One of the writing projects I worked on in my Writing 39B class here at the university was called the RIP Project. "Rhetoric in Practice" Project. Or Rest in Peace lol. That was intense. We were supposed to write a total of 6-8 pages about trying to convince our audience of something. One part was supposed to be the actual content: choosing a genre like a blog or column and writing something in the style of it. The other part was analyzing our own writing choices and how they appealed to our audience. I didn't like the workload. This was a lot. But I still put genuine thought into the game industry topic I wrote about, and I wanted to talk about that more in this post.
The topic I chose was on game industry life. At the time, I was thinking about choosing a Computer Game Science major here at the university, so I wanted to look more into it. I had to tie my project in to the class theme, which was fairy tales at the time, so the project was a little cheesy, but I made it work. As I was researching it though, I realized how harsh it is. Crunch time and short employment seem to be continuous problems in almost every game studio. I mean like, seriously. It sounds really bad, from what I've read. Here's an excerpt from Joshua Rivera's "Inside the Video Game Industry's Culture of Crunch Time":
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“This is people coming in at 9. Working all day. Leaving 10, 11, 12, 1, depending what they were doing. And then coming back the next morning and doing it all over again, six to seven days a week. To my knowledge, five couples got a divorce because of this. Almost the entire creative leadership has now quit, after ship. It was toxic; it was a toxic environment.”
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At first, I'd think this is rare. This is really extreme. But I've seen this same pattern in the other articles I've read, like Andrew McMillen's IGN article on L.A. Noire's 7-year development.
In the end, from doing this project, I've realized that while making games is fun, in the game industry, it can be so busy that it can hurt your health. I don't want to do a Computer Game Science major anymore, just normal Computer Science. I still like making games (I've done a little bit. Nothing AAA of course, but still, I've really enjoyed it), but I don't want to devote my life to it, especially with this lifestyle I'm hearing about. I haven't researched into other computer science fields yet, but I still do love computers and want to have a career with it.
Though I wonder if this lifestyle is common in other industries, and like it's just receiving news in the game industry because the industry is so big. Not sure.
Anyways, I wanted to share my RIP project on this. I did take it seriously, more than just for the grade. Yes, it's a little cheesy. I had to tie it in with fairy tales. But both in the main project and self-analysis, I add in what I've seen from game industry life articles. Of course I haven't had any experience in the industry, but I still think at least mentioning these articles is important.
Dropbox link:
RIP Project
Articles about game industry life:
(the two not mentioned in my bibliography were more about an image and analyzing Polygon's column genre)
Andrew McMillen. "Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make?"
YouTube. "The Realities of Life in Game Development" (Interestingly, I don't think the panel mentions crunch. So maybe crunch is over-hyped, like not in all industries? Or maybe there's something odd here. I don't know.)
Joshua Rivera. "Inside the Video Game Industry's Culture of Crunch Time"
Jason Schreier. "The Horrible World of Video Game Crunch"
YouTube. "What It's Really Like to Work in the Game Industry"
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