I’m an avid follower of Adam Martin’s blog, and I’ve linked to his Quality of Life topics before. The latest post pertaining to Quality of Life addresses the common industry term, crunch (or crunch time).
Basically crunch equates to unpaid overtime.
This concept is now firmly rooted in the game development industry and is becoming more and more prevalent in the practices of firms. Among some companies it is actually expected.
Crunch time is defended, by management stating that employees are so motivated they want to keep working, or by having to meet deadlines and will only be for a short time.
Initially the problem would arise as you near a deadline, most likely a ship date, and there are many unfinished things still left to do. For the remaining days/weeks, you would put in overtime to make sure the project shipped. It’s understandable how this arises, though the problem is that employees take the burden of unpaid overtime for management’s mistakes.
Salary is salary. You get paid the same whether you work 40, or 60 hours. The current opinion oh whether this is ethic is being discussed on many professional forums, blogs and news sites across the web. I’m not going to debate about which circumstances it is acceptable, or not acceptable, or if it’s acceptable to work 60+ hours if people are fairly compensate.
I’m just going to take the concept of unpaid overtime, or unnecessary overtime (overtime which is generated due to poor design / planning from management) and put it squarely where it belongs: in the trash.
Whether you’re into design documents or scrum, it doesn’t matter. Plan, and plan accordingly. Just because chaos is the currency industry practice doesn’t mean it’s the best practice. There are very ambitious people who attempt to get notoriety in the industry, mainly designers who plaster their name on the title because they feel like their name is more important than the title itself. It’s as ridiculous as authors who’s names are bigger than the title of their book on the cover.
These individuals wants to be leaders of the industry. They want to be on the panels at all the conventions, and interviewed at all the shows, and written about and have large Wikipedia pages heralding their ground-breaking advances in the gaming industry.
And they will do it on the backs on the artists and programmers who burn out after a few years, only to be replaced by a new legion of people who think they’ve reached the Promised Land.
It sounds sort of Stalin-istic in a sense. Huge industry, overworked labor, a small class of people who want monuments of themselves depicting their achievements. So, crunch time, and this unpaid labor, has been throughout history and throughout other industries, to make greatness for others without compensation. Did you work on Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa? Unless your Sid or Richard, I don’t really care. That’s the sort of feeling that I get from, the community.
Stop making other people rich. Your life, as it is an accumulation of hours, is not worth any more or less than anyone else’s. If you’re going to labor, don’t be exploited. Don’t be exploited because you feel it’s the only way to keep your job, or make sure the project ships. The people who buy your game don’t care how much time you spent on it, as long as it runs, so they’re not going to be the voice for fair labor. You have to be.
It’s unfortunate that the modern mentality towards unions are negative. A game developer’s union would be an interesting thing to see. Form it like The Chaos Engine, where management, HR, marketing, etc people are not allowed. Simply developers. Programmers and artists. This is what many I believed the IGDA was, or hoped it would be, but it really isn’t. As long as studio heads are the board members of an organization, than how could it possibly support or defend the worker’s rights? Your entitled to it. Have a voice.
Why slave away for an industry that you’d most likely be ashamed about associating with in a few years? Then you’ll regret the work even more, considering you did it unpaid.