Beating the Burnout: Finding Success Under Stress

[Music] all right everybody welcome to french 101 we yes actually does anybody in here speak french okay then i am i ordinarily start off start these off with a really terrible joke and i'm not gonna break the cycle at gdc just some of you may not understand this one because it's a bad french joke that there's two cats swimming across a river one of them is named one two three the other is named uh which one makes it to the other side you're right one two three cat makes it because unfortunately [Laughter] [Applause] i'm already getting caught i'm already getting jeers from up here they want me off the stage no so uh it's day four everybody and i think this is probably an apt panel for day four who's feeling who's feeling just exhausted okay okay hold on keep your hands up keep your hands up keep you down okay for those of you who are feeling exhausted keep your hands up if you've deliberately said no to things like parties interviews etc okay most of you okay that's good that's good all right so what we're gonna do is we're gonna we have this fantastic panel of industry veterans and we're gonna talk about how they deal with stress particularly burnout stress and hopefully they're going to have some really great tips for you all to do the same thing but first let's talk about well who i am and who i'm here with my name is dr b i am the clinical director of a mental health nonprofit called take this uh starting in 2012 we were actually the first mental health nonprofit to serve the game industry and our whole mission can be boiled down to it's okay to not be okay and it is a you know basically mental health challenges are far more common than we realize regardless of whether they raise to the level of a full diagnosis or not and yet we're not talking about it one of the statistics we like to cite is from the centers for disease control here in the united states and roughly one in four people will be diagnosed in their lifetime think about that and this is actually kind of a conservative number this number does not include substance abuse disorders this number does not include neurodevelopmental disorder like asperger's but it's still significant if you don't know someone who suffers from a mental health diagnosis yeah you do yeah you do and they're not talking about it which is part of the problem so take this exists to help bring education to studios to attendees and we do a lot of talks like this and we want to bring awareness to all of you and apparently you all are you're all concerned about burnout yeah yeah yeah because like this industry's heart or something like totally who who who got into this industry with the dreams of i'm going to make amazing games i mean obviously but and it's going to be great i'm going to do it my spare time and i'm going to leave it i'm already getting laughter as soon as i say spare time yeah we're going to talk about that um but what is burnout like no seriously i'm i'm asking you what is burnout somebody give me a guess because we use the term all the time and i want to make sure we're all on the same page yes you in the back with the red sleeves [Music] so it's when your mind completely and suddenly stops and you cannot think anymore okay who else yes deep depression let's go over to the yes 100 for too long to the point that you cannot go anymore way back in the corner cannot function boy that just that summarizes it all yes you your work starts to become terrible so you can't think okay so i love that i'm getting such a great response on day four unless you're all stretching and i just don't know it because i don't know you know drinking gotta keep that never mind um all of you are correct in part burnout is all of these things it's not first of all it's kind of like imposter syndrome it's not a diagnosis all right imposter syndrome isn't actually a syndrome but burnout is something that is a unique long-term form of stress that affects our cognition our ability to think affects our mood so deep depression touches on that it affects our functioning and it also affects our career longevity and incidentally it has correlates with all of these things now part of the reason this is going to be really important for studios if you are a manager at a studio big small somewhere in between doesn't matter pay attention to this because turn turnover rates are a substantive cost a statistic that we cited in a white paper that take this wrote for the igda in 2016 called crunch hertz cited that the cost just the cost of retraining a new employee is 20 of their annual salary that's not to even mention losses in productivity due to retraining time in the united states alone productivity costs related to depression we're in the 44 billion dollar range per year so we want to optimize our spaces and i believe it was the most recent developer satisfaction survey that the igda put out that roughly two out of three developers and game industry employees dropped by their 10th year we don't have many veterans in this industry and we want that because we want that expertise and so we need to we need to eliminate this stuff but since i mentioned crunch okay well again since you all were in the mood for raising hands or stretching i don't know i'm not going to judge but what happens to burnout if we just work less hard yes so you're probably working just as hard for less amount of time and you feel just as stressed if we just eliminate the work hours okay yes you start losing momentum if you back off okay and what was that benefits you but your work fails so what you know when you're watching your numbers and you have you're looking at ratings and all of that and what happens then i mean that's terrifying yes you start to get stressed about what you don't have done oh boy if i had a nickel for every time i heard that one yes you're less likely to ship if you don't work constantly you read our paper seriously actually uh over studios who regularly use crunch ha there is a correlation with lowered metacritic scores yeah yes okay so there so there's fear there's fear of a lack of progress in your career because your peers and your superiors are going to be looking down on you if you work less hours well what happens to burnout yes guilt oh boy we were opened up a whole can of worms didn't know this was going to turn into group therapy did you yes so we hear negativity about self negativity about work guilt fear yes so to summarize this burnout's a form of depression and you work harder to beat the depression but then you get more depressed about working hard and it works not as good because you can't think of straight and okay no one else has experienced that right okay well let's let's talk about why it's not just a simple matter of working less hours and you're all touching on this because burnout is not just a matter of exhaustion sure burnout exhaustion is a part of it but it's not the only part okay there's two other