IGDA: Regarding Overtime Concerns at Rockstar San Diego

I am glad to see IGDA response on the matter.  Hopefully this situation can be resolve and everyone can be happy on both side (employees having more time with their family and management having productive employees that produce great games) as in my opinion employees that are well treated with normal hours will be more productive and motivated then employees that are press until burn out, exhaustion.

Effectively, that is all the IGDA has.

What would you want the IGDA to do? It cannot sanction Rockstar, nor can it take legal action.

All it can do is condemn work practices it finds wrong and destructive. But that's the point. An individual developer can decry unhealthy and immoral working conditions, but when the organization for professional game developers does so, it should carry more weight.

We're already seeing news stories pick up the IGDA press release, and that is what the IGDA can offer. As Justice Brandeis said, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

What can we do as an organization to move forward on this matter which clearly upsets all of us. Could we come up with some plan for action? Perhaps IGDA leadership could reach out to Rockstar San Diego leadership for comment and to provide resources in an effort to help corrent their quality of life issues.

Could the IGDA serve as a mediator for employee concerns to top brass?

I am glad to see IGDA's quick repsonse to this issue. I am very disheartened by the negative remarks. I am hoping it is just a loud minority.

This is an appropriate response to this issue.  The QoL white paper has helped move this debate forward.  A decade ago, death march conditions were worse and considered an expected part of game development.   Thing have changed without a union.

The wives can sue and might just, given the experiences shared by Erin Hoffman (EA Spouse).

Moving forward, we might want to look at ways for excessive overtime to be reported anonymously through the IGDA so that things don't have to go so far.

You don't need unions and bureaucracys to shed light on the problem.  I'm sure the bad press alone is creating a great deal of pressure right now to address this than what was happening a week ago before any of this came to light.

No matter what ANYONE says, when you make waves - anon or not - it has a ripple effect that causes people to lose their jobs. And lets not even go into the stress inducing nature of the whole thing which I'm sure any therapist can take apart with ease and subsequently put everyone on anti-anxiety and anti-stress meds.

I honestly hope I'm just misreading your comment, Derek.  You really think the best approach to this problem is to pop some Xanax and stick our heads in the sand?  It's that type of attitude that has our industry in this situation to begin with.  Management at all of these studios uses the fact that their employees want to ship the best product possible to coerce the staff to work ridiculous numbers of unpaid hours.  And we encourage it to happen by showing these companies that there are no real consequences for their transgressions.  Every time you silently work the deathmarch, you reinforce crunch as a valid business strategy.

Are there risks in trying to change the status quo?  Absolutely.  But, ultimately, anything worth doing in life comes with some measure of risk.  Tell me, if the whole staff at R*SD walked off the job and refused to return until their concerns had been addressed, would they all be fired?  Would T2 just shuttle the whole studio?  Not bloody likely.  That's an extreme example, but the point remains. 

So if it helps you sleep at night, you take your meds and accept things as they are.  For the rest of us, the path of change is long and difficult.  But, as with all journeys, the only way to reach the finish is to take that first step - and this type of public admonishment seems like a pretty good one.

Hi Derek. You bring up a lot of points, and not a lot of organization between them, so I'm not sure what your core takeaway point is, but since you invoked my name...

Go ahead, contact Erin and find out how many of the non-anon folks who were around during the EA Spouse debacle are still there today. Sure they could have moved on voluntarily or down-sized at the cost of doing business; but nevertheless, thing about that for a minute and see if you can convince yourself that the millions the debacle cost EA didn't have any effect on jobs at the affected studios.

This is a bit of a distraction. The "non-anon", and the "anon" at EA from that time are indeed mostly not there -- and they are much, much happier, in every single case of the many I've talked to. The dynamics of EA's decisions to hire and layoff staff are much more complex than a single lawsuit, and I would challenge you to rationally isolate the effect of the overtime lawsuits alone -- it can't be done. EA has been distressed for years for reasons entirely unrelated to the lawsuit fallout. The two are only connected in the reverse, insofar as a studio in distress has a higher tendency to overwork its talent due to its shortfalls in market prediction and ability to adapt. The ~$30m from the two OT lawsuits was a blip on their radar, but for perspective, that figure amounts to 0.008% of EA's 2008 net revenue ($3.67 billion). It's enough to make a blip on a chart, and to cause change -- not enough to cause their studio closures and layoffs, which are instead strategic, as you can bet they're telling their stockholders. If they were to damage themselves by cutting that much staff on the basis of two lawsuits, they'd be shooting themselves in both feet, and they actually are not that stupid. Your assumption that "waves" at these large companies cause direct loss of jobs is not based in fact and is a fear-based assumption that has kept a stranglehold on the industry for years.

Developers have rights, and they should be using them. This is all in addition to Tim Woodbury's very correct points.

Hi Derek,

The distraction itself was the example you used -- "find out how many of the non-anon folks who were around during the EA_spouse debacle are still there today". You insinuated or stated that their absence was from firing or layoffs as a result of the worker action, which is flatly not true.

The danger here and throughout QOL discussions is the perpetuation of absolutes and mythology surrounding working practices. Because people are so emotionally invested in their careers and livelihoods, it's often difficult for them to separate themselves to a useful analytical distance -- and I say this as a person mostly known for writing an angry emotional rant about working conditions. What I have found throughout over five years now of fighting for this cause is that it is very complex and there are almost NO absolutes. The route to fixing it can be won, but it's won slowly and on multiple fronts at the same time. This makes it difficult to track and impossible to make a simple absolute statement about. And when people make statements like "this is ALWAYS X", it preys on our predisposition to fear and lash out and get angry instead of solving problems. And for some of us, the mission of solving those problems is really, really important.

