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Choose Your Enemies Wisely
Honestly, I don’t want to have enemies. I like being liked too much to want enemies. But I suspect this is going to make some. I’m going to provide you with two quotes and I would like someone to reconcile them for me. Someone authoritative, mind you…not the good people who will likely respond in the comments section with amens and words of encouragement. God bless you, though, Comments Section People. Write your comments anyway. Our industry needs the support.
Here’s a quote from develop-online.net. Dateline today, January 12th, 2011:
“The development team at New York outfit Kaos has been subjected to a seven-day crunch phase for two months, the studio’s owning publisher THQ has said.
The Kaos workforce has been thrown into the brutal crunch phase in order to finish work on its current project, Homefront, before the scheduled US release of March 8th.
THQ has no intention of delaying the game past its release date.
The publisher’s executive vice president of Core Games, Danny Bilson, said on Twitter that he was yesterday in New York to visit the studio.
His message read: “At Kaos studios in New York sitting with a team that's finaling on 7-day weeks for a couple of months. Talk about that ‘thousand yard stare’.” ”
Now here’s a quote from the website for Kaos Studios, the company at which developers have allegedly been working seven days a week for months:
“Quality (of Life) Assurance
Above all, we are driven to ensure that our employees have a high quality of life and a good work/life balance. While game development – like any entertainment business – is a profession that lives on deadlines and overtime, Kaos places a high premium on our employees coming to work refreshed, relaxed, and ready to make industry-leading games. Key to that is our deployment of Scrum and Agile methodologies, our commitment to an 8-hour workday, and our refusal to burn out our employees. While we may not be able to eliminate overtime and crunch completely, we’re constantly evolving our business to better meet the needs of both the project and the long-term health and happiness of our workforce.”
Reiterating: Explanation, good. Enemies, bad.
All I’m after is an explanation as to how these two things can be true. Kaos has allegedly had some people working every day for 60+ days. Kaos also claims that they are “driven to ensure that [their] employees have a high quality of life.”
Now, I’m no simpleminded idealist. I’ve been in the industry for 13 years. I’ve worked with publishers. I've worked with irrational leaders. And I know you have to make tough decisions some times. But I’m here to say it does not have to be this way.
Mike Acton of Insomniac recently posted an enormously eloquent blog entry explaining what they do at his studio to prevent disasters such as the one befalling Kaos. The IGDA published a Quality of Life paper seven years ago explaining “how studios can adopt best practices to help alleviate some of the stress and allow for a more balanced life.” (source: IGDA Quality of Life White Paper Info) The problems aren’t new and they haven’t stopped. The solutions aren’t new either, but only a few studios seem to be implementing them.
Why Are You So Upset, Keith?
I’m upset because I’ve seen too many projects – worked on many of them – paid for with the currency of developers’ lives. Artists working overtime to bring the framerate up instead of being at home with their newborn child. Designers fitting maps into memory at the last minute instead of planning their wedding with their fiancées. I started my own consulting business because a big part of the solution involves better planning and better project management. And I happen to be pretty good at both. I’ve helped salvage woefully late titles. But I was also on a team that, when allowed control of its own destiny, turned out the most successful game (AAA, cross-platform) our company has ever shipped. And we did it in little more than 1 year, and without overtime. So if you don’t think it can be done or don’t know how, call me. I would be abundantly happy to help ensure debilitating overtime never happens again, at Kaos or anywhere.
Recap
- Don’t want enemies
- Do want an explanation, re: Kaos crunching like crazy on Homefront
- Game production doesn’t have to be like this
- If you don’t believe me or don’t know how to fix it, contact me
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However, I would like to understand *why* they're being held to this deadline: you don't just try to cram 6-8 months work into two without a significant reason. Do they have a contractual obligation to meet, are THQ being nasty, is the money running out or something else altogether? And why haven't they been able to maintain their schedule: were the timeline estimates overly optimistic or has the team fallen behind schedule?
It's unlikely that there's a single root cause, but it'd be good to get an understanding of what caused this...
Kudos for their development team for sticking with it.
Tip of the Hat
It's mismanagement like this that has completely erased any type of desire to work in this industry. No, not ALL studios are like this, but lets be honest, almost all are.
If you are working on a game and you are put into crunch mode, forced to work overtime, or don't get the weekends off, your boss dropped the ball. A mistake has been made. Crunch is a result of inexperienced managers who are too young, too optimistic, and have unrealistic expectations and poor planning abilities.