components based on a model that's been in use for a couple of decades that it's exhaustion it is cynicism so in other words just i don't care i don't care about you i don't care about this you know who likes working around the person who's always negative all the time god i'm glad nobody raised their hand god oh yeah but it's it's a drain on you it's a drain on the team it's a dream oh i forgot i had that on they're so tiny the lav mics um but the it becomes a trap of negativity but also there's an interrelated idea of a sense of ineffectiveness do we feel like our work is producing anything do we have a purpose and the solutions to burnout have to tap into all of these things like how discouraging it is it when you're working on a project so close to completion cancelled anybody experience that yeah yeah i think some friends of mine and i won't say which studio but they had one they were working on for five years and right before it was about to ship boom cancelled how demoralizing is that how ineffective do you feel in your job where all the five years of work nothing how negative are you going to feel about your next experience and also how exhausted so this is all of the above coming into one and that's really what burnout is now a couple of things we want to talk about in this is also self-doubt self-doubt unhealthy self-doubt i mean if i in my current physical state decide i want to go free climb el capitan and there's a part of my brain that goes no no let's ignore my crippling phobia of heights for a moment and i just couldn't do it physically that there are healthy forms of self-doubt but other forms of self-doubt are unrealistic and that be that produces a sense of inefficacy so all of this is interrelated all of the topics that are commonly talked about in terms of the stressors of being in the game space are interrelated and contribute we can't just focus on one to find solutions we need to focus on purpose we need to focus on investment of in the product we need to focus on reasonable working hours because your cognitive your i know it feels weird i heard somebody say i lose my motivation you feel like you lose your motivation well most of us i get weirdly amped after a while but um even i have my limits because of this there's another thing called a technical term is allostatic load don't have to remember that but basically think of a thermostat okay our bodies are remarkably adaptive now if you leave the door open in your house and it's new england in the winter your thermostat is going to start to work overtime for those of you who may be from outside of the u.s new england is cold i'm from the other side of the country in seattle so i never heard of this term winterizing your house but apparently it's a thing we have rain they have blizzards and so your door is open your heater is going to try and maintain the temperature in your house so it's going to kick into high gear and it's going to do a good job for a while but it's going to burn out our bodies are no different and we need to regulate that a little bit better but once it gets used to it it's hard to come back down so we need to have preventative measures as well and that's what these lovely folks here are going to talk about how they have maintained success in this industry for as long as they have and i'm going to ask everybody to introduce themselves unfortunately one of our panelists security at the airport just unexpectedly long missed his flight and was unable to be here with us but he gave me some great written answers that i may be cheating and reading off later but who are you what do you do how long you've been doing it okay um so i'm kate edwards i i'm a geographer and i've been in the industry for 26 years i do culturalization work which means i help game developers avoid political and cultural mistakes and their content that gets them banned by governments and because consumer uprisings and stuff like that i did that at microsoft for 13 years and i've been self-employed ever since in my late last 10 years or so in the industry i've gotten very involved in advocacy issues i ran the igda for five years as the executive director i left in 2017 and since then i've been very active in a lot of advocacy issues including unionization and creating a legal defense fund and things of that nature you know you can applaud this is already an audience participation panel if you feel free to applaud you know spontaneously you go for it there you go i know where my hecklers are so uh i'm david ettery i'm the ceo and co-founder of spry fox and we've made games uh like triple town alpha bear bushido bear rum the mad gods steam birds um if any of y'all have played any of those and um yeah happy to be here i'm amir rao i'm the studio director and co-founder of supergiant games we're an 18-person independent game company here in san francisco we made bastion transistor pyre and working on a game called hades right now and missing is tommy rafenez who is the ceo of team meat they have some really cool stuff for meat boy coming out very soon i hear and i'm dr b the clinical director of take this i am not a developer i'm actually a doctor of clinical psychology and so for you all so when have you experienced any of the any of the things we talked about in terms of like negativity exhaustion um a sense of inefficacy in your work and how do you deal with it you want to start [Laughter] so i guess for me i view that form of exhaustion as the potentially inevitable outcome of like a passionate point of view on your work um so for me when i have felt that way uh my own my own view on it looking backwards now um because most of this most of this happened much earlier is that it was like me understanding and learning what my limits were i had no other way of discovering them no matter you know if i come to this panel or not um then to work the way i did to find out what i was capable of and where i might break um so in my experience i worked a lot um i you know especially on something like bastion i think you know we were living in a living room in the house we're working all the time uh but we were also like kind of young and didn't have anywhere else to be um so i try to be kind to myself in the in the retrospect uh of all that stuff you know i've definitely pushed myself too hard i've made mistakes that um uh in in in understanding my own limits but that's uh i think the hard thing about that stuff is it's a recurring lesson that you end up having to sometimes relearn every time you uh every time you might get i mean i think we all want to be i think a lot of us are drawn to this work because we are like passionately consumed by it um and we sometimes want a job that is so creatively fulfilling it does not fit inside 40 hours um and i think that that sometimes leads to the types of things that you're talking about um which is sad because it started like from a place of of actual like joy and engagement so you're talking about