A weird, sexy, completely untrue version of a video game career
November 12, 2013 8:58 AM   Subscribe

"There’s a dearth of rigorous coverage of the industry. The video game press, such as it is, remains mired in a culture of payola and ad revenue addiction, outside of a few outlets like Gamasutra. The one television station devoted to industry news, G4 (which has moved away from covering only video games), seemed committed to proving every gamer stereotype true, with an endless parade of uncritical corporate press releases punctuated only by sophomoric oral sex jokes. [...] All of which is a shame, because something in the industry is wrong. Here, as in few other places, we see the kind of exploitation normally associated with the industrial sector in creative work."
posted by postcommunism (43 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fascinating article. This seems pretty much to be the vein it's been for a long time however, see the 'wonderful' Kane and Lynch firing along with numerous other issues. One of the issues that really makes it clear to me is that video game reviewing is essentially done on a 7-10 point scale. That's something that's been discussed before on the blue, but I think the score creep is at least a part of the problem.

One publication that wasn't mentioned in the article and I hope is close to untarnished is my beloved PC Gamer magazine. It's been nice recently that their previews aren't a total whitewashing of the game experience. I remember when they previewed the disaster that was Aliens: Colonial Marines, they certainly seemed to hold reservations about the finished product while still talking about the features that COULD be good.

If they are truly a 'good' publication, I wonder if that's a feature of their medium, the fact that they may have enough subscribers not to be beholden to the publishers entirely or some other factor.
posted by Carillon at 9:10 AM on November 12, 2013


Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work. I'm not entirely sure when this article was written - I first read it about five years ago - but it highlights some of the awfulness inherent in the games industry, specifically EA. Maybe it's changed somewhat since then, but I doubt it.
posted by backseatpilot at 9:25 AM on November 12, 2013


The absence of meaningful criticism, of course, being one huge strike against video games as an art form.

I'm not sure which conversation we've had before we want to have right now but that's always a good one.
posted by Teakettle at 9:30 AM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


It seems odd this whole article is written without any mention of the biggest shift in the gaming industry, away from the $100M budget blockbusters with 500 employees and over to indie games with a few programmers. That involves lots of hours and sweat too, but more on a craftsman model than a factory model. I'm not saying big gaming is going away, but there's a lot of movement now in the lower budget end thanks to Steam, iOS, Android, etc.

The part of the game industry I don't understand is the payment for the programmers. Salaries aren't great. And they're not getting stock options and, in most cases, not even getting big bonuses. With their skills they can work fewer hours in the Internet sector, or finance, or any number of other places that need software engineering skills that pay better and have saner hours.

Everyone I know who's worked on AAA games has either moved to indie development or out of the industry entirely.
posted by Nelson at 9:32 AM on November 12, 2013


Articles written for young males by young males in a young industry are not going to be great journalism.

Cyril Connolly once wrote about George Orwell "He could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry".

I think that's where we are with Metafilter these days, we're the looking glass version of the Daily Mail.
posted by fingerbang at 9:32 AM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


Maybe that it's just that I'm now solidly middle-aged, but the one-upmanship and dickwaving over Crunch Mode is just tedious to me now.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:32 AM on November 12, 2013


It seems odd this whole article is written without any mention of the biggest shift in the gaming industry, away from the $100M budget blockbusters with 500 employees and over to indie games with a few programmers. That involves lots of hours and sweat too, but more on a craftsman model than a factory model.
Many observers pin their hopes on indie studios. But working in a five person shop making small games is no guarantor against the same sorts of abuses the corporate players truck in. The rise of indies must be married to a just and equitable approach to work and employment if they are to serve as a collective counterweight to corporate abuses. Given the size of most indie studios, radical approaches such as cooperatively owned studios and flat hierarchies are within easier reach than most anywhere else in the wider tech sector.
posted by Etrigan at 9:35 AM on November 12, 2013 [6 favorites]


Ah yes. The standard complaint of the lack of interesting writing about videogames. And yet...

Also games development is, once you get past the fun factory lure, just another branch of software development, and everyone going in should expect that. You will not be paid in magic, so demand real compensation or go elsewhere.
posted by Artw at 9:36 AM on November 12, 2013 [4 favorites]


And when someone does go and criticize, the publisher pulls out his DMCA and tries to shut the guy down.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 9:39 AM on November 12, 2013


It seems odd this whole article is written without any mention of the biggest shift in the gaming industry, away from the $100M budget blockbusters with 500 employees and over to indie games with a few programmers. That involves lots of hours and sweat too, but more on a craftsman model than a factory model. I'm not saying big gaming is going away, but there's a lot of movement now in the lower budget end thanks to Steam, iOS, Android, etc.

