Dear childless 31 year old white men: Thanks for the all the good times!
Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
131–140 of 177 posts
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#132And the studios will just flick a swtich and change that? they don't even care about better games. it's all about sales. and rightly so.
The issue is marketing and what the market become recently.
Games now work just like hollywood. It's just a matter of releasing something with the right name at the right time.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#133Earlier 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…
>Healthcare is especially good in this respect I agree with your overall point but will temper it some by noting that there are VERY high barriers to entry ( http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-beco... for one discussion I wrote) and those barriers are enforced by regulators. That being said, once you get the necessary credentials to enter the market the gig is pretty sweet and pretty protected. T…
Too many anti-dentites around :)
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#134The fact that they are childless indicates that they don't have time to have children, but how the hell is the fact that they're white relevant to the point they're trying to make in the article?
A great many people simply cannot fathom the idea of mature, responsible adults choosing not to procreate.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#135Earlier 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…
Do you have a blog or link to your work? I'd be very interested in reading about the experiences of someone who has a successful "career" making games while providing for a family.
Not anything that's updated with any regularity. As I ramp up to a Kickstarter I'm certainly going to be updating more, but that hasn't started yet, so everything is pretty stale.
The sad truth is that I feel like a lot of things that go on are either not worthy of writing about, or they involve some kind of sensitive negotiation or relationship that I shouldn't post about. At the end of the day I end up paralyzed by these fears and fail to post anything.
But you can find the rather rusty company blog here [1], or my personal blog here [2]. The latter has a bit more activity because it has my Pinboard stream on the side, and I try to post a comment with most links.
In general, though, no, I don't really blog as well as I should. Yet, anyway. Kickstarter may change things for me.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's fine to be a "race traitor" or gender traitor if yours dominates. Your use of the word "dominates" is disingenuous. Let's imagine: - - - There exists a country in which 95% of all leadership in government and industry is male. There are a few women here and there, but for the most part, it's all men at the top. And at the top, people are pretty protected. They can generally get away with whatever they want, as…
You might not realize it but the thing you're complaining about? That's the Patriarchy to a t. No one thinks 'patriarchy' means 'all men oppressing all women.' except people constructing straw men. Patriarchy is the force that both tells women they belong at home and tells men that it's honourable to die in war. It's all around us.
Not really. Patriarchy literally means "rule of the fathers", and the point being made when people talk about the patriarchy is exactly that all men are, fundamentally, more like the handful of men at the top than any women is - that men at all levels benefit from the power structures within society.
In fact, the reason it was called "patriarchy" in the first place was to draw an analogy between men who ruled entire nations and patriarchs who had no influence outside their own family - to treat them as though they shared in and benefitted from the exact same male-dominated power structures in the same ways, ignoring little details like some of them having far more downsides than benefits.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's fine to be a "race traitor" or gender traitor if yours dominates. Your use of the word "dominates" is disingenuous. Let's imagine: - - - There exists a country in which 95% of all leadership in government and industry is male. There are a few women here and there, but for the most part, it's all men at the top. And at the top, people are pretty protected. They can generally get away with whatever they want, as…
You might not realize it but the thing you're complaining about? That's the Patriarchy to a t. No one thinks 'patriarchy' means 'all men oppressing all women.' except people constructing straw men. Patriarchy is the force that both tells women they belong at home and tells men that it's honourable to die in war. It's all around us.
I'm not constructing a straw man. You'll be bullied until you go silent if you claim to be a feminist while asserting that men can be victims of sexism, or that whites/Asians can be victims of racism[1].
You can use the word "Patriarchy". You can use the phrase "male domination". But it doesn't change the fact that men at the bottom have to watch the men at the top stomping all over them while preening themselves.
[1]: http://goatinahat.tumblr.com/post/45265637509/behaxrant-wesh...
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#138I 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…
I agree with everything you've said except for one thing: Giving it up. EIther making games or making music. Both of these pursuits are entirely compatible with having kids and a normal job, so long as you pursue them in a way compatible with your lifestyle. You don't have to go on the road and live out of a van to be in a band; you can pick up some cheap hardware and software and record at home. Record a vocal take,…
> There's no reason you can't make an indie game when you're older and have more responsibilities
Something else that people will start to understand more over the next few years as programmers get older: Once you get past a certain age, you tend to have less responsibilities again. Once the kids leave and you start to pay off your car and so on, possibilities begin to open up.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've consulted in NYC design shops where most of the designs and documentation were being done by interns. They were available 24/7 and extremely bright; the business couldn't have gotten anything out without them. The full time people and owners were paid way more than necessary all while the interns were unpaid or lowpaid.
Why don't they network a bit and create their own design shop? Given that they're already all in one place.
Because that requires capital, and no one is going to fund interns, skilled though they may be.
Re: Why your games are made by childless, 31 year old white men
#140Earlier 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?
My opinion is that "Software Engineering" is an artisan trade. What it isn't is based on science. What is rigorous is usually based around theoretical mathematics.
Let me put it like this: there are very very few designs in software where there are limitations that are based on intrinsics. Whereas if you talk with a chemist, it's very clear that there are actual properties underlying what they do, and these physical properties do things like go "bang" when you screw up. Or if you're building a circuit, you use the underlying equations of the resistors and other components to drive the design. Very little of that exists in computer science.
This doesn't make what we do immoral or bad or demeaning. But in my opinion, this conflation with physcial-based sciences produces a confusion of the mind.
I'm prone to consider computer science "algorithmic mathematics" and quality software engineering "software craftsmanship". It reminds me far more of house building than circuit design.