basically a constant readjustment of your expectations in in learning from your failures yeah basically i'm trying to say is like i haven't fixed or solved this um like um this is like an ongoing part of you know our lives you know we don't we you know we're not at a giant company there isn't someone who's like bringing in tubs of food and implying that we should all be working late um it's it's not that kind of thing it's a small group of people who are passionately invested in the in the work we're doing and um how much of their life is a part of work is uh is a constant exchange based on what's going on in their life and what's going on at work um so i i've experienced i think two very different forms of burnout but both pretty nasty one of them was like way back in i don't remember 2011 or 2012 or something and we had it was like it was on realm of the mad god actually we had for a fairly arbitrary set of reasons five weeks to make the game way better or we were screwed and um and so i worked 100 hours or more every week for five weeks and it was just like amir was saying at the end of that i was like oh that's i found my limit like i ran all the way up to the edge of the cliff very nearly threw myself over it and then thankfully pulled back and was like i'm never doing that again like i was a broken shell of a human at the end of that five-week period um and then the other kind of burnout is very different but just as nasty and it's the when you work on something even if you you know um you know you work on it for reasonable hours and you know not more than 40 hours a week and everything's hunky-dory but then you ship it and it fails and particularly if it fails for reasons that you feel like we're not in your control which is something that's going to happen a lot in games like you'll look at and you'll be like i did my best my game is good it still didn't succeed which is like a super common story um like every time that happens and thankfully it hasn't happened too many times but when it does you just feel the life sucked out of you and for there's a period of time where you're like why am i doing this you know and it happens to you even if you have made like i am very lucky and i use the word luck very intentionally like yeah i work hard and all that stuff but like but like to have as many successful games as buy fox has had requires a lot of luck um in addition to skill and sweat and all that and um and it doesn't matter like i have even with all the number like the you know i think we have like five games that have been played by several million people like and and it doesn't matter when a game fails it's you still take it super personally and it's like and it makes you want to quit so yeah those are my two burnouts i think from my perspective because my job has been a little different i mean i have i've been involved in crunch episodes with different teams because i'm more of an advisory role to a lot of these teams i have a choice whether to crunch or not when i created my geopolitical team at microsoft to handle this kind of work i made sure that my team never worked ridiculous hours even though at the time microsoft was kind of insisting on pretty long hours for different teams especially if you're like a core programming team and i just said that we don't work that way here i'll take the heat for it but my people you go home so um but a lot of my burnout well let me ask this question how many people here consider themselves an introvert of course yeah we're the game industry so i do i do too i'm you know i think i can take myers-briggs or whatever else and it always comes out and i something um i can fake extra virgin really well now but um one of the biggest challenges i always had in my career was people weren't out it's it's dealing with people and i'm not saying it's just because they're incompetent not everyone's incompetent but there's people who just have different visions or they pull you in a different direction or um they are incompetent there's those people too let's face it um and it's just having to deal with that kind of pressure of being in an organization so i guess part of it is what i face a lot is organizational burnout it's like being in this organization that might be dysfunctional even though you love your function you love what you do you love whatever job you're doing but you just the organization you're in just it's just you wish it could be better in multiple attempts with management and all that just don't don't make it better and so i find over when i look back over my career that's usually all the inflection points i've had where i've left a company or you know done something different made a major shift was always because of a interpersonal thing it was always because either the organization burned me out like microsoft the work that i did at microsoft i love my work i've been doing it for 30 years now and i and i still love it every day i got tired of doing it there for many reasons and so i'm just like i have to get out of here i have to do you know something else do it somewhere else um and so that that's often the case for me is you just kind of reach this point where i can't do it here anymore um you hit walls and everything you know along with that comes emotional burnout too it's like when i created this geopolitical team it took me seven months i wrote a proposal because we had this big incident happen in korea and it inspired me to create this team i had to shop it around to five different vps before i finally got approval and every one of those rejections was very difficult i'm like why can't they understand this is a great idea um then finally the last vb who approved it approved it in five minutes and that's because he was not from the us he was the only vp i talked to who was not from the u.s he's from south africa and he's his first answer was i thought we're doing this already so he just like he's like yes we need to do this so i think for me it's it's less i've had less of the physical burnout episodes but much more of the the interpersonal organizational kind of burnout episodes that have been pretty trying at times well and it's interesting for me to think about uh all the the different positions that you all have because uh one of the things that tommy said when he answered this question via email was that he's never really experienced burnout the way we described it in that model and i wonder how much of that has to do with literal ownership of the work um you know david and amir you you're both in positions where the work truly is yours i mean you're both speaking about passion to this and you know kate you you're a consultant that is a very different position where the people you can say all the amazing things you want but they could choose or not to listen kind of like the original jurassic park no seriously no the technical consultant on the original jurassic park dr jack horner is a big proponent of the idea that the