An amusing little story
2 Likes
I dunno, because when you show up to do something for free for 40 hours a week someone who wants to get paid to do that same thing gets fired, because they just werenāt quite enthusiastic enough about orcs and/or they have kids, other dependents, health issues, interests that donāt involve orcs, a need for sleep, a lack of a desire to sacrifice themselves for third quarter earnings, sdadfhar6tjwyjdghkjfgjkfhjkhk
2 Likes
War Games is a really good map. I canāt put my finger on why I greatly prefer the retouched TF1 maps to the TF2 originals. A lot of them allow you to get Titans into the fray easier.
This has got to be Frontier Defense.
Youāre right that itās unfair.
I mean, I would prefer to work on my own stuff, but the energy sap from the hour back to my place means I get more out of staying late.
Iām not sure how to square the circle that people psychologically inclined towards working extra also tip expectations unfairly against those working a humanistic schedule; I know that I donāt expect that out of others but will defend my right to make semi-creative output as much as I want.
I wish the project Iām working on was worth more than a 40 hour work week
this is putting it diplomatically
go home
you donāt need to be sitting under the watchful idea of producer man to think about what would be cool. go home and think about it. if youāre only doing it because you want to do it, no one needs to know about it.
I may or may not have perfectionist tendencies and issues with delegating responsibility! I may or may not have spent the last week re-doing work implemented by someone else that wasnāt done correctly!
But honestly have you seen the garbage that ships in AAA games? Thereās a very high standard of interrogation to design that Iām used to from the āprofessional indieā scene thatās lacking at big studios and I can only cope by creeping responsibility as I grow ashamed of more and more systems (seriously I thought ranged aiming would be owned and locked down but itās barely a hundredth of a programmerās time; Jaime Griesemer could fox this up in a week but no one has taken responsibility and I want to but itās way too late but I know how to make it better and it kills me that itās not)
Working on something this big has meant ignoring lots of things Iād normally stay late to fix because they matter because good games matter.
1 Like
Unfortunately an hour of fruitful design talk usually translates to 10-40 person-hours of implementation. Iād be happy to spend a lot more time talking and less implementing but thatās just not how it goes.
Normally Iād be able to work remote with the build on my home machine but here Iād have to Remote Desktop in and thatās not feasible for gameplay stuff; still, itās not like a Japanese āhours of face-time with the bossā culture (boy Iāve heard enough war stories from friends)
(wait hereās a good one)
I have a friend who worked at Aki in the early 2000s. Mandatory late nights every night, terrible pay ($30k/year in Tokyo). Heās going to with a group to a wrestling match at about 9pm, heās in the elevator, the doors are closing. A pair of hands shoots through and grabs him by the neck. āGet back to work, nowā ā itās his 5ā5" boss (heās 6ā3"). He goes back to his desk, works until midnight.
2 Likes
Look Iām sorry to be Mr. Fucking Privileged up in here but clearly you donāt know what itās like to have a job you love doing creative work on a project you want to be proud of, getting home, and being completely unable to distract yourself from thinking about the problem you need to solve or the thing you need to design
āGo home and think about itā is clearly the kind of thing someone whoās never had that would say. Thatās the problem. Only being able to think about it feels like a waste of time when you could be doing something concrete if you were back at the office.
I feel like a dick because this post reads like āsorry you hate your job, maybe if you loved it, youād start to understandā. Maybe someone should write a thinkpiece about how loving your job or getting emotionally involved with your projects is Actually Badā¢. Iām also fully willing to admit that my obsessive personality type is Not Helpingā¢ in this scenario.
But no one is saying the consequences of these choices donāt exist, but letās not kid ourselves: this is society, where everything is unfair, and the only real choice you get is not if someone else gets screwed by your actions but how.
1 Like
the mildest things I would say in response to these posts would piss you two off tremendously and piss me off ten times more
I will never, ever make video game software for a living. At least not in America. Iāve been working a lot of overtime the last few months (drafting for a civil engineering firm) and thereās still more to come but Iāve made it known exactly how much Iām willing to work and havenāt taken any crap from the people above me trying to pressure me to work more.
I wish I had something I was passionate about that I could turn into a career but like most working people in the world my job is just a means to an end and not a path toward self actualization.
Crunch culture is a straight up sickness and a product of poor planning, unrealistic expectations and our twisted social values.
Not casting judgement or anything (your whole way of life is wrong!)
heh
I have a lot of respect for placing firm boundaries on what work can expect from you; itās the most basic form of labor rights after all.
