iPhone, you’ve got three vastly different markets that each offer numerous ways to get started.
The battered wife analogy is a little melodramatic. Of course no one blames the victim, but ironically, most literature targeted at women in abusive relationships in fact urge women to leave and get away from the abuse. Applying your logic about the economic climate to this situation, we’d suggest that women in abusive relationships do nothing and wait for the government to save them! That’s the mentality of a victim, not of someone who controls their own life.
I do think we need to distinguish between what are legitimately abusive practices that should not be condonded (and I laid out my objections to Death Marching up front) and companies who have high expectations of their workers, and reward them accordingly. Epic is in the latter group, because unlike the vast majority of game development studios irrespective of their crunch practices, Epic actually shares ownership with its employees and people who work there share in the spoils of their successes. Ask the folks who work there if they’d be happier with 40 hour weeks at the cost of some of that compensation and see what they tell you. I have
dgackey
April 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pmpermalink
Thanks… addressing your points from bottom up…
I have no doubt that Epic employees wouldn’t trade their compensation for better working practices, but isn’t this a false dilemma? Mike Capps claims that Epic crunches intentionally so that they have less employees to split the profits among. The question that begs to be asked is whether they could find a way to make games of the same quality with the same number of employees. Are they even trying this, or have they resigned themselves to the idea that crunch is the solution? If they’re not working at peak efficiency all of the time, it seems odd to suggest that the choice is solely between crunch and compensation.
The battered woman analogy is a little melodramatic, really. And it is almost always the best solution for a battered woman to get out, but it doesn’t make the choice any less hard. I guess I think people are too flippant with this advice, in general, when applied to game developers in crunch. There are always options but they are not always practical. Many of us like our jobs quite a bit, except for the crunch. Why give up the whole job if we can work to eliminate or minimize the crunch?
Just an example… back in the EA spouse days, if I recall, Erin and Leander felt trapped in their situation because of a signing bonus that was required to be paid back to EA if Leander left within a year. They didn’t have the money to pay it back, so Erin turned to anonymous blogging. Did they have a choice? Maybe, but I couldn’t face them and say they did it the wrong way.
Regarding scheduling, I think your view is overly pessimistic, but of course as pessimism tends to be it’s grounded in reality. Perhaps it’s impossible to schedule a project correctly, I’m not sure as that isn’t my job. But it sounds like a cop out. If we crunched on the last project for 1 month, why not try to scope and schedule this project so that we finish 1 month earlier? We’ll have more time for polish and a buffer to account for extended bugfixing or anything else that comes up.
Schedule and scope are intimately related, which I think you’ve pointed out. My requirement from production as a programmer is that they’re scheduling and scoping the project to the best of their ability. I think a lot of times if they are, crunch won’t happen very much. It probably still happens… the best project I worked on we crunched for a week. But the issue for me is… are we trying to minimize crunch? As a project, as a company, as an industry. If we’re going to hold everyone up to high standards of work and efficiency, we should seriously examine the causes of crunch on any project and avoid them on the next.
This is why Epic’s stated practice of scheduling crunch is so abhorrent to me. There doesn’t seem to be any assumption that they can improve their efficiency. They’re putting their trust fully in a tool that ideally would be reserved for emergencies. What if Epic runs into a problem they didn’t expect and didn’t schedule? Instead of their planned 3 weeks of crunch they may end up with months of it. Again, I’m not project manager, but it seems like bad practice to me, and when applied at GDC it sounds like bad advice.
Disclaimers: I also dislike Costikyan’s ranty tendency. I thought Rod Fergusson’s talk was 90% good (from the slides, I wasn’t there). And I fully understood Mike Capps position from the Studio Heads panel and get where he’s coming from. I like having this discussion… I just hope everyone understands fundamentally that if we can avoid crunch at all, we should try.
Dan Olson
April 11th, 2009 at 8:59 pmpermalink
Dan,
On one hand, I know from people that work at Epic who have commented that yes, they are constantly working on improving their processes and that they have actually gotten *less* crunchy over the years. They have a lot of guys in the same boat as me, getting older, married with kids, etc., and that is only going to increase for them because they are always going to be looking for experienced developers as opposed to the “EA approach” of setting up in a college town and churning through idealistic new grads.