tyrannosaurus rex is not a hunter but a scavenger largely based on its anatomy that would have been a boring movie but you know you're in a position where they can take or leave your suggestion so all three of you are in very unique positions what would you say to those who don't have your positions about this easy question right well i think that i mean just my view is that that that just doubles down on the stress i mean when you if you have some level of agency in the work that you do like in my case it's like i consult and if they don't like what i said or they're not going to do what i say i'm just like good luck you know it's in writing that i told you so so when you do screw up not when but when you do because i know you will because you didn't listen to me um you will get banned in this country you will have this huge uprising on twitter um you know you can come back and just say you know we're sorry we didn't listen to you but it but that's hard that's very hard because i want them to succeed my whole job is to help them succeed and so that adds a lot of stress on me i get emotional stress from it i feel stressful for them and if that happens frequently which it doesn't but it can you know we have multiple you know things like that happen you just that's burnt out you're just like maybe i should just go take like an easy job somewhere i could just like be a program manager on marvel so maybe i can meet chris hemisworth someday or something i don't know so i i am i i think this is i'm going to give an answer to basically two questions here one of the things that i've noticed that helps me tremendously with burnout is is making sure that i love the people who i work with it makes an enormous difference it doesn't matter how crappy the world is and how much how many things are going wrong if i trust and care about the people who i'm with it's kind of like well we're all in this together like we'll make it work right and even if we don't make it work like you know we care about each other we'll figure this out um i realize and so that that that's an interesting question you were going to ask later like um but um i think that this is a like i understand that i'm privileged like i literally get to pick who i work with because i the the person who runs the company but but i i do feel like when i talk to my friends who are not in that position that they oftentimes underestimate their ability to to get themselves out of situations where they're working with people whom they aren't happy being around um and that's actually something that i'd really strongly encourage you guys like it like you know many people are afraid to even go to their manager for example and tell them like i'm not happy around this person like and there's so many reasons you could be not happy it's not like it could be that they're a terrible human being sure like and and and that happens but and it could also be other things it could just be subtle things like there's a major cultural mismatch like you're constantly feeling friction like you're not being able to settle it yourselves you know whatever actually sorry i should take a step back if it is something like that like talk to that person try to work it out right like don't just be miserable like that's a that's like a first thing but like if you have tried that or feel like there's a good reason you can't like for for example that person is a harasser then yeah you go to your manager like don't don't just be silently miserable and if you feel like you can't go to your manager about something like that like that's a very strong signal you are in the wrong place like you do not belong in a company where you cannot tell your manager that there's another person who for whatever reason makes you not want to go to work you know what i mean um and if you if you if you make an effort to make sure that you're only working with people who you like and respect it will make such a huge difference it dampens burnout dramatically um and if that means that you need to just be more of a hustler and always be aware of like where your next job might be because the current one isn't the one isn't working out for all the reasons that i just described them like so be it you know i mean like hopefully not like hopefully eventually you find a place like i like to think that the people at spritefox feel pretty good about being at spry fox we don't have a lot of turnover you know these companies exist you can find them like you owe that to yourself if you're going to work this hard let's face it everyone in this room who's making games there's a very very high chance you could double your salary in any other industry like very high chance so if you're going to work in this industry really hard like making less than you could be making anywhere else possibly longer hours than you'd be working anywhere else like you deserve to at least work with people that you like i'm trying to let that i'm trying to let that one sink in for a moment because i mean that's that touches on two of the three parts of the burnout model you're talking about self-efficacy and attachment to an outcome as well as a lack of cynicism in your work environment so you're touching on two out of three and it sounds remarkably protective that's awesome amir how about you yeah i mean you know a late night so we made bash in the living room of my dad's house uh so like a late night there was not a burnout night it was like a sleepover that lasted for 20 months um so it was it was a different feeling because i was there with uh the woman who would become my wife uh and uh you know my best friends in the whole world working on a game together um so that feels really different than if you're in a big team or a big company where i think one of the things that's really interesting to me about crunch stuff is i think it's pretty rare that someone directly just says you know push push it like like do more than you can do um that's almost never the conversation right it's usually a little bit more insidious which is you have way more work than time people are starting to stay late they're starting to bring in dinners um these like small telltale signs leadership is getting anxious and nervous well that's what we heard from everybody here yeah release date is coming up these kinds of things um it's all and and if you are in a situation even where you love the people you work with you may feel like a lot of social pressure um to to deliver because you don't want to let anyone down right uh in those scenarios it can be helpful to think of the difference between when you own the work and when you don't uh because if someone is asking or implying that you should do this if you're doing it for probably what we could categorize are healthy reasons like you want to be a part of something you really believe in what's there you think it's time limited and it's not going to destroy your life those are maybe some reasons that you can