Passion and Overtime

Quality of life in the video games industry is something that has been getting a lot of attention lately. With the IGDA pushing for better control over quality of life, I thought I should post a few things about my opinion and experience here, just so you know.

When you first meet me, I often times come across as a passionate and energetic programmer who loves to talk about the details, the true nitty gritty details that drive most people insane. I love chatting about the true ones and zeros that push the hardware and talking about different design methodologies and practices, but I rarely bring up the subject of overtime.

I don’t expect to get paid overtime. I do what I do, not for a love of money, but for the love of a challenge. Honestly, you couldn’t pay me enough to sit at a machine and cut and copy code to create the same thing that has been done a thousand times before. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit, and be bored out of my mind, and honestly expect me to be enthusiastic about the difference I am making in the company. I’m too much of a rogue, too much of a cowboy to let that happen.

So when people start complaining about their game developer’s job cutting away at their social life I like to point out one simple thing. In game development, you do it for the love of it, the passion, and the excitement it brings you upon completion. You do not do it for a large paycheck(although that is a very big bonus) and you don’t expect to get rich. Instead, you gain the support of a community and the respect of your fellow colleagues.

If that means spending 3 months out of the year working 90+ hours a week, I’d do it!

However, I should note that I work with small companies, with typically one or two projects in the pipeline at any particular time. In larger companies where you are just getting slammed, week after week, month after month with these horrendous hours, well, I can understand the problem there. I wouldn’t want my life to revolve around a company that I have no say in(or very little say in) and I wouldn’t want to be dragged along an endless ride. I would want to work on one project, complete that project, take some time off, and then work a normal 50+ hours a week for while before returning to the endless hell of crunch-time.

However, I realized that the only alternative for these large companies to dictate any sort of realistic timelines comes in part from management. Often times, management consists of other programmers who greatly overestimate the true capabilities of their team and/or they greatly underestimate the amount of work that needs to get done to get the product out the door. Often times, telling the people higher up then they are that they can complete the project in a shorter amount of time then is humanly possible.

They do this because, well, if they don’t, the higher ups would look at the project and determine it’s not worth the time.

So here we are, stuck in a predicament. It’s a catch 22. If you say you can get it done early, then you are forcing your team to an early burnout. If you say you can get it done late, then management will forgo your nifty game design doc and talk about someone else that can get it done faster.

So what can be done to fix this…

Easy… Go indie!

At least there, you dictate when the product ships. At least there, you assemble your team and get the ball rolling yourself. You are the one accountable, and you are the one responsible for the success or failure of your company.

-Ken Noland

A Note About Rockstars

I’m a young programmer. Too young to remember the days of the 1983 crash and too young to actually see Pong or Pac-man arcade games in their original glory (not counting the numerous rip-offs and replica systems you can get today). I’m also too young to remember the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES), the Sega Genesis, and countless other platforms that I was too young to have. Of course I’ve played the original Zelda, the one that came in the gold colored cartridge. I logged my fair share of hours into that game and then, for a quick break, I would see how fast I could get through Mario, the original Mario, the one with the old 8 bit graphics and two frames of animation for every character. I am, however, too young to remember what it must have been like to program for those machines. I was only 12 when I saw Doom for the very first time.

I’m showing my age a bit. I’m young, naïve, and I know it. I prefer to think of it as a blessing. I am one of the new kids on the block, the next generation of video game programmers. The kind that doesn’t mind working late into the evening solving some unseen problem at the last hour, coming in like the Calvary of old times. We are the cowboy’s, the ninja’s, and the rock stars of the programming world!

Not really though, I’m more like a starving musician then a rock star.

The truth is that I missed a great deal of video game history. I have read about all the things listed above, but I can not relate to having to give up my creative game development job, albeit low paying job to go to corporate computing and high paying job because the market has crashed and there is no room for the next developer. I do not know what it must’ve been like to be small team, maybe 5 or 6 people, and publish a game in just 5 months. I can only imagine what it must’ve been like back then, just from my escapades while designing “Hock-a-loogy” or “Blow up Barney”, two games I created back in junior high school.

They never got published, but they did manage to get me kicked out of the computer lab because the instructors found out kids were playing my game instead of doing their homework. That was unfortunate because I never got to finish Hock-a-loogy. I was going to build this storefront that you could purchase milk to make your spit bigger, and purchase burritos to make your spit explode, but I never had the chance. I’m starting to go off on a bit of a tangent. Oh well, such is life!

Now, I currently own two NES systems, a Sega Genesis, a Dreamcast, and all those old out of date consoles I never had a chance to explore as a young kid. I picked them up just as a reminder of where we came from, and where we are going. What used to be a generation forced into thinking that a green blob on the center of the screen is a goblin now has a full detailed slimy creature with numerous details rendered to look as though this creature could exist in real life.

I’m not one to speak about the shortcomings of imagination on modern video games, and how the pixel has been replaced with the texture mapped high res smooth looking assets in a game today. I’m all for it, it’s a shift from the end user creativity to a work of art made by the designer of the video game. It’s no longer about balancing out the rules and making sure the game mechanics work right on paper, but does the full fledged economy, with thousands and thousands of players work to benefit the target crowd.

With this environment, things had to change, and the industry has grown a lot more mature to handle these assets and deliver the artwork of the designers. An industry born out of hackers in a computer lab, just trying to create something entertaining for those old vacuum tube computers has grown into a multi billion dollar industry with no end in sight for growth.

Like movies, video games entertain people. They distract them, perhaps for a moment bringing them into some other universe that they can take out there aggression on some street walker, or fight some alien species in some universe far from home. The main difference is that video games are interactive and movies are not, but both mediums have shifted towards the designers and favor artistic beauty now over technology

Although, after watching a few of my favorite movies on HD with the huge surround sound receiver and amp, I have a hard time returning to normal TV. So I guess my argument of beauty over technology has its limits. Games do require technology to advance to portray more artistic feeling and enable the artists to pack in more detail where needed, just as movies need a larger format to include more detail, like the teardrops on a human eye, just before they fall. You can’t see that detail on a regular TV, but give me an HD and it becomes clear that the actress is about to cry.

If I were to revisit Hock-a-loogy, I would need to hire a team of artists to create more realistic stick figures. The trees would have to sway with the wind, the spit would have to look more realistic. Instead of just being a couple of pixels hand crafted, it would need to be a fully 3D rendered spitball, with transparency and all sorts of high end filters and effects and particle systems and so on and so forth. Would it change the game mechanics? Of course it would! Would it make the game more fun to play? Well, who knows?

But it would be more entertaining to see the marks of the spit on the target character and see that detail in the game, as opposed to just saying “You’ve been hit”.

I enjoyed cracking open the emulator for the NES games and downloading all the games I never got a chance to play. I really loved checking out all the details and the fine per pixel animation of the classic games, but nothing can compare to the modern age of full detailed graphics and photo realism that games are currently reaching.

I suppose my argument here is that things change. I’m one of the new guys on the block, and though I’ve read all about the old days, I can’t relate to the old generation. Like the rock stars of the 1940’s vs. the rock stars of today, I simply see a change in culture and I still see a public in need of entertainment. Perhaps it is up to us, the next generation of game developers, to learn from our elders and to really reach out to this public, and, in essence, become the rock stars, once again, of the game development world.

-Ken Noland