Something my former boss -- just before he, and then I, got out of the game development industry -- said was happening to the industry was that the middle was disappearing. Everything was going either to huge sweatshops or to indie startups. Life is not particularly good for the average developer in either case.

I read somewhere recently that more than half of game developers leave the industry right around age 40.
posted by Foosnark at 9:50 AM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


Every time I start to feel bad about my job, I should read video game CEOs talk about hiring practices, because I've never felt so glad to have a job where absolutely no one expects that I will work unpaid overtime to show that I have a passion for the industry and our work product. It's one of the secret advantages of having a kind of boring job that inspires no passion and which no one dreams of having as a small child. Sometimes the best job to have is one that's just a job.
posted by Copronymus at 9:52 AM on November 12, 2013 [20 favorites]


Teakettle: "The absence of meaningful criticism, of course, being one huge strike against video games as an art form. "

To me that marks the medium as very young, not as it not being art.
posted by brundlefly at 9:58 AM on November 12, 2013


It seems odd this whole article is written without any mention of the biggest shift in the gaming industry, away from the $100M budget blockbusters with 500 employees and over to indie games with a few programmers.

I'm pretty sure that GTA V made more in its first weekend than all the indie games out there made all all year across all platforms... (Ok, that might be hyperbole, but I suspect it's close)
posted by aspo at 10:00 AM on November 12, 2013


The part of the game industry I don't understand is the payment for the programmers. Salaries aren't great. And they're not getting stock options and, in most cases, not even getting big bonuses. With their skills they can work fewer hours in the Internet sector, or finance, or any number of other places that need software engineering skills that pay better and have saner hours.

It's about supply and demand. If pay and benefits were the same and you asked fresh grads whether they wanted to take a job working on the graphics engine for the next version of Starcraft or a job on backend programming for an accounting system of a company that sells floor wax, they are all going to pick Starcraft. So game companies pick some of the best grads to give terrible pay and poor working conditions, and more boring companies have to fight over the talent that's left over by offering better.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:01 AM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


Something like 9/10 of the writing on videogames that's worth reading is about how broken the industry is, though, or how broken the culture is, or how most games are garbagey consumer-products, or how the industry is crashing and taking the medium down with it, or how everything is awful now but maybe it used to be better and/or we were children, or backpatting celebrations of the culture's anti-intellectualism, etc. Replacing the dumb optimism of the overt culture and industry with witty cynicism and negativity is just exhausting. There is a dearth of "serious" games journalism, and part of it is the industry/culture's insistence that games can't ever be taken seriously, which is kind of the gist of Mike Capps' comments referenced in the article; "lighten up, our employees want to work themselves into the ground, who are we to stop them!" Alternate writing that gets beyond the uncritically-positive/sarcastically-critical dichotomy is really needed; pieces like this, which are just trying to be frank, are good.
posted by byanyothername at 10:03 AM on November 12, 2013 [5 favorites]


No one ever said it when I worked in the industry (1996-2003), but it was understood that we were getting paid with the Cool Dividend. As in, look how cool it is that you're making video games! And you get to go to E3! And we have a foosball table! Besides, if you don't work like a dog, some other young idiots will be happy to take your place, which is so cool!

I was young. I was stupid. I didn't want to work a job like my dad, despite the fact that his hours were sane, his pay was excellent, and the only times he was late to dinner was because of traffic, not because his boss insisted he sleep under his desk because this hockey game just has to be out before the season starts. I hated my job, yet I was too stubborn to admit it to myself. When I finally got fired/laid off (Treyarch was axing people, and I made myself as dispensable as possible by goofing off), it was a relief. I did other programming jobs, but I got to be a normal human while doing them.

I should have known my industry was fucked when one of my managers tried to convince me he was good at his job because he always played as the Protoss. He was completely serious when he said this. I should have bolted then and there, but noooooooo...)
posted by RakDaddy at 10:18 AM on November 12, 2013 [14 favorites]


Game industry comparisons to sweatshop exploitation always ring hollow to me, because all of these downtrodden game developers have a nice shiny escape pod waiting for them in case things get too bad: a less cool, better paying, less abusive job with reasonable hours in the broader tech sector.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:22 AM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


Thanks to etrigan for correcting me that the article does talk briefly about indie games, and in a mostly positive way. I think it's a mistake to dismiss that end of the market as too small to be relevant, though. Particularly in the phone and tablet area; maybe that market will consolidate to a few big players, but I'm guessing at the $3 price point for product it never will.
posted by Nelson at 10:42 AM on November 12, 2013


he was good at his job because he always played as the Protoss

Maybe he was using a metaphor. Did he just hang out and play defense until he built five or six carriers, then just swarm all over his opponents?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:48 AM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


The absence of meaningful criticism, of course, being one huge strike against video games as an art form.