Iām sorry I keep nervously picking at this but I just want to express why I do this. I love to make games. I would much, much rather work on my own projects but Iām only slowly navigating myself into a position where Iām able to do so. In the meantime, Iāll work extremely hard on a game thatās not my own because I love to make games more than I respect my labor. Iām not doing it for recognition or money.
My previous job was at a tech startup making a failed Pokemon Go precursor. Nobody worked late and boy! the game was a piece of garbage. I didnāt work late there either except two circumstances:
- Convincing the companyās creative director, a TV writer, to drop his terrible design ideas and implement my realistic and considered ideas; mostly this meant getting him into a room and patiently wearing him down over four hours in the eveniung. Luckily he only visited the office once a week.
- Working a convention, which is the bleeding edge of stress and chaos that energizes me; we had monthly builds and exhibits at comic cons and flying out for a crazy weekend was the part of the job I actually looked forward to because it was new and challenging.
1 Like
Yep, when youāre doing what you love itās not really a job anymore. Work practices at AAA studios that Iāve heard about sound like a cult though, where if youāre not willing to give 150% and then some what are you even doing there. Not everyone who wants to work in video games should be expected to constantly crunch and sacrifce their lives for it though.
That just leads to less people overall being involved in the process, less diversity of voices giving input, only the youngest, hungriest, most idealistic True Believers willing to stick it out to stay in for the long haul. Just bad for video games overall. By Gamers, For Gamers.
1 Like
man, I think I used to feel this way too? but now Iām questioning whether I ever did. Iām not sure I like games that much anymore!
Iām finally setting aside the time to work on my own game(s) and like, itās way more satisfying than anything Iām doing at work, but Iām not sure if itās because Iām working at a VR company while being a heavy VR pessimist or if itās just that Iām not cut out to work on games I donāt love. I hope itās the former!
1 Like
Honestly from a perspective of this one studio the problem is not the workload enforcing diversity as much as the hiring and cultural views of the people working there. At this point in my life I couldnāt move back to midwest suburbia because I like the pulsing weirdness of the city. Work is 90% white guys between 25-35 and itās just sad. The bathrooms on our floor of the office building are customized, of course ā 5 stalls, 5 urinals in the menās room,
one stall in the womenās room.
I also get distressed at the monocultural influences. Everyone plays either Overwatch or Hearthstone religiously; nearly everyone pulls from the same well of pop-culture movies and TV shows, exclusively. A lot of this is my distant perspective and lack of intimacy with their interests but so much of the samey output of AAA is this dance between limited creative impulses and binding market considerations.
4 Likes
I think itās generally better to divide your attention like this but itās honestly less stressful for me to indulge in one project rather than feel guilty that Iām not contributing enough to multiple.
Just want to highlight that this might be your main problem from what Iām hearing here. You have one half of the lead/manager skillset ā perspective, curiosity, introspection, prioritization ā but not the other half ā delegation, escalation, influence. So you desperately try to improve things with pure individual-contributor work, realizing how insufficient it is to solve the problems youāve identified. You should be a lead, it would be better for both the company and for you. I donāt know enough about your companyās politics to advise you on how to make that happen ā or if itās possible for you to start behaving more like a lead without formal authority ā but itās a part of resolving the tensions youāre expressing here.
Also if youāre already being told to delegate, then you need to figure out how to make that happen compatibly with your perfectionism. You want to structure the task such that another person is fully responsible for the portions which will likely will be done correctly by them with no input on your part needed at all ā while you still stay involved in the delegated project to help make sure you still control design or other difficult concerns that you trust only yourself to get right. So delegation comes in degrees from total handover to occasional check-ins to 50-50 time spent.
Note: above advice assumes that your company is not totally dysfunctional. If itās super hierarchical+they canāt recognize your talent and give you authority / itās simply impossible with the staffing + timeline + average-talent-level + technical debt to do these things better even if you were empowered to deploy influence to make everyone around you work better and smarter, then I dunnoā¦ you could probably find another company where you could make a bigger difference.
2 Likes
I have been complaining nonstop about this and will continue to complain about it. Why, when literally more of human culture is cheaply available than at any point in the past, are we still engaging with the same narrow set of shit. Why?
7 Likes
I think youāre double screwing yourself by working late to fix things other people did poorly. Youāre working late, and you canāt hire people who do things right because most of them donāt want to work super late. The people you want to hire go work somewhere with a lot less stress and better pay.
2 Likes