“It Doesn’t Feel Right If We Don’t Work Weekends …”
I wasn’t planning to write a followup to yesterday’s post, but one of my co-workers, who shall remain unnamed, said something today that brought up another wrinkle in the quality of life issues within the Games Industry, the culture problem.
My co-workers and I recently finished a six month killer of a contract, what’s we in the business call a death march. Personal lives go by the wayside during a death march; phone calls from friends and family don’t get returned, children don’t see their mothers or fathers, spouses lose their patience with having to do all of the tasks that they would normally share. It’s a tying time, especially when you have a family, as most experienced people eventually do.
Consequently, the weeks and months following the completion of a death march consist of bridge building, fence mending, and general reconciliation. You spend time with your wife and kids, you sift through the backlog of voice mail and return calls, you fix all the crap that went wrong with your house. And, hopefully, you do enough concentrating on things that aren’t work to win back points with all the people who couldn’t count on you during the death march, particularly your spouse. This point cannot be overstated. Their generosity of spirit enabled your focus on work, and if you don’t believe me then try to not be distracted when you’ve got a major deadline at the end of the day but you don’t have a stitch of clean clothing and the leak under the bathroom sink has flooded half of the first floor. You’re not only obligated to repay that debt, but you’d be less than wise to not engender that same spirit, such that when the next death march comes you’ll be granted more of it.
So, I could only respond with dry silence when one of my much younger co-workers asked me if I’d be working this weekend. “I’m going to work out of sheer boredom,” he said cheerfully. “It doesn’t feel right if we don’t work weekends.” I bet it wouldn’t feel right if I dropped him out a second story window, but at that moment I briefly thought it might be nice.
His cheery statement highlights the problem that’s not imposed on game development teams by managers, or publishers, or even corporate gods who plan our offshoring with cold detachment --- this problem our culture carries like Typhoid Mary, the lingering meme that working death marches is cool. Maybe we need our own public service announcements, or a surgeon general’s warning. “Coding for more than fourteen hours per day for weeks straight has been shown to generate bugs larger than your mom’s minivan and induce a dazed drug-like state without the fun bits.”
I’m confident that my green friend’s attitude will develop as he lives and works more, but I can only hope that the industry will similarly mature.
My co-workers and I recently finished a six month killer of a contract, what’s we in the business call a death march. Personal lives go by the wayside during a death march; phone calls from friends and family don’t get returned, children don’t see their mothers or fathers, spouses lose their patience with having to do all of the tasks that they would normally share. It’s a tying time, especially when you have a family, as most experienced people eventually do.
Consequently, the weeks and months following the completion of a death march consist of bridge building, fence mending, and general reconciliation. You spend time with your wife and kids, you sift through the backlog of voice mail and return calls, you fix all the crap that went wrong with your house. And, hopefully, you do enough concentrating on things that aren’t work to win back points with all the people who couldn’t count on you during the death march, particularly your spouse. This point cannot be overstated. Their generosity of spirit enabled your focus on work, and if you don’t believe me then try to not be distracted when you’ve got a major deadline at the end of the day but you don’t have a stitch of clean clothing and the leak under the bathroom sink has flooded half of the first floor. You’re not only obligated to repay that debt, but you’d be less than wise to not engender that same spirit, such that when the next death march comes you’ll be granted more of it.
So, I could only respond with dry silence when one of my much younger co-workers asked me if I’d be working this weekend. “I’m going to work out of sheer boredom,” he said cheerfully. “It doesn’t feel right if we don’t work weekends.” I bet it wouldn’t feel right if I dropped him out a second story window, but at that moment I briefly thought it might be nice.
His cheery statement highlights the problem that’s not imposed on game development teams by managers, or publishers, or even corporate gods who plan our offshoring with cold detachment --- this problem our culture carries like Typhoid Mary, the lingering meme that working death marches is cool. Maybe we need our own public service announcements, or a surgeon general’s warning. “Coding for more than fourteen hours per day for weeks straight has been shown to generate bugs larger than your mom’s minivan and induce a dazed drug-like state without the fun bits.”
I’m confident that my green friend’s attitude will develop as he lives and works more, but I can only hope that the industry will similarly mature.
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 7:12 PM
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