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No Studio Is An Island

Scenes from the Quality of Life Summit

by Matthew Sakey

 

Industry, Deceive Thyself

Whenever I think about quality of life in the game industry, I'm reminded of a scene from Jaws :

Hooper, the marine biologist, is teasing the oceanophobe police chief Martin Brody: “It doesn't make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island,” says he.

To which Brody blandly replies, “It's only an island if you look at it from the water.”

The quality of life dilemma is just like that. If you live on an island, you're eventually going to have to deal with water. There's (literally) no way around it. Here in the games business, our own dirty secret – that victims of the Ukrainian sex trade get better treatment than most studio employees – has been similarly… not ignored, but collectively self-deceived to the proverbial back burner. Pretending that it's not an island won't make it less so, and the cracks around this already fragile mindset are widening fast.

EA_spouse didn't ignite the quality of life problem, nor did her post sweep away a concealing veil and surprise us all. We've known for years that employees in the game industry are worked to physical and emotional collapse, that the vast majority leave before their 35 th birthday, that the business end knows and does nothing. What EA_spouse said wasn't a wake-up call, it was a last call. Though she never said it, her missive finally got nearly everyone to recognize a truth that should have been apparent for ages: that the industry faces disaster if something is not done.

And so a summit on quality of life was held in early March at the 2005 Game Developers Conference. Speakers and panelists provided a look at our options from all angles. The matter is complicated, and very much intertwined with our other challenges; games are wrestling with diversity, dwindling innovation, violence and acceptance issues alongside quality of life. And while the Summit produced no lightbulb-burst answers, it clarified a host of muddy sub-issues. Best of all, the industry for once put aside its xenophobia and listened to outsider views. What they had to say was eye-opening indeed.

Nearly everyone agrees that quality of life needs to be reformed, but opinions vary on what those reforms should be. The Summit helped crystallize them. The truth is that every option offered so far has benefits and drawbacks. Industry groups raise awareness, but cannot enforce reform. Lawsuits, satisfying in a screw-you sort of way, are long-term solutions at best and precedent-setting victories for the bad guys at worst. Prodding from studios that have already adopted sane QoL practices may have some effect, but it's unlikely to foment industry-wide change.

The biggest specter is the U word, looming ever larger since EA_spouse. Massive, revolutionary and potentially damaging change may be forced on us if we prove unwilling to fix the problem responsibly. There's a warning in that, to supporters and opponents alike. Ten years ago, the concept of unionizing the global games industry would be considered ludicrous, but the movement has been gaining steam in direct proportion to employee misery. Publisher greed and developer arrogance have stoked its boilers, and our collective delusion that we're not on an island has turned an oddity into a colossal roaring freight train. Some are saying that we either get on or get squashed.

Developers of the World, Unite

From an article in April's Game Developer to queries across many an industry forum, talk of unionization abounds. It's the atom bomb of solutions to a problem that is quickly growing to atom bomb proportions. But before we start a chorus of Do You Hear the People Sing , we might want to educate ourselves on the process, risks and results. Former union organizer Gina Neff, now a professor teaching labor relations at UC San Diego, guided us through the intricacies of the unionization process and gently implied that it might not be the best solution.

Supporters of the union idea use Hollywood as evidence that it can work in a complex, creative industry like ours. And theoretically it can, but Neff's lecture raised some serious concerns. Unionization takes years – three or four at least, and more likely nine or ten – and the turnover rate in this industry is much higher than that. A huge proportion of people enter, work, rise, and leave within ten years.

Game development's global nature means that even if we do unionize, there will be significant regulatory differences from border to border. And while a number of tech unions are slavering at the possibility of gobbling up the games industry, there is the question of how much they'd actually help. It might be preferable to implement the change ourselves rather than depending on unions to do it for us.

Does anyone in the business – even the pro-unioners – actually want to unionize? I don't believe that they do. People want humane working conditions and pay for overtime. In short, they want a quality of life. And while a union could provide that, the cost would be awfully high. Unionizing seems tasty to those made miserable by hideous working conditions, but it's a declaration of war that will lead to long-term resentment. Management and labor alike might prefer an alternative.