That said, why should we begrudge Epic for choosing to try to maintain a small, efficient studio structure where everyone gets a nice piece of bonus pie? They’re not misleading people or trying to trick people into working there for a fat bonus check, only to spring crunch on them at the last minute. They’ve actually got the guts to say it up front, which a lot of other studios don’t. Too many studios feel compelled to lie about their commitment to Quality of Life when what it really comes down to is they are stretched for resources and are one bad game away from going under. Just because a studio crunches doesn’t necessarily mean they’re complacent about it. In Epic’s case, I think they’re just able to be honest because they are prestigious enough that it won’t hurt them. Bungie, Valve, and Blizzard are all in the same boat, from what I understand.
Sure, and believe me, I’m not advocating going to the nuclear option and quitting the first time you’re faced with crunch. As I said in my original entry, when you run into a situation that becomes untenable for you at work, you have the option of ignoring it, trying to change it, or making a job change. I suppose the last option is to do nothing but complain, and my view is that far too many people choose the last option. That said, changing a group’s culture is a very difficult thing to do, and one of the things I’ve tried to repeatedly reiterate is that crunch isn’t a single-source problem that can be fixed by management going “you know what, let’s stop abusing our peons today!”.
Understandable, but again — taking a signing bonus is a choice. Those are called “golden handcuffs” and there’s a reason that employers offer them (and it isn’t because they like giving out free money). They offer them BECAUSE they know it makes people more likely to stick around, everything else being equal. And, though it isn’t terribly relevant to this discussion, the way most people get around this is by negotiating with potential employers to pick up the cost of the bonus that was due the previous employer. If they want you bad enough, this is a no-brainer.
Again, why do you assume that we *wouldn’t* try and schedule appropriately the next time around? One of the biggest problems with the crunch argument is that many people base all their arguments on the fundamental idea that producers are amenable or at the very least ambivalent to crunch, and do nothing to try and minimize or curb it. Assume for a second that every producer did everything in their power to curb crunch, and studio heads realized that crunch was a big problem. Do you really think that would end crunch forever?
The reason I say it wouldn’t is because guys like Epic, Valve, Bungie, and Blizzard are all among the best in our industry in terms of employee happiness and retention, success, and constantly investing in improving themselves, and none of them have managed to solve this problem, despite generating BILLIONS of dollars of revenue for the last decade. And the reason for this is because they’re all studios that value product quality above anything else.
I tend to agree with you, but I’m something of a libertarian, I guess. Don’t get me wrong, I abhor the idea of studios who claim they don’t crunch, and then go into a death march a year before ship. Those places deserve to see their people leave en masse. But there are so many situations that don’t fit neatly into a black and white argument. Lots of fledgling studios simply can’t afford to hire enough people to pull off something ambitious, but they try anyway. Should we as an industry, tell them that’s not okay? If the guys working there know it up front and they’re sharing in the spoils of success at the end, I don’t see the problem. That’s not just symptomatic of the games industry; that’s pretty much the blueprint for any startup in any business, anywhere.
Personally, like I said, I don’t schedule crunch, and I don’t mandate crunch. But I know we will crunch on my project at some point. And that’s why I’m *extremely* flexible and understanding with my people early in development (and we do work 40 hour weeks. And beer has been known to be consumed on Fridays. Or other days that end with “y”). I like to think of crunch as a bank of goodwill, and it’s my job to make deposits in that bank before I ask for a withdrawal. If someone can’t or won’t give extra when I ask, that’s fine, and I don’t take it personally or blackball them, but I’m less generous with my deposits of goodwill going forward. It’s a two way street.
Thanks again for the comments, I’m a little shocked that anyone’s actually reading this
dgackey
April 11th, 2009 at 9:34 pmpermalink
I don’t assume people try to make crunch better with each successive project. I’ve been burned on this. Every year management came to us and said “Well this crunch sucked and we’re sorry about that.” They collect opinions in a postmortem… what went wrong? We point out what went wrong, to the best of our abilities, and none of these things are changed for the next project. But what *is* changed for the next project is the scope and schedule, which are increased and decreased respectively.
It’s a vicious cycle, and I don’t think it was just that one studio trapped in it. I don’t (or at least don’t wish to) begrudge Epic for their practices, but I’d appreciate it if in their public statements about crunch they at least mentioned that they think it’s a bad thing and they try to minimize it. So far all I’ve heard is words like “necessary” and “intentional”, and when you’re in a position of influence like Epic is, this is dangerous ammunition to give all of the employers who don’t have the talent and processes setup to create games the way Epic creates games.
This may be going in circles… we both agree crunch is bad, disagree on some of the causes, apply libertarian principles to Epic’s use of it, and possibly disagree on the ramifications of Epic’s one-sided presentation of their views on the issue.
Dan Olson
April 13th, 2009 at 2:47 ampermalink