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| 03.15.2007Free Agency
Free agency is hardly a revolutionary philosophy in an entertainment industry; the movies have had it for decades. As the Games industry moves in on Hollywood, using many of their people and techniques to etch into their markets, we cannot help but become more like them (see Roman Empire for examples). We have our cinematographers, our marketing driven productions, crushing schedules, our voice actors and special effects studios.
For a long time the heavy dependency on hardware and talent pools (and sunshine) held movies to one town; Los Angeles. Now that these restrictions are being invented away, movies are becoming de-centralized. The games business is starting out de-centralized; a company may set up anywhere there is office space, within reason. What does this matter to free agency?
First: Movie style free agency works best when most productions are local; one can only travel so far so many times for work and maintain a semblance of a family life. Changing continents once a cycle in search of that perfect game is fun for a little while, but eventually will wear on you.
Second: The movie industry supports free agency in that the unions provide the said agents a pension and health plan; without such safety nets free agency becomes rather unattractive. Short term production companies would hardly be expected to shoulder this burden, especially spread throughout the world as they are under varied laws and tax structures.
Third: Game company employees gain much of their training through on-job and company training programs (such as EA’s EAU). In the movies, free agents get some of this training from their union, which also takes on the responsibility to screen out poor performers before they burden a production company. Free agents without such a centralized training support will then be overall less skilled and have to learn by fire on a tight production schedule’s dime; rather than as they do now via training programs run by their permanent HR development departments. Short term productions would not be expected to shoulder the additional cost to train workers when most of that benefit is passed on to the free agent’s next employer.
But workers have to learn somewhere, and colleges do not provide the level of practical education necessary to just “plug and play” into a full speed production. This sort of training centralization either comes from a company studio (inherently centralized) or from a centralized training group that only weakens over distance.
I am in no way arguing for a Union, only saying that the support structures that have allowed free agency to thrive in the movies are not present in our industry; so free agency remains a dream for most.
The movie-style free agency system does make the most sense given the similarity of our production cycles, and allows maximum (and much needed) flexibility to both workers and production companies. Workers need room to follow games that they actually want to make, and production companies can be less worried about long term overhead and more focused on the games at hand.
Imagine the flexibility of nearing a deadline and being able to call in 20 trained guys for two weeks to hammer through it rather than potentially burning out your whole team months before final? The pipeline would have to be massively standardized in order for it to work, but you get the idea.
As much as I love the idea of free agency, I just don’t see it working for the rank and file in practical terms until the support structures, in whatever form, are created. The de-centralized nature of our industry makes this extremely difficult however, and it may stay a dream in all but the most studio-dense cities (like Southern California).-Evan Webb
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Letters to the Editor