That said, mistakes are made. People screw up. I just mean to say that you should never, ever, PLAN to have crunch time. Crunch means something bad happened. You never plan to crunch.
It would be more accurate to say that the need for crunch is a result of that. The fact that it actually happens is more a result of the entire dev team deciding that, for what ever reasons, it's more important to them to meet the deadline someone else set than to only work the hours they're paid for.
Ironically, what this means from a managerial perspective is that if you're not doing crunch, you're potentially wasting money, since you have staff that would probably work overtime for free and you're failing to take advantage of it.
Devs are not meat. Suits, please stop treating them this way!
It's not clear from this story whether it's the suits or the devs behind the crunch.
Deadlines are reality for most businesses but they're usually set pretty far in advance (often a year or two). Pretending like they come out of nowhere and not scheduling and scaling a project accordingly is a production problem.
Where the "suits" might have blame in these cases, is getting devs to sign bad deals that promise too much work in not enough time. But the existence of deadlines is hardly the problem.
a) I worked at KAOS, and can assure you, the developers there are a passionate and professional bunch - solid, experienced guys.
b) for the sake of argument, let's assume it is a new and inexperienced mod team, and they bite off more than they can chew.... that still doesn't make it appropriate for THQ, a publicly traded company, to mandate 7-days-a-week crunch for two months. They can take other action, absolutely. They can fire people, they can add resources, they can adjust ship dates. But no company should be able to abolish the weekend.
What THQ has done is egregious and immoral, if not illegal. A two month perpetual crunch, over the holidays, is bad enough, but for one of their top executives to then tweet about it like it's a feather in his cap just adds insult to injury.
"THQ has no intention of delaying the game past its release date."
I'd say that's a mandate.
Its sad that the average career span in the games industry is equatable to the average career span in the NFL. And even more sad that the average compensation is drastically different.
Organisations make those nice, fluffy "we love our employees" statements to:
a) Make employees think they're safe, and
b) As a legal shield.
But what they say they do and what they do can be worlds apart.
The mouth piece of the company do no have any say in the actually running of the company, it could be an absolute sweat shop but they are paid to say it's the best place to work ever. For a realistic view you'd be better off asking the employees..
If a company sticks around long enough they get into their groove and know what they are doing, so there is less "unknown" in the crunch time but it still will be there and people will just plan for that. Companies which push their employees for 6+ month crunch marches then fire them at the end, well those companies are just exploiting their employees.. Sad it but it happens often in this industry..
I think this article raises good questions and does not attempt to get into the blame game. Especially when none of us here have any of the facts beyond the quotes above.
I am like you Keith, in the sense that I have been in countless death marches. Some unforeseen and some embraced because I am a bit insane, but 60 days is a strong sign that something has gone seriously wrong.
But that's just my opinion with no information on this situation to back it up.
I will not name any studios or any games I've personally been on that employed such horrendous manditory work days, but in the end, the sheer effort and sacrifice each developer contributed resulted in highly received games which almost justifies the cost to the studio. Unfortunately, that's as far as it goes for most as we shortly see those same hard working devs get laid off. I know, it's beating the dead horse but ignoring it doesn't make it stop.
It is necessary to take into account the human factor. I don't think it is anyone's place to try and guess what happened to the game and it's development cycle, but let's assume an idea didn't quite convince and had to be reworked multiple times before finally reaching it's final version in the design, if it's a big part of the game everything else will simply be pushed back, can't make cake with no eggs.
You also seem to be comparing your work on a AAA title which was the best your studio ever had with every other project. Many companies, and people, seem to forget games are about fun. If we take Uncharted, Bejeweled and CityVille and compare their design cycles I'm sure you'll find thousands of similarities and discrepancies on the macro level, development cycle, company policy and such. But you have to account for the micro. What if the designer for CityVille had that idea percolating on his mind and then it happened. You'll find the planning phase for CityVille might have been shorter and that sped up the whole process, just because the designer felt more inspired.
And that's coming from someone who has been working at home as an indie for the past year and a half on the same title. So I might not share the experience of years of professional craft, but to me it seems that the two sentences which will make you understand what happened are:
"We need to stay open" & "Mistakes were made..."
It is NOT like you take a guy from your design team and tell him "Ok, pal. Need three great mission for tomorrow". Those three GREAT mission will need time to actually become great. Every text needs to be reviewed just as much as every idea needs to be re-thought.
