Quality of Life Sucks?

Quality of life in the games industry is a joke! Let’s talk about sex and violence, censorship, technological challenges, corrupting the youth of the world, but the quality of life in the industry is something that goes without saying. It sucks, plain and simple!

Yet the problem, for all intents and purposes, has an easy solution. Planning! You see, it’s planning that causes this thing we lovingly refer to as “crunch time.” It’s poor planning that forces us to work these 90+ hours a week and face these impossible deadlines. It’s poor planning that is the culprit here, so the answer is simple. If you want to relieve yourself of this crunch time burden, plan better!

I have yet to see a single studio get over this major obstacle without enforcing some kind of totalitarian rule over its developers and artists. Personally, I hate to be micro managed because it always makes me feel like a kid. It’s like having a mom that continually asks you if you wiped your ass when you got off the toilet… of course I did, I’ve been potty trained since I was 2! When the lead programmer checks in on you every half an hour to see your progress and of you checked the latest fix then that distracts me from the work I could get done and it’s belittling because it makes me feel as though they don’t have enough trust in my skills as a developer. But their micromanaged, totalitarian policy states that by 3:30 I should be finished with my latest system and moving on to the next… put simply, that’s not how it works!

If it was a choice to me, I’d rather have crunch mode then an over managed studio. At least in crunch mode I don’t have to worry about what my manager thinks of my work, I just build it and if there’s a problem with it then I implement something else. Otherwise, I move on to the next thing in my checklist. If my checklist gets too long, then I tell my manager and he delegates some of my work out. I’d rather have that, and work my 90+ hours a week, then have the opposing totalitarian ruler!

But that’s just my opinion!

I knew what I was getting into when I got my first job in the games industry. I knew that there would be long hours, impossible deadlines, and non stop craziness when the game was about to be released, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was the problem, the challenge of being there, on the front lines and triumphing over all of it to create a piece of entertainment that would inspire new, and more challenging projects. Boy, did I get my wish!

-Ken Noland