I remember seeing somebody point out that the problem with game criticism is that virtually everybody involved in it is a fanboy, not a critic.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:56 AM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


The absence of meaningful criticism, of course, being one huge strike against video games as an art form. I'm not sure which conversation we've had before we want to have right now but that's always a good one.

No, it isn't. In the history of art criticism, perhaps the thing closest to a universal constant is that every time some idiot decrees "XYZ is NOT art!", they've been wrong, regardless of what the XYZ du jour happens to be. (And not just wrong, but once 50 years have passed and the new has settled in and the statement is viewed through the lens of hindsight, laughably wrong.)

As to the specifics of this framing, the premise is wrong - a corrupt commercial criticism empire reflects only its own dearth of criticism. Meaningful criticism exists, regardless of what glossy magazines and cable television shows are or aren't contributing.
posted by anonymisc at 11:00 AM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


I should have known my industry was fucked when one of my managers tried to convince me he was good at his job because he always played as the Protoss. He was completely serious when he said this. I should have bolted then and there, but noooooooo...)

Yes. Never trust someone who doesn't play Zerg.
posted by Riton at 11:03 AM on November 12, 2013 [3 favorites]


I work in this industry and I occasionally feel crazy for trying to set boundaries. I have friends who have worked at studios where people like to stay until 10 or 11 PM, because they're 22 and all their friends work there. As someone going on 30, trying to get home by 7 can feel like a kind of treason, like you're undercutting the ethos of the team. I had a co-worker set a meeting for 9 PM last week and when I raised an objection, I was made to feel like I was the one who was dysfunctional.

Point being: As much as there is a clear and present exploitation of labor in the games industry, there's an entire class of worker willing to work those hours. Its a culture issue as much as a management one.
posted by GilloD at 11:25 AM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


Point being: As much as there is a clear and present exploitation of labor in the games industry, there's an entire class of worker willing to work those hours. Its a culture issue as much as a management one.

My ex, who is tangentially involved in the industry, claimed that the genius move of video game CEOs was turning the creation of the games into a game. Harness the lust for competition and dick measuring that your typical young male gamer considers recreational, and model an office culture after it. Your employees will naturally self-select for ubercompetitive, dedicated personalities and weed out the lesser players.

Maybe that really works for some people, and is motivating and stimulating. But as someone who has played on Xbox Live and organized WoW raids, I can confidently say I would tear my eyes out if my livelihood depended on putting up with that culture for 10+ hours a day.
posted by almostmanda at 11:36 AM on November 12, 2013 [5 favorites]


Here's the big secret of working crazy hours: nobody gets very much extra work done that way.
posted by Artw at 11:39 AM on November 12, 2013 [23 favorites]


The absence of meaningful criticism, of course, being one huge strike against video games as an art form

A dearth and an absence are two very, very different things. The industry works in such a way that if you want to be the one who writes the story, you have to play ball. And it's been like that for thirty fucking years. Games journalism/criticism is young only in relation to other mediums. Read Confessions of the Game Doctor by Bill Kunkel, if you can find a copy. Dude was out there writing features on Combat when it came out.

Sometimes I suspect the only worthwhile publication out there who can get AAA exclusives is Game Informer. They're owned by Gamestop, sure, but at least they have the ability to say "this game is boring" and not have to be afraid of losing the exclusive because they're also determining where on the shelf your boring game is. Although, of course, that mild bit of near-journalism comes in a capsule review rated 6/10 ...two issues after a five-page spread on the game they're coming very close to actually criticizing.