Not to mention creativity is something too unpredictable to be a cohesive part of planning, I just can't see you telling someone: "Yeah and you better come ready on the 24th, because you're deadline for the game's first level is on the 29th, so you'll need to have that great gameplay idea by 25th, because you need to move on to work on that first level."
And if hope to change is ever to be had, we need to make up the mind of those giving us the money, the almighty investors.
I'd also like to point out that not everyone becomes less effective when working overtime, and that a great many people working in this business do so knowing the sacrifices they will have to make. They consider these sacrifices to be an acceptable cost for having a job that is fulfilling and challenging.
Some people do not, and they leave their company or the industry altogether. Or, knowing the nature of the business before they get into it, they choose a less demanding position in a less demanding industry. In fact, many of those who face the ordeal of crunch time would not be able to get a job in the industry if it were easier, because the labor supply would be more plentiful.
All that is not to say that executives and managers are always justified in ordering crunch time. However, in some cases, even when development is well-planned and managed, the economics of game development won't work without it. The success of creative endeavors is not easy to predict.
White-collar unions are not a solution, period. Unless you like your industry bloated, drowning in red ink, subsidized and/or heavily regulated by government, and shipped off to emerging economies in far-off lands.
It's true that union jobs tend to be very secure - until the company falls over (GM), anyway. But in the brutally competitive and difficult games business, where companies are only as strong as their latest hit and development is already fleeing rapidly to Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe, the traditional union model just wouldn't work.
I actually do have a strong opinion on this matter. I was once called a loser because I quit a job that was about to enter a major crunch period, and I responded with calling the guy a loser because he would give up his relationship and two years of his life for something no one was going to remember in five years' time. It was cathartic - but not very constructive.
One of basic facts about big budget game development is that a hundred is a lot of people, and four years is a lot of time. Those are huge, highly complex software engineering enterprises, and on top of that, game devlopment is supposed to be artistically creative. I'm not saying this in order to claim that disasters have to happen, because I don't think they do. But it is impossible for a regular human being to track, control, and predict the dynamic of such a large project without the aid of procedures, methodologies and automated tools.
Generally speaking, there are few established procedures, methodologies etc. in this industry. We do borrow from utility software development, but we're not doing it very well. There is a lot of theory on the subject, but we're not very good at implementing it. We're on a tanker, and we're trying to steer it with oars. Our own projects end up surprising us on every turn.
I used to work in a team that ended up crunching for more than six months, with some sub-teams enduring an even longer emergency period. It was a textbook example of a software engineering disaster.
But, you know what? Before the crunch started, the director of that team spent like a year telling everyone how he believed in the 8-hour workday, and how avoiding the crunch was one of his top priorities - even as we kept warning him about delays. The production had managed to predict the crunch a year in advance. Pretty much everybody wanted it to not happen. And then it happened anyway, because we never really did anything about it. I mean, you can row very very very fast if you really really really want to, but the real solution to the Clueless Tanker Syndrome is to install a rudder. In other words, working harder won't help you; you have to change your strategy.
There are many strategic issues at work here, but I think the biggest one is that we're still in the 1980s in terms of mindset. We foster this illusion of being a lone self-sufficient settler on an untamed frontier, trying to rush to the nearest gold vein before other settlers can claim it. The biggest weakness of this mindset is the lack of sense of accountability. It's just us versus the frontier.
You wouldn't believe how hard it was to introduce something as simple as a priority list in that project I mentioned. Priority list is a basic accountability tool for project leaders. In order to use it, you have to acknowledge that you can't have everything you want because you're on a finite budget. Only the top of the list is going to be completed before we run out of time. If we cannot reach the bottom of the list, it means that you, the project leader, have put too many items on it. The concept is simple enough, but many people in leadership positions just won't acknowledge it.
One can give more examples like this, but that would be boring. Something that needs to be pointed out, though, is that accoutability is not just a producer's problem. Designers tend to want all their ideas implemented all at once, and they sure can have more ideas in an hour than you can implement in a year. Artists indluge in the search for that perfect balance that not even other artists can see. Programmers often find themselves unable to resist the allure of the feature creep.
In my experience, neither producers nor the suits are the biggest pain in the proverbial arse as far as project stability is concerned. The most disruptive people are dysfunctional designers, programmers, and artists in leadership positions (do note that "wannabe creator", i.e. an untrained person who wants to have an impact on game design no matter what, is a common variant of a dysfunctional designer).