can use to convince yourself um to to put in a little more or whatever whatever you want but for the most part the people who are creating these environments um are like maybe the only ones who stand to benefit from this so a lot of people work really hard on things that they later do not see the economic or positive or brand or reputational benefits from that and that's really really different so think about uh think about who is going to benefit from your overwork because it's a really different equation if it's you and your peers and the people you're connected to and fans that you might love or a franchise that you might be really really attached to than uh like shareholders or um like the the executive staff of your corporation who may not even know your name um so it's a really really really different uh sort of setup between those two things well what do you all see you know we mentioned you mentioned uh david you mentioned your privilege and being able to pick your team and kate had stories of you know way back in the day at microsoft and the bureaucratic structure that it is where do you all see managers especially like mid-level managers where is their responsibility in helping to curb the burnout well from my perspective a manager is is or is a leader but what to lead is to serve in my view and if you are in a leadership position that means you are serving the needs of the people under you and if you don't see it that way then you should not be a leader you should not be a manager um you basically you it's not a triangle with you at the top it's you at the bottom serving the needs of everyone in your organization so you work for them and that's that's really the perspective that you have to see it and so on that level you have a fundamental responsibility not only to the job that they're working on so that it's successful so you're obviously trying to work towards the production and all that kind of stuff but that also means shepherding their needs and being making sure that they're okay on an emotional level physical level all these other dimensions of what makes a successful project happen and you know to look just at numbers and just look at a you know time sheet of of what's due the due dates and all that kind of stuff yeah you got to do that because that's part of your responsibility but to me that's the easy part you know the hard part is actually going around and making sure you know the names of everyone on your team and making sure you know what their situation is and making sure you have some level of empathy with the different situations that they're facing because every single person's different and so so that's one of the things i often really try and encourage people in a leadership role it's like if you cannot see yourself as a servant and as a shepherd then you're definitely in the wrong job [Applause] all right apparently kate just dropped the mic on that one just don't drop the mic they're expensive okay um you all talked about mistakes that mistakes are inevitable in fact amir you talked about your learning process as a constant recalibration of mistakes in a new environment what advice do you have for everybody on how to accept the fact that we will make mistakes and how do they build the resilience to get through them yeah so they're not mistakes like that's the simple answer like how could you have known like there is no way for you to have known how it was going to affect your life and what was going to happen to it until you did it so i would not necessarily view those chapters of your life as a moment where you totally dropped the ball on something that everyone already knew because everyone's limits are different everyone's lives are different all those things are are unique and personal to the individuals so if you've experienced uh some extreme emotional event connected to work or even like a persistent low-level nagging emotional event sort of connected to those things i would be kind to yourself about that because the reason i have to keep relearning is because it's popping up in different ways you know if it was the exact same thing every time i would be i would be much more prepared um but uh but the way the way this kind of consumption creeps into your life is is going to be different each time and it's probably because it's coming from someplace inside you that's that's like either highly motivated or highly ambitious or highly loyal to the people you work with or whatever those things are it's probably coming from a place that isn't entirely negative that isn't just a lack of self-control an inability to constrain yourself a lack of prioritization like all the things that we can use to beat ourselves up with um yeah i just yeah it's not a mistake it's just it's just how you have to learn so you're talking about reframing yeah but it's i mean it's central to it it is not a coincidence that many of the most successful creative companies including like the pixars and stuff of the world like they are all very very good at trying to banish the word failure from their company cultures like it's not failure it's just not failure it's i mean there are forms of failure but they're not the ones that most people think about like if you hire someone and they are just unreliable and mean and whatever like you know bad person attributes for like i don't know what you would call that like like yeah those people are failing as far as i'm concerned and we do everything we can to try to get unfortunately we've actually i don't think in the history of sprite fox you've ever hired someone that was quite that bad but like when we hire someone who's even a little bit toxic like we make an effort to get rid of them quickly um because that's failure that that's bad aside from that like if it's a person who's like an intelligent human being who honest really cares and is honestly trying their best and something goes wrong it's never failure it's just they tried their best and it didn't work and we're super super hardcore about that and we've started to entrench that in other aspects of our culture like for example um a little bit of quick background will help you understand spry fox is kind of weird like we're only 18 people but we'll have like four games in concurrent development in any given time um and we've been like that since the beginning when we were even a lot less than 18 people um and we do that in part because we have this obsession with making highly creative games and we know that we're probably like that's super risky and some of them are going to fail maybe even a lot of them are going to fail and so as a result you have to be making a lot of them so that at least one of them can succeed and cover the cost of all the failures but when you do that like i was saying earlier like you're pouring yourself into these original expressions and then they fail and it's a knife in the heart and so how do you how do you deal with that and the way you deal with