I don't believe unionization is the answer. It will take too long and I have serious doubts about whether certain publishers, and even some developers, would negotiate in good faith. After all, EA and others are already treating employees in a manner that is flatly illegal and getting away with it. A union won't automatically make them ethical. Furthermore, a drive to unionize might accelerate outsourcing and erode the western hemisphere's chunk of the business. So I personally, based in large part on what Dr. Neff said, am not behind unionization – yet. But my position will soon be the minority. If the current trends continue, the choice might be made for us. In the meantime, though, there are other ways.

 

The Good Fight

The IGDA has long been a proponent of sincere reform, issuing a white paper on the subject and calling the industry out with an open letter that makes its position very clear. Francois Dominic Laramee, chair of the IGDA's Quality of Life Committee, has worked tirelessly to promote awareness and reform. His presentation at the Summit skewered conventional wisdom about crunch times and posited that games made by unhappy, exhausted people tend to be buggy and dull. Francois also hosted a round table on quality of life best practices. Based on that discussion, we can expect big things from the QoL Committee this year: the annualization of last year's employee satisfaction survey, probably super-sized with probing new questions. The Committee is also considering an industry code of conduct and possibly special recognition for companies that offer fair labor policies.

The real issue with the IGDA's involvement in quality of life is one of impact. Despite requests from some corners, it's not a union, can't become a union, doesn't want to anyway and has no mechanism to enforce its positions. It is dependent on studio, publisher, and individual memberships for its existence and influence. Its responsibility is to protect the industry from outside threats, provide advocacy and comment on issues. The IGDA can't force reform. That has to come from deeper inside.

Others have been working hard to raise awareness of the problem. Evan Robinson has published numerous articles on the subject, ranging from strong opinions to exquisitely researched proof that the current system is failing. Tom Buscaglia, long a provider of legal advice to the industry, clarified the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act at the Summit and commented on current litigation. Lawsuits are an uphill battle to say the least. Though it would be great to stick it to a company that mistreats its people, the legal bills would be staggering – with no guarantee of victory. EA can (and does) outspend plaintiffs by a zillion to one to protect its unethical behavior in court. Suing is a risky endeavor.

More importantly, lawsuits tend to be pointed at one issue: overtime pay. It's absolutely necessary to explicitly include overtime and comp time in our contracts, but alone that's insufficient. Overtime is just easiest to sue for, which is why it is the principal demand in both lawsuits currently pending against EA. The real concern is that the Fair Labor Standards Act is fuzzy on whether or not game developers are considered exempt from overtime. Even if the suits are successful, we'd still face years of status quo while opponents of QoL reform manipulated the plodding legal system into delay after delay. Even then, assuming victory, the reforms would be limited to one (albeit huge) American company.

 

Extra Crunchy

I tend to believe that “crunch time” is the beginning and end of the problem –compensation and benefits are reasonably good, it's the 100-hour work week, increasingly written into the corporate handbook, that needs fixed. Even EA_spouse's chief complaint was that her partner's health was failing under the onslaught of endless crunch and that the hours were taking their toll not only on him, but on everyone around him and the game itself. The elimination of crunch would almost certainly silence the rumbles of unionization. Convincing opponents that crunch doesn't work, though, is a difficult proposition.

Large, publicly traded companies balk at hour limits because (they claim) a reduced work schedule would negatively impact sales, potentially resulting in actions from angry shareholders. Like most arguments made in favor of inhumane working conditions, this one breaks down under the most casual of examinations. Studies suggest that the 40-hour week results in more productivity over the long term, so the claim that reduced hours would mean slower time to market and diminished sales is simply not valid. Yet the public companies cling to it, due in no small part to the fact that other arguments against reduced schedules are even less compelling.