The frontier mentality has to change, but it's not going to happen overnight. Meanwhile, I think there are two things that can be done about it.
The first one is that we need to stop running away from formalised solutions and development theory. We need those tools, so suck it up and go read a book now! Oh, and by the way, "The Mythical Man-Month" doesn't count. It's from the seventies.
The second one is a system of checks and balances. Essentially, problems are most commonly made by people who cannot get fired when they have pissed off someone. But when you take a closer look at the distribution of responsibilities within a team, it starts to look more like a circle than a tree. The team are responsible for making the creative direction's vision happen. The production are responsible for providing the team with the resources (e.g. time). Finally, the creative direction are responsible for staying within the constraints set by the production. This means that, in essence, everyone is responsible to someone.
2 months, 2 extra days a week + some extra hours on the weekday = ~20 work days = ~1 month.
If these developers receive 1 month's salary bonus or 1 month off of work then it sort of makes up. If it's business as usual after shipping then that's just messed up.
Basic probabilistic calculus allows you to account for reiteration risk (i.e. "there is an X chance we're going to have to throw this away and do it again") in a similar manner.
Or, you could simply set project deadline and release date further apart, so that there is a buffer for the inevitable delay.
The reason why none of these work is that they allow you to make a better schedule, but they don't stop you from overloading it. "Hey, it looks like they're going to do meet their deadline, so let's give them one more task, because obviously they're not working hard enough!" Some people, if given more time, will simply keep making up more stuff that absolutely, totally, undisputably needs to get done. Their team will always spend the last six months crunching, even if the project took twenty years to complete.
Personally, I believe that crunch is wrong. But Kaos's approach is quite common in our industry. If one instance of 60 day crunch shocks you, then you ought to visit more devs in SF and LA... The true scope of long-term crunch in our industry is much larger than you seem to think.
While I can't speak first-hand for Wolfenstein and Singularity, my understanding is significant effort also went into shipping these titles.
Now, I'm not going to say Raven was an evil pl
ace (second best to where I am now, as it would turn out),but
Anyway, there are without question good people there, but Raven has also seen tremendous turnover, 2 major layoffs recently, and its fair share of destructive crunch. And Keith has seen it. You're right, the problem is VERY large. That still doesn't make it ok.
But as a musician first and foremost who has been branching into video game design, I must say that most people employed in the video game business seem very...boring? No offense, but great art is made by great artists who throw themselves into their craft completely. I find most video game professionals to be very decidedly uncreative, and, frankly, whiny. You are artisans of a craft.
Point being, I've spent countless hours working on things for the sheer love of it, with no concern for pay, recognition or industry-approval. It sounds to me like a game company needs all-hands on deck and instead of a team of creative artisans banding together to finish their product, people complain about working 7 days a week. If you're lucky enough to being paid to create digital games and are on a team that has a project actually WORTH putting extra time into, it sounds like a win-win-win to me. Yet, people whine...
I find it hard to argue that the video game industry should be treated as the next true creative medium when the field seems to be so full of whiny, mediocre talent. (To be clear, I'm not stating the author is or is not such, just that I find it hard to see what the problem really is...)
I love it when people say "No offense" while saying something completely offensive.
"Hey, no offense, but your baby looks like a half retarded orangutan that's been beaten in the face with an ugly stick. No offense, man, no offense!"
But you're right. People shouldn't complain about insane working conditions that lead to career threatening mental burn-out, family issues, and possible medical problems. They should do it for the art, man. /sarcasm
As well to single out the video game industry for having mostly bland and mediocre talent without acknowledging that all forms of art have an equal amount if not more bland and mediocre talent is absurd. Every industry is full of boring and mediocre talent, maybe other industries have more interesting people but the talent is no greater. Honestly the art work I have seen from artist working on video games typically far exceeds the art I see from any other industry, especially art you see in a museum.
Q: "Why is 90% of science fiction crap?"
A: "90% of everything is crap."
:-)
"I find it hard to argue that the video game industry should be treated as the next true creative medium..."
Don't try too hard, we don't really need you.
For one thing, these people are professionals. They are paid to do a job, and as anyone else here working in games can tell you, games are one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration. Only very small numbers of people have the opportunity for creative work, and even they are heavily constrained by marketing and other business reality. When you are a line artist reducing polygons for for months on end to get the frame rate up, saying "do it for the art" is about the most patronizing and ignorant thing you could say.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that point, haha.