bulletin witch

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my hatred of video games is why my one-person game studio name is gonna be “fuck you software”

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I’d like to make a shovelware company named spadesoft.

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I also don’t understand how this ridiculous crunch even produces results, I can code for about 20 hours a week max before there’s a huge drop in my productivity and I need to work on something else

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it only produces “results” insofar as “results” mean “the bullshit goalpost moving we did 2 weeks before the build deadline”

otherwise it doesn’t

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Missing the days when a game was scheduled for Q2 1993 and just showed up at Kmart in November or whatever.

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isn’t it the typical “this guy was in office till 2 AM ergo he works hard” being applied

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It’s no problem that half the players of ullamaliztli get sacrificed as long as new players are waiting in the wings.

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there’s a reason I lost half my animators to this game for a few months last year

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the animation is at least very good :confused:

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Even Ashes of Time?? lol

(to clarify: i like that film but i sure hope they got a better print than the one that was used for the 2008 “restoration”)

I’m gettin pretty pumped

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oh wow you can play as like anyone and declare yourself emperor

the alternate history possibilities of this are ridiculous

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yeah there is a whole lot of ck2 in there (with a whole new and extremely thorough setting!) for a series that was always about the battles first and the map layer second

really really excited

The other day, I was talking with a friend who’s employed as a creative lead for an app developer working on a payday loan project. At the meeting for the proposal he raised a strong objection to the project only to be told that “you live in a capitalist country, deal with it”.

If you were to go to his company’s website you’d see the a hip, stylish, modern culture advertised with all the millennial workplace trappings one comes to expect from a “startup”. I think working in the games industry has that same sort of appeal for a lot of people in the sense that we think being in a smaller creative company of like-minded people will lead to a more accommodating, open work environment. Obviously, what we’re finding is the opposite in a lot of ways.

I work for a large, multi-national corp and the irony is that the power isn’t nearly as concentrated at the top as you’re lead to believe. If my boss ever gave me some sort of disgusting nickname, all I would need to do is contact HR and his ass would be in some serious trouble. This level of oversight/accountability seems to be non-existent with smaller companies? I realize working in my nebulous corporate capacity is different than the games industry and it’s not like the largest developers haven’t had their fair share of issues either, but some days I’m really happy I work for the big company with resources available that take employee concerns seriously to ensure a more comfortable work/life balance.

I don’t have any work skills nor am I passionate about my job, so it makes sense for me to limit my participation to only 40 hours per week but it fucking sucks to see to passionate/skilled people subjected to this treatment. Working conditions during this neo-lib hellscape all have the same features: unchecked power concentrated at the top, the “minimum” hours are actually NOT minimum, underpaid contract work, etc. I know nothing I’m typing is illuminating in any sense but the more we can push back against this mess the better.

For anyone interested I found a free PDF of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. Its an accessible read and short!

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I think it’s very similar to a lot of small business environments: as a worker, you can feel a lot more invested, that your input and relationships matter, but you run deep risks of petty tyrants who completely don’t know how to run their business, and a general lack of institutional knowledge and backing leads to lots of feast/famine freakouts.

and you get paid a lot less

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I work for a small company that plays at being a big company.

We have no HR, no union, and I was hired by a power-hungry IT manager who did a lot of damage centralizing many tasks under himself and him alone.

Thankfully he’s gone, but we still have issues; for eight months I was being paid my 40hrs a week salary but working 56 hours over six days while our new manager got up to speed. I’ve managed to get those hours cut back and a small pay increase, but that came at the cost of what we REALLY needed (another IT person). Plus I had to sign a waiver saying I have to repay my raise if I quit within the next two years.

The last small company I worked for kept fucking up their tax reporting, which has still affected me to this day.

Before that I worked for the government, which is as big as you can get. There were other issues there, but at least I had a union and HR personnel I could deal with.

damn

I’m the fool who romantically pines for the small-company days where I cared enough that I would stay late often, because my direct actions had such power over the game. Now my work is through emanations and perturbations and occasional dips into micro-feedback and I’ve been taught that it’s not my game and I wish I could care like that again

I mean, I’d love to have a job where I’m creating something, instead of just solving problems and reacting.

I’ve built some tools while here and made some of our work easier, and I love doing it, but it’s not the focus of my job. Most of my time is just putting out fires when they happen.