And there is tons and tons of worthwhile and intelligent game criticism all over the internet if you care to look for it. The problem is that these places necessarily don't play ball and don't get the exclusives and are many times lost in the shuffle behind the veritable Greek chorus of parroted press releases.
posted by griphus at 11:46 AM on November 12, 2013


Just yesterday I listened to the Joystiq and Weekend Confirmed podcasts, one after the other, both reporting on very similar things. I'm pretty sure if I could convince a person that has never played video games before to listen to both of them side-by-side, they could immediately tell me which podcast's parent company was giving out press passes and which was relying on people with press passes to come on their show.
posted by griphus at 11:49 AM on November 12, 2013


Also games development is, once you get past the fun factory lure, just another branch of software development

Is it though? It sounds like game companies need fewer and fewer actual software developers, now that widely-available engines can do all the hard work. It seems to me like game development is going to converge with web design/movie animation/TV production as a field where a lot of young bright artsy types with tech school training toil for absurdly low wages. Maybe it's not there yet though.
posted by miyabo at 12:07 PM on November 12, 2013


Also, if you're a game developer who is regretting your career choice, you should develop an RPG where you play a morose game developer who works 80 hours a week and gets laid off at the end of each level to convince young people not to follow you.
posted by miyabo at 12:13 PM on November 12, 2013 [3 favorites]


Carillon: One of the issues that really makes it clear to me is that video game reviewing is essentially done on a 7-10 point scale. That's something that's been discussed before on the blue, but I think the score creep is at least a part of the problem.

I think maybe the issue is that games are reviewed more like consumer products, and less like other media, and people don't always like that. In reviews for say, computer hardware, something that gets a 3/10 is a total disaster - something that either frequently doesn't work or has massive, catastrophic design flaws. In movie reviews, it's just somewhat subpar by critical standards. Games seem to follow the first model, where a mediocre but functional product is good enough to have about a 60%. However, in games, basic operation is not guaranteed, so it might not be bad to reserve the lower number-space for games that really do fundamentally fail in either functionality, or core mechanics, or other key features.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:50 PM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


The problem is that these places necessarily don't play ball and don't get the exclusives and are many times lost in the shuffle behind the veritable Greek chorus of parroted press releases.

Not something that's all unique to games journalism of course; any entertainment journalism has the same problem, even (especially) book reviewing. But what's missing still is the video game equivalent of the London Review of Books, something that takes the time to properly review and look at games while having enough prestige that it gets listened to.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:51 PM on November 12, 2013


I feel like many people here are missing that the TFA is about labor conditions in the gaming sector and the lack of a press that takes those issues--or, indeed, the industry itself--seriously or critically. The lack of good journalism or review writing about the games themselves (whether as art or entertainment) is a side issue. The author is primarily interested in the lack of good critical writing about the industry.

Game industry comparisons to sweatshop exploitation always ring hollow to me, because all of these downtrodden game developers have a nice shiny escape pod waiting for them in case things get too bad: a less cool, better paying, less abusive job with reasonable hours in the broader tech sector.

Is that really true for the under-educated and over-worked QA temps that the authors spends most of his time talking about, those who have worthless video game degrees from shady for-profit colleges? I'm biased and predisposed to believe that the answer is no, here, but I'm very open to correction from those with relevant first- or secondhand experience.
posted by col_pogo at 1:15 PM on November 12, 2013 [7 favorites]


Do people who enter the industry still come from the QA side? I've read a couple of things that say that this isn't true anymore. And the article seems to hint at this, saying how QA and Dev sides are separated and QA is seen as much lower in the pecking order.
posted by FJT at 1:30 PM on November 12, 2013


The author is primarily interested in the lack of good critical writing about the industry.

Its interesting to me --- in the wider software industry, the downsides / problems with game development are well known. The problem I guess is that its not nearly as well known for students, so new CS grads can be pulled in without really knowing the score.

Some people may actually want to work in those conditions, I don't know, but I imagine some reasonable percentage don't know what they're going into.

But the knowledge is there in the other parts of the tech industry, if only because of the steady flow of survivors from games programming telling their stories at work.
posted by wildcrdj at 1:32 PM on November 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


From my limited experience in the broader tech industry, there is tremendous stigma against QA people transitioning to development. It's almost better to have some completely unrelated experience in a different field than to be pigeonholed as QA if you're applying to be a developer. I don't know why this is.

On the bright side, most places seem to treat QA people pretty well and pay them reasonably, unlike the gaming industry apparently. It's not a bad career path as long as you don't see it as a stepping stone.
posted by miyabo at 2:30 PM on November 12, 2013


At Harmonix (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Dance Central), where I work, many people have started in QA and moved into production or design. (A few people have taken tentative steps towards engineering and found that they had better opportunities elsewhere than waiting for internal promotions, but I think that jump is higher for various reasons.) Some of them have risen pretty darn high; for example, a random tester on Frequency (2001) became the head of our entire hardware department by 2007. QA is also integrated directly into all projects; for example, I (a programmer) share an office with two testers. I don't know how far from the norm we are.
posted by dfan at 5:18 PM on November 12, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yeah, QA is typically separated from the rest of development at most companies. At my studio this isn't true - it's close to what Harmonix does, apparently. I work with a lot of people who came in from QA, including my producer who was in QA only a year ago, and some of our QA people take on development tasks on each project. A group of testers are usually 'embedded' with designers in the last several months of a game.