it is by not causing calling it failure like you celebrate all the things you learned from making that thing and like we try to be really conscious about that like where you know a game at the end of it we'll spend a lot of time talking about like what are all the cool things that we did and what did we learn from that and like oh were there any problems what did we learn from that and like it's never failure you know what i mean it's just growing as a person um i think that's super central we also recently in our slack channel added a a pyre uh uh uh channel for a place where like if you're working on a prototype and the prototype ends up not being fun you like give it its send off there right like like you know it was a good soldier it died hooray on the next one um and like and it's just a way like again so that it's not you didn't screw up like the fact that your prototype wasn't fun is not a is not on you like that's what happens with prototypes let's celebrate the fact that this one didn't work out and move on to the next one you know what i mean um so i think that's actually pretty important um i highly encourage you to try to completely reframe your thinking about and also again quite frankly if you're in a place where that's not where the way people think and they're not willing to think that way no matter how much you encourage them to like maybe that's not a good place to be like don't don't be at a place where you get brow beaten for trying your best and and it not working out um yeah so you know all of you have touched on this idea of studio culture being important like what's your take-home tip for people looking for a good fit for studio culture like what do you look for it's always good when i ask a question like ooh yeah well so i mean i can just talk about i'm gonna just answer a different question because yeah well that's it you know what that's okay take the politician's way out yeah so yeah i'll just answer the question i want to answer um which is like what do what do we do um around around things like this like what do we do to promote like healthy working habits because um so ultimately it's super giant uh here's the thing i'm most proud of about supergiant we made really good games all the people who worked on bastion still work there right those are that group is still there um so for us like sustainably creating like the games we make is like central to what we want to accomplish so you know hopefully we'll be like the rolling stones and be like super freaking old charge like ten thousand dollars per game or something when we're like 70. um but um the the basic idea for us is we end up uh doing things we like hesitated about because we came from ea so it's like we shouldn't have policies but actually we need policies um and we especially need policies uh to save us like from ourselves so an example of stuff we do at supergiant we don't send weekend emails so like friday at 5 00 to monday at 5am there's no emails or slack messages or anything like that if there's an emergency you get a phone call and there are emergencies and so you don't have to worry about checking you know you can turn it off that's it uh we used to have unlimited time off and then no one took time off so we have a mandatory minimum 20 days off and you can take more um so the idea is we have the kind of culture where people need to be reminded to leave um and so we made a policy around that um and then we have like really liberal kind of like work from home type of policies because we want like work-life balance is something that comes up a lot i for some reason i chafe at that phrase because it makes it sound like there is a perfect state that you can achieve in which your work and life are like perfectly just like together um for me we we try to talk about like work life integration um how how does work contour to your life like how can it fit into your life and in any reasonable human company that's trying to sustain itself that will change like almost every year so in terms of a culture you know we're contours to your life is a central part of our culture and we end up inventing all these small ways to promote healthy habits for ourselves as a result and the only reason we can make those is because we did the opposite and didn't work um so we had to learn it over time yeah so we um we had um we've done some similar stuff where uh for example we we say you should not work weekends and and sometimes like you said there's emergencies and people will have to work weekends but we explicitly say and by we i mean daniel and i the co-founders that like if someone is working on a weekend there is a very high chance that that means daniel and i [ __ ] up like we take that on ourselves and like and we encourage everyone who works in sprite fox to feel free to call us out on that too like if someone's like i worked eight hours on saturday you suck dave like like like that's a good thing right because it increases the odds that i'm i mean it decreases the likelihood that i will then put them in that situation again in the future because i don't like being told i suck so so so there's that and we also have we have a challenge that supergiant doesn't which is that we're spread all over the world so this has made it super hard to have like boundaries around work and and life because it's like i have people who are in south africa they're messaging me at hours that i would rather not be messaged um but i don't want them to have to work with crazy hours so i will accept those messages and like it's a thing and it's complicated and honestly there's no good answer that it's very messy but what so what we've tried to do to solve for that aside from the like please don't work on weekends so at least i'm not getting the insane 2 a.m message on saturday um is is please be respectful and ask folks like how they feel about being messaged at any given time like we have people on the team who feel very very very strongly that they should not be bothered in slack on a saturday or sunday for any reason and so i know who those people are and like we now have a culture in the studio where like if i'm like trying to like use their name but i don't want to bother them i'll like brent like we'll write we'll do b dash rent in slack so that he does not get a ping you know and everyone in the studio knows this and you'll see like on the weekends when people are like the few people who are bothering to write something on the weekends like they're all dashing names and it's great because it's like a conscious and very clear cultural sign that like we respect people's boundaries um that's probably one of my favorite things that has happened organically in our in our slack channel um so it's just a thing like you just have the open conversations about it there are people in the group that like they actually like for them it's actually more important to be able to take like friday off like they actually want to spend a few hours