Developer Stress Crippling Game Innovation?

hapwned writes "Jason Della Rocca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), looks at the big picture of the grim, dead-end careers of game developers. From the article: 'More fundamental is the notion that immature practices and extreme working conditions are bankrupting the industry's passion - the love for creating games that drives developers to be developers. When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem. How can an industry truly grow, and an art form evolve, if everyone is gone by the time they hit 30?'"

Re:Uh... yeah....

[mossico]

If you think most people lose their creative spark by 30, look at the average of art directors and creatives in advertising firms. It's not that different from engineering, it takes time to get good at it.

Re:Uh... yeah....

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell marked this as insightful?!? Creativity is not generally age related, but I'd hardly be surprised to find that in most (but not all) people it drops off significantly when they're put under too much pressure. Did you actually RTFA? OK, that's probably a stupid question. Think of the following authors whose creative output was most significant after the age of 30:

J.R.R. Tolkein
C.S. Lewis
J.K. Rowling

(In fact just think how many authors publish their first novel *after* turning 30: loads.)

And what about the film industry? Steven Spielberg? Peter Jackson? Ridley Scott? George Lucas? (Oh wait... sorry, I didn't mean that last one, but you get the picture.)

Oi! Mods! WAKE UP!!!!

Re:Open Job Security

[vertinox]

If more of the source code was open, less developers would be needed. As time goes on, less and less developers are needed, until finally none are needed and we end up with programmers out of jobs and large variety of the same game.

That's not true.

Take John Carmack for example. He releases all his code with games after a while. Not only that... He's pretty much licensed out his engines to other companies before he does that. Yet we didn't see every single game using code from Quake or Doom and then ditching all their devs. In fact we usually see this companies hire on more.

Secondly, most companies do this already through licensing... These days either they are licensing the Doom3 engine or Unreal Engines.

That and others build from scratch depending on their needs.

However, I would say that making this open source really helps fledgling devs to figure out the "how'd they do that?" kind of questions.

5 years later....

[joebooty]

I worked in the games industry in PC game development for about 5 years coming out of college. Some good things. I had my own office, there were pinball machines and game consoles in the break room, you could get pizza billed to the company delivered any time after hours etc. Also I learned some very important things about software development. Things like designing self contained code that can not break/interfere with unrelated code. Also learning that just because an app is more or less code complete means very little in the overall completion of your product, the real work is just beginning when that project hits QA. We had a QA lab inhouse and it was interesting to get perspective from interacting with those guys. Also the job made me better at testing my own code because if I did not test it well, I was just going to have 20 entries in the bug tracker when i got to work the next morning. Now on to the bad things. 60 hour weeks were very common. When there are milestones or internal project reviews or E3 or some gamign conference require special builds it is more like 70-80 hours with no weekends. When you have a team of 8 programmers and on any given day 4 of you are still there at 9pm it psychologically does not seem so bad because everyone is going through it together. Likewise when you show up on a Sunday and you see all the familiar cars in the parking lot you do not feel as though you are getting 'screwed' on your weekend. It is kind of amazing what you can get used to but in the end it does feel like young single programmers pretty much are the fuel of the gaming industry. When they are tapped out there is always more fuel waiting to jump onboard. Over time you realize all those perks are just lures to keep you at work as much as possible. When you are 22 some of these sacrifices are not so bad and you are constantly learning new things. When you move on to your second and third projects you start to realize that the problems are no longer new and being at work 60-70 hours a week for a salaried job is more annoying that it used to be. It is annoying things that change over time like hardware technology and machine API's relearning these things over and over every couple years is not intellectually rewarding it feels more like a chore. You can make a good living in games but most places pay a fairly modest salary and then have project completion bonuses that can be VERY rewarding if the product does well. Unfortunately programmers are just one part of the equation on whether or not a project sells well but we ARE the only part that does 20+ hours of free overtime every week for a couple years. Unless your product does great it is entirely possible that you walk away with the equivalent of 5-10$ per hour of bonus money for all that OT you worked which is really a raw deal. Ive been out of games for about 5 years now and would not consider going back. I do not regret my time there because I learned a great deal, but leaving the industry yields more money for fewer hours of easier work. Not a hard decision in retrospect.

Re:Sad but true...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me, having started working in the game industry in 1990, that the industry has switched from most games developed by mom 'n pop 20-40-employee companies (with the publisher offering minor input on the game after the milestones are laid out) to most games being developed by super-mega-corporations who require complete control over the game, even for third party titles.

Now, you can't entirely blame the corporations since there's a 500lb gorilla, better known as Wal-Mart, stomping around and dictating game content. OTOH Corporations are too pussy to stand up and call Wal-Mart's bluff, so they deserve the end result. But until their bluff is called, corporations need complete control so they can satisify those soulless bloodsuckers.

The industry really changed when the corporations moved in. The hours didn't get worse (well, if they did, not by much), but employee compensation really took a nosedive. Now the fruits of their labor must pay the salaries of countless overpriced stuffed shirts, who routinely demand the company have top-dollar real estate, perfectly positioned window offices, super-deluxe office furniture, etc. - hell, just look at EA. The suits live in a glass castle, while the people who actually do something that earns the company money are shoved into nameless cubicles in nondescript buildings.

Game companies were traditionally light on management - most of the "management" also did things besides manage people that contributed to the bottom line. They programmed, they did artwork, they made levels, they contributed to the games in some seriously meaningful way. These days management can barely be counted on to be computer saavy enough to play Microsoft Solitaire.

I'm seriously hoping the Nintendo Revolution can help reverse this trend. In theory it will allow smaller developers to compete with the big boys because it will be cheaper to develop a title. Without the super-mad-flash graphics & sound & crap that doesn't actually contribute to gameplay in any meaningful way, games will have to compete on the merits of how fun they are to play. Which is the purpose of playing a game in the first place.

Re:Define License

[vertinox]

Hrm.... Well free as in GPL code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake#Source_code [wikipedia.org]

The source code of the Quake and QuakeWorld engines was licensed under the GPL in 1999. The id Software maps, objects, textures, sounds and other creative works remain under their original license. The shareware distribution of Quake is still freely redistributable and usable with the GPLed engine code. One must purchase a copy of Quake in order to get the registered version of the game which includes more single player episodes and the deathmatch maps.

Sure its not free as in BSD, but doesn't cost anyone to download and use (and even release a commercial game) as long as they adhear to the GLP license.

Re:You claim..

[preppypoof]

there is a difference between software engineer (which the article claims is the #1 job to have in America) and a game developer

Re:5 years later....

[batonrye]

This is all kind of discouraging to me.

Currently I develop games as a hobby, and if that's the way its going to be working in the industry... well I just don't know if its something I want to peruse as a career. It seems to me that keeping the work enjoyable is crucial to producing quality and *original* content.

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Re:Prescription

[PitaBred]

Object Oriented versus list processing (hence the name).
It's basically a mathematics-oriented language [wikipedia.org], and mostly useless for most things outside of that. An interesting intellectual exercise for geeks, useful if you're a mathematician, and that's about it.

Re:Prescription

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It's basically a mathematics-oriented language, and mostly useless for most things outside of that. An interesting intellectual exercise for geeks, useful if you're a mathematician, and that's about it.

Amoung others, [tech.coop] Naughty Dog use a customised version of LISP called GAOL(Game Action Oriented Lisp). It was used extensively on Jak 2, one of the most impressive games on the PS2, or indeed any console.

As the link mentions, the "difficulty" of Lisp, has lead to its sidelining all too often. The fact is, it is a very, very powerful language and definitely worth a look given the obstacles modern game programmers are running up against.