Current Events > New York Times: Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/opinion/work-culture-video-games-crunch.html?

Among video game developers, its called crunch: a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family and even food. Crunch makes the industry roll but its taking a serious toll on its workers.

In late 2011, as he was finishing up production on the role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the programmer Jean Simonet started feeling severe stomach pains. At first, doctors were perplexed. But on his third emergency room visit, he revealed that hed been regularly staying at the office late and coming in on weekends to fix bugs and add features that he thought would take Skyrim from good to great, no matter how much sleep he lost along the way.

He took his doctors advice and took the next few weeks off work, trying to relax and acclimate to a normal sleep schedule. With this hiatus from crunch, eventually the pain just disappeared, he said.
Anecdotes like this are common in the video game industry, which generated $30.4 billion in the United States last year but has a human cost that cant be calculated. The designer Clint Hocking described suffering memory loss as a result of the stress and anxiety of crunching on a game. Brett Douville, a veteran game programmer, said he once worked so long and for so hard that he found himself temporarily unable to step out of his car.

Modern video games like Mass Effect and Uncharted cost tens of millions of dollars and require the labor of hundreds of people, who can each work 80- or even 100-hour weeks. In game development, crunch is not constrained to the final two or three weeks of a project. A team might crunch at any time, and a crunch might endure for several months. Programmers will stay late on weeknights to squash bugs, artists will use weekends to put the final polish on their characters, and everyone on the team will feel pressured to work extra hours in solidarity with overworked colleagues.

In a 2016 survey by the International Game Developers Association, 65 percent of developers said theyd had to crunch, with 52 percent adding that theyd done it more than twice in the previous two years. (Of those who said they did not crunch, 32 percent noted that their job did require periods of long hours, extended work hours or extended overtime that was just not called crunch. )

People think that making games is easy, said Marcin Iwinski, a co-chief executive and co-founder of CD Projekt Red, the Polish developer of a 2015 game, The Witcher 3. Its hard-core work. It can destroy your life.

Mr. Iwinski, like many other top video game creators, sees crunch as a necessary evil. He and other developers say because of the rapid evolution of video game technology, among other reasons, the time it takes to complete basic tasks can vary drastically from project to project, which makes it difficult to plan accurate schedules.

A growing faction of game developers, however, argues that its possible to make good games without crunching. Tanya X. Short, a co-founder of the independent studio Kitfox Games, asked colleagues to sign an online pledge against excessive overtime. The pledge, which was published last year, has been signed by over 500 game developers.

Game developer work culture sounds horrible.
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the video game industry is going to crash sooner than later
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All that work and Skyrim is still buggy as shit
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This shit sucks.
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Turbam posted...

All that work and Skyrim is still buggy as shit

Yeah, because the fucking bug guy took weeks off!
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He should've spent more time leveling Restoration. It's his own fault.
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All the favorite development studios are really bad with crunch. Naughty Dog was in a crunch for huge periods for both The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. They barely got a break. Lost Legacy sounded a lot easier to deal with even with the shorter turnaround.

I think CDProjektRed is really bad with it.
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Darmik posted...

I think CDProjektRed is really bad with it.

But...But much CDPR are le indie saviors of le vidya
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Then they turn that hard work into lootboxes and microtransactions.
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No wonder Persona 5 is made with so much love, the people who created it were allowed 8 hours of sleep and a normal life in general
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I feel sorry for those devs who spend a year or so working hard on a game and just get fired because they don't need that position for a few months. That must suck.
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It's ridiculous how video games have gotten shittier yet more expensive to create and yet still manage to fail to impress the public. Even worse is when they piss off the public so people pirate that shit instead, through to be honest, i think those people were planning on pirating anyway and just wanted to justify their stealing .
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Jiek_Fafn posted...

He should've spent more time leveling Restoration. It's his own fault.

Bethesda could've prevented it by just placing some shrines of the divines around the office.

I hear those poor sods don't even have a wall!
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