on saturday and like take all the friday off and it's like okay you can do that but like you're gonna do the hyphen thing on the weekend when you are working like you're not bothering the rest of us don't like don't ruin our lives with your choices and like and it works for the most part like it's messy again i'm not gonna pretend that this is like perfect there are definitely times where like there's some friction but it works okay well i know from the other side of the coin how many people here are freelance by choice okay so there's some of us here yeah not a lot of us but there's some of us so for those of us who are freelance or consultants or in that in that role that's we're not working in a company but we choose to work with different companies oftentimes we choose because we need to pay our rent or we our mortgage or whatever so a lot of times it's hard for us to turn down work because we want the work obviously but there are times over my career where i have turned down jobs from from certain clients because the either the project that is being brought to me is something that i don't want to work on it's just the content is something i don't want to associate with um or the company just has a really bad reputation for how it treats its people and those are really hard decisions to make because you're just like i really could use this contract but you know it's trying to take the high road and kind of reinforce these are my values and and the thing is i do communicate that to them now maybe that burns a bridge with them but if that's the way they are i really don't give a [ __ ] so you know i maybe i don't want to work with them again so um but i do think it's important to not only make that decision but to communicate why you know why am i choosing not to take this work that i desperately need because you are doing this and i know this and this and this you know and you can make all the excuses but i've talked to your employees or whoever and it's pretty clear that you've got a messy situation and so i don't want to kind of reinforce that basically help make you successful on the back of people who are being you know treated really unfairly so um but that's hard i mean it's really hard in the consultant role or a freelance role to turn away stuff like that but we have to be very conscious of it and the other part of that oftentimes pretty much every freelancer i know you know we don't have someone in management giving us holidays we don't have anyone telling us to go home at night we don't have any of that because we're basically in our home office just heads down doing this and oftentimes we're doing it of course because we absolutely love what we do hopefully we do if we don't then we shouldn't be doing it but um that's really hard and so i know for me it's it's been really tough over the last 14 years after i left microsoft to really discipline myself to stop working you know actually like a policy when i'm home i travel a lot to speak at events but when i am home in seattle i like saturday is usually just my day i just i don't do anything other than just go out you know you know get some air you know do whatever maybe you know clean the house a little bit just you know don't do work and so i try and do that kind of thing for myself and but even that's been really hard to discipline so i think it's a in when you're in that role it's just it's tough and you really have to find that self-discipline and if you have to get other people around you to hold you accountable to it i do want to quickly and something occurred to me relatedly that i do want to emphasize everything that in particular that amir and i were talking about everything that amir and i were talking about in particular um is predicated on what i was saying earlier which is we we like and trust the people we work with and vice versa like so much of what we've been talking about would break down if we worked with [ __ ] um so i i think that's something you i'm gonna repeat it because i think it's so important like this is really something you have to take to heart like you you know there's this mythos and this mythology in silicon valley and in games of like well there's there's that amazing programmer who's like 10 times more effective than any other programmer but he's also an [ __ ] but it's okay because he's 10 times better than any other programmer and he's going to make our game amazing and so like you yes you want people like that no i i think that's [ __ ] you don't want people that seems pretty consistent across the board like um almost everybody i've ever spoken with has said universally i will i would prefer a middle of the road employee who's a delight to work with versus you know some diva who comes in and says yeah i want my desk to be filled with 1 000 brown m ms every day is i go in and if there's one blue i quit yeah i mean think about it like you can't have a um a policy where people are required to take at least 20 days of vacation unless you trust those people right that they're not going to abuse that that they're people worthy of that you can't have a situation where you know where you expect everyone to do the hyphen thing and slack and not bother each other unless like they're people who actually care and would would internalize something like that like that just stops working otherwise like so yeah choose who you work with carefully and so that that it's that seems to be an ongoing theme here is that the team makes a difference and the team helps build the connection but on top of that in terms of studio managers you because of the amount of discipline it takes to take time off when you're really passionate about this and it is it does take a lot of discipline and it's really helpful to have people who bug you to take time off i don't know this from personal experience at all i've literally been ordered to take a vacation two weeks from now um my boss is laughing at this because she's the one who made me do it but but you're talking about implementing studio policies to make people realize that working less to a degree makes them work more effectively and keeps your employees and one of the signals amir you look for in things is turnover rate in terms of a good studio environment so lightning round because i want to cut i want to cut to questions for a few minutes um think about your questions now begin them with a who what where why not story time um what would you want to tell yourself your earlier career self about how to make your career last and tommy replied with the very colorful only be loyal to those who are loyal to you and lawyer the [ __ ] up wow wow well my my answer would be very simple um one of the things mark twain he once expressed it's been said in many ways but he wrote that comparison is the death of joy and if i could have told myself that even when i was 10 years old or 15 or whatever that would have changed my life tremendously i am very thankful for where i am i