For reasons largely inexplicable, many supporters of the current model seem to think that standardizing a 40-hour week would make it a law, and any who dared work even a second longer would trigger industry-wide armageddon. They also seem to think that going to a 40-hour week would squish all the passion out of their employees, turning them into khaki-and-oxford wearing McWorkers incapable of creative thought. But that's not what it means; the above claims are little more than a desperate obfuscation. They just sound better than “We support crunch and no overtime because we're greedy and see the people who work for us as replaceable commodities.”

No one has a problem with occasional overtime. Staying late now and then is part of life in every industry. In fact, I bet that most employees would say that occasional and reasonable overtime is expected and doesn't necessarily need to be compensated – within reason. “40 hours a week” as a company policy doesn't mean that under no circumstances will anyone ever be allowed to work even 40:00.01. It means that the company's policy is 40 hours a week.

Overtime, when required , should be confirmed by the supervisor ahead of time and kept to a minimum. The statistics do show that tiny crunch periods – no more than 60 hours a week for two weeks – can boost productivity. Extended crunch means worse games with more bugs and longer dev cycles, because prolonged work and lack of sleep results in increased rate of error and decreased overall output. This is proven. And no, you can't implement a two week crunch/one week regular/two week crunch schedule.

My favorite aspect of institutionalized crunch and massive consolidation are the long-term effects on innovation and creativity. The truth has emerged despite squawks that a 40-hour week would turn employees into uncreative drones. Electronic Arts, distended with avarice, compassionless, haughty, and blind, bludgeons its people with a full time crunch policy but hasn't produced a really original game in years. There are only so many Tolkien franchises to gobble up; only so many sports to claim exclusive rights to. It's just a matter of time before the entire world realizes that the days of Adventure Construction Set and Archon are long gone. EA's blandness is perhaps unsurprising when one considers that employees of their subsidiary studios haven't seen a tree since 1994.

 

Issuing Patches

Approaches to dealing with crunch have, so far, taken one form: offering perks to employees so crunch seems less torturous. Deborah Tillett of BreakAway Games presented her studio as a case study to demonstrate the positive effect such reforms can have on morale and productivity. BreakAway provides everything from paid-for dinners with a partner to organized play dates and help with childcare. Hank Howie of Blue Fang didn't speak at the Summit, but is an outspoken supporter of studio reform, and has implemented changes similar to BreakAway's. Other companies like BioWare and Firaxis are also trying to make things right. In a nutshell, the view from this angle says that great games can't come from miserable studios, and the nominal cost involved with reducing the agony of crunch is well worth the investment. This is very true.

Unfortunately, providing bonus services to minimize the damage is the equivalent of applying a patch to a broken game rather than coding an unbroken one in the first place. Such perks should certainly be available, but studios that offer them do still crunch. The industry does love to patch things, but in this case it might be wiser to rebuild from the ground up.

Crunch happens because projects go out of scope or it takes longer to reach a milestone than the time allotted. It is a result of poor management and process, not a necessity of the business. Crunch is a symptom, and treating the symptom won't cure the underlying problem. The industry doesn't “need” crunch, it needs policies and procedures by which the work is planned correctly and done properly.

 

Treating the Disease

It's not surprising that things like institutionalized crunch are seen as par for the course; we started as a garage industry, where such things are normal. It's almost like no one was looking when games became real, so for a long time there was a shortage of businesspeople, and inappropriate practices remained part of the model. After a while people just became used to it. But the fact is, games aren't a garage industry any more, and if we want to be treated like an adult we have to start acting like one. The games business says, “Improve by working more.” Every shred of research says, “Improve by working better.”

Amusingly, the real solution to the quality of life dilemma has nothing at all to do with quality of life. It's also probably the hardest to apply, but it will make everyone happy. Quality of life is a problem because we never implemented project management best practices or standardized measurement and evaluation processes – systems used to great effect for years in other industries. We just count hours and assume that if it's a high number, things must be going well.