Most testers I've talked to describe a very different work experience than ours though, where they are NOT allowed to talk directly to developers, where there's little to no advancement, where there's a bit more Eye-of-Sauron watching their every move. That kind of thing definitely seems to be the norm for QA.

There's not much stigma against developers with QA in their background. But there are a lot of blockers to QA people seeking to enter development - it takes luck, being in the right place at the right time, and working at a studio already known for promoting within. It's not a path I ever recommend to aspiring developers.
posted by subject_verb_remainder at 6:46 PM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


QA is rarely treated seriously in any software field. Everyone is expected to move to dev or project managment after a couple of years. The long term effect is that there are relatively few real professionals in the QA field.

That doesn't sound bad, until your company really needs good, experienced testers, so your medical device doesn't kill someone, or your satellite doesn't turn into a shiny brick in orbit. And then you see how much a consultant charges...

Having done (non-gaming) QA for almost a decade and a half now, I'm trying to move to development to broaden my experience. There's a lot I have to learn, but overcoming the stain of QA has been unnecessarily painful.
posted by underflow at 9:02 PM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


Articles written for young males by young males in a young industry are not going to be great journalism.

Man, being young is great, though, even if you aren't a dude. I mean, I feel like I could do anything, be anything-- I don't have to take any kind of bullshit from anyone. It's really awesome, kickin' rad. You should try it.
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 5:58 AM on November 13, 2013


Are you sure you're young? Maybe it's all the coke.
posted by FJT at 10:05 AM on November 13, 2013


What clicked for me in the article is that some of the unfortunate aspects of videogame culture, insularity and bigotry and etc. aside, actually help keep production costs down. Not just at the level of skilled labor - the industry's hardly unique in trying to pay in "passion" over money - but in the much more boring trenches of QA, in-game support, community management, and so forth where there's no creativity as a carrot. And it works because the industry presents itself as a fan subculture: menial tasks which are nonetheless necessary if the game's going to make money can be presented to workers as another form of subculture interaction and consumption, and their actual compensation discounted accordingly.

The article doesn't actually come out and say that, but I read a difference between the capitol P passion justifications for programmer overtime and the low-level, non-creative labor that's justified as part "foot in the door," part "this is your subculture and we're paying you," and which apparently constitutes an easily recruited and easily discarded workforce.

There's some overlap with publishing or film there, but as far as I know there's nothing quite the same. Is proofreading also a $10 an hour, constant crunch of a job which relies on would-be authors, or on people who just identify as big fans of reading? Outside of animation and some VFX, is there something similar in film?

And there's class differences, too, which the article also didn't touch on. I can't help but think that the person working for nothing or near it at a major publishing house isn't in quite the same context as someone who spends 60 hours a week testing triggers on CoD maps or working the support forums, or who sees an ad like the one mentioned in the article and thinks "yeah, maybe that's the way in."
posted by postcommunism at 10:46 AM on November 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


Is proofreading also a $10 an hour, constant crunch of a job which relies on would-be authors, or on people who just identify as big fans of reading?

From what I have heard from friends, yes it is. Many of the people doing grunt work at publishers are working for free as unpaid interns.

Film, too. There are a lot of film school grads working for $10 an hour in something marginally related to the industry.

I think the economics are the same in each case: lots of young people are passionate about the product, they all want to grow up and help make the product, wages go down and down and down.
posted by miyabo at 1:27 PM on November 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


> I think the economics are the same in each case: lots of young people are passionate about the product, they all want to grow up and help make the product

I dunno - the impression I got for those positions in the game industry seemed closer to Apple than Conde Nast (or HuffPo, for that matter), as far as how the consumer fandom can be used to encourage lower wages.

I am bringing stuff to the article that wasn't explicitly covered there, though. The way industry spectacle is used at conventions, the way it gets covered in games journalism, and so on; it's not just crappy in and of itself, it actually helps make QA or other low positions worse. Not something I'd thought of.
posted by postcommunism at 6:52 PM on November 13, 2013


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