So looking at your statement above, I see a number of problems:

[no matter what], [noise or no noise], [anything related to standing up and speaking against something like this] [AT YOUR JOB] [can and will] [lead to people being fired] [at some point].

It's full of absolutes and vagaries at the same time. What does "at some point" mean? How would you test and track that? You can't. People are let go for all sorts of reasons, so a statement that "X will lead to people being fired at some point" is empty because "X" could be anything and still be non-falsifiable.

So let's cut it down to a thesis: 1) speaking up about QOL; 2) at your job; 3) will lead to people being fired:

The absolutes don't work here. This depends at the very least upon:

1) How you speak up;

2) What you say;

3) Who you say it to;

4) Where you work.

All of these are generally manifestly within a developer's control to change, and those are the things that we're trying to educate on to empower developers to take charge of their own quality of life. And they absolutely SHOULD speak up. And if they DO work for a developer that will fire them for 1) reasonably 2) in an educated fashion 3) in respectful disposition 4) presenting solutions and not just problems -- then their solution is to find another employer.

Employers that will cut your head off for "speaking up" do exist, and frankly shouldn't. But they are not "all", "no matter what", "noise or no noise", "can and will". The absolutes in your perspective are immediately dismissable with a single counterexample because it's such a rigid statement. And QOL is not a rigid issue.

The "why" people don't speak up is founded on an assumption (people don't speak up in their jobs -- they do, actually) and is another separate analysis independent from the answer you have before your question.

...WE NEED TO UNIONIZE!!!!!

Hi Derek,

I've re-read your comment a number of times over the past few days, and it still reads the same to me.  From your comments on the original blog post over at Gamasutra, it's clear that you belive that crunch is not an inevitable part of working in the games industry but a practice that we've allowed to exist that should change.  Your post here is, to me, a bit of a contadiction.  You sound like you want change but, in the same breath, you come up with reasons why it's impossible/improbable.  It seems as if others have come to the same conclusion from reading your post, so perhaps it is the phrasing that betrays your intent.

I have to agree strongly with Erin on this issue.  Speaking up against workplace injustice is not necessarily a path to the unemployment line.  As she correctly put it, your job security in that scenario is largely dependent on factors over which you as an individual have complete control - namely: what you say, how you say it, and to whom.  To give you a personal example, I worked for an employer who put us on an impossible schedule of building four titles from spec to ship in just under three months.  Crunch started immediately.  We worked 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week (including Thanksgiving and, if not for a freak Seattle snow storm, Christmas).  We worked that schedule for five months - yes the schedule slipped... it had to.  Everyone worked around 2 productive hours a day and spent the rest of their time writing bugs for the next day, or fixing the bugs they'd written the day before.  At that point, I was done.  I collected myself, went to our engineering lead, and explained calmly and clearly that since they wanted these projects to ship, I would be working 40 hour weeks from then on.  I explained our productivity loss from the overtime as I saw it in the trenches, and I explained the reason the code was so buggy build-to-build.  Not only was I not fired, I got to work the hours I wanted and needed, but the products shipped within the next month (which wouldn't have happened if we were still crunching through that period).  Now, that's merely one example.  It doesn't take into account the "who you work for," that Erin mentioned.  With the wrong studio, maybe I would've been fired.  I admit that as a DINK, I have less skin in the game and can more easily take those kinds of risks. 

Mooning the boss is, by your own admission, a harsh example (and exceedingly immature, btw).  Most anyone would acknowledge that that particular action would not achieve the desired result.  But why is addressing the problem directly and seeking redress not a valid course of action?  If we want to remove the risk that you see in that action, we need to remove the individual from the equation.  I agree with you that the American labor union is an outdated, outmoded system meant to preserve the status quo for the few tenured workers at the expense of both the enterprise and the less tenured workers.  I do, however, believe that we would see great possibility for success with a system not unlike the European works councils or co-determination.  The difficulty is in forcing the necessary legislative changes that would enable those to exist.  This is an area where I think the IGDA will not be a help.  The organization can speak out against companies that allow these conditions to exist but, as you mentioned, the major industry execs have a strong hand in both running and funding this organization.  I believe in the work this organization does for our medium, but it is not and cannot be a driving force for employment law reform as long as it exists as an organization the represents both the employer and the employed.

Just my $0.02 ($0.01 adjusted for inflation)

You might think that management would know how to balance work for the purpose of worker efficiency, but it's simply not true.  When there is a tradition of unpaid overtime, then it's natural for managers to try and get as many of them as possible - in the same way that an animal will often eat all the food it is given, even if it then become very fat and slow.

Food gives you energy, to a certain point, beyond which it makes you lose energy.  Payment for overtime is usually about 1.5x, so the pay scale balances out to discourage overtime unless absolutely necessary.  However, unpaid overtime discourages balance, and because of temptation, there need to be rules set down to control the natural tendency of managers to exert overtime.

Basically what I'm saying is that unpaid overtime is like giving managers unlimited free twinkies.

@ Tim

Wait. What? Tone?

First you said I wasn't clear. Then you mis-interpreted what I wrote. Now its my tone?

I realize that without a face-to-face exchange, it is hard to gauge someone's stance, but nowhere was I even gearing towards an argument, let alone a flamewar. Why would I?

If you and I were facing each other at a panel having this exchange, I doubt that the things would be any different. Except for the fact that you'd be able to tell from my face, posture and stance, that we were having a debate, not a flamewar.

Anyway, I give up. Have at it.

For the record, it is exchanges like this that end up causing issues to get lost in the noise and people just move on like it never happened. Then everything becomes inconsequential and we've all but wasted our collective time.