When a game is on schedule, no one should be expected to stay late unless there's a LAN party. The way to ensure this is by correctly planning scope and budget, anticipating unexpected pitfalls, streamlining communication and managing change. Proaction rather than reaction is the key to minimizing the production problems that lead to crunch.

Tobi Saulnier of Vicarious Visions described her studio's approach to process improvement. Using Spiderman for the DS as a guinea pig, Vicarious Visions instituted standardized self-assessment and time management practices, training the team in quality software techniques before beginning preproduction. Policies of no-risk early warning allowed developers who knew something was lagging or out of scope to alert the team without fear of reprisal, and aggressive granularization of items on the project list eliminated difficult-to-plan-for generalizations. Time and activity were used to assess the status of the project, not the commitment of the employee; this gave the line workers the comfort level necessary to bring concerns up earlier.

The result, in addition to shipping on time, was increased morale, better communication with management, more detailed planning techniques, more reusable code, minimized rework and a total buy-in from the team. Tobi did admit that there was a minor crunch at the end, but that's to be expected with a new process. Vicarious Visions will see fewer and fewer scheduling and production problems as they hone the system.

But it was Steve McConnell's amazing keynote that really sold it. You can't refute hard numbers, and his hard numbers showed insane cycle reductions and ROIs – to the tune of thousands of percent – by simply institutionalizing formal design, code, and project inspections that have already been invented and are in use elsewhere. Steve demonstrated that solid, stable, good games can be produced faster and for a fraction of the cost if we just run projects better. Considering that this guy is a guru of software project efficiency, his words had impact.

These processes wouldn't degrade creativity or innovation. The two can coexist because they have almost no bearing on one another. Broken project management, on the other hand, is devastating to creativity. What does it do to a team's innovative spirit when endless hours are spent reinventing the wheel or developing features that wind up on the cutting room floor?

What it really comes down to is planning. We're not very good at planning things accurately. We grossly underestimate milestones and fail to deal properly with unforeseen pitfalls. Employees are afraid to announce problems because they don't want to get blamed. The simple mantra of “work smarter” could lead the business to a Utopia of efficiency in which everyone can go home at 5:30.

Management structures will need to change for this to happen. We tend to promote the “best” person to lead positions, which can be a mistake. Lead Programmer shouldn't necessarily be your “best” programmer, it should be the programmer who can best manage the team. People-wrangling and a flair for organization are the keys to good leadership in a production-oriented business. In addition to instituting formalized best practices for production, the industry needs to improve its executive structure.

While all that would fix the problem in a matter of a few years, there is a deeper root issue at play: that poor treatment of employees and miserable quality of life are so entrenched in the industry's consciousness that many have come to believe we actually need it in order to succeed. This misguided philosophy has been around for a long time, but at the Summit it came from a corner that I, at least, would never have expected.

 

The Passion of the Game Developer

Said our handout of the studio heads' panel that closed the Summit: “this panel of industry leaders will explore the potential for a sustainable future where passion is rewarded, not exploited.” Horrifyingly, they did nothing of the sort.

Many have long assumed that publishers are the chief bad guys in this; of course developers want better quality of life and crunchlessness, but they're bullied by the soul gobbling engines of misery that are the major publishers. Turns out that while publisher behavior isn't doing the industry any good, high-ranking developers are more than a little complicit.

The panel exhibited the most reprehensible form of casual contempt for the plight of their employees. For the plight of themselves . Based on their remarks, a latecomer might assume that none of them even believed that there was a quality of life problem. All we heard for two hours was the perennial favorite moronism that people who work in this industry have “passion,” and passion means long hours.

Shiny's Dave Perry was quite outspoken at the Summit panel: going to a 9-5 schedule, he insisted, would turn his people into Jell-O molds, globularly uniform and bland, robbed of vim and utterly without imagination. It's this passion, he insisted, that makes great games. But all those passionately hyper-creative long hours put in by employees of his studio produced… Enter the Matrix . And while Perry may have laughed all the way to the bank, his own most recent product is compelling evidence of what equating long hours with passion and creativity really results in – buggy, pedestrian, lugubrious games based on tired franchises long bereft of artistic potency.

