EA Spouse Outed

patio11 writes "EA Spouse, who sparked a revolution (or, at least, a wave of lawsuits and promises for improvement) in the game development industry with a blog post decrying labor practices at Electronics Arts, was outed as Erin Hoffman in a Mercury News article. She and then-fiance, now-husband Leander Hasty were plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits against EA and continue to develop games and be activists for better working conditions for game developers." From the article: "More than a year later, game developers have won settlements in three class-action lawsuits alleging EA created exhausting work schedules without paying overtime and successfully pressed employers to ease unrelenting workloads. And EA Spouse, whose true identity has been cloaked until now, is becoming a voice against America's culture of overwork."

Already Revealed

[Xyl3ne]

Kinda dupe?

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/04/26/1733244.shtml [slashdot.org]

Re:Is this the root of EA's problems?

[GundamFan]

I thought about that while I was typing my message here is what I think... I think there are two types of creativity here the ability to do great things with small resources, or the ablity to freely create. When being icreative in the first way I think most people think "how can I accomplish my goals with what I have" and "what goals can I change to meet my situation". With more free creativity you end up with less compromising over goals but also less progress over time. What really is needed is a good balance of the two, without a deadline nothing would get done but deadlines that come too soon often make products rushed, compromised in other ways or both.

Re:Is this the root of EA's problems?

[Kadin2048]

Sleep deprived cranky game developers can't possibly be very creative, can they?

Nah, artists always work best when they're coddled, fat, and happy. Oh, wait ...

Just kidding, although I do think that sometimes a deadline is the kick in the pants that's sometimes needed for people to produce their best work, there's no excuse to just abuse your people continually. You can only maintain that kind of increased tempo for a certain amount of time, before it just becomes fatiguing and output quality is going to drop.

I've actually worked on a few big projects where I remember the "big push" at the end with some fondness. Okay, at the time I probably would have called you stupid for saying that, but in retrospect I knew that it brought the team of people I was working with together and caused us to make a better product than we probably would have done, if we had spread the same number of hours of work out across a traditional work schedule. (Disclaimer, I'm not in gaming, but I can't imagine it's that much different.) However I can only imagine doing that regularly ... that's not going to do anyone any good.

Back on topic here -- does anyone know where I can get the backstory on ea_spouse? I didn't follow this too closely when it was going on so I'm wondering if I can fill myself in.

Re:Is this the root of EA's problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the story I was forwarded:
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/04/exclusive _nicol.html [mercurynews.com]

There's a link to the original LJ post as well from there.

It's interesting that I've been working with ea_spouse for a while now at 1stPP and I didn't even know it :P

Re:entitlement

[sesshomaru]

"Euroland's underlying economic performance is better than many commentators portray. Over the past decade, GDP per head has risen virtually at the same rate in euroland as the United States; euroland productivity growth (output per hour) and the rise in the employment rates were slightly faster than in the United States; and to maintain the same growth in GDP per head, U.S. workers have had to work much longer hours than their euroland counterparts." -- Kevin Daly, Goldman Sachs, January 2004

Re:entitlement

[sesshomaru]

The Conference Board, a respected US business pressure group, estimated this downward adjustment shaves 1.5% off the consumer price index every year and therefore reduces its inflation rate by that amount. But the inflation rate is deducted from the nominal gross domestic product numbers to give the real increase in GDP. If the inflation rate is understated by 1.5% compared with how other countries measure the same data, it follows that America's growth rate is claimed to be 1.5% higher than it is in reality. So its lead over the eurozone in the past four years, 10% growth against 4%, is almost entirely a statistical fiction.

This, if you accept it, provides the clue to the great conundrum of the so-called American recovery since 2000. Despite a huge expansion of its public sector, where 1.1 million jobs were created, employment is still only at the levels of 2000.

In previous post-war recoveries where there has been such a purported growth surge, there have been millions of new jobs. But in this case, America's job creation record is one of the worst in the developed world and worse - no doubt to most readers' astonishment - than that of the eurozone. --- How America fakes its figures, Evening Standard (London), Feb 3, 2005 [findarticles.com]

Yes, everything is fine, full steam ahead, what icebergs?