Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#491

Post by rubicon33 » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #470

rubicon33 wrote: post #294

It's incredible reading through the comments on this post and nobody seems to see the game industry for what it is: the canary in the coal mine. Programming within the game industry is sliding rapidly toward blue collar, and you'd be a fool to assume the problem is contained. The problem for programmers is simple - Supply and Demand. Thanks to a massive publicity push from big tech, the public is being sold - hook li…

Following this logic further, should we try to fight against education initiatives in general too? Educated people are more likely to be able to pick up programming, or take one of many other white-collar jobs. We could team up with people of other white-collar jobs and work on slashing funding for public schools, etc., to make sure future generations don't replace us too soon. Somehow that doesn't seem right. I thin…

Or you could have a more nuanced perspective... Maybe computer science should remain where it belongs - higher education.

Not everyone and their mother needs to "learn to code".

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#492

Post by jtms » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

jimcsharp wrote: post #371

jtms wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reverse corporation of sorts, but with only a single source of revenue. A corporation is a collective that works together to produce something. A union, on the other hand, seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it.

I'm not sure if I'm being poe's law'd or this is going to turn into a recursive thread but... this is also describing a corporation: > seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it

I guess my main points were that corporations differ in that their “host” is basically all of society and they must produce things of value or they die, but a union’s “host” is either a single corporation or industry and they do not directly produce things of value.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#493

Post by kzzzznot » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 12:06 PM UTC

grigjd3 wrote: post #486

sizzle wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the influx of bootcamp grads cause the same effect on the supply and demand of developers?

I have my doubts. Maybe a bootcamp can prep someone to make apps (though I know very little about mobile app development), but at least in my job, I need a pretty in-depth understanding of how technology works. It's not enough to have used Spark a few times but I really need to know what it's good at and what it lacks and I need this understanding across all my tools. I need to know at least the basics of the impleme…

What field do you work in?

In app and web dev this theoretical grounding is less important.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#494

Post by chrisco255 » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #391

chrisco255 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion.

> An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion. This statement is completely and utterly nonsensical to anyone that has even a shallow understanding of the history of labour struggles and unionizing.

Oh I do understand the history. But with modern employment laws for overtime, safety, harassment, etc, workplace conditions are no longer an issue in the United States. In the meantime employee ownership aligns incentives l to operate efficiently and profitably.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#495

Post by Retra » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

jquery wrote: post #485

Retra wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Millionaires don't exist, because who would ever want more money?"

Are you suggesting garbage men will be millionaires? When we're talking about spending trillions and fundamentally changing the relationship between citizens, their government, and work, platitudes convince nobody but the choir.

No, I'm saying people will continue to be garbage men because they want more money. Basic income is not going to stop people from wanting more money.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#496

Post by usefulcat » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

moate wrote: post #370

usefulcat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the root cause of sucky gamedev working conditions (and I'm speaking mainly about developers here, as that is what I have first hand experience with) is the fact that a lot of people just really want to work on games and choose to put up with it. This is especially true for developers; there are plenty of developer jobs out there that are nothing like your typical game studio, and the skills that game d…

Unions do not exist to protect potential members, they exist to protect actual members. Saying "it's harder to break into the industry" isn't going to discourage someone already in the industry. This actually does hit on the major difficulty in unionizing, which is that people want to make games. It seems fun. It feels rewarding to point to something bringing joy to your friends and family and go "I helped make that!…

> Unions do not exist to protect potential members, they exist to protect actual members.

Yes. Often (though not always) by increasing barriers to entry. Either directly, for example by requiring union membership, or indirectly, by increasing the cost of labor, which could mean that companies in the industry will higher fewer people in aggregate.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#497

Post by Nasrudith » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 2:01 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #86

Nasrudith wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AAA scale in general leads to some of the "suckage" issues since the problems occur in all large productions. With the capital comes risk aversion and to recoup the costs they go more lowest common denominator in addition to coordination issues with large teams and scaling. Even less overtime intense efforts like live action movies show these flaws. Now they certainly do have unique pathologies related to the…

And earlier Civilizations had game-breaking exploitable bugs. People have been pining for the mythical good old days since the age of Pliny.

The issue isn't that they had flaws - it is that they had them despite the budget and man-hours involved showing 'they just didn't care' aspects.

Whereas the older ones did it with smaller teams and more constrained resources where seeking efficiency had some weird side effects - granted there were also plenty of 'shovelware' examples from the past.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#498

Post by ido » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #464

slg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don't have to pay…

The way I usually put it is "I'll happily code for free, but if you want me to code up your ideas , you have to pay me more than all the other folks that want me to code up theirs." Interestingly this holds up even though I'm now coding up my own ideas - even though I'm calling the shots on what I work on, they're still constrained by what there's potentially a market for, and so it's still not really passion coding.…

It works that way for me too. I’m (among other things) a game developer, and a few years ago someone asked me how much it’ll cost to make a game for them after looking my name up from one of the games I’ve made.

I gave them a quote without thinking too much (“$100/h, maybe a bit less if it’s something really interesting”[0]) and they were shocked, saying something like “I didn’t think you made that much money from these games!”. Well, if I did I wouldn’t be taking on contract work to begin with but you’re not getting the same rate as my own projects :)

[0] these days it would be more like $150/h.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#499

Post by adrianhel » Sun, Apr 07, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

z3phyr wrote: post #321

sokoloff wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more overlap than I'd have predicted 30 years ago. There are very good open source databases, content management systems, web servers, full text corpus search systems, operating systems, and 100s of other "kind of boring" things that a 20 year old version of me would assume people would need to be paid to create. (Some of those are a crossover where a substantial portion of the development was originall…

Operating systems and programming languages do come in the cool catagory

The common attribute is that these things are generic. That is not an attribute most software has.

Re: Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

#500

Post by dalore » Mon, Apr 08, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

Macross8299 wrote: post #477

dalore wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say a better solution would be to universal income, or a freedom fund of sorts. So people can be free to go and do their passion jobs, be it making music or writing games. Game development companies might become more like a collective where the developers who are all on universal income pool together and treated as equals. One can dream.

Cool idea, but how do you split the profit (assuming this is a world where games are still sold for money)? I'd imagine once you start having discussions about equity distribution and revenue split, it stops being a collective of equals.

Each collective would come up with it's own, or perhaps the games are done for free since they are getting paid via universal income. Or perhaps the games are sold at a sliding scale, pay what you want. Perhaps the profits all go back into the company which would/could provide for its employees non financial benefits, even living arrangements.