have no regrets about all my different paths but thinking about others and where they are and how good they are or bad they are any of that and around this issue of stress and burnout and everything i hear it all the time when i talk to developers the one huge massive layer of stress is that they're looking on social media looking on facebook and twitter and they're going to this conference in dubrovnik and they're going over here and and here i am in my [ __ ] still working and i'm depressed and i'm angry and this game's not working and i can't get the build going all that kind of stuff and i think that layer of pressure is just like you're at the bottom of the ocean and i just see you have to just stop comparing yourself to what other people are doing around you and just focus on what you do best focus on your work you know and you know just and especially one of the things i see a lot is when people say i will never be as good as them i'm never i'll never be as good of an artist or program or whatever you know and if you see people like that around you whether it's in your studio at school or whatever guess what you just found a mentor go ask them to help you to to get better at what you're doing but that that i think for me would be a fundamental difference if i had just mind my own business and focus on what i do best no comparisons find a mentor yes awesome oh lord um so uh i would say the the stuff i look back on and feel the worst about are the times when overwork might have affected my relationship or my relationship so probably something like you know uh tell anna that you love her and that you're grateful for her um you know i'm we're we're married everything's good um [Laughter] but uh you know certainly that's that's the stuff i look back on and and it's like man she she lived in the house with us she like was there the whole time um and uh she cooked for us she did all sorts of things that lifted our spirits and made bastion possible so uh you know i've said it a lot since then but i should have said it more than so tell those you care about that you love them i've been i've been pretty lucky i i there's not a whole lot that i would have told myself to do differently 10 years ago aside from and you guys can guess this from the multiple things i've already said like there's a handful of people i kind of wish i would have separated myself from sooner you know people who were like just not awesome people and by awesome i don't neces don't mean they weren't the greatest artist or programmer ever i mean they were just not nice people they were just very selfish or very this or very that and like they made my life worse and as soon as they were out of my life my life got 10x better oh so we've got about three and a half minutes for questions and there are microphones right here but the good news is we will be hanging out in one of the wrap-up rooms afterwards if you have more questions that don't get asked so come on up to the microphone give us your quick question let's see what we can answer hey ian schreiber rit many people here are students faculty or people who mentor them for at the student level there are some people in higher ed that say that take the thing of we need to teach how to take care of yourself how to work in a safe and sane way there are others that say well lots of parts of the industry suck a lot of these students are going to go to currency studios we need to prepare them for it how would you find the balance between those things so how do you teach students the balance between hard work and sustainable work well the how do you balance the um the fact that industry is going to have some crunchy studios that students will go to and you are and are part of our role is to prepare students for that eventuality versus you know not burning our students out before they even get to industry so how do you prepare students for the reality of the industry as it is while teaching them to try and be better yes okay that's a great question and you all have answers to this concrete ones right i mean i've actually been a lot involved in a lot of educational programs especially in europe and one of the things that some of them have done is try and model you know they basically model themselves after a studio an ideal studio you know so they try and model that behavior to the students in the process of education so that they can take that model and and bring that expectation to their employer one of the things i've also been mentoring a lot of students about is that when you go into a job interview you must be asking those questions about about what's the work life like do you crunch here what's your diversity numbers all of that kind of stuff because you know you know and not only ask the question but be willing to walk away if the question is not what you want to hear that is super tough and it takes courage to walk away from your first job but i've heard some students who've done it and they felt instantly empowered because now i have a choice i wasn't desperate and i think we have to encourage students to be able to do that and make that choice for their own benefit so in other words teach students to ask good questions training programs need to model the ideal yes cool i i oh i'm going to add one thing to that which is because i like i i agree with that and then at the same time i know because it's just the reality of life that there's going to be a bunch of young people out there who are going to feel like they only have one job offer and they've spent the last four years trying to get in the game industry you better believe they're going to take that job offer that this is like even if it they're going into a studio that they know crunches 24 7. so given that i guess what i'd say and i realize this is hard because like 90 of this room is introverts and i'm a secret introvert too so i get it um is like you just have to always be networking like you have to make an enormous effort to make sure that you meet other people that you get your name out there that you have eventually other options because yeah you might find yourself feeling like you're being forced to take a job at a place that has an unhealthy culture in some way shape or form and i'm not going to judge you for doing that like if you feel like you really have to do that to break in so be it like dude i mean i worked like a like a mule when i was in my 20s i mean i'm not going to criticize anyone for that but like the reason i'm not still doing that is because i forced myself out of my box and that worked more than i thought was physically possible um you know because again secret introvert so yeah so um we just got the call for time where is the meetup room for further questions 204 okay we will be in room 204 but thank you all

Channel: GDC

Views: 29,359

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: 1ZbqYXyW74s

Length: 59min 12sec (3552 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021