Game development is not the healthiest activity today. This is the opinion of Jason Schreier, editor of Kotaku and author of the book about the difficult life of developers “Sweat, Blood and Pixels”. Why so, he told on the pages of The New York Times. We offer a short translation of the material.
In the role of the main villain, Jason has a crunch. We are talking about increasing the working day to 20 hours for several days or even weeks. At this time, developers sleep in the office and refuse everything that can distract them from work.
“Crunch drives the industry, but costs its workers dearly,” writes Jason.
At the beginning of 2011, when work on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was approaching the final, its programmer Jean Simonet began to experience severe abdominal pain. The doctors were at first at a loss. Then, when he told them that he not only stays at work late, but also comes to her on weekends, polishing the game, he was advised to rest and change the regime. It helped.
In March 2005, Creative Director of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Clint Hocking (Clint Hocking) began to experience memory lapses in connection with the delivery of the project. Then he worked on the game for 70-80 hours a week instead of the usual 40.
Even earlier, in 2001, the designer of Jedi Starfighter Brett Duval (Brett Douville), when handing over the project, took on the tasks of a retired programmer. So his work week suddenly turned into an 80-hour week. All this led to the fact that at some point he simply could not get to his feet and get out of the car.
Situations like those described above are quite ordinary for the industry. That’s what Jason says. And if we can calculate how much games earn per year, then it is impossible to know how they affect the health of employees.
In 2016, in a study by IGDA (International Game Developers Association), 65% of respondents said they had a crunch. 52% noted that their number had doubled over the past two years. 32% of those who reported no crunches added that their work “requires periods of overtime, which is not called crunching.”
When Jason interviewed Marcin Iwinski, co–founder of CD Projekt Red, for his book, he said that one should not think that creating games is a simple matter: “It’s a difficult job. It can ruin your life.”
At the same time, Ivinsky, like other developers, considers crunch a necessary evil. According to him, due to the rapid development of development technologies, as well as a number of other reasons, the time spent on the simplest tasks is changing significantly. This leads to the fact that planning often becomes ineffective.
Jason believes that if developers want to avoid health problems in the future, they need to stop justifying a culture in which crunch is the norm. A night or a weekend at work, of course, may be necessary for the project and even please, but on a permanent basis they only harm. No video game is worth a burnout or a night in the hospital.
“Developers should constantly tell their bosses and, more importantly, themselves that health should come first,” James sums up.
A source: The New York Times