Does this apply to those extremely rare game studios that produce good games?
Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
111–120 of 177 posts
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#112Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#113Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. A lot of suckers want to get into the field, and the employers know this. I know people who work in haute-couture shops. They typically clock in 14+ hours per day, and regularly work insane hours on the weekend. The weeks leading up to a fashion show / collection are brutal. These people have years of experience and managerial responsibilities, yet their sa…
> Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doi…
> Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job
That assumes that you don't get any value out of having a glamorous job. Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome! You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically challenging, you spend your day looking at monsters and explosions instead of spreadsheets and forms. People you meet will be excited to talk to you about your work. If you're lucky, you create something that people will form real emotional attachment to.
It's not smarter to choose a higher-salary job, because salary-maximization is not the goal of life. You spend much of your waking life at work, and a bigger salary won't give you those hours of your life back. You may as well try to make them be something you love.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#114It seems like some sort of natural law that any industry with a lot of revenue and teens/young adults dream of working in ends up with similar issues. Poor work environment, poor or deceptive compensation, tons of time or travel, psychopathic management and some sort of age bracket.
That best describes the game industry, but it fits the major label side of the music industry, the bottom 95% of pro snowboarding, military combat, resort work and i'm sure there's more.
And if include a set that misses just one of the traits you arguably could ad tv and film, the junior level investment banking scene, pro sports maybe.
Hell, startup employee is a fairly close fit as well.
I think it's just human nature - young people have a lot of passion, energy and without a stretch of office employment may lack some of the context necessary to decide how exploitative or appropriate various demands are.
Given some of the common psychological traits often associated with officers and directors at many firms, it's not surprising that a certain number of them would see no problem in or perhaps even their responsibility to structure their business or process to take advantage of (exploit) this pool of people that dream of being part of it.
At some point, whether or not the constant crunch turnover and burnout is worth it versus a more sustainable style that increased retention and experience level seems like an unsolvable riddle for any firm thats culture has been built on crunching.
Anybody who has made it to senior management in these places has done so by being successful at executing the model and getting their underlings to work under those conditions. If you can't stomach it you won't stick around. So essentially upper management is full of people who have shown they're cool with it and have seen it work. Some probably flat out enjoy it.
With this kind of environment it's hard to believe you could even finish pitching the idea, let alone get enough traction to investigate or even come up with a plan to implement something that would take so long to have any measurable results.
Unless great results came quickly, I'd be surprised if they had more than two years before everybody got sacked and they reversed coarse
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two tangential points I want to hit quickly. First, most software developers are taught "computer science" (or an imitation of it) in their formal education, not engineering. Second, software is mostly not engineering. Engineering is very measurable. But software includes a lot of design and craftsmanship. If software dev. were restricted only to the portion that could reasonably be called pure engineering it would b…
So if it isn't science, and isn't engineering, what is it closest to in terms of other endeavors?
Math. That explains the endless debates on aesthetics, the difficulty of measuring productivity, and the enormous spectrum of productivity.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a software engineering student about to start an internship(Paid, 4 months) at a major game studio. I am considering applying for a job once I complete the internship if everything goes well. I would like to see if the studio where I will work has a decent workflow. If not I would be willing to tough it out as a generalist programmer while trying to apply to other jobs that interest me in another industry. The id…
Keep in mind that your job might look bad in your resume. Given the bad rep gaming companies have, only people that are inexperienced/not that good, or clueless go to the industry. I know you have to start your career somewhere, but keep that in mind.
Gaming companies have a rep for being a bad place to work that nevertheless attract top-notch talent. I've been programming for a living for since 1997, and this is the first time I've heard someone say that game hackers are "not that good or clueless".
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#117I was a game programmer at EA for eight years. > The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity, This is pretty spot-on. One of the main reasons I left the industry was because I got tired of it being perpetual amateur hour. I felt like I didn't know much and yet I often knew more than those around me. I worked on one game where more t…
Aren't your four bullet points essentially true of a large number of web applications in tech hubs like Silicon Valley? The only point I might contest for that analogy would be (2), but I think we are still seeing a trend towards disrupting traditional payment systems (e.g., people expect Facebook to be free and funded by ads). And it's worth mentioning that Silicon Valley startups do have their fair share of underpa…
Yes, I think the startup market may be similar. Two differences are that right now there are so many startups, there is still strong demand for programmers. The game industry is actually not that big, so the demand for game programmers hasn't been as high.
Also, I think the startup scene is newer. While there are some younger developers now whose childhood dream is to build a website, there aren't as many of those as there are people who grew up playing videogames and who want nothing more than to make them.
As the web gets older and you have more adults whose software experiences during their formative years revolved around websites (or, I guess, soon, mobile apps), that may change.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doi…
> Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job That assumes that you don't get any value out of having a glamorous job. Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome! You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically chal…
> That assumes that you don't get any value out of having a glamorous job.
The only value you get out of having a "glamorous job" is that other people think you have a glamorous job. Glamour has to do with perception, not reality.
> Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome!
Wrong. They want to be game developers because they think a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome. Once again, this deals only with perception.
> You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically challenging, you spend your day looking at monsters and explosions instead of spreadsheets and forms...If you're lucky, you create something that people will form real emotional attachment to.
From the numerous comments on this thread alone, actually being a game developer is about as far from any of those things as you can get.
> People you meet will be excited to talk to you about your work.
This is probably the only thing on your list that is true, but if your happiness is primarily based on what other people think about you, you have a lot bigger problems in life than what your job is.
> You may as well try to make them be something you love.
I never said that you shouldn't do something you love. My point was that you should consider the bias of perception on market dynamics when determining your occupation, rather than falling prey to the trap of perception, like a lot of people do.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most trendy, fashionable and 'glamorous' jobs are like this. Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job (or market, if you're starting a business) you can find that provides a product that your customers simply can't live without. You just don't want to be selling an elastic product, and you don't want to be in an industry where there's supply-side competition from people who are doi…
> Which is why the smart thing to do is to go for the most unfashionable job That assumes that you don't get any value out of having a glamorous job. Sure, there are tons of people that want to be game developers. Why? Because a lot of things about being a game developer are awesome! You get a laid-back working environment, you get to work with artists and other exciting, creative people, the work is technically chal…
> You get a laid-back working environment
Laid back, to me, means "Oh, we had to work 60 hours last week, so this week I'm gonna leave around 4 pm on Thursday. I'll send an email to the team lead to not expect me tomorrow"
From the stories I've heard, "laid back" in the game industry means "great news! it's 7 pm on Sunday evening, everybody go home and be with your kids"
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The real problem however is not that they are immature when they get in, but that too often they get out once they reach maturity, > This is pretty spot-on. I've studiously avoided working for EA (they almost had me once, but I said no when they pulled a bait-and-switch on the project that convinced me to interview to begin with), but I've been in the industry for 20+ years, mostly working for smaller companies or…
> I've studiously avoided working for EA For what it's worth, I found work-life balance increased steadily during my tenure at EA. The whole ea_spouse thing brought a lot of attention to problems. It still wasn't great, but it was better than when I started. When I left EA, I was working 40 hours a week reliably. This was in large part, though, because that was a high priority for me and I moved off game teams and on…
Take a look at http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.htm...
TED talk, sheds some light on the how many people you need to make it big.
The industry launched her album, 25K bought it and it was a failure, on Kickstartet she raised 1.5millon dollars with almost exactly 25k backers. The irony, there are a lot of people and a lot of people like music, and even if its not the everyone, it's big enough that they can make a good wage.