The real puzzle was the degree to which members of the panel seemed to want things both ways. At the beginning of the discussion, they all sagely agreed that large dev teams were part of the problem – mismanaged, unwieldy. Then at the end they all noddingly opined that large teams were the solution; more people to carry an increased workload. They blasted immature and underqualified management, but didn't seem to believe that a mature, qualified manager might not think a year's worth of 16-hour days are a wise idea. All acknowledged that something must be wrong or else we wouldn't be having a summit, but then insisted that gallons of overtime is just part of a developer's (you guessed it) passion.

The panelists, developers all, did say some things with which no one could take issue – calls for better management, in-depth autopsies of each title shipped, lengthier preproduction, advanced planning, auditing of existing systems. But each and every one of them disputed research demonstrating that a 40-hour work week produces the best time to output to error rate; all insisted flatly that longer hours meant more work done. Presumably they also believe that cooking a turkey for one hour at 500 degrees is the same as cooking it for two hours at 250. And their response to the suggestion that people can be passionate about games while still wanting to see their families was frankly alarming.

"We don't have many married people,” said Julian Eggebretch of Factor 5.

"We burn people out in this business,” said Rich Vogel of Sony Online.

"Studios exaggerate their stories about crunch,” said Joe Minton of Cyberlore.

The guys on the panel, though developers, had no consideration for quality of life. Entitled to their opinions they may be, but the willingness to use passion as a tool of enslavement is unsettling to say the least. And if ranking members of the development community think this way, it's unlikely that any union movement will gain much foothold.

 

The Invisible War

Throughout the Summit, mention was made of the elephant in the room, the gigantic problem about which no one would speak. The colloquialism was used many times. For crunch or against it, insider or outsider, everyone seemed to agree that the games industry has too long ignored a lurking menace, which now threatens to grow into a monster so huge and so horrible that we simply can't fight it off.

Ironically, this monster is gaming's evil twin. It has always been with us, but there was a time when its claws weren't quite so sharp. The guy in 1979 still working on his game project even though he knows it's four in the morning and he has to be at work. The first employees of id, living on pizza and beavering away at Wolfenstein 3D in 24-hour shifts. The indie developer with dreams of making something so special it'll be remembered for decades, forgetting sleep, forgetting food. That, the developer panel could doubtless tell you, is passion .

But passion has become a corporate tool, a yoke of guilt that keeps people chained to their desks, asking themselves why they're at the office after midnight with a baby at home and a spouse they haven't seen in days. I wonder how many developers stare at their monitors and try to remember what it's like to simply love games.

There is still passion in this business – more than in most. The passion is for games, for the worlds they create and the world they help us escape, however temporarily. The passion for machining reality to match imagination, the passion for creating something that thrills, or terrifies, or excites. Passion has been the beating heart of this medium since grad students stayed late to play Space War on a mainframe. Sane business practices won't drive it away. Passion is more readily extinguished by exploitation than by a time card. And deceiving ourselves into the idea that this is how the industry wants to behave would be the biggest mistake of all.

Of course, we could continue to do just that, laboring under the solemn conviction that if we pretend there's no quality of life problem, there won't be one – or at least we won't have to deal with it. If we close our eyes to EA_spouse and everyone else and do nothing, we can ignore the elephant for a while longer.

It's only an island if you look at it from the water.

 

Related Resources/Links

 

Authors' Bio

Eric Zimmerman Matthew Sakey is a writer and consultant. His work includes games-based learning design, curriculum design for game studies programs and research into the cultural impact of the medium. Matthew has written on gaming for Play Meter and Game Developer magazines, AOL, MSN, and others. He reviews games as “Steerpike” at www.fourfatchicks.com and consults with researchers and corporate clients interested in leveraging game technologies for learning. For more information, visit www.matthewsakey.net or email him at matthewsakey -at- comcast -dot- net.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the IGDA.