Comments on: No Overtime Payment Making Video Games. And?

By: Eyejinx

Eyejinx — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 00:09:39 +0000

Greetings:
Fair enough. I got side-tracked by the concept of “exploitation” which is a part of the EA discussion, but not a point you were raising. My apologies for the digression. I whole-heartedly agree that there are a large number of people who put in significantly more hours than 40 a week because they have chosen to do so.

But, for what it’s worth, I do think there are a lot of interesting jobs that don’t require massive amounts of overtime. As I said, the studio where I work has very sane, very employee-friendly processes that make successful games possible without huge amounts of overtime.

It’s just a shame that more studios haven’t made those commitments.

Eyejinx.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:13:10 +0000

The post came in response to several discussions with academics who work 50-60 hours a week with no overtime pay being enraged that the game industry makes people work 50-60 hours a week with no overtime pay.

I don’t have any kind of permanent tenure, and I know the lazy professor exists, but the tenured professors I know personally work very hard. The mechanics of unpaid overtime are probably different from job to job, but doesn’t it follow a three-fold model?
1) Having a job where you control the hours yourself.
2) Having a job with great social pressure towards giving everything you’ve got.
3) Having a job that you take great personal pride in.

Creative industries (like the game industry), academia, non-profit organizations, startups, and having your own company all qualify.

(Come to think of it, I have personally been near the burn-out stage in each of these.)

By: Eyejinx

Eyejinx — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:40:42 +0000

Greetings:
It warms the cockles of my heart to see an academic actually going out into the world of game development and spending a substantial amount of time listening and learning to find out how the realities of commercial game development are different from the theory. I do think he paints an overly rosy picture of EA, putting the best possible spin on many of the issues, but then again, they did put him up for a semester and approve the article; however, kudos for recognizing a lack of knowledge and doing something to actually address it. I sincerely wish that more game studies folks would do the same.

As for the comments on overtime, it’s probably a given that any startup is going to require insane hours. If you’re the one starting the business, and thus retaining ownership of it, it’s difficult to complain that you’re being exploited. Similarly, there are frightening numbers of exploitive relationships in academia (grad students teaching for financial support, adjunct positions without benefits, tenure-track faculty being overloaded with committee work in addition to publishing and teaching requirements, 4/4 positions for entry level faculty, etc.), but the flip side is the tenured position, where there is no incentive to work any overtime other than personal dedication, with no fear of repercussions. I have known more than a few tenured professors who did little to nothing more than the minimum and worked far less than standard 40-hour work weeks.

So, I think there are still some key differences between the kinds of labor issues that come up with academics and those that are being brought up in the recent EA discussions. This is not a “my suffering is more serious” point, since I work at a game dev job where there is practically no overtime, almost no crunch, and plenty of employee-friendly policies (and we still get AAA games out that sell millions of copies, and we’ve never missed a ship date). Rather, in the spirit of the Pausch piece, I think it behooves academics to recognize the real differences instead of making blanket comparisons.

Eyejinx.